Coconut Juice

Temporary Beach House 1
Originally uploaded by rjschmidt.

A few days ago we were out walking and we found a couple of guys on the beach who’d built a kind of fort out of some boards they’d collected. Their platform was the foundation of their old house, which had been completely stripped away, leaving only the well standing higher than a bee’s knees. They had quite the place: pleasant, remote, removed from all other civilization by a two kilometre strip of wreckage behind them, and such a great view out to the sea that it almost made you forget that anything had happened.

It seemed like a peaceful life. It was midday when we wandered by and they were just waking up. Actually, the guy up in the tall hut on stilts beside the main house didn’t wake up until we were almost ready to go. All we saw of him for most of the visit was his two napping feet, hanging out the second story doorway at the top of the ladder. When he woke up his head appeared, smiling down at us with all three of his cigarette stained teeth. He insisted we stay for coconuts and set about organizing a boy who was hanging around grinning to look sharp and get some for us. Then he came down, shook hands all around, said winningly, ‘spek good ingrish,’ and led me out to the beach to tell me that boats can go on the water … I think.

These were good guys. They’d been keeping busy. There were a whole bunch of bottles under the house that they’d collected. It reminded me of the old 7-Up bottles in the root cellar of my grandparents’ house when I was a kid. There’s something nice about bottles all lined up like that. It’s so … normal. There was a tube of toothpaste and a mashed toothbrush by the well and laundry hung between two palm trees, waving in the wind. The dishes, unwashed in a plastic basin, were collecting ants. These guys were living. Considering what they’d been through, that was saying something.

The coconuts arrived, after some good-natured yelling at the boy, who still couldn’t stop grinning. The men set to happily arguing who had the best technique for rendering coconuts for drinking. They all had a go, and when the champion emerged, there were no hard feelings from our hosts that it turned out to be our driver. We sat there dribbling coconut milk down our chins and listening to their stories. One of the guys said that the wave had picked him up, carried him inland and dumped him in town, two kilometres from the shore. He somehow got on top of it and rode it by holding on to things, and so kept his life. But that was all he got, his life. He lost his house, his whole family, all his belongings. This plot on the beach is the only other thing he has left, so he came back and built this little house. Starting again from scratch. Literally. Whatever you can scratch up from the ground.

They described what this strip had been like, before the wave. I looked up the beach and saw that it was haunted by the ghost of a beautiful past, flitting around in the wreckage and the few standing trees: Beachfront houses and cafes, the coconut palms for shade, the breeze off the ocean to cool you, sitting on the veranda with your toes in the sand. A lazy day. A cold drink. The sound of kids. And now, just this house of old boards and collected bottles. Dining on coconuts, smoking cigarettes, talking, planning to rebuild it somehow. I admired their fortitude.

We offered to give some of our tents to them and to their neighbours. They called everyone over and we made a list. ‘But what about the Green Line?’ we asked them. The Indonesian government has decreed that no buildings are to be built within 500 metres of the shoreline, a coastal buffer to which they have given this cheery name. ‘Aren’t you afraid if you build here, the army will come and move you?’ Three-teeth laughed and dismissed this with a wave of his cigarette before he lit it and took a long drag. ‘This is my home,’ he said as if that settled it. Then he added, with a sly look, ‘If they say I cannot build my house here, I will open a café!’ He laughed.

Meanwhile, back down the beach, the Indonesian army was busy digging up sand by the dump truck load to use in the foundations of the (surprise) army-style barracks they are building everywhere to resettle people. Temporarily, they say, but they’re sure making a lot of them. I haven’t met a single person that thinks they are a good idea. They’re afraid that between the barracks and the Green Line, the army will grab all the good land for themselves. It wouldn’t be the first time. And the locals here aren’t too happy about their beach getting dug up. They’d brought out the local UNHCR rep to take a look even though it was Sunday. She was a little fireball Italian revolutionary, leading her entourage up the beach like Che Guevara. ‘These people are too passive!’ she crescendoed when we’d got her going. ‘In Italy we would be RIOTING if this happened!’ She looked around, but as no one seemed inclined to do as they do in Rome, she gathered her troops and marched off to find a more fertile environment for popular revolution.

