Saturday, June 03, 2006

Surveying the damage


This is one last pic from Sarian, the village we visited outside Bantul. The man with the helmet sustained a blow to the head carrying his kids to safety, as described on the Merapi blog.

It was a very dark and stumbly kind of tour around the village on dirt paths. At one point we passed the most musical pen full of ducks I've ever heard. They were like a duck gamelan. Chad got great tape of them but they sounded too cheerful to use in the resulting story. One of the local residents said, "they're really happy not to have a roof over their heads anymore."

The earthquake has definitely faded off the front pages. It already feels strange, looking back. It's one of those experiences that consumes you so completely, it seems like a dream in retrospect. Perhaps for the people there, too, most of whom are now shifting from emergency mode to rebuilding mode.

2 comments:

Jason Sylvis said...

It's so weird watching this thing fade into the media fog. For those couple of days I was completely immersed in that event, following the news almost hour by hour. It was a strange experience tracking the news and Chad's page stats and watching these odd graphs peak and trough as the news changed. It was looking at some undersea mountain range of metadata. I couldn't tell you what it meant, and I knew that it probably meant little if anything to you guys or all of those people who were actually dealing with the dead, injured, and rubble of their former lives. Strange times we live in.
peace,
j

Anonymous said...

Hi Trish!
We miss you.
Can we hear the ducks? Please?