An E-Mail Reply

Wow,

Ha ha ha, it's interesting to read what A and Ch wrote. Looks
like there are lots of different takes on matters relating to religion
and faith, and of course, God. I was especially intrigued by what
Chicha said about God and religion being merely something that people
would like to believe to give reasons for everything that went wrong
in their lives. Or some other people's lives, that is. Well, the
westerners aren't the only people who came up with this 'conclusion'.
I happened to come across real life examples. Lots of 'em.

One in particular happened on a Friday night about two weeks ago. I
was on my way to a friend's wedding. I took a taxi and was riding
shotgun (next to the driver, that is). As it often happens whenever a
gues is riding shotgun, most taxi drivers feel compelled to try and
strike a conversation with his guest. And at that time, this was true.

So, he opened by asking me why at that time there were so many
soldiers guarding buildings around the Thamrin-Sudirman area. I told
him that I haven't been watching the news all day (Well, actually I
haven't been watching any news, period), so I couldn't relieve him of
his curiosity. Maybe there's a bomb threat, he said. I said that that
was a possibility (I would later found out that leaders from Asian
countries and others were holding a conference here in Jakarta that
dayconcerning the tsunami and the disaster that it has brought along
and what to do about it).

He would go on to say about how the tsunami has brought about a
disaster of such magnitude. I couldn't agree with him more. Then he
went on to say that maybe God wanted to punish the Aceh people for
going against the Indonesian government, don't you think so? I mean,
Aceh and GAM are moslems. The government and military are also
moslems. They're supposed to be brothers in Islam. They're not
supposed to fight each other. Maybe God wanted to punish the Aceh
people for going against the rightful government. Don't you think so?

At this point, I didn't know what to say. I wish I could just say that
it was a natural disaster. I don't know about whether God had a hand
in it. I wish I could say that why God doesn't punish the government
and military instead? They also caused a lot of pain to the Aceh
people, why not punish them also? Why not punish Jakarta instead? I
wish I could say to the taxi driver not to blame it on God. I wish I
could say that it's not that simple. But then again, who am I to speak
on God's behalf?

The only word that came out of my mouth was 'maybe.'

Maybe.

Well, yeah, maybe. So, it seems that there was no way that people
could predict this thing, this...what do you call it?
Tsunami.
Yeah, tsunami. What kind of a word is it anyway?
It's a Japanese word.
Oh yeah? How did the Japanese come up with it anyway?
Ummm, well, from what I know, the Japanese has got a lot of experience
with earthquakes. And tsunami usually comes after an earthquake.
Oh yeah? So the Japanese has got a lot of experience with it? I
thought this thing couldn't be predicted.
Well, it is kinda hard to predict. But from what I know, some people
survived because they were able to read the signs. The signs that
tells a tsunami was about to happen. There are actually ways to
predict a tsunami happening. It might not save all of them, but it
might save some who would be threatened by it.
I see.

Maybe it was just me, but it seems that from my explanations, his
early assumptions about the 'Hands of God' being so Almighty and
unpredictable seems a bit dashed. Then again, maybe it was just me.
All I know is that the taxi driver dropped the subject and went on to
talk about what kind of event I was going to. So I told him about the
wedding party.

The wedding party turned out to be the best I've ever been to, but
that of course is another story entirely.

I guess, we believe what we want to believe. I just don't know what
those Aceh people believe in right now. But I'd like to believe that
right now, they're trying to cope with it as best as they could. I'd
like to believe that right now, God or Whoever it is, is giving them
the strength to deal with whatever it is that is on their hands right
now. But I guess, most of all, I would like to believe that even in
this dire predicament, they would be able to realize that inside their
soul, there lies a strength that they didn't know exist. A strength to
be Godlike. A realization that eventhough we view ourselves as
unworthy, each of us are actually Small Gods, in our own ways.

Well, I have this long article. I hope you guys won't mind reading it.
But I think you'll be able to learn something out of it.

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The incredible generosity of the tsunami's survivors.
By Eric Lichtblau

Villagers wearing surgical masks rummage through debris

BANDA ACEH, Indonesia—Yusmadi Sulaiman sat cross-legged on the drab
concrete floor, taking another drag from his cigarette. With the
electricity still out in much of Banda Aceh, in the northwest tip of
Indonesia's Sumatra island, the faint light of a candle illuminated
his tears as he told how the giant wave of the tsunami—a word Sulaiman
had never even heard a few days earlier—had reached out and swallowed
his family whole like some nightmarish scene from a Hollywood movie.

One moment, Sulaiman told me, his 4-year-old son was clutched in his
arms as father and son clung to a coconut tree. The next moment, the
boy was gone. Sulaiman heard his wife calling out to him a few feet
away, as she held on to their 8-year-old daughter.

"Hold me, Bang, hold me," the wife cried, using the Indonesian term of
reverence for a spouse. Soon enough, she and her daughter were gone,
too, washed away in the flood that some of the locals came to know
scornfully as "Black Sunday."

It was three days after the Dec. 26 tsunami when Sulaiman and I first
spoke. A spry, youthful-looking man of 60 who drives a delivery truck
for a local food company, Sulaiman had been searching for days for his
wife and four children in the streets and alleys of his hardscrabble
village, streets now lined with bodies and rubble, and he would keep
looking for days after that. He would not find them.

Yet even amid such overwhelming tragedy, Sulaiman and many other
survivors with whom I spoke in the days after the tsunami carried an
air of hope and of optimism. They talked of rebuilding, and they
displayed a generosity that was unmistakable. Sulaiman exhibited that
spirit when he overheard that my translator and I were looking to
reach an area of devastation some miles away. "Let me drive you," he
interjected. "No, no—that's not necessary," I told him.

