Small woman shows great courage
Small woman shows great courage
Azhar Ghani, ANN/Straits Times/Banda Aceh
If heroes are measured by how tall they walk amid tough odds, then Yusnizar Yunus is one many times over.
Standing barely at 1.5m, the 37-year-old Singapore permanent resident, who was born in Aceh and grew up there, is not one of the throngs of aid workers who have descended on Indonesia's tsunami-shattered province.
She is simply a mother of two boys who are still missing after the Dec 26 tsunami.
Yet somehow, the Raffles Hospital public relations executive, who has worked in Singapore for nine years, has been able to summon the resolve to remain standing despite wave after wave of devastating blows.
So far, her parents -- father Muhammad Yunus Zainuddin, 65, and mother Cut Rohani Rohani Yunus, 60 -- have been confirmed dead.
They lived in Aceh and the two boys were holidaying with them. The older boy, 11-year-old student Yohansyah Putra Yusoff of Damai Primary, is her son with former husband Yusoff Samadi, a Singaporean technician.
The younger son, 15-month-old Jordan Adam, is her child with her current husband, Indonesian architect Wisnu Gunawan.
She had been carrying Jordan when Sars scourged Singapore in 2003 but continued to work at the hospital -- despite her husband's reservations -- out of a sense of duty. In the end, both mother and child emerged unscathed.
In November, she brought her children to her parents' home in Banda Aceh for Lebaran, spent a month here, then left them here, planning to take them back when school reopened.
A day after she returned to Singapore, the tsunami struck. The plucky, indefatigable woman secured tickets for Banda Aceh and flew there the next day with her younger sister Mona Mellizar, 20, a student in a Singapore private school.
When she took in the city, bereft of all its familiar landmarks, her heart sank. Water-logged debris prevented the sisters from approaching her parents' collapsed two-storey house near the coastline.
Yusnizar went through the next three days sleepless, without food and water, combing the town in vain for surviving kin.
The nights were the most harrowing. With power cut, the darkness magnified the sobs and shrieks of lost and frightened children.
"I would have gone crazy and lost focus if I had stayed a day longer," she recalled.
Calling a temporary halt to their search, the sisters went to Medan, where they met Yusnizar's ex-husband, who had arrived with two brothers to help in the search.
They returned to Banda Aceh on Dec 31. A day later, they found her parents' bodies at their home, and another that resembled Yodansyah.
That was the day The Straits Times first ran into Yusnizar. Looking dishevelled and with dark rings circling her eyes, she was walking around in a pair of hotel bedroom slippers, having lost her shoes earlier.
On Jan. 2, Yusnizar stood stoically by as a Singapore Civil Defence Force (SCDF) rescue team extricated her parents' bodies. The body thought to be Yodansyah's was not his, and Jordan Adam remained missing.
While her ex-husband's party left, the mother was determined to be there for her missing sons. She left briefly to give her parents a proper burial, but soon returned to Banda Aceh.
Relatives of her parents' neighbours said they had seen two child corpses some 200m away from her family home.
On Jan. 5, she was again trawling the disaster area with SCDF officers.
As of Jan. 6, she had still not given up hope. She was arranging to place notices in Indonesian newspapers, begging anyone who had seen her boys -- dead or alive -- to contact her.
"As a mother, I have to know," was all she would say.