Finding Shelter

On the 26th of December 2004, a magnitude 9.3 earthquake struck off the coast of Aceh at the northernmost tip of Sumatra. The devastating and unrelenting tsunami that followed caused unprecedented death and destruction throughout Southeast Asia, particularly to the “special territory” of Aceh. Of the 5,000 inhabitants of the village where Yudi Andika lives, the tsunami spared only 500, who escaped with only the clothes they wore…and each other. Yudi and his family were among the lucky survivors on a coastline completely ravaged by the waves.

As a young boy living on the coast, Yudi recalls spending a great deal of time at the beach, playing in the water almost every day. He grew accustomed to the ocean and to life by the sea. The doors of the family home were open to the beach and also to the small number of surfers that trickled through these parts in the early ’80s.

“A couple of surfers came here when I was very little,” Yudi recalls. “As I grew up I knew about surfing from them.” Yudi tried it for the first time in the early ’90s when he was 10. “A couple of surfers ask me to come to the beachbreak. They push me on a bodyboard the first time…the second time they ask me to go with my younger brother and together we surfed the beachbreak.” That beachbreak was where Yudi’s surfing really developed.

During much of Yudi’s life, Aceh was largely isolated from the rest of the world. The people lived amidst conflict and tension. It was an unstable political period thanks to a prolonged and bloody civil war between the separatist Free Aceh Movement (GAM) and the central government of Indonesia. The war threatened a bleak future for the people of Aceh, as Yudi remembers: “It was very frightening for the civilians…people were threatened and interrogated…many questions, many questions…very dangerous because everyone was carrying guns.” According to Yudi, the mountains nearby his village were a GAM stronghold, and also near the village was an Indonesian army base. “Very scary,” says Yudi. “Sometimes we didn’t know where the gunshots and bombings were coming from.”

It was a war over land, resources, and economic profit, perhaps also fuelled by a very conservative form of Islam more prevalent in Aceh than the rest of Indonesia. It was this war that was disrupted – literally out of the blue – by a far-reaching and massively ruinous force of nature.

Yudi had returned that morning from an earlier party on the beach and was sharing breakfast at home with his family. It was all very relaxed until tremors from the earthquake began at around 8:20a.m. Although earthquakes are common to the region, this earthquake was different.

“For around 15 minutes it did not stop,” says Yudi. “At first it was small, and then bigger, bigger, bigger. Sometimes, before, we had earthquakes, but not really strong and long like this.”

Yudi and his family evacuated the house and gathered outside to watch the house moving from side to side. A little while later Yudi recalls hearing what he thought was an airplane, but when he looked to the sky, there was no visible sign. Turning to his mother, Yudi read her mind and within moments others were running up from the beach, shouting, “Big wave coming soon!”

Against his mother’s wish Yudi took off to see for himself. “There were people on the beach, some running, some not,” he recalls. “The water was shallow and drawing out to sea. Some were collecting fish off the reef, but far away, looking like an oil slick in the distance, a wave was coming.”
Yudi ran swiftly back to his family and told them of the approaching danger, but the key to the family’s second motorbike was missing and panic set in as Yudi, his mother, and sister all desperately searched for the key to their escape. Yudi’s father was on the street with others from the neighbourhood. Distraught, Yudi told his mother to take his sister on the one motorbike, promising that he would run on foot, but his mother refused.

“If we die, we die together,” she said. Just then, Yudi’s mother remembered the spare key in the cupboard and for a moment the panic stopped. Yudi’s father appeared as they climbed on the bikes and together they fled the family home – Yudi and his sister on one bike, his father and mother on the other.

Amidst the panic and chaos they were separated within a short distance of leaving the house. Yudi and his sister went one way, his father and mother went another. Yudi motored towards Banda Aceh in an attempt to escape the full thrust of the tsunami. “In the rice field to the west I could see this big, black monster – like 60 or 80 feet tall – just coming through the field…standing up like a cobra. It stood up like that,” he says, still mystified as he shows the shape with his hand. “Maybe there were people in there mixing with wood, sand, trees…everything mixing in there.”

But as they fled towards Banda Aceh, Yudi and his sister suddenly faced essentially the same wave, which had wrapped around the tip of Sumatra and was making its way back toward them through the city of Banda Aceh.

“A big swell was coming from the other direction. I was only about 100 metres from this thing when I saw it hit a roof. I swerved to the right and went faster and faster with my bike. We go very far away…far away past the wave.” Yudi and his sister escaped. They sat with others, perched on a mountainside, overlooking the devastation below.

Worried for his parents he left his sister with the others and went searching. He walked the muddy roads, amidst the horror of the devastation. “There was wood and trees on the street and then I see like thousands and thousands of bodies, dead bodies.” Yudi is amazed and astonished still by the memory. After walking not so far, he met a guy he knew from his own village, who was able to point him to the area to which his parents had fled. Yudi was reunited with his mother and father, who had also remarkably survived after losing their motorbike and running the last 200 metres to safety.
Hardship prevailed in the days that followed. Masses of displaced inhabitants sheltered together in makeshift tents and camps in areas free from wreckage. Shop owners gave what they had to the hungry, and people did what they could to help each other survive.

