When the news hits too close to home

When the news hits too close to home

My mobile phone had been ringing incessantly and beeping a series
of text messages when I first learned that my husband was hurt in
the blast yesterday.

I was ignoring it as I was in the middle of an interview
during an assignment to East Nusa Tenggara, nearly 2,000 km from
Jakarta.

The messages from various people alerted me: "explosion at the
Australian Embassy".

My initial reaction was typical of a journalist -- I wondered
how big the damage was and how many people died. I thought I
would have to pull out sooner than my plan on Saturday.

Then it hit me: my husband works in a building across the
street from the embassy. It is only his second week at the
company.

Frantically I began calling him. My heart was sinking when the
calls did not go through, until I finally heard his voice at the
other end of the line.

"My office has been bombed," he said. His voice was still
shaken and nearly drowned by the hectic-sounding background.

"I'm hit in the head," he said. "I'm fine, I'm bleeding but
I'm fine."

He was walking to the MMC hospital about 10 minutes away from
the blast site.

I later learned that as he spoke to me, he was holding his
wound at the top right side of his head to stop it from bleeding
profusely. I let him go, while promising to call his father to
say he was OK.

I could not hide my emotion to the people I had just
interviewed. We have only been married for a month and two days
as of Thursday, and it was too much to take for me.

My husband was sitting at his desk in his room on the fifth
floor on that ill-fated morning, about half an hour before I
called.

He heard a loud boom that shocked his entire being. The glass
windows shattered, the room turned dark and it rained dust from
the ceiling, he recalled to me over the phone later.

It took him about 10 seconds before he realized what had just
happened.

He stumbled outside of his room, and saw a scene of chaos,
with people screaming and running.

His shirt was drenched in blood because of the gaping wound -
"a minor glass he told me -- on his head.

A pregnant co-worker was in a state of panic, and together
with other men he helped carry the woman.

Outside it was clear there had been a major bombing attack,
judging from the scene of the destruction. Ruined cars with
bloody drivers and passengers were clogging the streets, and
everyone looked shocked and confused.

At the hospital, the floods of patients was divided into the
severely wounded and the lightly wounded.

He sat with about 20 other people outside. A nurse came and
dressed their wound while they waited for proper medical
treatment. Blankets were spread on the floor for some of the
victims.

"I soon left because there were other people with far worse
condition than me and the hospital was overwhelmed," he said.

He hitched a ride with a friend who happened to be passing by
on a motorcycle, and later went to a different hospital to get
his wound stitched.

In Kupang, I had managed to secure the last flight out with
the help of my news source's political clout.

I had not been able to reach my husband again since our first
phone call. I knew I had to go home to see for my self that he
was ok.

I've had more than one brush with death but nothing prepares
me for the feeling of almost losing my husband in a tragedy like
bombing. It dawns on me, we are as vulnerable as the people we
write about.

In a profession as emotionally taxing as journalism you
condition yourself for a mental block to have a clear
perspective. It helps you move along and write your story.

For me this was still hard at moments like the Bali bombings,
when, at the end of the day, I sobbed in my hotel room when
images of innocent victims whose charred bodies were piled in the
swamped morgue hit me.

A bombing attack is one of the most heinous acts of crimes
because of its indiscriminative nature and the massive
destruction it wreaks.

Unsuspecting people fall victims just for being at the wrong
place at the wrong time. Victims become numbers -- the more they
are, the bigger the impact.

To think that my husband could have been one of them has
unsettled me. But still, I am thankful that he was a lot more
fortunate than many others in the blast.

-- Devi Asmarani/The Straits Times