First came the tremors. They reverberated so violently that the walls of the IRC offices cracked and the gate outside fell to the ground.
A half hour later, the waves came. They lifted boats onto houses and smashed cars like bugs. The IRC headquarters in Banda Aceh was inundated with water up to the second floor. Debris punched holes though the walls of an adjacent warehouse. A junkyard of jetsam lay at the front door and the smell of death was everywhere.
Fadhil, an environmental health manager, was at work on the day the ground shook and the waves came. And after the December 26th earthquake and tsunami, he and other IRC staff labored non-stop attending to each other’s needs and laying the groundwork for the organization’s massive Aceh relief effort. “They were on top of virtually everything,” said Gillian Dunn, emergency coordinator for the Aceh response. “They were our points of contact. They were the people who briefed us. They worked 24/7 to get our field office set up.”
To be sure, when Fadhil spoke recently about his experience he refused to acknowledge that his efforts were extraordinary. He noted that many IRC staff members suffered the loss of family and friends and many others barely escaped with their lives. He said he still grieves over one staffer Rosnani (most people in Aceh do not have family names) who succumbed to the force of the waves and another Amirullah who is still missing along with his wife and two small children. They were among the 113,000 dead and the 126,000 missing from the disaster.
But by any measure, Fadhil and other IRC staffers made an extraordinary effort after the tsunami. This is their story.
When the earthquake hit, Fadhil and the other staffers ran from their office but found it nearly impossible to stay on their feet. “We wanted to get into the car but we couldn’t,” he said. “It was literally jumping up and down in the parking lot.”
After the quake subsided, most of the staff decided they would go home to check on their families. Soon afterwards, the tsunami arrived and Banda Aceh was reduced to chaos.
In the ensuing hours the team struggled to reunite. Fadhil returned to the IRC office fearing the worst. He found Jal, a security guard who had stayed at his post, had survived only by climbing atop a mango tree. But he didn’t know the whereabouts of three other IRC workers – Gun, an administrative assistant; Hanif, a driver; and Uti, a child protection officer – all of whom lived in the hardest hit areas.
So Fadhil went to find a rubber boat to see if he could row out and save others. But the boat didn’t inflate and Fadhil was soon wading in water chest deep. In the meantime he began to learn the fate of other IRC workers. The wave had dragged Gun for two kilometers. He was coughing up sludge and sand, but by some miracle managed to survive. Hanif and his wife endured the tsunami after climbing to the top of a nearby house, but he had lost his mother. Uti was also alive, but lost her entire family except one brother.
In the ensuing hours it was apparent that there would soon be little to eat in Banda Aceh. So Fadhil traveled eight hours on a small motorbike where he secured food for the rest of the team. When he returned to Banda Aceh, he found that other IRC team members were already beginning to arrive from Jakarta.
They were staying in the house of IRC staffer Ian, the administration coordinator, who also worked hard to ensure that the IRC offices and staff recovered from the earthquake. In the hours after the tsunami, he too went to the IRC’s offices to secure the cashbox and other valuable items from looters. “Among other things, I was hoping that we could find our vehicles,” Ian said. “At first I couldn’t find them. But then I looked up and there was one of our cars stuck in the branches of a tree.”
Ian remained in Banda Aceh searching for staff even after he learned that his wife had fallen ill. But when he returned home that night, he learned that she had contracted dengue fever and had to be taken to a hospital in Medan, some 14 hours away by car.
Once he arrived to Medan, however, he received a call from the emergency team, who was gearing up for the response. “There was someone on the telephone who wanted me to get a truck, three large generators and 35 mattresses,” he said. “He asked me if I could get them and bring them back to Banda Aceh. If it were any other organization I would have thought they were crazy. But I knew what had happened to Aceh and I knew how important it was.”
To pay for the goods, Ian took money from his personal account – some seven times his monthly salary – and bought the necessary items. The next day he found that some 35 IRC staffers from various parts of the globe had begun relief efforts out of his home. “It didn’t matter how many they were,” he said. “Of course, they were all welcome.”
By the time Dunn arrived in Banda Aceh, Ian had already secured another IRC office. And despite their personal suffering, the staff was all hard at work providing needed supplies to the victims of the disaster.
