February 10, 2005

Dear Family, Friends, and Colleagues,

I recently returned from Aceh, the land of death. When I received a request to accompany a team from Presbyterian Disaster Assistance (PDA), my heart said yes, this is what I have to do. I thought we were going to Aceh, but instead we spent a week in Jakarta and Medan, meeting with church leaders, NGO officials, and refugees from the disaster area. It wasn’t what I expected, but I learned a lot. I learned about the complexity of organizing a massive relief movement and coordinating the efforts of overlapping organizations.

In Medan, a weeping mother told us how her little daughter was saved by their Muslim neighbor, who risked her life to save her from the flood. A young woman told how she fled from the tidal wave crying “Jesus! Jesus! Help me!” The tsunami threw her up to the top of a high building and set her down without injury. In Jakarta, we met my student, the Reverend Elisa Tambunan. He told how he returned to Banda Aceh the day after the tsunami to search for his family, who had gathered at his mother’s house near the beach for a Christmas reunion. After climbing through the rubble and around bloated corpses he finally made it to his mother’s house. As he stood on the roof of the ruin he saw desolation in all directions. Fifteen members of his immediate family were swept away. In his heart he felt an overwhelming conviction that God had deserted them. He was alone. All the sermons that he had preached about God’s loving kindness returned to him empty. Still, he did not lose faith. Elisa said God had sent us to him, to give him comfort. But how could we possibly comfort him, except to share his pain? Is there a secret in that ocean of grief? My heart told me that I had to go to Aceh. I had to try to understand, even if there was nothing to understand.

A few days later, Duta Wacana Christian University in Yogyakarta sent me to Aceh to assess the current situation. On Wednesday night I stayed with student activists at a Karo Batak church guesthouse in Medan, where the electricity was out. The darkness encouraged me to go to bed early, but I lay in bed for most of the night with my eyes open, staring into the darkness. I was afraid to go to Aceh, afraid of what I would find, afraid of what I wouldn’t find. For some strange reason I kept hearing the lines from a Leonard Cohen song: “I can’t forget. I can’t forget. I can’t forget, but I don’t remember what.”

Early the next morning we hitched a ride from Medan to Meulaboh on a Singapore military helicopter. Meulaboh is on the West coast of Aceh in Northern Sumatra. You’ve no doubt seen the pictures. The main city looks like Hiroshima after the atom bomb. The edge of the city is now the center and resembles the United Nations. Every language, tribe, creed, and nation seems represented, herded this way and that by Indonesian soldiers. Everyone wants to help. According to the latest reports, there are over 250,000 people dead or missing in Aceh.

After I forced myself through the heavy winds of the helicopter blades, I found myself surrounded by Acehnese children. They were laughing and showing me their pet monkey. Everywhere I went in Aceh people greeted me with warmth. Where was the famous Acehenese suspicion of foreigners? Did the tsunami open their hearts? I also saw anguish and tears, faces etched in grief, but even those faces seemed to smooth into smiles when they greeted me. That was one miracle.

We walked past dozens of banners proclaiming the presence of famous relief organizations until we arrived at a simple, unmarked storefront, which served as the command post (“posko”) of a ragtag group of student volunteers. Shunning media attention and bureaucratic protocol, this group has been working their hearts out to serve the Acehenese ever since disaster struck. They sleep on the floor behind heaps of boxes and mountains of rice sacks ready for distribution. Or they sleep on mats with refugees, sharing their space and their suffering. They are Indonesian Catholics, Muslims, and Protestants, from all over this vast country of 17,000 islands. Some represent Christian or Muslim relief organizations, which provide supplies. Some just came on their own and hooked into the network. They are united in eschewing any religious or political agenda. They refuse to use religious titles and don’t hold any worship services. A Catholic nun, who refused to be called “Sister,” told me, “Service is our worship.” Christians and Muslims working together, breaking down walls of suspicion and distain. That is another miracle.

