The tears of a student

The tears of a student

She stood out in the disaster zone. A pretty 22-year-old student looking lost and lonely amongst the colorless rubble. Narrowly she had escaped the same fate as her schoolmates. A confused feeling of both relief and intense sorrow was haunting her just like most other survivors in Padang in West Sumatra.

Sherina Veronika was in her last year of studying English Literature when the 7.9 earthquake struck. It was a little after five o'clock and just 10 minutes before class was finished. "It was the noise of a huge mirror breaking," she describes the first minutes, "then we all ran out."  Just when she wanted to run through the corridor that would lead her to the exit, the whole building in front of her collapsed. In it - a full class of students and their 25-year-old teacher. One of them was one of Sherina's best friends. Last year they won a debating contest together in Surabaya.

The English college in the city of Padang was at the center of a more than 40-hour-long rescue effort. Soldiers heard voices the morning after the quake. Nineteen-year-old Sari and her 25-year-old teacher Suci were screaming from under the rubble. Their voices had a chilling effect on all the bystanders who were helplessly watching soldiers dig with their bare hands. After filming their efforts for hours I couldn’t watch them anymore. Painfully slow, they had been connecting electric cables for more than an hour just to be able to use a drill.

Some were laughing and smoking away those terrible long minutes. I couldn’t think of anything else than these two poor women fully conscience, in great pain and darkness, buried under the rubble. I could only try to imagine their ordeal. These were only two women caught up in a disaster that had cost the lives of more than a thousand. But these two women could be saved!

When cameraman Ray Jones and I left the destroyed school at 1:30 in the morning we both had given up on them. By then the soldiers had hardly moved an inch. All those hours Suci's husband kept talking to his wife. Desperately trying to calm her down.

Only the next afternoon, after we filmed and interviewed more survivors and filed more stories, we heard that a miracle had happened. Both women were taken out of the rubble alive. More than 40 hours after the disaster. As soon as we could we went to the hospital to visit them.

Great pain

We found the teacher Suci in great pain and again her husband next to her, trying to calm her down. Both her legs were suffering from gangrene and at least one of them needed to be amputated immediately. Doctors in the army hospital told us there was not much they could do for her. They simply didn’t have the right equipment.

When vice president Jusuf Kalla visited her in the hospital we grabbed our chance. After the interview we pleaded with him to make sure the woman could be evacuated to Jakarta. But the vice president didn’t think that was necessary. He left without making any efforts to see if she would survive.

Sherina, who was watching the whole scene, couldn’t hold her tears. There was her teacher who had just been miraculously rescued in great pain and nobody to help her. After the interview at her destroyed school we decided to take Sherina along. She was good company and she shouldn’t be alone after all she had gone through.

We owed it to her to help her teacher. We wanted to show her that journalists are not only heartless people showing up at a disaster zone chasing stories and then leaving.

After covering so many disasters in the past 12 years, I have decided that I will help if I can. The tsunami in 2004 killing more than 175,000 people, the earthquake in Yogjakarta killing more than 6,000 people and several earthquakes, landslides and storms after that. It’s always us, the journalists, who arrive first at the scene. In those crucial hours before any aid arrives we can make a difference. Even if it’s only possible to help one person.

Luckily for Suci, help came. After a few phone calls a doctor from Jakarta took care of her and made sure she got the right treatment. Sherina was relieved but she was sad because of the loss of her friend.

During dinner – even Pizza Hut had reopened after a couple of nights – she sat with us silently. Her voice was shaky, her eyes staring into a distance. I was wondering how a young woman like her will ever cope with such a traumatic experience. When will she be able to make jokes again, laugh until tears fall from her cheeks? When will the ghosts stop haunting her in her dreams?

When we left Padang she held on to us tightly. It was hard to leave her behind.

Now that I’m back in Jakarta, I read about her pain and trauma on Facebook. "I feel unreal, I still think they’re alive, Am I going crazy?" she writes. She is worried about her studies and her future. "I have to go back to another school and my class is on the second floor, scary," she writes. In a message to me she writes about her broken house. "Love u guys much," she writes, "I’ll be waiting for you and your team."