Bali cries, again

Jodie Harrison, Contributor, Kuta, Bali

Oct. 1, 2005 began as yet another day in paradise on the idyllic island of Bali. The sun was shining, the frangipani blooming and the streets were colorfully decorated with ceremonial offerings for the eve of Galungan, the Balinese "Christmas" celebrations. On previous nights, fireworks had been set off on the beach to ward off evil spirits.

Despite the overnight 126.6 percent fuel price hike, the feeling among the locals was one of optimism as their businesses had recovered to 50 percent since the 2002 Bali bombings. Again, tourists were returning to Bali, and for more than one-third of the population whose income relies on tourism, this was a very good thing.

"Many people starved after 2002," said Katot Landriani as she painted flowers on my fingernails. "Half business is better than no business. Bali is again smiling."

Earlier that day, I had purchased a beautiful, brass Balinese buddha for my water garden back in Melbourne. Indonesian children, on their first day of school holidays, were everywhere laughing in the streets. Many were shopping with their parents, spending their Galungan bonuses on flowers, food and traditional gifts for the much-anticipated festivities.

So when the first bomb exploded in the packed Kuta Square Shopping Center at 7:30 p.m., many of the victims were Indonesian parents and children.

I was with my husband at our cousin's beachside villa in Kerobokan three kilometers down the beach. We had discussed dining on seafood at the popular Jimbaran Beach cafes. However, our guest was late, much to my husband's irritation. I was about to phone our guest when we heard a loud, dull noise and the villa shook.

"That was a big firework," I commented. I picked up the phone. The line was dead. Within a minute, the villa again shook. "Maybe someone has crashed their car into the compound gates."

I went to the front gates and asked the security to find us a cab and to tell our absent guest -- if he showed up -- that we would meet him at the restaurant. I could tell by their faces that something was wrong.

"Sorry Miss Jodie. You cannot go to Jimbaran," said Agung. "There has been more bombs and the police have blocked the roads. Please don't go there and please do not go to Kuta."

We headed for the nearby Kudeta Restaurant on Seminyak beach. Security was on high alert. No cars were allowed in. Everyone was personally scanned by security. A small army of private guards with metal detectors slowly walked across the beach, scanning every centimeter of sand.

Anyone taking a romantic stroll along the water's edge was bathed in massive spotlights and Indonesians with backpacks were physically stopped and searched.

An argument broke out between an Australian journalist and an Indonesian man when the Aussie demanded the Indonesian open his backpack as he entered the up-market restaurant. The Indonesian turned out to be a local journalist.

Australian hostess Lucy Lazita was doing her best to keep calm among the dining tourists and expatriate residents as news spread of the bombs. Our Balinese waitress struggled to maintain her composure as she told us her sister worked at Kuta Square, and that she couldn't find out if she was okay until her shift finished at 1 a.m.

We joined a table with the Australian head chef, Robert, and a group of Aussie tourists including Adele Andrews and Nicky Rowsell of Elwood and their Kew friend Lisa Hammond.

"It's not going to stop me coming back to Bali," said Adele. I believe when your time's up, it's up. We are not going to leave. We are going to stay and help."

Lucy told me that the first bomb had gone off in Raja's restaurant in Kuta Square, and the other two at Jimbaran Beach cafes beside the Intercontinental Hotel. They had found another two bombs in the sand at Jimbaran that had failed to go off, and another, at Hard Rock Hotel, that the bomb squad had diffused.

"It could have been much worse," she said.

I immediately arranged a driver and headed to Sanglah Hospital in Denpasar with Agung, who would not let me out of his sight.

"If anything happens to you, I'll have to answer to your cousin. I think your new buddha is protecting you," he said.

At 9 p.m., the scene outside the hospital was one of fear and desperation. Thousands of people had converged on Sanglah, frantically trying to locate missing friends and family.

Three giant whiteboards had already been erected listing the Missing, Injured and Dead. As the night wore on, fleets of ambulances and cars ferried the victims to Sanglah. The lists grew longer with every hour.

People covered in burns and cuts, some missing limbs and many Indonesians carrying blood-soaked children flooded the halls and walkways between wards.

Tourists and locals, some with medical training, volunteered to help in any way they could.

I pushed patients on hospital beds between the Australian- built Intesive Care Unit (ICU) and the Burns Unit upstairs. I held up drips and I learned how to switch off the alarm on the ICU monitors when someone died, then fetch someone from the morgue next door to move the body so we could bring in another patient.

On the ramp between units, I met another Aussie volunteer, Kim Butler. She had helped out during the 2002 blasts and was back again to lend a hand. As we walked up the ramp, our beach sandals began slipping on the blood that trailed from top to bottom.

Kim was holding up Nicholas Scott's drip as he was being moved between surgery and burns units. Nicholas, from Cairns in Far North Queensland, was the best eyewitness the police had to the Kuta Square bombing.

"This guy walked past our table in the Raja's restaurant and threw a small white package the size of a small house brick on our table," said Nicholas. "I called to him, `Hey mate! We didn't order that'. He turned and looked at me then yelled something. I recognized 'Allah' and `Bomb'. Then there was an explosion and the next morning I woke up in this hospital."

