'We never know when our time is up'

Ruslan Sangadji, Banda Aceh, Aceh

Usually addressed as Ibu Ina, Inayah Sa'adudin, the wife of the former North Aceh regent, has her own story about coping with the earthquake and the tsunami that recently hit Aceh.

It is about how she saved herself, but also about how, driving the truck herself, she carried away dead bodies found around her house.

Ibu Ina, the mother of Nailini Tarmidzi 17, Raburrayan 15, M. Fakhri 12 and M. Haikal 8, told The Jakarta Post that on Dec. 26 she and her entire family had fled for safety to Dayah Tgk Chie' Omar Diyan Islamic Boarding School in Krueng Lam Kareung. Indrapuri, Banda Aceh.

Accompanied by her husband, she returned a few days later to their house on Jl. Todak in Lampriet, Banda Aceh, the capital of Aceh, which is also known as the Veranda of Mecca.

About 50 meters from her house, she was surprised to find building debris as virtually all the houses in her neighborhood had been destroyed. Surprise, however, soon turned to shock, then horror, when she saw a great number of blackened dead bodies lying scattered along the road leading to their house.

Unable to do much about this, she could only put her trust in God and try her best not to cry. Other residents were busy looking for family members and relatives among the scattered corpses.

It was her husband who suggested they should carry away the dead bodies and bury them, and Inayah set about procuring a truck with which to transport the corpses.

Finally, she located a truck that belonged to one of her brothers-in-law. She drove the truck to her house, and without fear or any feeling of repugnance, loaded the dead bodies into the truck and took them to Lambaro, now a mass burial site.

"I drove the truck myself to Lambaro and my husband followed on his motorbike," she said, the memory that many of the dead bodies were those of children bringing tears to her eyes.

After driving the corpses to Lambaro, she left the truck there as it was out of fuel. Together with her husband, she returned home. When they arrived, they found their house still standing. Not even a single dead body or a piece of wood was found in the yard.

Even the chairs on the terrace were in their usual position. Of course mud covered the floor of the house but nothing inside the house was broken. Inayah could not explain why this was so. She only said that every day she sat on the chair, reading the Koran. Even after the earthquake hit the area, she sat on the chair, reciting Asmaul Husna (a passage from the Koran).

Early in the morning before the disaster, Inayah said she had a bad omen about Banda Aceh, her birthplace. That is why she decided not to go out that Sunday.

However, her third child, M. Fakhri, asked her to take him to the soccer field and she complied. She and Fakhri later went to the house of one of Fakhri's classmates. They were going to play football together.

While they were on the way, there was an earthquake. The car she was driving rocked. She stopped the car and, arms tightly wrapped around Fakhri and his friend, she left the car. The three of them sat on the road. When the earthquake was over, she decided to return home. Back home, she found her husband and their three children were reciting Asmaul Husna.

Suddenly, it was very noisy outside. People rushed out and shouted wildly: "Water! ... water! ... water!... . Inayah and her family decided to move to an Islamic boarding school in Indrapuri for safety.

They had driven but a few meters when someone stopped the car and asked them to help his old mother because the old women could no longer walk. They took her into the car. To their astonishment, ten other people got into the car as well.

Meanwhile, seawater had covered part of Banda Aceh. The water was as high as the car's wheels. Driving through a knee-deep flood, they finally arrived at the Islamic boarding school. "Thank God, we are all safe," she said upon arriving there.

A day before the tsunami struck, she had a feeling that something bad would occur. With her husband, she addressed at least 800 students of Syiah Kuala University, Banda Aceh, in a program about Emotional Spiritual Quotient (ESQ). They were giving the students something to contemplate.

She said: "We never know when God will take us. We will never know whether we can still see tomorrow." She remembers uttering those two sentences but does not know whom of the participating students was spared.

Now she can only hope that this major natural calamity was the last to happen in her birthplace. She also hopes that this disaster can arouse in the community a desire to jointly rebuild Aceh.

"Nobody can rebuild Aceh but the Acehnese themselves. That's why we must always foster our togetherness and discard differences," she said.