We watched her go, lazy and full of coconut juice. The beach kind of gets into you here. But I hope she’s successful. In the meantime, the guys up the stretch will sit in the shade of the coconut trees, nap in the heat of the day, and gather their lives back around them. Just a small thing, a house on the beach, but it’s always the small things, isn’t it? Just pray that the Big Things don’t come and take it away. You’d hate to see vice ganging up with nature to beat the hell out of these guys again.

Quick Laughs Between The Lines

A couple of quick quotations, for the sake of humour, taken from conversations I’ve been part of recently:

Mike, on the idiosyncrasies and idiocies of humanitarian good-will: ‘Well, the Belgians gave us 700 tents and then left, and I’ve finally figured out what those other things with them are. At first, I thought they were cooking stoves, but it turns out they’re tent heaters. In Indonesia, where the temperature is always above 98, the Belgians gave us tent heaters.’

Kevin, on why he hired Hannah as the new bookkeeper: ‘Well, I found out she had a degree in accounting and she was washing my underpants.’

Jon, on the 5 am call to prayer: ‘It’s sounds like an orchestra tuning, very loudly, and never quite getting it right.’

Jon, on church splits: ‘Well, there’s a biblical precedent, and sometimes it can lead to some good things.’
Me, in reply: ‘Like Protestantism?’

Arief, in response to a news report quoting the Indonesian general, who said that he would be ready to ‘crack down’ if the peace talks between the separatists and the government failed: ‘They have been cracking for 3 years now. The Indonesian army has 50 000 and the separatists have 5000 and some cows. All is cracking.’

Well, that’s all for now, folks. Stay tuned …

Kids and Rubble

Kids and Rubble

We drive through the neighbourhood and it’s getting so I don’t notice anymore that the houses are all leveled or standing drunkenly like wounded giants with their twisted staircase guts and rebar bones exposed. It’s pile after pile of junk, strewn here and there with muddy jeans or tree roots poking up, going on and on with one cleared street through it. Then Rita sees a little girl she met once at the airport and the little girl sees her, and there’s recognition and frantic waving and calls of ‘Stop, STOP!’ to the driver and all of a sudden we are surrounded by a whole family – or what’s left of it. They are living, apparently, right in one of the piles of junk, which on closer inspection turns out to be a house of planks, salvaged from the ruin and cobbled together. In back there is a tent. This was their neighbourhood, and now they’ve come back.

The grown-ups mill around talking, and after awhile the little girl gets bored with their monologues and wanders off across the street by herself. Her name is Elfi, short for Elyiba Santi, and she’s 10 years old. Elfi is the one I want to watch. I don’t understand the language of the adults. I hear later that they are telling their stories. One man shows us the pictures of his wife and children. I hear later that he could not save them and they are dead. He is smiling as he talks and taking photos with his phone. I hear later that Indonesians have a smile for every emotion. Another lady, they tell me, has a hard time not crying, but I don’t notice. This is how you discover things in a culture different from your own – later, after the fact. But there is another language, the speech of children’s feet and where they go, which has a poetry more universal and so 10 year-old Elfi is who I watch now.

She wanders away by herself into the rubble, climbing over the pile of concrete blocks, up and down them, disappearing into the crevasses and reappearing. She is Finding Things. Her head emerges from the depths and in her hand held high is a pair of green basketball shorts, only slightly muddy. She looks towards the crowd of her elders to see if there is anyone who will join her jubilation at the find, but sees no one and slings the shorts disinterestedly over the edge of a broken wall. The fun has gone out of them. The next time she finds treasure she locates a chubby boy in a yellow t-shirt in the crowd who can be her accomplice. She jerks her head forward and flings a stream of high-pitched words that arc through the crowd of insensible grown-ups and land with impressive accuracy in the boy’s ear. He waddle-runs over the broken houses to her and joins the triumph: She’s discovered a backpack and it dangles from her waving fist by its single useful strap.