There were two types of bombs: three in backpacks and the others were of the small white parcel variety. Both contained explosives filled with thousands of ball bearings designed to maim and to kill.

A crisis center had been set up beside the whiteboards, and stunned crowds watched as names, ages, nationalities and hotels were scrawled up by volunteers. Twelve hours after the blasts, 23 Australians were listed on the boards; the majority of the names were Indonesian, and many of these were children.

The first name on the Dead board was Brendan Fitzgerald, 16, Australian. He was eating at Raja's with his father and sister at the table beside Nicholas'. His father Terry was considered critical and spent most of the night in surgery having, among other procedures, his spleen removed.

His daughter Jessica, 13, was in ICU and surgery, also critical.

As the mother of a 13-year-old girl and also a Fitzgerald by marriage, I felt a special connection with her. She lay in a hospital bed, her young face and arms covered in burns. I asked the doctor how she was doing, and he replied, not well.

Jessica had been found in the smoldering Raja's ruins by an Australian nurse called Melissa, who had brought her straight to the hospital. They had lost her once during the night, and he couldn't tell me if she or her father would pull through.

Jessica's arms were wrapped in bandages from her shoulders to her wrists. I held her scratched hand and stroked the flowers painted on her fingernails.

"Hey Jessica, we have matching fingernails," I whispered. The doctor told me she probably couldn't hear me, but that I should keep talking to her and the other Aussies because sometimes, it could simply take a familiar accent to bring them around.

Friends of the Fitzgerald family from Busselton WA came to the hospital and rallied around them, whispering words of encouragement. When Jessica finally opened her eyes, there were tears of happiness on everyone's faces.

"I feel like crap," croaked Jessica. "I bet I look like crap."

Family friend Bev Dawson assured her that she didn't look too bad. "You've got a few cuts and scratches," said Bev. "Dad's right beside you and he's got a few cuts and scratches just like you, love, but you are going to be okay."

Jessica was facing the bomb when it exploded. Her father took the brunt of the blast across his back and lay in the next bed, still critical. His lips had turned blue. Australian nurse Julie Spencer covered him with a warm blanket. "That's what happens when the body goes into shock," said Julie.

Julie and her fiance Darren Hodge, an Air Ambulance officer, from Newport, Victoria, had come to Bali with their two children and parents to finally tie the knot on Oct. 7. They still planned to go ahead with the wedding, despite the rest of their wedding guests canceling flights.

Throughout Sunday, Jessica came in and out of consciousness. Her first question was: "Where is my brother? Is my brother OK?"

I explained that lots of people had been hurt and they had been taken to four different hospitals, and that we hadn't found him yet. It was a line we would repeat many times that first day as Jessica would ask over and over about her brother.

Hospital staff felt it was better to wait until her mother and grandmother arrived, so she would have more support when the bad news had to be broken.

I talked to Jessica about our shared love of music and promised to score free tickets for her and some friends to a Perth concert. I told her about my own 13-year-old daughter Madison, and discovered both were keen net-ballers and loved Kath & Kim.

"Look at moi, Jessica. Look at moi!" That got a smile. I told her I had a net-ball signed by Kath, Kim and Shazza, who were our neighbors in the Melbourne suburb of Elwood. We compared the matching flowers on our fingernails.

"How much did you pay for yours? I got mine for Rp 70,000," she said.

I told her she had bargained a good price. Then, yet again, she asked if I could go and look for her brother. I said I would try, and walked outside the ICU before I began to cry.

Under the covered walkway, Indonesian parents held their badly injured children waiting for their turns to see a doctor. Many were covered in burns and were bleeding from embedded glass and ball bearings used in the bombs.

I sat with a husband and wife who were holding their toddler son wrapped in a red sarong. The baby had cuts down one side of his face. I squeezed his little hand and tried to smile bravely as tears flowed down my face.

In perfect English, the woman told me she was selling postcards with her baby son in Kuta Square when the bomb exploded. The husband opened the red sarong. The child's left foot was missing and what remained of his leg was a charred mess. The mother held my hand and we wept together.

"Today, Bali cries," she said.

Inside the ICU, friends of the Fitzgerald's wondered how Brendan Fitzgerald could be listed as dead, since none of them had identified his body now laying in a yellow plastic bag in the morgue with the number "1" written in black texta.

"I think we're still hoping that it's all a big mistake and Brendan will turn up somewhere alive," said a friend.

I counted 26 yellow plastic bags in the morgue. Twelve were unidentified, nine were Indonesian, one was Japanese and three were listed as Australian: Brendan Fitzgerald, Jennifer Williamson and Colin Zwilsky.

Three others were in smaller, separate bags. The mortician told me these were the suicide bombers and that the police had just come to photograph the decapitated heads.

"They are remarkably intact considering...," he said.

Outside the morgue I met Steven Nye, an employee of Colin Zwilsky. He told me Colin's wife Fiona was listed as missing, but he was quite sure she was one of the `unidentified'. He was desperately trying to locate the Zwilsky's two sons: Issac, 17, and Ben, 14. The boys were not dining with their parents at Jimbaran beach at the time of the blast, but they could not be found.

