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.