Malsingmaps Forum

That's the same mosque that was still standing after the tsunami?

I guess we don't know what nature has in store for us....

But hopefully the event will make everyone be more aware of where they build their homes and be more educated in the signs of such impending events. And of course, be vigilant always.

Saturday January 5, 2008
The Star

The ache of Aceh

By BRIAN CRACKNELL

Three years after the tsunami, Aceh still aches from the blow it received in December 2004.

Fearsome figures: 260,000 Indonesians swept away in 15 minutes. At the plant I visit in Lokhnga, Aceh, 130 employees were lost, the workshop block obliterated by waves that rose to 30m by some accounts.

Up the coast, one building constructed by the Japanese decades earlier vanished, its foundations totally eradicated, just like the police station and the army base.

A final resting place.
But it’s not the figures, harrowing as they are, but the stories of those who lived through the tsunami horror that sear my conscience and unsettle me.

The housekeeper: her son, eight years old, died. Her employer, a Westerner named Crawford, had given the warning to run to the mountain, where they subsequently spent three days trekking.

Three waves came, one small, the second bigger, and the final one enormous. They watched from the mountain the maelstrom in miniature below. When she spoke of Lokhnga, she absent-mindedly mentioned: “A lot of buildings used to be there.”

As she recounted the tale of her locale, she seemed rooted, yet bereft.

At the guesthouse a strange quiet prevails. No one talks much. I get an enhanced understanding of the Malay word rasa. You don’t so much state things as much as sniff and sense what meaning lies therein.

In the entrance hall stand stuffed turtles, a bear and a wildcat. A guard speaks of “damaged nature”; the animal artefacts look vengeful.

At the house where we lunch, a European talks in accented English of such suffering to be stuck in Aceh for one month. We share a table yet he offers no food, no questions.

“You are French?” I ask.

“Wrong.”

I’ve failed the test.

“You live in Malaysia?” comes the follow-up, with a hint of derision.

“Right.”

Our translator, an ethnic Chinese, had been away in Jakarta on Dec 26, when the disaster happened. It took him three days to confirm his family were all alive. The tsunami, he relates, was “like a human”, as it curled through town, swooshing whole sections away, skirting others.

This was once a hospital.
His father, the head of the district’s Chinese clan association, calculated from a census that around three-quarters of their members were unaccounted for. Of those who survived, half did not come back, out of fear, grief or some unstated reasons.

The driver is a big, burly man with a scar on his forehead (I suspect tsunami-sustained); all his family killed. He now lives “semi-permanent” in a Mercy Malaysia-built house. He matter-of-factly comments on its poor quality – two years after being built, it’s already basah (wet) and in need of repair.

The Mercy Malaysia rep later says that the Indonesians insisted on concrete houses.

The driver speaks of 25m waves, and, as he mouths the words, I see his scar extend from forehead to cheekbone.

A Java-born manager tells me they have to be careful not to re-awaken memories in people. So many are alone.

That night, going back to the guesthouse, a fellow 4WD passenger speaks to me from the front seat in English. I can’t see her face, but she shows me photos in her purse of her son (nine), daughter (13) and husband, all taken by the tsunami.

She feels guilt about her daughter who, as a surviving neighbour later recounted, had politely declined his offer to take her because she was sure her mother would be coming to get her. The mother now tells of how she had managed to hold onto her boy three times, but the fourth time the waves were too strong.

She adds: “The water was black, pak.”

Another reminder of the toxic, volcanic rush. I have no heart to ask her how it must have been for her to survive. I want to cry.

A battered beach.
She states: “I am alone”.

When she gets down from the vehicle, the driver recounts in Bahasa Indonesia his loss – a wife and daughter.

In my bathroom, I stoop to slosh my face with water from the cold tap, and it spitefully spits out a wild, whipping water that splashes my shirt – a reminder of the water’s wildness, as if any were needed.

Each time I am driven by the beach, it’s like watching a brooding bully who’ll lash out at any moment on a whim, and with a wave. Curiously, the tune of Ralph McTell’s Streets of London pops fleetingly in my mind, with lyrics localised.

So how can you tell me you’re deprived/and say for you that life has no joy?/Let me take you by the hand/ I’ll lead you round the coast of Aceh/ I’ll show you something to make you change your mind . . .

In Medan, an official would later tell me about Banda Aceh: “Very, very nice. Very, very problem. Before, nice place to stay”.

It is a war zone. Indeed, people pepper their conversations with references to “selepas tsunami”, as previous Western generations spoke of “after the war”.

On my last day, I get the driver to take me further afield, around the ravaged coast, to get a broader picture. The boat Pelita Maju sits washed up on Lokhnga Beach; in its vicinity, clumps of brick and tile amid the usual flotsam and jetsam.

A couple of miles further on, I see the Meraksa Olele Hospital, a graveyard and memorial now, all its inhabitants killed, its ruins a testimony on the gouged ground.

Above all, now a feature of “Aceh tourism” is the LTD Apung 1, a large vessel that used to be anchored offshore holding a generator that supplied electricity to Banda Aceh.

Now, it rests 3km inland. In Punge village, then a district of devastation, now surrounded by kampung houses, the ruins of others still remain underneath where the ship had flattened them in 2004.

At the airport – an engineer in his 40s, who on tsunami day was unable to get back to his village of 15,000, where now only half remain, his entire family gone. Now re-married and with a baby boy, Adil, he seems to hold the boy close by him, not to him, not out of absence of love, but out of an apparent absence of mind. Not tearful, but transfixed.

For me, he symbolises Aceh – largely silent but spiritually smitten and mentally traumatised, starting anew.

Akhwan, my Indonesian contact person, speaks glowingly of his two young daughters. I ask their names.

“Alma.”

“And the other?”

“Hannah.”

I am cheered by that name. If I had a daughter, that would be my preferred name for her.

“What does her name mean?”

With a beaming smile comes the reply: “Hope.”

http://thestar.com.my/lifestyle/story.a ... =lifefocus

Hi Naim,

The pictures bring back memories when I was in Banda Aceh in 1983-1984. My company was building a cement plant in LokhNga a near Lampuuk. I can still remember the mosque in Lampuuk as I will there every Friday for Friday prayers. I remember the mosque is about 2Km from the beach. From photos taken from a helicopter after the tsunami the areas around the cement plant that have quite a number of villages are completely wipeout. The cement plant looks like it is completely devastated. The jetty to ship the cement seems to be intact.

There is a huge barge that was dump by the tsunami near the road to the cement plant. The bridge joining lokhnga are gone too.

Did you try their Gulai Kambing with the special "herb"?

I will normally drive up to medan from Banda Aceh twice a month in my friend's Suzuki Jimny I remember i need to traverse up and around Gunung Sangeh (dormant volcano) just outside Banda Aceh to sigli, lokhsemuawae....to medan.....