Volunteers helped to come to terms with trauma

Volunteers helped to come to terms with trauma

Tiarma Siboro, The Jakarta Post, Denpasar

Every tragedy has its own story and leaves its own scars. For the
volunteers in Bali who rushed to help after the terrorist attack
there, they have their own traumas and memories to deal with.

Imelda, an assistant at a fashion house in Kuta, rushed to
Sanglah General Hospital hours after the explosion. She found
herself deeply touched by the victims' suffering, though it had
never occurred to her that she would be dealing with dead bodies.

The first few days on the job she was fine, but after a week
her friends began to feel something was wrong with her.

"We found her talking to herself a lot and many times she
asked us to take her to the ruins of the Paddy Club," recalled a
volunteer.

Her physical and mental condition deteriorated daily, until
her brother decide to take her back to their hometown of
Surayaba, East Java.

Hapsari, a coordinator for local volunteer group Humanitarian
Volunteers Network for Bali (JRKB), which was set up to help the
bombing victims and medical staff at the Sanglah General Hospital
in downtown Denpasar and other hospitals in the city, later
called Imelda's family to ask about her condition.

"She (Imelda) told me she often went to Dr. Sutomo Hospital in
Surabaya and went to the morgue just to feel and smell the
atmosphere," Hapsari said.

Hapsari and other staff members at JRKB also had concerns
about the mental condition of three other volunteers, Nana, Woro
and Esther, who appeared quite happy and untroubled.

"When we did not send them to the morgue, these girls felt so
unhappy and disappointed," Hapsari said, adding that she was
afraid their eagerness to work in the morgue was a reflection of
the true depth of their trauma.

The three students from Udayana University's School of Letters
joined hundreds of other volunteers working around the clock to
help the victims of the bombings at the Sari Club and Paddy's
Cafe in Kuta, which killed nearly 200 people and injured hundreds
of people, both Indonesians and foreigners.

Their jobs included taking care of more than a hundred bodies
prior to their identification by a multinational forensic team,
keeping bodies in the morgue and cold storage containers cool,
moving the bodies from the morgue into the containers and keeping
these two places clean and hygienic.

"This is my first experience dealing with the morgue and
corpses. I didn't have any idea it could be so horrible. There
were so many beautiful young faces in the morgue, some of them
with happy faces, while other faces expressed their suffering and
pain," said the 22-year-old Esther.

Seeing all this pain and misery, the volunteers found it
difficult to keep control of their emotions.

"If we could not control our emotions, I don't think we could
have managed to work there (at the morgue) all day. Some of our
friends, including volunteers from the Indonesian Red Cross, felt
numb after working there," Roro recalled.

Other volunteers at the Sanglah hospital, though not suffering
from trauma, faced health problems because the hospital failed to
provide them with preventive medical care to protect them from
such problems as tetanus, tuberculosis and hepatitis.

Irish Trapman, a member of the Australian Red Cross, paid her
respects to the volunteers. "I shudder to think what those
volunteers witnessed when they rushed to assist the victims of
the devastation that occurred in Bali. Their humanity and
compassion is a lesson to us all during this difficult time."

Trapman, also a psychologist, praised the local volunteers
who, in her view, scarified their personal safety to help the
victims.

"I came here (to Bali) as I heard about these volunteers, and
I insisted on training them in psychological debriefing. First, I
came to the crime sites so that I could see the context in which
volunteers had to work," Trapman recently said.

During her time there, Trapman conducted psychological
debriefing sessions with volunteers from the Indonesian Red
Cross' Bali chapter, and she believes the work will help them
come to terms with what they experienced.

"These volunteers have to recognize that they have been
through a traumatic incident and that physical and psychological
symptoms, such as headaches, loss of appetite, helplessness,
sadness, confusion and guilt are normal reactions to the abnormal
events of the tragedy here they were so closely involved
with," Trapman said.

Trapman, who has also worked with volunteers in Rwanda, Congo
and Bosnia, said every disasters had its own story, and described
the Bali tragedy as "one of the most horrible disasters that I
have ever seen".