Boys Undergo Rite of Passage in a Tent Camp

Despair hung in the air on the day Samhudi became a man, mixing with the dust kicked up by a hard wind.

There is little to do but idle away time in this makeshift camp for tsunami survivors. It is built tantalizingly close to the aquamarine waters where local fishermen went to sea before the great wave came. But now everyone waits to be fed, waits until it is time to pray again, waits to hear where they will go next.

And lying on his back propped against his father’s arms one day last week, the frightened boy waited his turn to be circumcised, making the symbolic journey from boy to man.

He lay there in the midst of the tumbling children and garbage and flies as a team of young doctors knelt around him for an operation they admitted should not be done in such unsanitary conditions.

“This is not good,” said Dr. Ulul Albab, 24. Albab headed the team of visiting doctors, interns and nurses from Jakarta, the national capital. “A circumcision is surgery and should be done in sterile conditions -- at least in a tent, not outside like this.

“But what can we do? This is a disaster.”

There was no question of waiting for a better time or place. Village leaders who run this camp of about 800 people said boys were demanding the operation, and they had asked the medical team to dedicate one of its twice-weekly visits to a mass circumcision.

Albab’s team had spent one day doing 14 circumcisions for another displaced community. They would do six in this camp, 24 miles down the smashed coastline from Banda Aceh, the provincial capital where the nearest hospital is located.

Samhudi was one of the last two patients of the day, his operation starting after afternoon prayers. Circumcision is a communal event in Aceh, located in the northern part of the island of Sumatra, and camp officials wanted the operations performed in the open-air cabana that serves as the camp’s mosque, so others could watch.

The doctors laid Samhudi down on a blue hospital sheet covering the prayer carpets. His father, Suardi, 36, sat cross-legged behind his son, cradling his head in the crook of an arm. Suardi says he had not considered getting his son circumcised until just three days before, when the village leaders came around. Suardi signed his son up right away.

Boys in Aceh province, where most people are devout Muslims, are circumcised by the time they reach age 13. Samhudi said he was 11. He is handsome without a hint of a beard. His father corrected him.

“You are 13,” he scolded his son. They settled on 12.

“I had no plan to do it, but I must do it,” Samhudi said, his voice hoarse with nerves.

“It is a good time to do it because there is no school now, so he will be able to rest afterward without missing anything,” Suardi said.

Post-tsunami medical care is free, he added. In Aceh, a circumcision normally costs a little over $5 if done by a nurse, over $10 if a doctor operates.

Samhudi had seen other boys undergo circumcision and claimed the operation didn’t scare him. His eyes told otherwise.

He searched his father’s face for comfort when the student doctor doing the operation lifted Samhudi’s sarong and swabbed him with disinfectant, then theatrically checked the anesthetic in the needle against the late afternoon sunlight.

His father covered his son’s eyes with the sarong for the injection. A nurse held his hand. Undergoing his own operation a few feet away, 12-year-old Heriza shrieked in fear or pain or both. His wailing unsettled Samhudi, who lifted his head to look at his own body and gave up a tear. He began softly repeating Koranic verses with the nurse, and the two of them soon locked voices in a sing-song duet.

“We do this for medical reasons and for religious reasons,” Dr. Albab said. “But the No. 1 reason is religion.”

Everyone in camp, it seemed, wanted to watch Samhudi’s rite of passage. There was lots of giggling from boys and girls jostling along the ledge to get a better view. The adults, even the nurses, cracked ribald jokes. One man snapped a photo on his mobile phone.

Heriza’s operation finished first and he walked away gingerly.

“I wasn’t afraid,” he said, his face smudged where the tears had run through the grime. “Everybody should do it.”

Gusts of wind sent dirt and debris sailing and forced the medical staff to cover their eyes against the onslaught. Suardi fretted about infection.

“Of course I’m worried,” he said. “At night there are no doctors or nurses here if something happens.”

The student doctor operating on Samhudi took more than an hour to finish the job. When it was done, the doctors handed the father and son a three-day regime of antibiotics and Vitamin C tablets to ward off infection. They collected the medical waste in a cardboard box and said they would burn it. The sun began to set; the flies got thicker.

Suardi considered himself among the lucky ones in this camp. The Dec. 26 tsunami hit just after he had returned from night fishing, and he was able to grab Samhudi, his wife and 16-month-old daughter and run for higher ground. But this camp is filled with single men, mostly fishermen who lost their families.

“Today made me think of my son,” said Zulkarnaini, 45, whose wife and son were killed in the tsunami. The boy liked to build his own toy cars and race his bike. After the tsunami, Zulkarnaini never found his son’s body, nor that of his wife.

“He was 11,” the father said. “He would have been getting circumcised today.”

Riting Camp is a tapestry of disaster aid: freshwater bladders donated by French firemen and tents from German and Chinese Indonesian relief agencies. New sewing machines from the European Union sit in the middle of the camp, their plastic seals unbroken, collecting dust.

After the surgery, Samhudi slowly picked his way through this chaotic landscape to his family’s tent, trailing a dozen chattering children. Did it hurt? they all wanted to know. Samhudi said nothing.

Back at home, he sat down to rest while his father talked about the family’s uncertain future. He had no money and did not know what he would do next, Suardi said. He would never go back to fishing.

“I still see the wave,” he said.

But his son never hesitated when asked what he wanted to do when he was older.

“I want to be a pilot,” he said. The other kids laughed at him, but Samhudi just smiled.

“I want to fly to Australia, to foreign countries,” he said.

And his eyes danced with the magic of a boy’s dreams.