Tsunami survivor tells of ordeal

BANDA ACEH, Indonesia (UMNS) - Lenni survived the tsunami partly because she was lucky and partly because she is a woman of great courage who knew she needed to survive for the sake of her children.

She clearly recalled her story one Tuesday afternoon in April while her youngest child slept peacefully in a hammock on the porch of the barracks where she lives with four of her six children.

The United Methodist Committee on Relief is helping her restore her life along with the other families living in the Cadek Permai temporary living center just outside of the city of Banda Aceh. Her two oldest children are married and live away from home.

Lenni remembers being awakened that Sunday morning by an earthquake. She and her husband gathered the children and ran outside to safety. When it seemed that the shaking had stopped they returned to the house to clean up.

While they were returning fallen dishes to their shelves they felt a second tremor. Once again Lenni and her family went outside, only this time they saw people running toward the town.
She says they were quiet -- no one was shouting, just running. Cars and trucks loaded with people headed away from the ocean. She asked her neighbor what was going on. Her neighbor went to the road to find out but never came back.

Lenni and her husband gathered their children and put them on a truck and told them to go to their grandmother's house in town. She and her husband slowly followed the crowd on their motorbike.

Then the wave came. They were at the edge of it and were knocked down. Lenni was thrown some distance in the crash and her husband was underneath the bike trying to get out when the next wave came, with piece of the neighborhood rolling inside.

Lenni recalls hearing her husband yell instructions for her to hang on to anything she could grab. Then she heard him crying out to God for her protection. It would be the last time she heard her husband's voice.

She describes the water that enveloped her as hot, black and sulfurous. It pulled her under and sucked her out toward the sea. When the third and the largest wave to wash into Banda Aceh that morning, "I thought it was the end of the world," Lenni says. The force of the wave kept pushing her down into the water.

Alone in the Water
When she finally got to the surface, Lenni was not sure if she was alive or dead. Then she tried to swim and realized how badly her right leg had been injured. She tried to stay afloat with the use of only one leg. She looked around and saw no one, no houses or trees, only black water and blue sky. "God saved me," she says.

Lenni found a floating tree to use as a raft and over time began to talk to the tree because she felt so alone. She said, "Bring me somewhere safe." She either passed out or fell asleep when she heard a voice saying "Wake up! Hold on to the tree or you will fall into the water." In her recollection the man who spoke to her was wearing white with a long beard. She clung tighter to the tree as it drifted to a nearby mountain.

She carefully climbed off the tree and found that she could not walk because of her injured leg, which would later become so infected that it had to be amputated. She found a wire lying on the ground and used it and some sticks to make a splint.

Rescue
She spent the night at an empty house. In the morning, she heard a voice yelling "Is anyone here? Is anyone alive?"

She cried back, "I'm here!" but hid herself because the force of the waves left her naked and she was embarrassed. The man called back, "Are you a ghost or a person?" because he could not see her. She answered, "I am not a ghost, I am still alive!" Lenni asked the man to throw her some clothes because she was naked and ashamed. The man told her not to worry, that everyone was naked from the waves.

The man called to some nearby people and they carried her to a medical post where she received the medical attention she so desperately needed. Her children found her at this site. They were all safe from the tsunami because they went ahead on the truck.

Lenni is now able to walk with the help of a prosthetic leg and is making plans for the future. She wants to go back to her business of baking cakes and supplying local shops with them. UMCOR is assisting her and the people in the temporary living center where she lives with housing, jobs and other needs.

More information on the work in Indonesia and other parts of the world can be found at http://new.gbgm-umc.org/umcor/, the UMCOR Web site.

*Scott, an UMCOR staff member in New York, visited Indonesia this spring.