"Please, let him," said his employer, a Jakarta businessman named Yusi
Pura who had ventured up to Banda Aceh to see if Sulaiman and other
employees were still alive. "He wants to help. It would make him feel
better. Please."

It was only by fluke that I was even in Indonesia. Visiting friends in
the Indonesian capital of Jakarta, I was on a tiny motorboat that
Sunday morning en route to Krakatoa—a volcano that, coincidentally or
not, set off one of the last major tsunamis in 1883 when it erupted
and killed 40,000 people. Our boat was rocked by swells so strong that
we were drenched in seawater and left grabbing for the life
preservers; it was not the casual Sunday boat ride we'd expected, to
be sure, but we had no idea until many hours later, after an
exhausting jaunt to the top of the still-smoldering volcano, that we
had just survived a major calamity centered immediately to our north.

Even some eight hours later, after we saw the first CNN crawl about a
strong earthquake, the damage appeared to be focused in Thailand and
Sri Lanka, and we had no idea of the enormity of the event. Indeed,
the Indonesians themselves would not realize for several days just how
badly they had been hit—until they began to receive reports of tens of
thousands of dead in tough-to-reach coastal regions south of Banda
Aceh.

Two bodies sit in a canal days after the tsunami

Soon enough, it became clear just how big a story this was—a human
drama far removed from the staid press conferences and congressional
hearings that I normally cover for the New York Times in Washington,
D.C. Starting my reporting in Jakarta, I was in the office of Mike
Elmquist, the disaster coordinator for the United Nations in
Indonesia, when he received an alarming report: An employee in the
region said as many as 40,000 people might be dead in the town of
Meulaboh, several hundred miles to the south of Banda Aceh. The report
couldn't be confirmed, he said, but if it was true. … His voice
trailed off. Within days, as authorities reached Meulaboh by boat,
air, and land, it became clear that the number might well be even
higher.

I was able to get a commercial flight up to Banda Aceh, surrounded by
Jakarta residents packing boxes of water, noodles, and Dunkin' Donuts
for friends and relatives. Some travelers bribed airline ticket agents
to get on the jammed flight.

Yusi, the Jakarta businessman who had gone looking for his employees
in Banda Aceh, quickly befriended my translator and me on the plane
ride up and insisted that we stay with him at the undamaged house his
company occupied just blocks outside the zone of devastation. While
dozens of newly arrived Western reporters slept side-by-side on the
floor of a makeshift media center a few blocks away, I may have been
the only journalist in Banda Aceh lucky enough to get my own room,
sparse as it was. More important, he and his employees quickly offered
me a tour of what was left of the local town, pointing out landmarks
that were no longer standing.

The devastation was remarkable. The unclaimed bodies of men, women,
and children, bloated and bloodied, dotted the streets and riverbeds.
Row upon row of shops and homes sat in rubble for miles, one building
indistinguishable from the next. A three-story government finance
building was flattened like a pancake. Vending carts were snapped like
twigs. Brightly colored fishing boats lay capsized in the streets,
hundreds of yards from the shoreline.

A coastal town 5 miles south of the heart of Banda Aceh, almost a week
after the tsunami

Perhaps most powerful was the putrid stench of death and decay that
was everywhere, forcing survivors to don surgical masks to ward off
the odor as they walked the streets. At one mass graveyard near the
airport on the outskirts of the city, home to some 6,000 bodies and
counting, the stink was overpowering.

Before arriving, I had heard a lot about the ardent anti-American
views held by many in the Aceh region, particularly here in an area
where Muslim separatists had been waging civil war for decades. I was
prepared for that hostility, but it never materialized. What I was not
prepared for, as I roamed the streets of the ravaged region, was the
site of countless villagers left homeless and hungry who were
nonetheless offering Western relief workers, journalists, and soldiers
a place to sleep, a bottle of water, or a plate of fresh noodles.

We inevitably offered them money for their kindness. Almost no one
would take it. Even a villager who offered to take me for a ride down
the coast on his motorcycle and "show me where the bodies are" (he
made good on his promise in unforgettably grim fashion) refused to
accept any money for gasoline, which was in very short supply.

All that the locals wanted, it seemed, was for the world to know what
was happening in their remote island region. "Tell your President Bush
we need help," implored one young woman at a refugee camp, as she gave
me a list of painkillers, laxatives, and other needed medical supplies
to forward to the U.S. authorities.

Saifuddin Abdurrahman, a leader of a local mosque in Banda Aceh, had
helped set up a refugee camp on its grounds. As I toured the place,
survivors told me the Indonesian government had let them down, so
religious leaders had to step in and do what they could. A thousand
survivors made do with two toilets among them, and they cooked
vegetable soup for themselves in an oversized kettle over an open
fire. Across an alley, bloody gauzes lay strewn on the ground at what
amounted to a makeshift infirmary for the wounded survivors, and a
wooden bench served as an operating table.

The night before I visited the infirmary, one man had died of an
infection from wounds suffered in the tsunami. The doctor, a young
Muslim woman who had been trying to catch a nap when I arrived,
explained that she had no antibiotics with which to treat the man and,
worse yet, no way to get him to a local hospital. "We need help, a lot
of help," she said.

Abdurrahman did what he could. After one employee at the mosque lost
his wife, a son, and his home to the tsunami and was unable to walk
from his own wounds, Abdurrahman brought the man back to his home in
what by local standards is a posh section of Banda Aceh. The man lay
sprawled on a mattress in Abdurrahman's living room, his daughter
tending to his wounds.

"I don't have the power to do anything," the man said. "I just pray to
Allah. There is nothing else to do."

Eric Lichtblau is a reporter in the Washington bureau of the New York
Times. He covers the Justice Department for the Times.

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