Generosity Unexpected

The first day we drove into Banda Aceh, we drove through the less affected part of the city. There was earthquake damage everywhere, watermarks on the sides of houses, there was a bustle of foreigners, trying to make a mark on the suffering before us. We drove on and on. We registered with the people we had to register with. We tried to ascertain where we should go, that hadn't had the appropriate aid yet.

In the end, I think where we went hung on a more personal connection. One of the members of our group used to live in Banda Aceh and to teach at the university (I think). I don't remember her name now. Unlike the rest of us, she had a frame of reference for what we were seeing. She knew what this place looked like before all this happened. I can't imagine how devastated she was feeling. She was also concerned for all the people she knew who lived here. Wondering if they had survived. So our convoy headed towards the university (I believe). From talking to some people we came to hear of a little refugee camp (slightly outside the main centre of the city) that might benefit from what we could offer. To be honest I have no idea precisely where we were, or how the decision to go there was made. But we ended up there. It was a hundred metres or so up the road from where the waterline of where the tsunami got up to stopped.

Upon arrival in the afternoon, it was immediately obvious some people required medical attention. They got us set up on the steps of their mosque, which surprised me (due to us being infidels). Some people attempted crowd control, and we set up a bit of a system. Three to four of us seeing people, with an interpreter (sometimes two interpreters if the indonesian had to then be interpreted into acehnese). We would write down on a piece of paper the persons name and the medicine they needed and send them over to where the boxes of medicine and some more people from our team were. There they were given the medicine and instructions on how to take it.

One of the first people I saw was a girl maybe between 15-25. She was thin and completely listless, like she'd loss the will to live. She was very, very sick. She had been in the tsunami and when my hands touched her chest I could feel the rattling of her breathing. When I put a stethescope to her chest, she had a pleural rub - that rasping sound. She was very dehydrated, it was obvious she wasn't drinking or eating. This girl needed IV access, fluids and IV antibiotics. The oral medication we had was not going to cut it. We got our drivers to drive her to a hospital (which she had not had any way of getting to).
Here is what was written in my journal about her:
Woman listless
Pleural rub
Short shallow breaths
Dying to die
Thirstless in her dehydration

In the meanwhile, the rest of the team (non-medico) was assessing the situation and seeing what else we could do to help these people. Things like how to distribute the food/water/clothing safely, where to set up the waterfilter, what else the community needed done. They met with the elder in charge of this little makeshift community and began discussions.

Something happened then that floored me. Some of the people who's home had survived, moved out of their home, so that our group could stay there. These people have lost sooo much. Friends, families, homes. When we arrived, they moved from their home! I don't know how they had the strength to be generous after everything they had faced. To smile and give from the little they had. We all set up our sleeping gear in their home. We spent a while getting our mosquito nets perfect so we wouldn't end up malaria ridden.

At this point Suzie said "Did the ground just move?" What followed was a bunch of people mocking Suzie and telling her she was just dizzy. Then there came the undeniable feeling of having the ground roll beneath our feet. Mmm, we should not have been so disparaging, Suzie was right, the ground here moves. The Australians were reasonably unphased. This stemmed from our ignorance of earthquakes. The LA girs came in and recommended we all move out of the house and set up our tents in the yard surrounding the mosque where the refugee camp was. The buildings here are already weak from the earthquakes, the aftershocks (which were incidently still 5 or something-a-rather on the richter scale) could easily collapse them. Most of us (not all) wearily packed up our things and reset it all up outside in tents. I didn't think Matthew would forgive me if my laziness got me killed, so I was one of the ones that moved out.

A little tent city grew up beside our trucks.