A Choice Between Finding the Dead, Seeking Survival

A week ago, this town on the west coast of Sumatra had a population of 11,000. Today, there are only a few hundred survivors.

They are left to search for the dead, who were buried under tons of rubble or washed out to sea by last Sunday’s overpowering tsunami. Or to make their way north, by boat or by foot, to seek food and shelter.

Authorities estimate that as many as 100,000 Indonesians died in the disaster, and they believe the greatest loss of life occurred here, on the flat, coastal plain of western Sumatra. The narrow strip of land abuts steep mountains, and when the tsunami hit, most people had nowhere to run.

A week later, many of the communities remain difficult to reach, and authorities have been slow to deliver aid. By Saturday, some villages had yet to receive assistance from the outside world.

So hundreds of survivors are leaving their ruined homes and heading north to refugee camps in Banda Aceh, the provincial capital about 12 miles away. In Leupueng, more than 100 survivors who had been living in the hills decided Saturday that it was time to go.

“There are so many bodies in the street, and we can’t find our family,” said Siti Hawa, 35, who was walking to Banda Aceh. “There is no place left to stay.

“Please help us,” she added, starting to cry. “Please help us so we can go back to our village.”

Other refugees traveled by boat and on foot from as far away as Meulaboh, a town 110 miles to the south that suffered some of the worst damage from the great wave. To reach Banda Aceh, they had to make their way through villages that had been turned to rubble, past washed-out bridges and around lagoons of black water contaminated by decomposing bodies.

Nearly all the west coast refugees lost family members; some lost everyone. As they walked along the path to Banda Aceh, they carried what was left of their meager possessions. A few supported their loads on their heads; others led goats that survived the flood.

Sahril Mahdi, 25, a fisherman from Leupueng, said the group had no choice but to go. “The village already has become a sea,” he said. “There is no water, no food, no house.”

Although most of the refugees wanted to leave the disaster zone, others were returning to their villages in the hope of locating family members, or at least their remains.

Irwan Jafar, 46, a motorbike repairman, traveled 10 hours by bus and then hiked for hours to Leupueng hoping to find his sister, Nurzaidah.

He was unprepared for the rotting corpses and mountain of debris that had taken the place of his family’s neighborhood. “It’s so sad,” he said. “The house is gone.”

Zainuddin Achmad, 31, one of Leupueng’s few survivors, returned from Banda Aceh to see if he could find any sign of his wife, his daughter, his parents and brothers.

He escaped the wave because he had climbed a hill to collect firewood. He felt the sharp jolt of the earthquake, then noticed soon afterward that the sea was receding. He saw many villagers run out to the exposed reef to pick up fish that were flopping on the coral.

Then he watched in horror as a wave he estimated to be 50 feet high swept in and inundated the entire town. He saw only a handful of people who were able to clamber up the steep hills to safety.

When the floodwaters receded half an hour later, not a single building stood. In place of shops and houses, there were piles of broken boards and chunks of concrete, with dead bodies tangled among the remnants.

The wave scoured the cliffs behind the town and left a new high-water mark 50 feet above sea level.

“I thought it was the end of the world because the entire area was covered by water,” Achmad said. “All that was left was the coconuts.”

Agam Patra, an affluent local businessman, was determined to find his 10-year-old son, Fatria, who had been missing since he left with his uncle and five other relatives last Sunday to go fishing.

Patra offered a reward of more than $100 to anyone who spotted a body with the distinctive ring the boy was wearing. On Saturday, one of Patra’s nephews found the youth’s blackened corpse near the beach in Leupueng.

More than 15 relatives gathered to help prepare the body for burial. They gently removed the brush and logs that rested on top of the corpse, then lifted it onto a white linen shroud and a black plastic sheet. Leading Muslim clerics ruled last week that bodies of the disaster’s victims need not be washed according to custom.

Several of Patra’s nephews carried the body to a nearby banana plantation for burial. For Leupueng, Patra said, it was the first funeral since the tsunami. For him, it was the fulfillment of a father’s most solemn obligation.

“It’s everything for me,” Patra said.