Aceh #1
Feb. 8/05

There’s a crack on the wall of my room in Banda Aceh that runs parallel to and about 18 inches below the ceiling before plunging like an Enron profit report, through a narrow, nipple-high band of flowered wallpaper to disappear in the floor.
The one in the john traces all the places where ceiling and walls meet so that every time you reach up to dump a bucket of water over your head you’re confronted by your mortality, and the real possibility the roof is about to drop, squishing you like a bug.
I watched those cracks for several weeks and though every second day brought new aftershocks, including a minute-long 6.1 whopper the day before I returned to Jakarta, the damage seems to have leveled out.
The kids in the school next door didn’t run screaming into the street which I take as a sign they’ve compartmentalized events of the past month almost as well as I.
Aftershocks were a way of life during the month I spent in Aceh after the tsunami. The only night I don’t remember the earth moving was the one J and I spent in a nice hotel in Medan the first day out of the Jakarta. Big, solid cement beast with a flesh and bone interior that’ll probably remain intact until the earth splits open at the end of days.
It really struck me sitting in room 19 of the Kuta Karang Lama hotel in Lhokseumawe, early the same day the intelligence division of the national police – pound-for-pound perhaps the dumbest brutes on the block – picked us up.
If it must 4 a.m. then I’d been at it for almost three days on about five hours sleep.
I’d just filed to the Globe & Mail and the phone rang with FOX! on the line from New York looking for an update. This may be the most enthusiastic & overwrought network in Rupert Murdoch’s television empire. Its employees are like cultists. I remember meeting a hyperactive 20something FOX!!! field producer from New Jersey in Kabul who kept insisting we “swap digits” which apparently means exchange phone-numbers. I had to threaten him with a empty bottle of Uzbek vodka before he backed off, and with me, people usually know when it’s time to back off.
In the world according to FOX!, traffic jams are “devastating” or “crippling”, critics of US foreign policy, “terrorist sympathizers” and Oliver North, “a true American patriot”.
They also pay upwards of $100.00 US per two minute Question & Answer session so we put a cork in it and try to work the phrase “God-fearin’ folks” in to render recognizable the Moslem fishermen and their families who make up the bulk of the Acehnese killed in the Boxing Day tsunami.
I bounced through various layers of their production system before washing up with CHIP! or BOB! or MAX! broadcasting live from something called FOX-CONTROL, the network nerve center and the place where “good” is molded into “bad” and “villains” into “heros”.
I’m not actually sure if FOX-CONTROL is the real name or something I made up but if it’s the latter, it should be the former.
As I struggled to re-form intelligent commentary about what I’d seen the previous day into something simple-syllabic and digestible by FOX!!! anchors and viewers, the floor started to shimmy and wobble. Struggling to contain the giggles, I reworded what was essentially a terrible seismic cause-and-effect Sunday morning event into the actions of a slavering, dangerous and perhaps animated creature with a rudimentary cerebral cortex and a visceral dislike for suburban commuters.
As the words formed, the yellow floor tiles began to undulate, morphing into the scales of the very creature I was conjuring for the lamp-jawed, mouth-breathing masses of middle-America, the swinging florescent ceiling lights slit-eyed cold and malicious, the dull, rolling hum of the ancient air-conditioning unit the bellows of the breast’s great lungs.
My laptop rattled on its grey Formica-topped table, and an ashtray fell to the floor as the doors of adjacent ground-floor units in this segregated (no marriage license meant J and I were not allowed to share a room) down-market hotel in this grey, petro-town swung open spilling terrified, half-awake renters into the rain-soaked parking lot.
At some point the anchor, ignoring the briefing notes, asked what I saw when I looked outside my hotel. It’s a question they ask every time.
I stood in the doorframe watching events unfold, and stuck to scripted descriptions of ruined fishing villages, a mounting death-toll and the three-story-high wall of black water that seemed to actively seek out its victims.