Leave her long enough, and Elfi will have her whole life back.

We stand on the street long enough to notice a curious thing. People are emerging from the wreckage, as if they were planted there last week and this week are sprouting up, as though all the old dresses and jeans and shirts and green basketball shorts that were the former sole inhabitants of this waste suddenly took shape and form and grew into people. Like Ezekiel’s valley of dry bones, they rise and begin the dance of rediscovering Life. It’s like this: You stand and peer over the broken things undulating slowly in a clear-cut path to the sea, like you are lost in a kind of sea with waves of concrete going up and down, and then over the crest of one distant wave, over the rise and fall, you see a hat pop up, then a brown head and a hand, and soon there is a whole person climbing over the broken waves to you. Bringing his wife, if they were lucky; if they were luckier, they bring their children. This sea of broken buildings, this jean-littered wasteland full of strapless backpacks and wounded houses, this place was their home, and now, slowly, they will begin to work in reverse of the Wave, and do what the brave have done for centuries the world over. They will pick up what’s left, and start again.

First Impressions

Wreckage - Banda Aceh

It’s worse than you would have thought, unbelievably. Like some petulant child god swept his arm in a temper over the floor where he was playing Town and flattened everything, then got up and stamped on it all. Flying in over Banda Aceh I kept thinking, ‘It’s so … flat. How can it be so flat? Doesn’t water go through things, over them, around them, and after it’s gone aren’t the things still there, damp and dripping, but standing?’ Later on the ground we drove through it all, and I saw what water can do. Where there were houses now there were bricks, separated almost into individual blocks, cement stripped away from the twisted rebar guts and lying in piles. Only the floors and foundations were left, with kitchen tiles exposed like patio decks and here and there a porcelain squat pan standing alone, like a garden fountain. The tsunami had turned the houses inside out.

And brought the outside in. Mud and sticks twisted up with the broken bricks and tiles. And the trees. Surely you’d think the trees would make it – root-deep and pliable, a part of nature like the Wave itself. But the trees lay like soldiers killed in some street war, at the doorsteps of former homes.

Dotted throughout the leveled ground stood the survivors, the lone, limping houses and trees that stood somehow through the rush and rip. The trees stripped and sanded up their trunks nearly thirty feet in some places and the houses with holes in the bottom walls as though they were kicked out like derelict children kick out fence slats in abandoned lots. Standing silhouettes on a trampled field, punctuating the devastation.

These are the big things. But it is always the small things that catch in your throat. The big things are so big, and block after block of rubble begins to look normal. You become numb to it, you absorb it: now the world is like this. But the small things reach up and poke you inside with their tiny fingers. They whisper sharp little whispers that sneak through to your heart. They are the childrens’ t-shirts, flapping from rebar poking out of the mud, the piece of porcelain that once was a bowl in a place that once was a kitchen where once there was a family, the names spray-painted on the remaining walls, grafitti tombstones. The big things shout DISASTER! The small things silently remind you of home. You decide which is worse.

These are just the objects, mind you. For the people you must go deeper, and I, just arrived, have not gone that deep. But people are here still. Looking around at the endless piles of rubble, it’s surprising that they are. I think I would have left – looked around once and left. This is a typical attitude for someone like me – someone, that is, who can leave. My attitude comes with the favoured circumstances of my birth; I was born someone who is allowed to leave. For those that remain, without such favour, life must continue where they are, despite what happens. So the people are out moving around the wreckage, sorting, shifting, digging, pulling their lives back from what the sea has left them. We drove past men chipping rebar off cement pillars and pulling strips of metal wire from piles of mud. Good scrap metal goes for 50 cents a kilo, I’m told. I heard of people tugging muddy pieces of clothing from the roots of twisted trees and beginning to wash them. Their resilience exposes my own lack. Like I said, I’d have left already.

