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Relief Efforts in Earthquake-affected Bantul,
Indonesia
June 1, 2006
At 6am on the 27th of May this year, Central Java was
rocked by an earthquake measuring about 6.3 on the Richter scale.
More than 6000 people have since died from the disaster and
survivors are in desperate need of humanitarian assistance.
Fortunately, relief efforts are underway and humanitarian
organisations have responded quickly to alleviate the suffering of
people in the affected region.
Stay tuned to Connections to
find out more about the kind of support that is being provided to
the devastated area. Welcome to the programme. I’m Yvonne Gomez.
JE: I remember, and this was on the first day, going to a
village where we were going to be distributing tarpaulins and when
we arrived and had handed them out, I went back with one of the
families to what used to be their home. It was just a mound of
bricks and cement. There was a sofa outside and it was the only
thing that they had and had managed to rescue. I don’t know how they
managed to rescue that but it was the only possession they had. They
didn’t even have shoes on their feet because they had to rush out of
there quickly. When I got to talking to the family and asked about
the condition of the children and she said that her children hadn’t
spoken to her since the earthquake struck, and that was a couple of
days before. The impact on children in something I find moving
because many of the parents have told me that the children get
scared when it gets dark because there’s no electricity and the
tremors, when they come, the children start to cry. The children are
maybe not traumatised, but certainly emotionally upset by what
they’ve seen, and they’ve lost their homes as well. Their worlds
have basically been turned upside down.
That was James East,
the Asia-Pacific Regional Office Communications Director for World
Vision.
World Vision’s relief team in Indonesia has been
distributing relief goods to inhabitants of Jetis village in Bantul
district, the area worst affected by the earthquake.
James
told me more about the situation that greeted him when he arrived at
Jogjakarta.
JE: Well, I arrived at night and the next
morning I went out. The city of Jogjakarta is basically ok. As you
move out into the suburbs and into the villages, you then come
across these villages or settlements that have been completely
devastated. Many of the villages are tucked away in these groves of
banana and palm plantations. You’ll find large piles of bricks where
homes once stood. So it seems very much like the people who are
poorer who were the ones who were not able to build solid homes are
the ones who have really suffered.
In your opinion, do you
think that the people who live in that area are aware that they’re
living in an earthquake zone and were they even mentally prepared
for something like this?
JE: That’s a good question. I’m not
sure if they’re really fully aware that they were living in an
earthquake zone, and I think that it’s very difficult for people who
are poor to really prepare well, because if you’re going to build a
building to withstand earthquakes, then you need to spend more money
on construction. The think I really noticed about the brickwork on
these things is that they obviously use a lot of sand in the cement
so you find that collapsing under you. I think that’s why so many of
these homes have tumbled down.
So what exactly have you been
doing for World Vision there in Bantul?
JE: What we’ve been
doing is distributing tarpaulins so that we can get people sheltered
and that was very important because it was raining at night-time.
Now we’re distributing thousands of what we call “family kits”, and
these kits are consisting of things like pots and pans, hygiene
items like soaps and toothbrushes and torches, so that people who’ve
lost everything at least have something with which to cook and to
keep themselves clean.
That was James East, the Asia-Pacific
Regional Office Communications Director for World Vision, speaking
to me from Jogjakarta in Indonesia.
Since the 11th May,
Singapore-based Mercy Relief has been sending missions to Central
Java. Salihin Sulaiman is Mercy Relief’s Communications Manager.
SS: It started with the Merapi mission. We have sent two
teams and when the third team went to Merapi, the earthquake
happened as well. So that team was then redeployed to the Jogjakarta
area to help out with the earthquake victims.
Tune in to the
programme to find out more. |
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