Indonesians Flock to Disaster Site to Find Loved Ones

Unable to contact her Indonesian relatives and with no official information on their fate available, Adi Jenkins hopped on a plane in Perth, Australia, this week to find them herself.

“I can’t reach my brother or anyone else on the telephone, so I didn’t see any other way,” said Jenkins, a 50-year-old native of Kota Bakdrin, a village on the outskirts of the city of Banda Aceh, which was badly hit by the Dec. 26 tsunami.

Ten days after the waves ripped through the Indian Ocean, killing at least 94,000 Indonesians and leaving many more homeless, the mechanisms for reuniting separated family members have gotten off to a slow start.

Relief workers running refugee camps here concede that there is no umbrella registry for missing people in place, nobody to call. Each camp keeps its own list and there is no coordination among them.

In the absence of central authority, frantic relatives have taken matters into their own hands. Often at some risk to themselves, many are traveling to the scene of the disaster in search of kin.

Tens of thousands have come already to Aceh, the hard-hit area at the northern tip of Sumatra island, from Jakarta and farther afield.

Flights to Banda Aceh are virtually impossible to book because of the crush of relatives, so some people are going to extremes.

Despite Indonesian authorities’ warnings of continuing danger, Saiful Usman, a 26-year-old fisherman, took a boat out the day after the tsunami to look for his sister on the outskirts of Banda Aceh. He couldn’t find her or even her house, so thorough was the destruction.

So he has continued his lonely search, visiting refugee camps around Sumatra.

“I’ve been to six different refugee camps, but I can’t get any information,” Usman said as he peered in frustration over a gate at a refugee camp in Medan, the largest city in Sumatra and the hub of much of the relief effort.

The camp is on an airbase, a place rich with the aromas of clove cigarettes and jet fuel. Although the C-130 cargo planes roar overhead as they take off with relief supplies, the refugees themselves are quiet. There is little weeping. People seem to be in a state between shock and deep contemplation.

By virtue of their absence, the missing are a powerful presence at the camps. Their faces stare out from photographs mounted throughout the camp. Desperate for information, family members are plastering pictures on any flat surface.

A 3-year-old girl with big, almond eyes and hair cut short like a boy. A young police officer with a peach-fuzz mustache posing with a rifle, trying to look tough. An attractive, young couple dressed in silk wedding costumes.

“Dicari!” -- “Wanted!” read the captions under the photos.

Overwhelmed relief officials say they can’t even begin helping people find their relatives.

“Eventually there will be a computerized system and it will all get organized. But right now, we don’t have the time,” said Tjog Seng Hie, who was running one of the refugee camps near Medan.

Adam Toto, an official with the Christian Children’s Fund, said that in many cases tsunami victims, including young children, were evacuated from the disaster scene in such haste that there was no record made of where they came from.

“Everything was so spontaneous,” Toto said, adding: “Right now, the focus is still on saving victims. In a few more days, they will be thinking about reuniting them.”

Yulmahendra is among those starting what is likely to be a frustrating and ultimately unsuccessful search for his family. Like many Indonesians, the 32-year-old civil servant uses only one name.

When the tsunami struck, he wrapped his arms tightly around his 2-year-old son. His wife held their infant daughter as they fled the water.

But then Yulmahendra made the classic mistake of looking back. He saw his mother stumble and fall. Without contemplating the wisdom of the decision, he went back to help her.

The next thing he remembers is holding on to an uprooted tree in the churning sea. Clutching the tree for eight hours before he was rescued by a fisherman, he scanned the detritus floating past him in the water. There were houses and cars, water buffalo and goats -- and many human corpses -- but not a trace of his family.

Yulmahendra sits with his legs stretched out as an aunt dresses his wounds, ugly brown-red welts on his legs, his eyes black and feet badly swollen.

“I will look for them as soon as I get my strength back,” Yulmahendra says. He understands that he might not get answers about his family for months, if ever.

His case is more complicated because his family had been visiting relatives in Banda Aceh at the time of the tsunami, so if they, or their bodies, are found, it will probably not be in their hometown.

“I don’t know what my chances are,” he says. “But I will continue to look.”