Seventeen years on..

Today (12th December) is the anniversary of the earthquake which hit Maumere and nearby islands such as Pulau Babi in 1992, resulting in the loss of more than 2,500 lives and the destruction of most of the buildings in the town, including the hospital. The current hospital was opened on a new site in 1998.

I have found it quite odd how little I have heard about this event given how recent it is (only 17 years ago) and how destructive it was. The little I have heard has been fragments of stories from colleagues at work and has had to be dragged out of them. I think that this lack of information is probably due to a number of factors :

• People here die young anyway. As I've already mentioned, life expectancy in Indonesia is much lower than in Ireland (68 years compared to 80, according to the WHO) so there are fewer people around who remember what happened and also the death of people at a young age is accepted as more commonplace than in developed countries. This situation has improved significantly recently so life expectancy in 1992 must have been even lower.
  

• There is generally a reluctance to talk about "bad things". This is connected to the strong animist traditions that sit by side with the Christian (mainly Roman Catholic) ethos in Flores. I've noticed that there is a great reluctance to talk about these bad things and I frequently hear "Satan" being mentioned !

• I find it hard to imagine what life in Maumere and the surrounding areas must have been like seventeen years ago. Internet access here even today is limited and unreliable, and there was certainly no internet access here at the time of the earthquake. Today, almost nobody here has a camera so there were probably no photographic records of what happened and also the heat means that dead bodies have to be dealt with extremely quickly so the whole business of dealing with funerals was probably over within a day or so. It's still possible to see where some of the town has been rebuilt (but never quite finished !).