We are looking around us and trying to work out how concrete turns to cardboard and caves and crumbles and warps and twists and zigzags. Here, we pass a house that has reared up and speared itself through a white van parked in front. There, steel reinforced columns, now ruined, leer serrated teeth at us.
I remember someone in a UN coordination meeting a couple of weeks earlier saying that this earthquake behaved oddly, with the tectonic plates moving up and down against each other, rather than side by side. Cheeky earth behaviour.
“I guess it’s hard to make something earthquake proof, because you never know which way the earth is going to move,” I say, feeling incredibly inadequate and unlearned, but for some reason still compelled to fill the air with words.
It has been a month since the earth here heaved and wrenched open, killing an estimated 1,117 people, injuring many more and leaving hundreds of thousands of buildings in Padang and surrounding regions ruined. (The government estimates over 200,000 houses are moderately or severely damaged).
And everywhere around us, life goes on. Young men transport televisions on their laps on scooters, streets carts roll and make fried treats and fresh juices, school girls in pure white jilbabs giggle and look at their phones and talk behind their hands and yell out to the white girl “hello mister” and laugh hysterically.
The organisation I’ve been working with in Jakarta is funding the installation of some water filtration units in some of the worst-hit villages around Padang; I’m here to oversee the project. Abi is our project manager here, doing an amazing job of organising everything.
I can’t help feeling entirely irrelevant and screamingly white as I inspect our third location. We follow a hand-drawn map to a kampung (village) and then we’re led down dirt tracks through to a family and their filthy well. It has been made more filthy by the recent earthquake, but I can’t help thinking it wouldn’t have been too clean to start with. Miya, a Padang local who is also helping to supervise the project, speaks to members of the community in Bahasa Indonesia, as I try to understand what they’re talking about. It is the family’s well, but it can serve the community and they are happy to share the water.
A naked boy of about 5 bounds around me, climbing trees and falling sideways, giggling and gazing with wide quizzical eyes at the strange white bulk towering over him.
“Are you happy with this location?” Miya asks me after a little while.
I think it’s important to be rational about it, so I start asking questions about how many families live in this village; will everyone be able to easily access the clean water? Are we sure it’s not contaminated by salt (this is one of the few things these particular filtration units cannot filter)? Is the community willing to work together to maintain it? And what is the water supply like currently – how do they use the water from the well as it is now? (Apparently they use rocks and other materials to filter it. Gazing down at the swirly brown water in the well, I don’t have the brain machinery to comprehend this). Eventually I just nod and tell them that yes, I am happy with this location.
The questions were something of a charade because as soon as I saw the stagnant brown well water and felt the curious eyes of the children living there, there was no way I could suggest another location.
I’m shamed by the thrill I seem to have supplied to the people in the kampung, and as we leave one of the women puts her hands on mine and rubs my white arms and I feel an acute sense of unbelonging.
Over the next few days I am continually struck by the incredible resilience of the people here. I peer at them through my white eyelids and try to imagine how it would feel if this place was my home; if the mosque where I worshiped and believed cracked and buckled to the ground; if I was homeless and living in a tent while mourning the loss of friends and neighbours and family. Or even if I had escaped harm or direct effects – still, how would it feel to have my friends and neighbours suffer, to have my city so callously ravaged?
Everywhere there is hope and energy for the future – people are rebuilding, standing tall on ruined buildings and making plans for new ones; teaching children in tents while schools are repaired or rebuilt from nothing; worshipping and believing as they have done every day of their lives. Of course there is sadness and devastation and there must be despair, but there are also so many signs of joy and forward-looking hope and pride; like snapshots of lessons in how to have faith and be happy:
The teenager walking across a bridge on her way home, caught in flashing rains and leisurely twirling an umbrella as if performing singin’ in the rain on stage.
The friendly faces greeting us along the sides of the village streets, waving at us as we drive past.
The leathery man lazing on his broken porch, gesturing to me to indicate I am welcome to come and look closer at his ruined home.
The principal of the school who pops his head over a broken fence and tells me that his school was crushed so now he is teaching somewhere else - just over there, do you see it; my school is in the white tent that says UNICEF.
The group of schoolgirls sending reams of giggles across the ruins of the Ambacang hotel, where so many souls were lost just weeks ago.
Looking across this fractured landscape with pale eyes and white skin it’s easy to feel despair creep along your arms, lifting your hair into goosebumps. But if you concentrate on watching the people, digging and carrying and constructing, straight-backed with faith and busy with plans, it becomes easier to smile with them and understand how they will survive.
