Luckily enough I'm living on the Northern side of the city which has been relatively
unaffected by the quake. My own house suffered a little bit of damage, but in
the estimation of this literature student, it's still perfectly safe to live
in. My housemates, neighbors, friends and I live in an odd proximity to the
disaster – if we were another few kilometers to the north or so, the whole
thing would have taken place 'somewhere else'. A kilometer or so to the
south and we would be homeless. Many, many very good friends are just now –
though thank god few friends have been very seriously injured.

The quake hit just before 6 on Saturday and I was scheduled to fly back from
Jakarta to Yogya at 10 that morning. Because the cell phone lines were all
tied up in Yogya, I'd only received one text saying there was a quake but
that we're okay. When I arrived at the airport in Jakarta I was told we'd
be landing in Solo. It was only when I caught the train from Solo to Yogya
(normally a one-hour ride, but this time six hours – they were repairing the
rail line just ahead of my train) that I first understood the seriousness of
the quake, and not just that it had shut off electricity at the airport or
something like this. We stopped for about three hours in a small town in
Klaten where there was no food and minimal drinking water – only cigarettes,
and residents sitting on mats outside their homes (this is still the situation
in much of Klaten- food relief has been focused on Bantul where the quake was
centered, but many parts of Klaten haven't seen a single aid worker or
volunteer). From there until we arrived in Yogya there were only destroyed
homes and buildings on either side of the train. It was almost impossible to
get a ride home from the station in Yogya because all the gas stations were
closed, but I finally made it home that night on the back of a stranger's
motorbike.

Since then I've been back and forth to Bantul probably 10 or so times. It
is truly truly devastated. Most villages I've seen don't have but a
handful of buildings still standing, and no one is going inside of these,
justifiably. Because most of Bantul still doesn't have electricity, few
people have charge on their cell phones and so have lost contact with their
friends in the north of Yogyakarta.

The most amazing thing about trying to help quake victims has been going into
devastated villages and seeing the amazing patience and perseverance of the
survivors. Yesterday we were in one village where more than 360 out of 380
homes were completely destroyed and 24 people died. They needed mats, lamps
(the security situation is a disaster), tampons, and powdered milk for adults.
When we started unloading powdered milk for children as well, the villagers
acually apologized to us – 'we don't mean to reject your offer, but we have
a week's stock of baby milk so you might take this someplace it's more
needed'. Scenes like this get repeated everywhere. Later that afternoon we
were in another village where a week after the quake they still didn't have
tents to fit more than a quarter of the 200 residents. So about 150 people
had been sleeping on the road for the past week, and it's rained probably
every second night since the quake. We were able to give them four large
tents and two very large tarps, along with some food, and medicine – still
they told us that, thanks to good clean water supplies, so far very few people
were sick and we should save our medicine for worse off villages. This in a
village where there might not have been one single home left standing!
Oftentimes we volunteers have joked that we actually look a lot more miserable
than the survivors we're hoping to help.

There are some very large aid organizations out there now, but even a week
later, you don't have to travel very far from the main road to find villages
that have received almost no help at all, or only help from a few isolated
individuals, where clean water is scarce and people have eaten nothing but
donated instant noodles for days. Aside from that, people are incredibly
afraid for their safety; I met with some people on Sunday who told me that on
Saturday night – the night of the quake – they had 6 motorcycles stolen
and taken away on pickup trucks. Rumors are of gangs from Semarang and
Surabaya; who knows. I haven't talked to anyone yet who has received aid from
the government or the army, even though they are here in force, mostly smoking
cigarettes by the side of the road from what I can tell. The police are a
little bit better; police generally work in the communities where they live,
so they've been a little bit more enthusiastic to help their neighbors.

With all the bottlenecks, it's not really that easy for volunteers to simply
plug themselves into big organizations, and I'm not sure exactly how effective
all of them have been either—there's lots of organization and lots of
supplies, but in this first week of the crisis when people are starving and
wet there hasn't been that much evidence of supplies getting through in nearly
the numbers you would hope. Since Sunday I've been working independently with
a team of about five friends. We have four motorbikes between us, a car and
cellphones, so we're able to go out in different directions in the morning to
do surveying around imogiri (where we've been focusing) and find out what
people need most. Then we load up the car (one of our gang is a girl with a
lot of connections to merchants and shopowners in solo and yogya, so we've
been able to get most of what we need wholesale), rucksacks and motorbikes and
bring back supplies the same day. It took a couple days to get a kind of
pattern together – none of us is emergency relief experts – but now we're
able to hit about 3 or 4 large villages a day, focusing exactly on the things
they need most. I think it's of some small psychological help to the people
we're trying to help as well, seeing that people they talk to in the morning
actually do turn up again in the afternoon, and then again in a couple of days
to check up.

Anyways, that's my first-hand experience of the quake. But I am ending with
an appeal, that my small and efficient team (of three Indonesian students, one
American student, and one adult who works) has been running entirely on our
own funds and probably spent a good $1400 already so far. Hopefully in
another week or two there will be very smoothly running aid operations and
we'll be able to disband and help with rebuilding, but for the meanwhile that
teams like ours are very needed, we and our neighbors a kilometer or two to
the south would be extremely grateful if you were willing to offer us any
donation to keep going. It would truly be a big help.

MAKE A DONATION AT HTTPS://WWW.13C.COM/AID

Scott Schlossberg
Doctoral Candidate
Department of South and Southeast Asian Studies
UC Berkeley
Phone: +62 81328665325