JANE'S TRIP REPORT - SIROMBU NIAS

On Thursday the 6th we arrived in Sirombu (purple dot on the map), a harbour town on the West coast of Nias. The tsunamis had come from two directions knocking down most of the houses and shops in the port.



Twelve people had died.

The church was still intact and a few of the houses, but most of the place was trashed. I walked through huge heaps of rubble and tangled wreckage in a landscape of brown dying foliage that looked as though it had been combed and made to lie down. The coconut trees seem to have been the most hardy. The ones still vertical are still alive. People are sitting inside what is left of the few houses still standing. They are living there in houses with half the walls missing that look like they might fall over with another quake or simply a strong wind.

A few people are fossiking in the rubble engulfing their houses: making little stacks of cement bricks still intact, pulling out crumpled aluminium cooking pots, muddy clothing. Further along what is left of the road is a small Indonesian red cross tent, set up as a community kitchen. People are riding push bikes and smiling as they approach me. An old lady wrapped in rags comes and shakes my hand.

One man is trying to burn a a thatched roof tangled up with rubbish that is blocking his front yard, but it is too wet. I ask him if everyone is going to work together to clean up, he looked
a bit doubtful, then smiled looking around him at all the chaos.

I thought a couple of front end loaders would go a long way right now. The only thing remotely like that I had seen was an old yellow steam roller parked diagonally across a hole in the road with a dog underneath it busily eating the head of a dead dog.

An official of some kind approached me and said conditions were much worse 25 kilometers north in the Kecamatan of Mandrehe. All the houses had been destroyed and 113 people were dead. The survivors, 700 people were crowded into a school building that was being used as a refugee camp.

Before I left Padang, an employee of mine had asked me to try and find his brothers' family who lived in Mandrehe as he had been unable to get in touch with them. Elvis, one of the deckhands on our boat is originally from Nias. He was able to hire some motorbikes and take the doctors to the refugee camp.

When they came back, hours after dark, they told us that conditions there were very not very good. They did not have enough toilets or clean water, and that if they did not get some help in soon, they thought a cholera outbreak was very possible.

We had unloaded sacks of rice and noodles, sugar, clothing, tarps, and some tools, the church was going to distribute it and some was going to the refugee camp. Elvis and I were unable to find Sam's brother and his family or any news of their whereabouts. He is still trying.