The Acehnese are proud people. They were the only part of Indonesia that the Dutch colonialists could never quite subjugate. They are equally firm in resisting Javanese or Indonesian domination. Aceh has a rich mosaic of vigorously Islamic cultures. They call themselves the veranda of Mecca and have instituted Syari’ah, Islamic law. But in my short visit, I saw little evidence of Middle Eastern style fundamentalism. There’s more Muslim Arab dress in Java than in West Aceh. Many Acehnese women don’t wear a veil or “jilbab,” but rather sport a brightly colored cloth wrapped round and round the top of their heads.

A tsunami is dramatic, like the Acehnese head clothe. I imagine people all over the world have nightmares about a humongous wall of water rushing down at them at 500 miles an hour. Those who survived tell vivid stories of how they escaped the great deluge that swept away houses, roads, and trucks, and deposited ships miles inland. If you visit me, I’ll show you my pictures! But tens of thousands of Acehnese were dead before the tidal waves ever swept over the city. I saw four-story reinforced concrete buildings that were level with the ground. They collapsed because of the 9.2 Richter scale earthquake, half an hour before the tsunamis. When I was Meulaboh, those buildings were still full of bodies, because even hundreds of people could not move those great blocks of cement. There were only a few bulldozers working in miles and miles of devastation.

The major relief organizations work with the Indonesian government, under the supervision of the military, to serve the official refugees that are housed in great camps of tents laid out in an orderly fashion. We all know there are mountains of food and money there. So what’s the use of a coalition of scruffy Indonesian student volunteers? They are serving the non-official refugees. To enter a refugee camp you need to show a whole series of documents: your ID card (KTP); a letter from you neighborhood leader proving where you lived; your family card, showing to whom you are related, etc. The Acehnese don’t trust the government (sound familiar?). Many of them don’t have and cannot get the documents needed to enter a camp because everything they owned, even their clothes, was swept away by the waves.

An Acehnese truck driver told me how the first tsunami swept him out of his six-wheeler and left him clinging, naked, to the top of a coconut palm tree. He hung on there for a day and a night with blood flowing from his leg, as three more tsunamis swept below him. Then he descended in exhaustion into waters that were still up to his neck. For another day and night he slogged through swamps and bodies to reach his home village, only to find it was gone. It took him another two days and two nights of walking in the rain and mud to reach Meulaboh, where he found his wife and child were still alive. He is a stubborn, rough man, not easy to kill. Incidentally, I saw a lot of water buffalos that were still alive near the coast. They too must be hard to kill. They love the water, are strong as oxen (stronger), have hard heads, and can swim all day.

Many Acehneses cant get into the camps and many more don’t want to. They went to live with relatives, friends, or distant acquaintances. They moved into abandoned houses, sleep in mosques, camp out in village halls, or double up with perfect strangers. Some who have money left Aceh. Most of them don’t have anything. Many are still hungry. The coalition of student volunteers set up five “poskos” (command posts) for distributing food, health care, and other supplies to about 1,000 “non-official” refugees. Four of these centers are one to two hours from Meulaboh, where there are hundreds of refugees and no other help available. The volunteers, who are not paid a single rupiah, are going out into the highways and byways to places that do not appear on any government list of refugees. Apparently two-thirds of the refugees are not in any of the official refugee camps. I visited the smallest of these centers where students were serving dinner to about 100 people. Dinner was plain white rice with a little grated coconut on the side. A muddy river provided all their water and sanitation needs.

