Coming Home to Yogyakarta
Lantip Budiarto, a member of the CARE emergency team in Indonesia, was dispatched to his hometown of Yogyakarta from CARE's office in Jakarta the day after the earthquake to help in CARE's emergency response. The following is his account of the trip home.
It was late, but I convinced the driver to take me to my brother-in-law's village. Kotagede is an ancient Javanese city, with many cemeteries. We knew the death toll was climbing, and at night the region was much too quiet.
When we turned down the first street, we saw something in the road. People. Bodies. At first I thought they were dead bodies, but they were just people sleeping on the street. Everyone is terrified to sleep inside. Every tremor and aftershock sends another piece of rubble crashing to the ground. They have seen what happened during the first earthquake, and they are afraid their houses will collapse.
With the rubble and people in the road, we had to park the car and walk to my family's house. The earthquake knocked out the electricity, so it was pitch black. We had left from Jakarta that morning in such a hurry, I forgot my flashlight, so I couldn't see. I could hear the sound of people breathing in the darkness, but I couldn't see them. My driver was afraid, so I walked through the rubble and sleeping bodies alone.
My two young daughters begged me not to come here — there is a volcano just outside of Yogyakarta, Mount Merapi, that scientists say is going to explode any day, and there are continuing aftershocks in the area. My daughters were afraid; after last year's tsunami, they didn't want me to go there either. But I had to come. I told them it is my duty to check on our cousins.
My family is safe, but our village is destroyed. They need food, and water, and shelter. CARE is one of the aid agencies responding to the earthquake, providing emergency aid to help the more than 130,000 left homeless by the disaster. CARE is focusing on the remote areas, like my family's village, to make sure that they get clean water to drink.
In my father's village in Klaten, seven people died, right next to our house. They were all trapped in their houses. Their relatives we able remove the bodies for a proper burial; it is not like after the tsunami, when all the bodies were swept away and survivors couldn't find their families. Here, it is easy to identify the dead.
Indonesia has suffered many disasters in the past two years, from the tsunami, to floods, and now the earthquake in Yogyakarta. But Indonesians will carry on, and help each other, like we always do. As I tell my daughters, we may be afraid, but it is our duty to help.
|