In the Eye of the Storm
March 28, 2005
11:40 pm
In the eye of the storm… right now, right now. I can’t hold the telephone. I can’t push the buttons coherently. The phones are blocked. I can’t tell anyone that I’m ok. No one at home or in the team knows where I am. We have no plan of action for tsunami number two. What is going to happen? The roads are completely blocked. We are stuck, can go no where. The streets are filled with people. Police with black uniforms have major machine gun type things in their hands as they patrol the streets in anticipation of looting. It’s frightening. There is chaos and I sit in the car with this computer in my lap wondering if someone will attack me, take the computer and getaway with it. People are traumatized. Their faces are blank states. They look right and left without seeing anything. My driver is freaking out, honking and aggravating everyone on the road. He wants everyone out of his way, out of his sight. No one goes anywhere. People filming, thinking only of taking profit later because live tsunami videos are a hot commodity, in high demand and make a lot of money. Where is everyone fleeing to? There are motor bikes with many people on a single seat stationary in the middle of intersections and no one goes anywhere. Families of four and five are on the bikes as they try to go somewhere. Where are we going? We escape what and where do we escape to? Mass pandemonium with people simply setting off anywhere away from the sea. The driver takes me towards the house, but is this by the water? Is there a tsunami coming? Is this the end in twenty minutes like what happened on the Sunday morning on the twenty-sixth of December? The earthquake shook the world and twenty minutes later, the ocean opened and washed it all away. Twenty minutes we have to get out of here, but where? Where do we run? Is the house near the water? I don’t know where I live. I’ve become complacent depending on the guidance of the drivers who take me here and there and I don’t know how close we are to the water. The three kilometer buffer we had before with well placed houses by the sea is now gone and bare land separates us from it now. So, if the water comes, it might come a little too close or even engulf us in its boneless jaws. We drive toward the house and everyone drives in the opposite direction. The four-lane road is now four lanes going all in the same direction… away from the area my driver is taking me. We are face to face with traffic coming at us head on and I tell the driver maybe to go in the same direction as the people. He doesn’t understand a word I say and I don’t understand a word he says. More and more people are on the street with video cameras, thinking of profit. They watch this massive exodus of thousands of people and no one is going anywhere. My driver is freaking. I’m freaking. I’m freaking that he is freaking. It calms my nerves to type and process my impressions on my computer now.
I was showing a film to the children at the orphanage when it happened. It was 2310 and I had fallen asleep on the table. One of the children awakened me and said “Tsunami, Tsunami.” This is the world they associate with earthquakes. At first, we giggled. The room was tickling our feet. But then the earth got progressively angrier and it wasn’t like the other little donuts we’ve gotten as free rides at the amusement park. Suddenly, it was somehow clear that this one was different and everyone ran down the stairs at the same time into the courtyard away from the potentially lethal structures of concrete. It was difficult making it down the stairs without clutching the sides of the stairwell. I stood in the courtyard now at least a little safer as if it made any difference. Had the buildings crumbled around us, we would have been among the debris, enveloped by it, trampled by it, buried by it. I stood seeing the trees waving from side to side as if gusts of stormy winds were blowing, but there were no winds. It was hard to stand as if the concrete under my feet were a sheet of fabric being pulled from side to side as if in a tug of war, as if I were one teeter taughter with two children competing for attention on both sides. The evening caretaker of the orphanage immediately assembled the children who all sat huddled on the concrete chanting some ancient sounding Muslim incantation. Some children were crying and completely traumatized, while others were cool, calm and collected consoling the other children obviously in pain. They had been here before. Some had lost their families and flashes of them must have been very real again. What more do they have to lose? The new children who have become their families were now possibly going to be taken from them, too. The trees were shaking from side to side. I couldn’t stand without looking like an inebriated drunkard on a sidewalk on a Saturday night. I can’t believe this. I stood holding two of the children who were in shock. The caretaker came menacingly towards me. He was irrational and agitated and angrily waved his arm at me to leave. I wanted to console the children, but it wasn’t the time. He wanted me gone and the children needed all of his attention. They’ve been here and done it before and in this situation only one cook in the kitchen. I left thinking of the children.
