January 14, 2005 ABSENT REMAINS Once a Village, Now Nothing: Even the Bodies Are Gone By IAN FISHER CALANG, Indonesia, Jan. 13 - This town was not just destroyed. It vanished. After almost three weeks, only 323 bodies have been found. Before Dec. 26, when the tsunami swept in from both sides of the pretty tropical peninsula that once cradled Calang, 7,300 people lived here. There is no hint of the 5,627 people missing, and the reality is settling in that 8 in 10 people in Calang were whisked clean away. "It seems impossible," said a student here, Suhardi, 20, still dumbstruck. The waves left little behind, not people and not houses. There is, in fact, almost nothing left to see. Concrete foundations were stripped bare. There is some rubble, though far less than might be expected given that every home, coffee shop, fish restaurant and mosque was leveled, apart from one rich man's manor, now a two-story skeleton of partial walls and bone-white columns. "There is only one," Col. Ikin Sodikin, an Indonesian Army officer, said as he pointed out the sole standing house. He chuckled in resignation, as people sometimes do in the face of things no one can really grasp. "All Calang has just disappeared," he said. Calang is one of many villages on the western coast of Aceh Province wiped from the map of Indonesia, where suffering along the land closest to the earthquake's epicenter has been compounded by its remoteness. In the next village south, Kreung Sabe, half the town's residents died, and all but 500 of the 4,400 people who lived there before the tsunami are homeless. They now must walk seven miles to a port where relief supplies are delivered with what they say is still not enough food or medicine. Just south of Kreung Sabe, a fishing village called Panga and three others nearby were flattened completely, with not a single house standing. In Panga itself, 793 of 1,108 people died, local leaders say, in a place with no airstrip, no port and roads completely washed out. It took a week for the first relief to arrive. Maybe 100 bodies, soldiers say, still lay around a swamp. "I've been encouraging people to come get them," said Lt. Col. Reza Utama, who lost 20 of his own men stationed here. But no body bags or rubber gloves have been delivered, and so Colonel Utama said, "people are a bit reluctant." This strip of coast southwest of the regional capital, Banda Aceh, itself devastated by the tsunami, appears to have suffered some of the worst proportional losses on Dec. 26. In the region hit by the earthquake and then the tsunami, this is also one of the places that help was last to reach. And that assistance, nearly three weeks later, seems both heroic and not quite enough. People complain of surviving on just rice and instant noodles. A local leader in Panga, named Ismaelis, said children were suffering from fever, vomiting and diarrhea. "We don't mind being orphans if the aid is coming," said Sharudin, 18, who lost his parents and four siblings. "If the aid doesn't come, it would be better if we just died with our parents." It is not for lack of trying: American military helicopters, Indonesian ships and aircraft, along with a flotilla of private boats are getting through to most places. (One aid official reported finding a village near Panga on Wednesday where residents said they had not seen any outside help.) But the devastation is so great, the numbers in need so huge, with much terrain accessible only by helicopter. On Wednesday, two aid boats capsized, residents said, in the treacherous surf off Panga. "It's a lot of people in some really remote places that aren't accessible," Maurice Knight, with the private consulting company International Resources Group, of Washington, D.C., said on a boat trip this week along the coast as part of his work coordinating relief efforts. "I think the fact is that it's going to have to be a scaling up, and that is going to take two months." But time is not unlimited: Rick Brennan, the health director for the aid group International Rescue Committee, camped out for two days here, said enough supplies were getting in to keep people basically fed and healthy. There are no signs of child malnutrition or outbreaks of serious diseases like cholera. He estimated, though, that 80 percent of the children had suffered from diarrhea, and sanitation in ever-more-crowded refugee camps is far from adequate to ensure health or prevent major disease outbreaks. "From a humanitarian point of view, we need to move quickly," he said. Perhaps more than any other place hit by the tsunami, the focus here is on the living - on getting food and medicine here more quickly, of drafting plans to resettle the homeless into refugee camps that are safe, clean and accessible. And perhaps more than anywhere else, there is no choice but to think more about the living, because so few of the dead have been found. Unlike elsewhere, there are no mass graves in this town, no patrols uncovering dozens of bodies a day. The few bodies that have been found were buried in small groups near where they lay. Zulfian Ahmad, 53, the governor of the province around Calang, has not found any trace of his wife or four of his five children, lost while he was away in Jakarta on business. He has not seen a single one of his neighbors. "Families are trying to find their relatives," he said, sitting on a mat in a tent where he has set up a makeshift office, complete with a typewriter and stacks of papers. "But the government believes they are dead. So we have to focus on the refugees." The destruction was so complete that it is hard to find anyone who lived in Calang in the throng of refugees crowded here by the beach, smoky from campfires as they combed through piles of donated clothing and waited for food rations. One man from a nearby village told a story similar to others along this coast: of a quake of tremendous strength, of a sea that receded and suddenly rushed back in fury. Near Calang, he said, he watched three waves from the top of a hill where he escaped with his family. "When the waves came, the coconut trees just smashed like a potato chip crushed in your hand," he said. The first wave, he said, came "fast and hard," destroying the trees and houses. The second was smaller. "The third one was the biggest, and it just swept everything away," he said. In Calang, once a jumping-off point for tourists to see orangutans, bears and tigers, geography may have been one reason for the destruction. The town rested on a peninsula, and people here said the waves had crashed from both sides, pushing some people inland but most of them simply out to sea. In that sea, groups of boys have begun swimming again, throwing themselves daringly into the waves and dangling off the big ropes that moor two Indonesian military ships here to keep order and to oversee the aid operation. If they are afraid, they will not say so. "I don't see any dead bodies," said one boy, Yuli, who said he was 12 but looked more like 8. An older boy, Wande, 14, watched them in the water from not far away. "You know, they know that people died, but they have trauma," he said. "They don't want to talk about it. They just want to play." The New York Times ------------------------ Yahoo! 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