Riding With Cowboys

I had just returned from a family ski trip to Lake Tahoe over New Year’s when I got a call from a friend at Mercy Corps. “This is going to sound totally crazy...” he said. The agency was looking for a volunteer to handle the deluge of media interest on the ground in Banda Aceh. In theory, I fit the bill: I had lived in Indonesia before and spent my career in journalism. But in the 25 years since my volunteer English teaching post there I hadn’t spoken the language. As a reporter, I had never covered a disaster. And I didn’t know the first thing about relief work. Still, Mercy Corps needed help fast.

It was quite a jump cut. One day, I’m knee-deep in powder enjoying my family and friends. Six days later, I’m in the tropics of Banda Aceh amid thousands of people who have, in a matter of minutes, lost their family and friends, forever.

Mercy Corps’ base of operations in Banda Aceh was a little house, a cottage really. It had one big common room, a tiny bathroom with a cold splash bath, a crude kitchen. Chickens ran around in the muddy yard. It was here that some 30 people lived during the first weeks of the response. In the bare common room, they worked 18-hour days, pausing only for a bowl of rice or a brief night’s rest on dusty rugs. Here they faced an ever-expanding list of duties with an ever-changing cast against a backdrop of unprecedented tragedy. But for all that, the little house was surprisingly calm. It was a bubble, an oasis.

There were makeshift outposts like this all over town. More than 50 non-governmental organizations like Mercy Corps were on the scene. Foreign military crews set up their compounds out by the airport. The center ring of the circus was U.N. headquarters, a cluster of white tents pitched on some tennis courts. Relief workers ran around full of adrenaline staking claims to the mission at hand and swapping rumors of the impending eviction of foreigners, of rebel skirmishes on the outskirts of town, of disease outbreaks in the camps.

In the midst of all this madness, what happened inside that little Mercy Corps cottage amazed me. The team, 30 youthful Indonesians and ex-pats armed with nothing but a few laptops, pulled off extraordinary feats day after day. It’s hard to imagine a bigger logistical nightmare than distributing food in a third-world disaster zone. Trucks break down, supplies are looted, bribes are demanded, you name it. Yet within two weeks, that tiny team had found a way to feed close to 50,000 people. That fact really hit me. It proved how big a difference a band of deeply committed people can make in situations like this.

The team camaraderie was remarkable, too. I felt it most strongly during our nightly talks sitting cross-legged in a circle on the big rug. Diane Johnson, our team leader, would begin with a few words that always seemed to settle us down. The 38-year-old earth mother from Louisiana had cut her teeth in places like the Niger, Afghanistan and Kosovo. She’d break news from outside the bubble, debunk rumors, and offer pithy advice. She’d dole out kudos to deserving colleagues and we’d applaud. Then we’d go around the circle describing the day's events and plotting out the next one.

Once, a big tremor disrupted the meeting. We all jumped up, ran into the yard and kept talking. Another night, the meeting was delayed because a food distribution team missed curfew. When they finally showed up, we cheered. Whenever too much tension crept into the room, someone would crack wise and have us rolling on that rug.

The circle talks kept us going but the really crucial conversations were the routine ones team members had with Acehnese survivors. One of Mercy Corps’s main thrusts in a disaster is to shift quickly from emergency relief to recovery and long-term development. Yet each situation is different—a great solution in Sudan may not work elsewhere—so it’s important to find out what aid recipients want and follow that. In Banda Aceh, food distribution was Mercy Corps’s foot in the door. After making deliveries to the refugee camps, team members would canvass from tent-to-tent.

The consensus from this outreach fed late-night brainstorming sessions that led to funding of programs within a day or two. Banda Aceh was one big test tube, a situation no one had ever seen before, and everything had to be improvised on the fly. The result was overnight successes like the Cash-for-Work program, which hit the front-page of the New York Times and many major TV networks. Such results would have been impossible without people on the ground who were able to think and act on their own and who respected the views of people they were trying to help.

My job was to publicize Mercy Corps’s work. This should have been easy given that Banda Aceh was crawling with reporters. Unfortunately, there was almost no way to contact them. The cell phone networks were overloaded and internet access was limited since the little house had just one land line. It was a joke. Here I was a communications officer with no means of communication. After a few frustrating days, my colleague and I commandeered one of the few cars available, drove to the busiest intersection and flagged down reporters easily identified by signs posted on their windshields.

I knew the work was going to be exhausting. Each day felt like 72 hours or more. But I wasn’t prepared for the emotional rollercoaster that came with it. Two incidents left a particularly deep impression on me.

The first one occurred while I was accompanying a Wall Street Journal reporter on a five-hour trek up the western coast of Sumatra. Over the course of 10 miles, we didn’t see a single standing structure in villages where 15,000 people had lived. Now and then we met travelers with heavy loads who gulped our water and straggled on.

Our journey was almost over when I saw four men grappling at the edge of the surf. I paused with a companion, Ramli, while the reporter and the others continued on. We walked onto the beach over to a young boy in an orange T-shirt. He sat on a log drawing in the sand with a piece of driftwood.

“I’m tired,” I told Ramli, rubbing my sunburned neck. Ramli had been with us ever since the first river crossing. He’d been across the river before on his way down to his family’s village to search, in vain, for relatives. We’d stripped to our skivvies and waded in close behind him. I sank deep in the silt as the brown water rose as high as my chest. People told me that Banda Aceh’s storm sewers were at first clogged with bodies but I tried not to think about that. As soon as we had reached the far side of the river we all whooped, and Ramli had laughed.

Suddenly, the men were much closer. Each one held the corner of a blanket and there was a coconut hanging out from one side. When they were 10 yards away, they dropped the blanket to the sand, and yanked it away.

The coconut was the featureless skull of a decomposing man. It was smooth and shiny as melted plastic. I couldn’t help staring. The man’s knees were wide apart, his ankles crossed, his ribcage sucked in, his hands gripping his groin. The boy glanced at me as I edged nearer. I needed to see it close, to hold in its smell. I wanted to touch the man’s thigh, there where the flesh parted just above the knee exposing six inches of grey bone. Flesh and bone, a piece of human driftwood, left by the sea.

Finally, I felt Ramli’s hand on my shoulder, drawing me back. And when I looked up, I noticed for the first time that perhaps a dozen other corpses were scattered here and there nearby. I had seen them before but thought they were debris.

It was the middle of the night when the second incident occurred. I had been jarred awake by a tremor—at 6.2, it was much smaller in magnitude than the quake that hit the region yet again several weeks ago—but at the time it felt enormous and endless. I lay there in the dark for a long time, terrified that the roof of the house I was in would collapse, anguished by scenes from the beach and around Banda Aceh replaying in my head, and missing my loved ones. I kept feeling aftershocks that weren’t there. The pre-dawn prayers blaring from neighborhood mosques sounded like a chorus of ghosts.

And then I did something I hadn’t done in 25 years: I started to cry. Not one of those sentimental-movie dribblers but a wracking sob that went on and on. I wasn’t sure I was going to be able to stop. Eventually, I did. The next day I had to re-assure a few colleagues that I wasn’t falling apart but, in a way, I was. It felt as if several layers of callousness and conditioning accumulated over the years had peeled off me.

In the days that followed, I found myself finally able to hold the gaze of survivors as they told their stories. I began to sense how it feels to have one’s family, one’s home, one’s entire community ripped away without warning. I became a witness. The pain and sorrow in their eyes is fresh inside me even now.