We heard from an Acehnese that it was now possible to reach the city of Teunom by a road through the mountains, since the coastal road is impassible. We set off in a vintage, 1978 Landrover full of student volunteers and six sacks of rice. It was sort of like the Landrover in the movie, “The Gods Must Be Crazy.” It had a winch on the front, which saved us. We were forever getting stuck in deep mud, but we always found a tree to pull us out with the winch. It took us 11 hours to reach the village of Sari Timon, where about 400 refugees from nearby Teunom were staying. They were desperate for food, and it was heartbreaking to think of how little each family would get from our six sacks of rice. We slept on the floor with the refugees and bathed in the river. We fried some fish for breakfast, caught from the river. To my delight, a stall next door sold us excellent Acehnese coffee, and we showed the people how to filter and chemically purify their water for drinking and cooking.

Before we arrived, Teunom could only be reached by helicopter. The U.S. marines were bringing food there each day. A local leader told me they feed about 5,000 people every day in the refugee camps, but there is not enough food. That implies there may be as many as 10,000 refugees who are not in the camps. The city is just totally wiped out. Here and there a solitary house or mosque remains standing amid the rubble. They’ve buried over 3,000, but how many more bodies remain under the rubble? In the refugee house where we stayed, a little boy drew a fierce picture on the wall of his family’s experience of the tsunami. His grandfather saved him and two of his sisters by carrying them to the second story of a nearby mosque. Another sister was swept away while his mother and brother were saved by clinging to the top of a coconut palm.

After we returned to Meulaboh there was an intense discussion at 2:00 a.m. about whether to open a new posko in Sari Timon, Teunom. It was apparent that the volunteers were all for it. The need was obvious. But it wasn’t yet clear if they would be able to pull it off. The place is only accessible by Landrover or boat in good weather. They need a newer four-wheel drive, a boat, or both. Some of the volunteers have to return to their universities or drop out of school. They are short of Indonesian volunteers to work at all their poskos. A Protestant theology student from Jakarta lamented to me, “Where are the Christian students? Why isn’t there an organized response from Christian universities and seminaries?” He came with a couple friends on their own initiative with no help from their school. What will happen when he and other volunteers have to return to finish their studies? Since I represented a Christian university with over 4,000 students I said I would see what we could do.

Now I’m back in Yogyakarta reflecting on the experience. Duta Wacana Christian University is committed to a long-term program for working alongside the Acehnese to rebuild their own lives. We will be sending faculty and student volunteers every month for the next year, or as long as we are welcome and needed. That is another miracle.

Some Acehnese believe that the tsunami was a curse. Some say it was for their own sins. Some say it was because Acehenese and Christians held immoral Christmas celebrations on the porch of Mecca. Some say it was just an impersonal act of nature. Some say it was a warning, a wake up call for all of us. My wife, Farsijana preached an audacious sermon on Psalm 98: “Let the sea roar, and all that fills it; the world and those who live in it. Let the floods clap their hands; let the hills sing together for joy at the presence of the Lord, for he is coming to judge the earth.” Perhaps the earth was praising God in her own way, showing us how puny we are and how great is the power of God. “All flesh is grass.” I don’t know if the earth was praising or groaning (Rom. 8:22), but I do believe that God has not abandoned Aceh.

Therefore we will not fear, though the earth should change,
Though the mountains shake in the heart of the sea;
Though its waters roar and foam, though the mountains tremble with its tumult.
There is a river whose streams make glad the city of God,
The holy habitation of the Most High.
Psalm 46:1-4

On December 26, 2004 the mountains shook in the heart of the sea and cracked open the violent barrier that separated Aceh from the rest of the world. A great dirty flood of people and organizations flowed in. Some have aggressive religious or political agendas. They want to subjugate the Acehnese to their own interests. But there is also a clear river flowing into Aceh, bringing life, joy, and hope, with no strings attached. Perhaps that is the secret that I can’t forget but don’t remember. We can be part of that pure, cool river whose streams make glad the porch of Mecca.

Wassalamu’alaikum,

Bernie and Farsijana Adeney-Risakotta

P.S. We will be on interpretation assignment in the United States, based in Berkeley, California, from July to December 2005. If you would like us to visit you please write to us soon.

The 2005 Mission Yearbook for Prayer & Study, p. 128