What is going to happen? We are on the fault line. We are near the water. Flashing lights everywhere. We are not at all ready for this. We are not prepared. We are without where to go. Is the wave going to come for us now? I don’t know where I am geographically at all. The ground was like jelly. I wonder where we are going. We are in the car and the driver just goes somewhere. He is taking pictures with his mobile telephone. What a mess. I can’t speak with him. I wanted to stay at the orphanage and calm the children, but the director wanted me gone like I never happened. I think he was shocked and trying to handle the children. The children sat on the ground crying.
The police now pass by with flashing lights. Blue flashing lights passing by with loud speakers speaking in Indonesian. I can’t understand anything. They are telling the people something. What are they saying? The driver says we go home so perhaps everything is fine. Military men with guns in one hand and on their mobile telephones that don’t work in the other hand. The systems don’t work. Electricity is out. How can they call an all clear when it hasn’t been yet thirty minutes? Probably nothing will happen, but that’s what they said on the Sunday morning that took nearly half a million people in a matter of minutes. I’m numb. How to prepare for this? Where do people go? They head for the hills away from the water. The streets are lined with people. The streets are packed with people on both sides of the road holding their babies close to them. No one knows what to do anywhere to go. There has yet to be disaster training for the people. The mosques were offering some guidance on the loud speakers. Again, it was in Indonesian and I couldn’t understand. Were they saying to head for the hills or all is clear? Again, how would they know anything? Only minutes have passed and everyone knows an earthquake that size could spark another tsunami. The children at the orphanage were chanting something, some passage again and again. I said the words along with them not knowing what it was. It was some prayer, a prayer asking Allah for safety would make sense. We are all the same. We are all in uncertainty. No electricity. Everything is black. I am nearly home. If the tsunami hits, what will it do? Oh, wow, just waiting for something isn’t nice. The feeling of the jelly earth under my feet with me barely balancing isn’t something a person knows what to do with. It’s a feeling of loss and numbness standing there not knowing, waiting and feeling guilty that mom and dad are going to know about this in minutes and they are going to think that I’m hurt and I feel badly that they are subjected to this fear for their child’s life. We are near home. I think no problem. I think all is ok.
1:42 am I’m home. The driver is gone. No one knows where he is. Apparently, he lost his family in the first tsunami and perhaps his unexplainable behavior was post traumatic stress syndrome’s many faces. I couldn’t understand why he was insisting that we leave the orphanage the minute the earthquake hit. I tried to explain the importance of supporting the orphans. It was obvious they were very traumatized and needed support, but he wasn’t thinking clearly. And his incessant honking at everyone on the road blocked and locked in place like sardines in a closed can only added to the pandemonium and nothing to his safe passage home. He was perhaps freaking out in his own way as I was freaking out in mine. I don’t do well in these natural disasters or any other disaster, come to think of it. Usually, I go to a place after it’s happened. The images on the television of people fleeing some catastrophe was tonight’s scenario. The neighborhood where I live is completely empty. The houses are blackened by the lightlessness of the power outing. The house guard greeted me warmly when I arrived and said that he is the only one who remained in the area because he is a good guard and committed to providing security for the house. I was grateful and impressed. The house is undamaged and everything appears fine. I doubt seriously that a tsunami will roll through, but if it does it must take some time. Where were the people going? I suppose I would be more assertive and leave the city had I experienced the first wave.
Emergency preparedness? No flashlights at arms reach and those that are are either broken or without batteries. The mobile telephone system is down, and if it were up, it wouldn’t matter because I don’t have adequate credit anyway. And the house phone landline service has-been cut because somehow the bill wasn’t paid. The sat phone wasn’t recharged; there are no candles, matches or lights. I managed to contact Karen who said the television is filled with news of the recent earthquake registering 8.5 nearby, but 8.2 in the city of
Love,
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home