On the second day, Yudi and two others decided to return to see the remains of their beachside village. But they only made it so far through the ruins by bike before coming to an area of water that they were forced to swim across. “There were lots of bodies still floating there,” Yudi says with dismay. “As we were swimming across, the bodies were under us. Some people had put a rope across there as the current was strong, and we just swim along the rope.” Yudi’s hand movements recollect the ordeal. “The water was strong, and the bodies ... so many. We had to swim through all of this to the village.”

Arriving at their decimated village, Yudi discovered one of his best friends, who he had been with the night before the tsunami. Because Yudi’s home was so close to the beach, the friend assumed he had been killed.

“He think I die already!” Yudi exclaims. “When we see each other we were so happy!” He says it with a big smile, nodding his head.

But most of Yudi´s friends were killed. Only a couple survived. Many of his relatives were also lost. “My father come from here and have lots of distant family here,” Yudi explains. “Lots of them – maybe like 100 or 120 in the village – they all die.” He pauses and drops his head. “Of my close family, one auntie and one cousin die…I miss them.”

In the village, everyone lost loved ones, and they grieved as a village. Some whole families were lost. Many children were left without parents; many parents were left without their children. It was common for a family of six or seven to live together in one house, and now it was equally common that only one or two of them survived.

For the survivors, the first two weeks were extremely difficult. Apart from the horror and hurt of losing their homes and loved ones, there was not enough medical help for the sick and injured. There was insufficient hygiene and a lack of food and water, too, however Yudi recalls helicopter food drops to the area early in the aftermath. “Four days after the tsunami they just drop the food anywhere they want. The roads were cut, so distribution was by helicopter.”

The clearing of dead bodies began almost immediately and was undertaken for the most part by the community itself. To begin with, bodies were being buried anywhere. Then a more organised system of collection by truck began, a difficult and enormously wretched task. Between a hundred and a thousand bodies were collected at a time and buried in mass graves. “It was very sad,” explains Yudi. “Sometimes the families wanted to find a body, but they could not find the body amongst it all.”

As the NGOs arrived during the first month, a system of food and water distribution, hygiene, medical care, and basic accommodation for the thousands of homeless was developed. For the next 12 months, Yudi’s family lived in a large makeshift camp.

Within a few weeks, Yudi was employed by an NGO and was sent by boat to take food, water, mosquito nets and blankets to a heavily damaged location down the coast. On arrival, Yudi met with a doctor and immediately began work helping with everything he could as they set up a mobile clinic. “It was very hard,” Yudi conveys, “a very busy job there…very ugly…because everybody get hurt by the tsunami, and they all need medical treatment. We not sleep until late at night and then get up very early to do everything we can do.”
In the months that followed, Yudi continued his work. As time went on, rebuilding began and Yudi gained experience and became involved with developing community projects. He was able to work with the village firsthand. “I set up a project making boats, helping the women’s group, helping the fishermen, carpenter, baker.” Yudi proudly points out that, “the people were happy because when we come, we help them get their business or career going again.”

Around one year after the disaster struck, people began moving back into Yudi’s village. With the help of foreign aid, communities rebuilt their homes. Back on their land, Yudi’s family stayed in a tent while they constructed a temporary dwelling. “It was hot…like a desert,” he recalls. “There were no trees. We had just a tent…and then the temporary house,” he says, chuckling as he points to the shack he and his mother and father still live in, while his father works to complete the new family home.

The 2004 tsunami brought an abrupt and complete stop to all human activity in the areas affected. Yet it was this single day of unimaginable human suffering that suspended one of Asia’s longest-running wars and led to the opening of Aceh to the international community and a flood of aid from around the world. This shift in momentum led to the signing of a peace agreement between the separatist movement GAM and the Indonesian Army on August 15th 2005. To this day, the peace continues to prevail.

As I write, four years after the earth shook, the landscape still bears the wounds of nature’s attack. A 30-metre-high scar marks the hills on the west-facing coast, recalling the height and force of the waves that hit these shores. Large ocean vessels rest in random locations kilometres from the sea. The few large trees on a once-forested line of dunes stand branchless up to 25 metres. A once-shaded coastline no longer boasts a palm-fringed setting, but instead a landscape regenerating. On the weekends a new generation of beachgoers leave Banda Aceh for the coast.

As for Yudi, he just walks to the end of the street. The beach there is his life and life goes on. He often thinks of how it was to be with friends and family in the times before the tsunami. It’s a new village now, and there are new challenges. Although the tsunami changed so many things, some things remain the same.

Yudi, a talented surfer, can be found clocking up plenty of tube time at one of his local breaks. Many of his new friends have followed his path and taken to surfing to find peace and joy, riding waves on a reborn coast.

On the flats just back from the beach, my bungalow shakes with earthly vibrations. It’s first light and I wake to turbulence, an emergent deep rumble and – in a moment of recognition – fear. I picture a larger-than-life sized wave, unimaginable amounts of water, uncompromising and headed for my bungalow. I launch from bed and run outside, climbing into some shorts along the way. Like me, others have fled their dwellings, and we group outside. In all of 30 seconds, the tremors stop. Yudi calmly heads to the beach to survey the ocean. He soon returns.

“No problem,” he declares. “The wind is offshore. Let’s go surfing.”

This article was published in The Surfer’s Path magazine, Issue 71, March/April 2009.