At 11:30 a.m. Darren Hodge and I discussed how incredible it was that nobody from the Australian Consulate had come to Sanglah Hospital. Many of the 23 Aussie victims were able to leave, yet no one had come to answer our questions about the evacuation procedure, or who to contact, or where we should go.

I tried to call the consulate from the nurse's desk phone in ICU, but only got a recorded message saying the consulate was closed for the holidays.

Government leaders from Jakarta, senior police and foreign embassy staff began arriving to visit the wounded. Within an hour, I met President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, Megawati -- who told me her grandmother was Balinese and so she had a special love for the island -- the health minister, the tourism minister, the national police chief, the British Consul-General, theh Belgian Consul-General and, finally, Australian Health Minister Tony Abbott, who was holidaying with his family.

I told Abbott that nobody from the consulate had come to check on the Australians at Sanglah. He said he was "pretty sure somebody had".

"Maybe they were locals employed by the consulate," suggested Abbott.

I told him I had been at the hospital all night and all day and if anyone came to see the Aussies, they never made themselves known to any of the patients, staff or volunteers. Abbott said that Qantas was sending two jets for any Australians who wanted to leave -- later qualified as "any Aussies with Qantas tickets who wanted to leave" -- and a medically outfitted Hercules to medevac the seriously injured.

Jessica and her father were top of the priority list.

Although Jessica's condition had stabilized, she was not moved to the Burns Unit, as they wanted to keep father and daughter together in ICU. The doctors also didn't want to run the risk of a kind-hearted person offering Jessica their condolences for the tragic loss of her brother.

SOS Retrievals had told us of their evacuation plan. Terry needed urgent medical attention and would go at 4 p.m. Jessica would follow him at 11 p.m., by which time the 250 media camped outside would be more manageable.

Year 8 school friend Peter Dabreu attempted to get a smile out of Jessica by telling her how famous she had become, and how many TV channels around the world were talking about her. "Gordon's gonna have an even bigger crush on you than ever," he teased.

"Is Gordon your boyfriend?" I asked Jessica.

"No way," she said. "I don't have a boyfriend."

I asked her, if she could have anyone in the whole world to deliver her flowers, who would she choose?

"The Streets. I just love The Streets." That is, the band, not The Streets of ice-cream fame.

Peter left the ICU and returned swiftly with a portable CD player, headphones and The Streets' latest album. Jessica told me the morphine was making her feel sick. Her injuries were such that she could not turn her head to see her father in the next bed.

She was beginning to suspect that things were worse than we'd told her: "If Dad's in the next bed, and all he's got are cuts and scratches like me, then why isn't he talking?"

I told her they had also given him morphine to make him sleep. To prove it, I took a photo of her father using my mobile telephone and held it up to Jessica's eye-level.

Seeing the photo of her sleeping father relaxed the teenager somewhat. I told her that her mother and grandmother were on their way and should be arriving within a few hours.

"Please, will you go and find out which hospital they took my brother to?"

I promised to try my best. Outside the ICU, patients were no longer waiting for doctors. The Indonesians outside consisted of mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers and friends of those lying in the morgue. We cried for Bali together.

On Sunday afternoon, I met another Aussie volunteer, a Melbourne doctor married to singer Katie Underwood -- the one from Bardot who really can sing. He and Katie were holidaying in Bali and he had come to the hospital to help. He told me Terry had finally regained consciousness a few minutes ago.

"The first thing he asked was about his son. We've given Jessica something to sleep."

Sleep. I had not had any in two days, and suddenly I felt incredibly tired. Agung and my driver had spent most of the day sleeping in the car outside.

I returned to our Kerobakan villa where my worried husband was waiting with our friend Katot, who had come to give me a massage. Within 10 minutes, I was fast asleep. Three hours later, I awoke crying from a nightmare. Unfortunately, it was not a bad dream; it was reality.

I could sleep no more and turned on the local news. Three decapitated heads were being shown in gruesome close-up. They played an amateur video that captured the suicide bomber wearing a black T-shirt and carrying backpack as he walked through Raja's restaurant.

I tried to find Jessica, Terry and Brendan among the diners, but suddenly everything blows up. A bloodied Japanese woman is crying as she wipes her bleeding face with a red-stained handkerchief. I know her, she is in bed MS117 at Sanglah.

An Asian man with an American accent pleads with the cameraman, "Please help me! Please help!" He was Shawn, a Vietnamese-American in bed MS106. A Raja's waiter, he died yesterday in ICU.

Cut to the Kuta Square clean-up site, Indonesians without gloves are picking up body parts and throwing them into rattan baskets. Close-up on a severed foot. I thought of the little Balinese baby and his parents.

Today, we cry for Bali. Again.

I had taken the baby and his parents to the Burns Unit. I needed to find out how the little fellow was doing. I quickly dressed and returned to the hospital after stopping at the flower market to buy 100 long-stemmed red roses. Most of the foreigners had been evacuated.

Today, I would spend the day visiting the Indonesian victims and delivering roses.

I needed to keep my brain busy.

I needed to stop crying.

I needed to see Bali smile again.