The day the earth trembled...

"We're used to earthquakes, two, three times every year. But this time it was different. Usually the ground moves sideways, causing no damage, or minimal damage. This time the ground moved up and down. The houses were lifted and then simply crumbled to the ground. It was like as if someone pulled the carpet from below our feet..."

*******

We were on the 17th floor and we felt the building tremble. And this was in Kuala Lumpur.

Exactly a year ago today, the devastating earthquake struck Padang in West Sumatera, Indonesia.

Two weeks later, I found myself in Padang, on a relief mission.

I was there for nearly a week, doing what we were sent there to do.

I would send a report back to headquarters every night. This would be followed by my daily... err... musings. Which included these:

Day 1
- Teh telor* oh my goodness it's like milkshake. A night drink they say it is before laughing...
- Satay Padang is delicious! Altho they don't call it Satay Padang here... that would be weird.
- We sleep 16 men in one house. 5 are on their way back from Pekan Baru, and some sleep in the garden. So house is relatively quiet now.
- We all share 1 bathroom. For this reason and the point preceding, this place not suitable for my ladies.
- I'm still wide awake. Teh telor memang power.

*teh telor means egg tea :-)

Day 2
Without the benefit of teh telor...
- Our house has no fan.
- To those who wondered why my haircut was as important as getting my vaccinations: with two strokes of my 80 cents plastic hair brush, I'm ready to face the world.
- We had a meeting tonight to plot the distribution of aid tomorrow. They were doin mental calculations on total weight and total litres and total items... I kept very quiet.

Day 3
- I was awakened at 3am last night, by a cat at my feet. No privacy I tell you.
- And the resident cockerel woke me up at the crack of dawn. Nothing romantic at all about that.
- School is back in session. They hold classes in tents. It feels like a sauna tho. When I reached there, they were on a break. In the teachers room, where the wall had collapsed, the kids were playing with a mannequin. They wrapped it in a batik cloth, and then carried the mannequin while chanting religious chants, as if it were a dead body.
- We had lunch today at a restaurant that had major cracks on its walls, had its windows shattered and floors cracked as well.
- For the first time in ages, I eat for energy. I can feel each morsel of food burn during the day. And we reach meal times famished. And we whack the meal like there's no tomorrow.
- The names of the places here will give lawyers like some of us nightmares. One place is called 2 x 11 Enam Lingkung. You actually call it that!
- I nearly fainted today. At dinner. The cendol in a glass. It was so sweet I nearly belched it out.

Day 4
- The cat woke me up at 2.58am
- The most bizzare incident so far - the cook cooking his Indo-mee with ... coffee.

HAHAHA!

In his defence, it was dark.

HAHAHA!

Day 5
No musings on Day 5 as things got a little complicated. We were about half-an-hour from our base late that night, after a long day out, when we were stopped by police. We were told that a few hundred metres down the road, a landslide had occured a few minutes prior, burying some passing cars. We had to take a 4 hour detour.

A couple of weeks later, when everyone involved in the mission got together, one of my team members 'credited' me with saving all our lifes.

"Thank god he insisted on eating good Padang fish head curry that night. It took us a while to locate one that had fish head curry, but we finally did. The time it took us all to finish the meal probably delayed us long enough."

Hmmm...

******

I haven't been back to Padang since, but having seen the devastation caused by that one afternoon of terror, the people of Padang have a long way to go, years perhaps, before life returns to some semblence of normalcy.

One elderly gentleman I met there said that he welcomed all aid, but he knew that the aid would eventually stop and that he needed to start rebuilding his life with his own hands, brick by brick.

And he meant it literally.

God bless the people of Padang.