Woman braves 'end of the world' toward light

Woman braves 'end of the world' toward light

Zakki Hakim, The Jakarta Post, Jakarta

Sari Puspita was lying unconscious on the floor of the Sailendra
Restaurant. When she finally woke up, she could not believe what
she saw -- total darkness and thick black smoke.

"This must be a dream," was her first thought.

Reality could not be that horrible, the 36-year-old mother of
two told herself while still crouched on the ground.

Sari, a secretary at oil company PT Dharma Muda Pratama,
actually thought that God had given her a premonition of the end
of the world.

She completely forgot that she just been at a business
luncheon with a group of clients at the Sailendra in the JW
Marriott Hotel's lobby.

Then she remembered that a blast had occurred and she realized
it was not a dream. So, she forced herself to stand up. It took
her a while before she steadied herself.

As she started trying to walk, she saw a man sitting on the
floor leaning against the wall. His body was covered in blood and
his eyes were wide open. She was sure he was still alive so she
pulled his hand. The man somehow came out of shock and got
unsteadily to his feet. He and Sari then tried to find their way
out of the hotel.

Only then did she realize that her buttocks, groin and thighs
were severely burned, and that her own body was also covered with
blood from wounds to her head and other parts of her body
inflicted by flying glass.

Amazingly, Sari and the man managed to get out onto the road
where they were helped onto a security guard pickup, which took
them to the Jakarta Hospital, South Jakarta.

In the hospital's emergency room she asked someone to contact
her husband, Mustainbillah, 37, who immediately left his office
in Bendungan Hilir, Central Jakarta, to be with Sari.

"I could not believe that I was capable of doing this," she
told The Jakarta Post at the Pertamina Hospital in South Jakarta,
where she was transferred a day after the blast to receive
treatment in the hospital's burns ward.

She said she had no idea about the magnitude of the incident
until she saw the television later that evening. She thought it
was just an exploding stove that had started a fire in the
restaurant.

"On the television I could see that the fire was quite big,
but I was not aware of it at the time. I must have been
unconscious for hours," she said. According to her husband,
however, Sari had arrived at the hospital within less than an
hour of the blast.

So many volunteers had been going back and forth to help the
victims, she said, it was amazing that nobody had found and
helped her.

"I was really disoriented," said Sari, whose office is located
in the Menara Rajawali building, next to the Marriott.

Ten days have now passed and she is still in the hospital --
the same hospital where some of her colleagues attending the same
business luncheon are also being treated.

Sari, the mother of Sarah, 7, and Fauzan, 3, was waiting on a
trolley for her turn to be treated in the burns unit when she
spotted her colleague, Zaenal, nearby.

Both Sari's and Zaenal's heads had been shaved to allow the
doctors to remove glass fragments from their scalps.

When they saw each other, they both laughed like children, and
both yelling out, "Shaolin monk!"

Nevertheless, their laughter was tinged by sadness.