Red Cross Blogs

Reporting from Indonesia: aftershocks and fear

By Sarah Oughton
October 6, 2009 at 4:55 pm

Guest blogger Sharon Reader is a communications officer in Scotland. She has been sent to Indonesia with the British Red Cross logistics emergency response unit (ERU). Here she reports back from Indonesia.

Last Sunday, amid torrential rain, I arrived in Padang, Sumatra, four days after an earthquake struck and devastated hundreds of thousands of lives.

This is my first mission overseas with the Red Cross and the first time I’ve been to the scene of a disaster. I don’t think anything could have really prepared me for how horrendous it actually is.
The role of the ERU is to get to get life-saving relief supplies to people who desperately need them. And they really do need them.

Nearly 200,000 buildings have been damaged, more than 600 people have

died and 1,500 are injured according to Indonesia’s National Disaster Management Agency. In addition, many hospitals, health centres, schools and community buildings have all been destroyed too. Electricity is intermittent across the region and many power lines have collapsed too.

But that’s just numbers. On Monday, I travelled up into the hills with some staff from the local Indonesian Red Cross and saw people hauling what furniture and supplies they could from their ruined homes.

Some had managed to pull tarpaulin from one crumbled wall to another and I couldn’t help thinking one strong tremor would be enough to collapse the rest of the building. Whole families were just sitting there, among the rubble. They looked like they couldn’t quite comprehend what had happened to them – I don’t suppose I’d be able to get my head around it either if it was my home.

We’ve also experienced about four aftershocks, which is pretty terrifying, but probably not a patch on how the people who lived through the actual earthquake must feel. For them every time a tremor comes, they must think it’s happening all over again. Last night there was a particularly bad one when I was in the office and many people were screaming and running around.

Most districts in Indonesia have local community health centres, where people can get medicines and minor surgery, often for free. One of the worst impacts of the earthquake has been the destruction of many clinics, leaving communities with no access to healthcare at a time when they need it most. The Indonesian Red Cross, with support from the International Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement, is travelling throughout the area to make sure people get access to healthcare.

Yesterday, at a mobile clinic in Cubudakair village I met one mother of four, whose youngest child hadn’t spoken a word since the earthquake. She told me she thought he was suffering trauma. She was at the clinic as all four of her children were ill with coughs and sickness.

She told me she was at home when the quake hit with her youngest son and just grabbed him and ran out the door. She’d barely made it out before the whole house collapsed, taking her livelihood – a small shop – with it. At the time she was just panicking about her other children and her husband, but now, she says she can’t think about the future, it’s too hard.

It’s really important that we can raise more funds to help families who have lost everything.
Please help us to help them.

To donate go to www.dec.org.uk or call 0370 60 60 900

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Tags: aftershocks, devastation, disaster, earthquake, emergency, emergency response unit, Indonesia

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