Today I saw a lot of bodies and a lot of suffering people. The Bantul
district was flattened by the quake, and only a few buildings like the
hospital I visited remain intact. There were hundreds of people with
head wounds and crushed limbs in the ward – all spread out on blankets
and straw mats around the floor. There were open air surgeries going
on all over the place – mostly sutures and fracture setting business.
There's clearly not a lot of pain killers around because the people,
many of them kids, were screaming while the doctors worked.
Hundreds of people have turned to begging for aid. This morning
international aid still hadn't been distributed, and it's clear most
had gone hungry since Saturday. Even the people at the hospital
hadn't eaten since their previous breakfast 24 hours and a long night
ago. I talked to some of the people on the roadside, gave them what I
could. People who are not used to begging are especially emotional
about it. It's a line many people don't expect to cross. Even with
so many people crossing the line at once, the resulting humility can
be expensive.
There was also a mosque that had been turned into a morgue. I thought
it was stacks of supplies at first, maybe tents, because Muslim people
wrap their dead in a way that's still not immediately familiar to me.
In plain cloth, sort of bundled. Thousands of people died here. I saw
just a few dozen.
I feel like such details may be too sensational to put up here- the
kind of thing that ends up on bad disaster TV anyway. But the fact is
it's all I can think about. I've never seen anything like it. These
people are having a terrible week. I held my sensations at bay for
most of the day, but they poked through at awkward times otherwise.
While reading stories for the network, for example, it's best not to
weep. If you do, they'll accuse you of sensationalism.
