From Sumatran Roast to Cups of Java: The coldest Christmas I could wish for!

I returned yesterday from spending another long holiday weekend seeing a different part of Sumatra. This weekend I joined a small team from my office to go give building construction aid in Kerinci, the mountainous western part of Jambi province that was most affected by last fall’s earthquake. The 12-hour drive there covered roads that would in other countries be considered impassable but we did our best to sleep through the bumps. After a few hours we got into the mountains and as my coworkers started bundling up exclaiming, “Dingin! Dingin!” I felt energized by the cool, fresh mountain air that never makes its way down to Jambi.

Upon arrival to the area’s main town Sungaipenuh (Full river), we went to survey the town we knew had suffered the most damage during the earthquake, Desa Lolo Kecil (Little Lolo Village). I don’t know if I was surprised that houses still had not been repaired since the Sept 30^th earthquake, or that I had never seen earthquake damage in an already poor area, but it was a sad sight. In between the visibly nicer houses that didn’t display any cracks, were the many brick houses of the village’s poor that had crumbled into bare house frames and corrugated iron roofs, the crumbled bricks still littering around and inside the house. And what I at first thought were just work sheds turned out to be the “temporary” houses of these people. Constructed from plywood, sheets of bamboo and about the size of one normal room, numerous families had set up a new life immediately next to the crumbled leftovers, some still housing the families cooking area and laundry lines hung under the roof; at least the leftovers served as shelter from the rain if it couldn’t be lived in.

The purpose of our trip was to find a worthy cause and recipients for a small chunk of money we had been given from donors in America to help survivors of the earthquake. While several local NGOs had already given attention to the village of Lolo Kecil, which suffered the worst in Kerinci with 130 houses at least partly damaged, international NGOs do not seem to have expanded their aid work from Padang to Kerinci, and plenty of victims are still homeless. After surveying the area on our own, our little team met with the village secretary (since the village head was out we would meet with him the next day but Indonesia has no end to levels of even local community bureaucracy so there were even positions lower we could have seen). He happily encouraged our plan to help locals purchase building supplies and soon another NGO worker in the area came to join us and discuss the current situation. We eventually decided the most effective way we could distribute our limited resources would be to focus it on the five most needy families. So the next day after meeting with the village head, and in a room full of village men and kretek smoke, the details were hammered out and he expressed his sincere appreciation. With representatives from each of the families (there was much debate about the time for the meeting because the men headed out to the fields early so it turned out to be mostly women there), a small ceremony transferred the money over to the village leadership who will facilitate the families’ purchase of materials and support the building process.

Despite much mention of Christmas this weekend our trip felt very much in the Christmas theme and it was eye-opening to see how these people have handled their suffering as a community. Of course there was still a fun element to the trip: