Earthquakes and Thoughts

I was going through my photographs and videos a few days ago. I found a video that I made of myself during my first days in Jakarta. It was when I was still enamored with my camera (not that I am not now-) and I was making videos of everything. This video was a piece of a journal, me talking to me about where I wanted to end up with this job, out of the total confusion of those first days in Jakarta. I said something like, “Everything is fine, and, with luck, tomorrow I will hear that they want to send me to Banda Aceh tomorrow, they want me for three months, and that I will have internet access while I am up there”. Of course, it took three more weeks until this all happened—but it did all happen.

So, I am in Banda, and I am working in the realities of a disaster relief slash development program. I had no real expectation of what I was getting into, so it is impossible to say that the realities do not reflect my expectations.

Last week, of course, was the earthquake off Simeulue and Nias Islands, not far off from the epicenter of the tsunami-generating quake. This one was smaller 8.7 instead of 9.2, but still not small. It was also deeper underground—30km instead of 19—and so there was no tsunami. But it did not stop it from killing somewhere around 2000 people on Nias and Simeulue. This threw our office back into disaster mode, although albeit nothing compared to what the initial tsunami response must have been. Our offices were drained of staff as all of them took Tiny Weeny, our AirServe plane, to Simeulue, where we had one of our offices. We sent in assessment teams first, to, unsurprisingly, assess the damage. Then we sent in child protection, shelter, logistics, and health people. And ships of goods—household kits, tarps, and food for distribution.

Although less than 20 people died in Simeulue, the panic that was seen in Banda Aceh was seen to a much greater extent there. Around 40% of the houses were destroyed initially, and almost constant aftershocks have meant that houses that were initially damaged have now fallen over. Very few people are remaining in their houses, and most of those who live by the coast have moved to the hills for fear of another tsunami. This means that there are thousands of people without shelter or food in the hills, in addition to all the people who were injured in the initial quake. There is no electricity or running water and many of the bridges and roads have been destroyed.

Of course, all the aid organizations were already here, and they were all ready to deal with an emergency. Kits of household goods, tarps, World Food Program food rations, all were ready to go, and only need to be transported. This is proving difficult, however, because Simeulue is under some extremely bad weather right now—ever large boats have to turn back because of the waves. But, if an emergency situation could ever said to be well taken care of, this one is. There is massive attention to the region, and people are working day and night to get materials out there.

On my end, in Banda Aceh, this created an intense need for information from all over the world. It is my job to put together the Situation Reports of the work we have been doing, and send them out to everyone that might care. And then answer all of the inane questions that everyone has about them. Also to deal with the media that pours in when ever there is such a disaster. So, the BBC, MSNBC, the Today show, Irish National Radio, Australian National Radio, the San Francisco Chronicle, and many more called to get information about what we were doing. I did some of the interviews… Anyone been listening to Irish National Radio lately?... and the big ones I handed over to my bosses. I am better suited to actually doing assessments and working with communities than to dealing with high powered media and home offices, but it is still interesting experience.

On a much more personal level, all of these disasters, being surrounded by areas where 200,000 people died, where there are still corpses in body bags on the street, three months after the tsunami, everything like that, has disconnected me in some ways from life at home in America. It is difficult for me to connect with some of the fun stories that I hear from friends in America—parties, spring, bars, everything like that—it’s like a nice but rather blurry movie. I heading into my third month away from America now, and in some ways I am beginning to feel more disconnected. But not in all ways. I still love to hear about what’s going on in the NYC bike scene, or Madison in spring… it just is beginning to feel more and more distant.

As for future plans, I am getting excited about these. Once my contract ends I will be heading up to Northern Vietnam to meet up with Craig Johnson, an old Cornell friend, and do a bike trip in Laos and Vietnam. Yay! And then, I am looking for work with CIFOR, the Center for International Forestry Research, or with some others working on wildlife biology and rehabilitation in tropical forests. I just got an email today from a woman working in a sun bear rehabilitation clinic who seems interested in having my help. That would be in South Kalimantan, Borneo, relatively close to areas I was in when I was growing up. I would love to work with bears.