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Trauma haunts quake survivors in West Sumatra
Written by: Thin Lei Win
A villager salvages her belongings from the ruins of her house at the quake-hit Durian Bumbung village in Padang Pariaman, Indonesia's West Sumatra province, October 8, 2009. REUTERS/Crack Palinggi
PARIAMAN, Indonesia (AlertNet) - Roha, a small, wiry lady of 82, wanted to talk to the group of Red Cross staff and volunteers who had come to distribute aid at her village.
The villager from Cubadak Air in Pariaman district, dressed in a long black and purple dress and a black headdress, shook hands and opened her mouth.
No words came out. But her eyes welled up with tears.
After a few seconds, she managed to utter a sound, between a choke and a word. Her son, standing behind her, said Roha had narrowly missed death when the 7.6 magnitude earthquake which struck West Sumatra on 30 September caused her house to collapse.
She’s been traumatised since.
As the rubble clears and aid gets into the more remote villages in the quake hit areas, aid workers say there is a less visible but equally vital need – support for traumatised survivors, many of whom have lost their loved ones and everything they own.
“Many of the survivors are still in shock, many are still upset and many are grieving,” Marlene Lee, a psychologist with medical charity Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF), told AlertNet.
“People are worried and nervous about aftershocks and more earthquakes.”
Loss of appetite, sleep disturbances and physical symptoms such as heart palpitations, headaches, backaches and muscle tension are normal reaction to a stressful event, said Lee.
In Tandikat village in Pariaman district, where the earthquake and subsequent landslides destroyed three hamlets, families are still waiting for bodies of loved ones to be found and the lack of closure adds to the tremendous grief, according to Lee.
"Each morning they return to the ruins of their homes and sit the whole day waiting for the search teams. They won’t leave to eat, and volunteers take food to them. It appears that everybody in every village has been affected in some way."
In Sikupa, another village in Pariaman district where 80 percent of houses were destroyed, both children and adults won’t go anywhere near their former houses. No one has been there to help the 1,500 families, Red Cross spokesman Patrick Fuller told AlertNet.
During the Red Cross’ visit on Thursday, puppet shows and group discussions were used to bring out the emotions of survivors.
“It’s always women and children that really suffer the most after such disasters, because women are the primary care givers and children can’t really comprehend what’s going on, so enabling children to express themselves is one of the aims of the program.”
On the same day, MSF started mobile clinics in Tandikat and Padang Alai, trying to bring a sense of normalcy to communities wrecked by natural disasters.
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Thin Lei Win joined AlertNet in June 2008, becoming the first AlertNet journalist to be based in Asia. Prior to joining AlertNet, Thin worked at trade publications in Singapore and most recently as a freelance writer in Vietnam. She has a Masters in Multi-Media Journalism from Bournemouth University.