To be perfectly honest, I’ve already thought of leaving. Several times. Shamefully, it isn’t the tsunami that makes me want to leave. For me it takes a much smaller wave than that. It’s too hot all the time, for example. The screens in my room have holes that let the mosquitoes in, and in they come, night and day. There’s no (oh the vanity!) mirror in any of the washrooms and shaving is done by feel. There’s also no place to put my toothbrush, or really any of my things for that matter. No cupboards or desk in my room, the bed has large gaps in the slats where the flabby mattress falls through, and I wake up stiff and look at the pile of my belongings on the floor in the hot empty room. I get up and go to the bathroom and a rotten smell rises from the floor drain.

It’s not comfortable here.

This is the reality: my petty and embarrassing discomforts in competition with the massive ruin and needs outside – and winning. I feel like going home.

I don’t have a nice solution to this piece. I’m not going home. I’m here to help and I’ll keep trying. I suppose I just wanted to say it. I’m not a hero. It’s a devastating situation and it’s hard to be here.

Politeness

Ok, feeling reasonably better about everything this morning. Amazing what a little sleep, prayer, and landing in Japan will do for a person. I believe that the Japanese are the most polite people on earth (of course, not having met everyone, I can't say that with confidence. When the girl working security bowed and smiled apologetically several times for having to search my bag, I decided it wouldn't be so bad if these people took over the world. We could learn a thing or two. Plus being North American in Asia, I like a national character that is actually more overboard about privacy and personal space than I am.

Right now I'm in Singapore, two hours away from the final flight to Medan. I had a marvelous sleep on the floor after I took the cushions off the lounge chairs and made a bed. I was only woken up once by two very pleasant characters with large automatic guns hanging from their shoulders. Just a routine passport check by special members of the Singaporean police force: "Thank you, sir, enjoy your trip!"

Well this internet port is about to run out so I'm off.

Thoughts From The Current

Four days ago I was standing on the lanai of my friends' apartment in Kona, Hawaii, watching a little girl. She was about six, with her hair in two pigtails, clutching a ziploc bag of cheerios. She didn't see me watching. She climbed up onto the bumper, then the trunk, then up the back window and on to the roof of a car parked in the parking lot, kicked off her Mary Janes and sat down cross-legged in her orange sundress to eat her snack. She looked around her, rolled over on to her side, slid frontways down the window, flicked cheerios off the roof and watched them roll into the storm drain, and generally owned the place. Later on I saw her standing in a rain gutter behind one of the buildings, pulling up parts of it like lion gutting an antelope. My friend Adam told me she was the caretaker's daughter.

'So this is her world,' I said. It was a wistful statement. I don't have a world.

At the moment, I am at the Detroit airport, watching the grey day go on and on out the big window and waiting for a plane bound for Tokyo. As one person, I'm really too small to inhabit such a large place as this planet that I keep flying around. There is no familiar car roof or bag of cheerios, nothing like that. The fact that all airports look the same doesn't help. After this, Tokyo, after Tokyo, Singapore, after Singapore, Medan - like a current pulling me along. Once, when I was fishing in the Squamish river for late chum, I saw ragged fins at the surface, drifting backward. They belonged to fish too old to make it home, wagging weakly in the current as the river pulled them back to the sea and deathward. This image comes to mind now. I wonder if I'm only going back to the confusion and mis-managed life of an aid worker because I've lost the strength to go forward. Hmm ... no. I know I could make it upriver and home. The problem is finding it. Here's where I have to leave the fish image, because I have no instinctual feeling of where home is. It's got something to do with a car roof and cheerios, maybe.

Ok, I admit it, I'm tired. These aren't the most cheerful thoughts. Honestly, folks, I'm not sure right now if I'm doing the right thing here. My visit to HQ in Baltimore left me with more questions than answers, and I'm right back in the old stew of doing things and trying to convince myself that it's helping. Unfortunately, my job this time is to try to convince other people of that as well, and from here it looks as though I might have to lie my head off to do that. I really hope not. I guess that's why I started with a little girl in her orange sundress spending the afternoon on the roof of her father's car. It was the last truly hopeful thing I saw.