BELOW IS THE PIECE I FILED TO THE GLOBE AND MAIL THAT MORNING. IT IS TIMED AT 4:17 AM/DEC 29

Paul Dillon
Lhokseumawe, Indonesia
On a normal day, dozens of brightly colored fishing boats would be tethered to the rickety raised catwalks that meander through the impoverished fishing community of Pusung on the east coast of the island of Sumatra.
Instead the poorest victims of Sunday’s devastating 9.0 magnitude earthquake and the killer tsunamis it spawned spent Tuesday evening trying to rescue their few remaining personal items from their ravaged homes.
“We have nothing left but our lives,” said 25-year-old Nurslah, surveying the thick, putrid pools of mud and broken timbers where her house once stood. “The only good thing is that my husband was fishing when the waves came and his boat was not damaged.”
Others were not so lucky. Three of Nurslah’s neighbours, including a seven year-old boy lost their lives when a wall of water and mud crashed into Pusung at 8:15 a.m., just 15 minutes after residents were jolted to their feet by a powerful earthquake hundreds of miles away in the Indian ocean.
The death toll in Aceh province on the northern tip of Sumatra is expected to reach 25,000, Indonesian Vice-President Jusuf Kalla said Tuesday in Jakarta. At least one-fifth of the population of 50,000 in the west coast town of Muelaboh are believed dead and a further 9000 died in the provincial capitol Banda Aceh.
The ten-hour drive from Medan in North Sumatra along the east coast of Aceh province to Pusung, offers a vivid snapshot of the power unleashed by the earthquake.
Along this otherwise bucolic stretch of road are communities which have cumulatively lost upwards of 1,000 residents according to the Indonesian ministry of health. At least 400 people were seriously injured and a further 300 are reported missing.
In places closer to the epicenter on the west side of Sumatra, the earth was split apart by the force of an earthquake of Biblical proportions that struck as fathers threw their fishing nets and children played by the water’s edge. The ensuing tsunami blamed for an estimated 48,000 dead in nations as far away Somalia buried towns in Aceh province under mud and water.
In communities like Pusung, other forces were at work. Here the damage was entirely done by the fast rising debris-choked waters
Sgt. Suyitno, an Indonesian Army officer working at a Lhokseumawe camp for people rendered homeless by the tragedy, said the earthquake caused the waters of the Malacca Strait to suddenly drop.
“Many fish were stranded so the people on the beach, mostly women, children and old people, rushed down the beach to collect them,” he said. “A short time later the first waves came in and trapped those poor people. I was told the wave was as high as two coconut trees.”
Evidence of the devastation wrought by the earthquake begins more than an hour’s drive south of Lhokseumawe, in the town of Nibong. The town’s principal mosque, which squats at the side of the Trans-Sumatran highway linking Medan and Banda Aceh, has become a tent-city built of cheap plastic tarps and sleeping mats.
Arranged like pickets along the mosque’s fence are roughly two-dozen boys under the age of 10, who survey the passing traffic and visitors hollow-eyed and mute. Though no one will come right out at say it, the few adults at the mosque hint that the boys have lost one or both of their parents.
By contrast many areas appear to have escaped unscathed. Behind the mosque are healthy green fields of rice and bucolic scenes of men and buffalo working the ground.
In consecutive towns one sees growing numbers of disposed people, some begging hand-outs along the highway. An estimated 25,000 people have been forced from their homes in the communities around Lhokseumawe, and tent-cities like those in Nibong flourish in the many mosques that line the route.
The buildings are the traditional refuges of long-suffering citizens of Aceh who are frequently trapped between the Indonesian army and separatist rebels who have waged a near 30-year campaign against the government in Jakarta.
In Kadung village 15 kms south of Lhokseumawe, the damage is finally visible for all to see. Although almost a kilometer from the sea shore, grad piles of mud and debris have piled up against and between gaudily colored homes.
While no one died here, the tsunami wiped out the vast shrimp farms that support the community.
“What are we going to do, how will we buy food and clothing now that everything is destroyed,” says an elderly man, surveying the ruined pools. “If someone doesn’t rebuild this could be the end of our community.”
Foreign aid is starting to trickle into Aceh. Two planes loaded with humanitarian aid arrived in Banda Aceh on Tuesday and Australia has dispatched four more military transports to the area.
Pusung’s 1,200 residents of a ardscrabble fishing community on the borders of Lhokseumawe are living in army tents in a camp that is a model of efficiency, run jointly by the army and the Indonesian Red Cross.
Sitting cross-legged in one of the tents surrounded by the few possessions she rescued from her home, 35-year-old Halima counts her blessings. She fled with her family ahead of the rising flood waters and despite the damage to her home, believes it is salvageable.
“There are many people who are suffering far more than we are,” she says, drawing her six-year-old son close. “People have lost their families, children have no parents. We are too scared to return home at this time but at least we still have a home that we can go back to one day.”

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