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.