Hi there,
Today I went up to Mt. Merapi. As my friend’s motorbike ascended up the mountain, the smell of woodsmoke got stronger and stronger. I noted it as odd but didn’t give it much thought - I was just the passenger on a friend’s motor, so I could take in the wild green canopy and the roadside houses and warungs (food stands). Then apruptly the canopy disappeared, and we ascended instead through open fields dotted with charred tree trunks. There was still plenty of green lower towards the ground – things grow fast in the tropics – but the tall trees were ruined. I imagine the smell of smoke has lingered there since the “hot clouds” erupting from Merapi passed by in October and November. My friend on the motorbike is from Germany, learning Indonesian at the same center as me, and volunteers with a Yogya-based NGO. The NGO is working on a participatory documentation project, in which children from villages who had to evacuate during the eruptions learn to conduct and document interviews with other villagers about their experience during and since the eruptions. That way, the childrena are engaged and learning skills, the experiences of people in and following the disaster are documented, and people get an opportunity to speak out loud about what they went and are going through.
Although the atmosphere during the taping was lively and cheerful, when asked, how did you feel during the disaster, the people interviewed said, trauma. ... One woman spoke to my friend and I about how her grandmother was burned by the hot cloud, and spent 2 days in the hospital in Yogya before dying. The village’s economy rests on cattle, and all the cattle died. - Someone said, even if you were rich before the eruption, you have become poor. - Many people’s homes were totally destroyed, but the government won’t give cows to people who don’t have somewhere to put them – but the same government’s timeline on providing housing recontruction assistance is impenatrably mysterious. It was difficult for children to attend the distant junior high school even before the eruptions, which interrupted what education they were getting, and took away the funds to continue.
And yet people want to stay in the village – it’s home, and they believe Merapi gives as much as it takes away. Unfortunately, while many people in the village returned in early December, many people are still in camps (whether official or - more likely – unofficial) or with relatives. The aid for those people is coming from the community only, as the government will only provide food assistance to those registered in the official camps. According to the NGO director – and anecdotal evidence everywhere else – the only effective emergency response is coming from the grassroots, from individual donations and work, and from the thriving NGO sector. My strong impression is that people don’t expect the slightest help from the government - so despite the massive wrong of that fact, they barely bother demanding what should be coming, and get on with doing what needs doing.
Of course kindhearted individuals only have so much to spare...and the disaster is still ongoing. There are still massive floods of sand and stones that come down off the mountain once a week or so, washing away bridges, houses, and filling the houses left standing with wet sand. You can’t take any route up to the mountain without passing a few rivers, and so you can’t help but see areas flattened by the lahar dingin (or so-called “cold lava”). 
On our way back down the mountain we took a different route than on the way up. This time we passed through an wide area that had been flooded - you could see the flood lines on homes; the landscape was totally sand. As we drove through, we rounded a curve and noticed a line of steam or smoke in the direction our LSM friends were leading us. It seems that the “cold lava” isn’t really cold; the sand and material is still warm enough to cause the water passing over it to steam. The part we forded was shallow, and narrow, and our tires (and our feet) survived just fine.
We finished the trip back to Yogya with a stop at a sate shack. A few tables covered with oilcloth, some bamboo “couches” and off to the side, the sate man sitting on a stool in front of a oilpan and gas burner, raw meat hanging over his head on hooks. The sate meat itself wasn’t worth writing home for, but that sauce was truly tasty: a little sweet, a little smokey, a little acidic and just the right amount of spicy, along the lines of really good BBQ sauce, except with a palm sugar and sweet soy base. And of course the company is the salt to any meal; the NGO guys are kind souls and so is my friend of the motorbike, and so the meal was a lovely end to an intense day. Waving goodbye from the back of the motorbike and realizing I wouldn’t have another real chance to visit the Merapi villages made my imminent goodbye to Yogya feel real, and bittersweet. I wrap up language classes on Monday, and back head to Jakarta on Tuesday. More later,
M
M
