The unluckiest place in the world

Indonesian reporter-photographer Bustamam took this picture on December 26, 2004, in the city of Meulaboh on the west coast of Sumatra.

by Chris Braithwaite

BANDA ACEH, Indonesia — The tsunami finally hit home when I turned a corner on a busy downtown street on an early June morning and saw the boat.

It was a pretty big boat, of the long, graceful lines favored by the local fishermen. It was hard up against a row of shops, nowhere near a body of water big enough to float such a vessel.

The statistics weren't enough, horrifying as they are. Estimates vary, of course, but a story in the Jakarta Post marking the six-month anniversary of the big wave said that of the more than 178,000 people it killed in 11 countries last December 26, 131,000 died in Indonesia. And virtually all of those died in the province of Aceh, which sits just north of the equator on the western tip of the island of Sumatra. Of the Acehnese survivors, the story said, 250,000 are still living in tents. The city of Banda Aceh sits at the northwestern tip of Aceh, fatally close to the epicenter of the earthquake that started it all.

Someone told me the wave swept through Banda Aceh just seven minutes after the earthquake — scant time for people to flee to safety, even if they had known what was coming.

Where it did its worst damage, on the flat plains within a few kilometers of the coast, the wave didn't leave ruins to mark its path. It would be easy to believe that no one had lived on these soggy, table-flat plains. But my guides assured me they had been crowded with tiny homes; pointed out the foundation pads where they had stood; noted with some pride the mosques that had survived the wave as if under God's special protection.

But for all of these sights, the stories told, the articles read, it was that boat that brought home the crazy nature of this catastrophe, the sense the survivors must have that they have gone through something not of this world.

People who write popular works about the earth and its place in the universe go to great lengths to find metaphors for the immensity of geologic time — the time it takes for mountains to rise and erode away, for continents to drift apart and bump together. When it can be measured at all, such motion is typically measured in millimeters per century. And against the span of the billions of years involved, the history of mankind is but a moment, the span of a single human life immeasurably small.

To have one's life ruined by continental drift seems a particularly unlikely stroke of particularly bad luck. Yet the people I worked with in Banda Aceh were victims of just that incredible happenstance.

At breakfast one morning, Ivan, a Canadian hired by the U.S. Agency of International Development to help sort out which survivors owned which bits of land in the coastal villages, told me that Aceh — the entire province of Aceh — sits 26 centimeters south of the place on the planet it held last Christmas Day.

Not to far from the boat was the once-handsome home of a relatively wealthy family. It was a typical two-story house with an atrium ceiling above the main room, the upstairs rooms off a balcony. The wave left the house standing, but tore off most of two walls. The family had propped it up with some big poles and carried on. I could see them in there, like pretend people in a cutaway architect's model, demonstrating the way life was lived in Banda Aceh, before the wave.

If the boat endures as a symbol of what the tsunami did to the urban landscape of Banda Aceh, the house is a symbol of what it failed to do to its people. It didn't quite knock them down.

Everywhere in town people are rebuilding, sweeping up the mess, rebuilding the walls of devastated shops, hauling buckets of cement onto the roofs of damaged buildings with simple pulleys.

I was there to provide what help I could to a particular corner of the Aceh's devastated economy, its newspapers.

The province's major daily, Serambi Indonesia, had its offices on the coastal plain about two kilometers from the sea. The wave left its rugged office building standing but swept through the first floor to the height of the ceiling.

Its web offset presses sat in front, in a low building of their own. That building and the presses were swept clean away.

Serambi lost about 50 of its staff of about 180 people to the wave. Among them were many key people on the business side of the operation.

My assignment was to help the paper, and the new staff that had been pressed into service, get the operation back on its financial feet.

Serambi was able to get back into print within seven days of the tsunami, thanks to a satellite office and plant it has about 120 kilometers south on Aceh's east coast, in the town of Lokhseumawe.

The paper's new circulation manager, Mohammad Jakfar, was working there on December 26, waiting for the pages of the next morning's paper to arrive in digital form, via satellite.

No pages came, and as the deadlines passed, urgent calls were made to headquarters in Banda Aceh. No one answered the calls.

Hours later, the first news of the disaster arrived in Lokhseumawe, which had suffered much less damage.

Mr. Jakfar and some colleagues loaded a car with food and headed north. They arrived in the evening of the day after the tsunami. The city was deserted.

"We thought they were all asleep," Jakfar recalled.

Chris Braithwaite spent the month of June in Aceh as a Knight International Press Fellow with the International Center for Journalists of Washington, D.C.