View from Pamenang's mosque roof.
Although half-destroyed, Pemenang Timur's market is still running. Merchants find whatever spaces for their stalls.
On the beautiful afternoon of November 30th, 2018 – a little under 4 months after the deadly earthquakes – I reached the shores of Lombok after a smooth boat ride from Bali. A few minutes later, I was comfortably sitting in the back seat of a car that was gently driving me to the north of the island. Kilometer after kilometer, I felt the landscape was getting more and more dazzling in what seemed to be a desperate move to get noticed and admired. The coconut trees were getting bigger, the green hills were looking more dramatic, the edge of the sea was shining more intensively.
A terrestrial interpretation of the Atlantis
Despite these remarkable attempts at seeking my gaze, the beautiful panorama and the rolling rice fields weren’t what was catching my attention. Instead, the ubiquitous wreckage kept stealing the show. As I was looking through the car’s window, my eyes were unblinkingly drawn to an endless amount of concrete bricks and volatile dust that seemed to be marking out each and every road of Northern Lombok. It was as if I was stepping into a vanished empire – a modern version of the ancient Rome, a terrestrial interpretation of the Atlantis. Except there was nothing poetic nor mysterious about it. The rubble wasn’t the result of an epic war or the slow passing of time. It wasn’t testifying about a lost civilization that had mysteriously disappeared from the surface of the earth. Far from it. It was simply the remains of the island inhabitants’ modest lives: small houses, splendid mosques, village schools, tiny shops, public hospitals, and every other building that contributed to a normally functioning life under these latitudes. The cause of this newly-shaped concrete landscape couldn’t be found in a meaningful or geopolitical purpose either. It merely came from the dysfunctioning nature, in an unfortunate episode which turned our nurturing Mother Earth into a weapon of mass destruction.
Four months after the 2018 deadly earthquakes, the streets in Northern Lombok are still covered in rubble.
Intimacy disappeared when the walls felt down.
Child playing in front of his broken house. He used the demolished front wall as a toy.
Natural disasters and terror attacks: a parallel
I don’t speak sasak (Lombok’s local language), but there is one word I kept hearing during all my stay on the island: “lindur” – meaning “earthquake”. It was at the backdrop of every conversation. Everytime an unidentified noise would kick in, people would run away screaming “lindur!” in a panicked reaction, reminding me of the stampedes that followed the Paris terror attacks in 2015. Witnessing these scenes, I couldn’t help but draw parallels between terrorism and natural disasters. In both cases, death strikes a lot of people at the same time on a completely random basis. Their only fault is to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. And, just like a terror attack, an earthquake leaves its victims with a deep trauma. Is it ever possible to find a reasonable explanation as to why someone innocent would have to go through such devastating an event? How are people expected to heal from something they can’t understand? The difference, though, is that when dealing with terrorism, you can place the blame somewhere. You can go further and name the culprits, hunt them down and incarcerate them in order to restrain -or, better yet, wipe out- the scope of their action. In the case of a natural disaster, there is nothing to be done; there is no closure. The thing responsible for this perceived random and cruel taking of precious life and shelter is the same entity that provided it in the first place: Earth and its natural elements.
After weeks of break, school has started again in Pemenang Timur. Tents serve as classroom, and keeping focused can be challenging for the kids. Aren't pegs so much fun?
Teachers must overcome their own traumas in order to get back to work. They take extra care of kids who lost family members.
Ever since the earthquakes, classrooms are synonyms with death threat. People carefully avoid walking inside.
The school building, likely to fall down, is completely abandoned.
The youngest pupils sit on the ground while learning how to read. Although rain saison has started, they are not provided with any kind of roof.
Tents aren't big enough to fit all the children. For those sitting on the side, the temptation is high to look outside instead of focusing on the class.
A needle in a haystack: the shaking land of Indonesia
Indonesia is infamous for its regular natural disasters: earthquakes, tsunamis and volcanic eruptions often make headlines in this vast archipelago composed by over 17,000 volcanic islands. From the cold perspective of rankings and figures, Lombok’s August 5th earthquake seems barely worthy of attention: 481 deaths and 1,413 injured are nothing in comparison to the 2,256 deaths and 4,612 injured following Sulawesi’s September 28th earthquake and tsunami. When comparing the two, both the local government and the international support would choose to direct their relief effort to the deadliest event. Yet, this optimization doesn’t stand the test of humanity: with 431,416 people displaced3, the reality of the ground in Lombok is truly apocalyptic. Children ride half-destroyed walls instead of wooden horses. They go to class under a tent – that is, when they’re lucky enough to have a cover above their head to keep them dry during the wet season. Some of them just quietly sit outside, on the ground. People pray in wrecked mosques during the day and sleep on the floor when the evening comes. Above all, they long for the presence of the loved ones who died during the longest and most destabilizing seconds of their lives.
Pamenang's mosque also suffered from the earthquakes: all its windows shattered and the cupola felt down. Water is flooding inside when it rains – that is, everyday.
While the ground floor is a praying space, the first floor of the mosque serves as a warehouse where construction materials are stored. Floors are connected with swaying bamboo ladders.
Four months after the earthquake, Pemenang Mosque is still under construction.
Pamenang's mosque is surrounded by ruins and rubble. Families who lost their houses patiently awaits for the government to fund their next home, but no one knows when the money will come.
Pemenang's mosque has been demolished by the earthquake, but the villagers keep coming to fervently pray. Here, a woman is praying facing the remains of the mosque cupola.
Seconds of terror, lives permanently destroyed
Aji, a thirty-something native of Lombok, remembers perfectly the course of the events on August 5th:“It was the middle of the night, but a pressing urge to go to the bathroom woke me up. While I was walking in the dark, I suddenly felt the ground shaking. I immediately suspected an earthquake and ran outside of my two-floor house. It fell down right when I was stepping out of the entrance door. I started to run towards another house of the village but it was falling too so I changed direction, only to stumble upon another building falling down. Everyone was screaming and running. It felt like we had no way out. It was the scariest moment of my life”.Like many others, Aji lost his house, relatives and his livelihood because of the earthquake. The two english schools he had built from scratch were demolished and, with them all, the scholar material, advertisement flyers and the student records he had worked so hard to collect. He now preciously holds on to his car, which has turned into his roof and his livelihood: he works as a driver for the few tourists who keep coming to the island. Work is scarce, but he still calls himself blessed to have been awake during the disaster. One of his sisters wasn’t as lucky: because she was sleeping, she got stuck under a concrete block which broke her leg and killed her three-year-old child. Four months later, she still wears a plaster and can’t get out of her bed. As a result, she can’t work anymore, making it especially challenging to gather enough money to pay for her drugs and medical care. One of the doctors she saw said it would be more cost-effective to cut off her leg, but she refused.
Aji lost his house and his two English school. His car is now both his livelihood and his roof.
A family proudly poses in front of one the few houses that resisted the earthquake in Tanjung.
This father is building a temporary house with bamboo, wood and tarpaulins. Despite his efforts, it is not completely waterproof and mattress are sometimes damp when the evening comes.
In the village of Gol, all the buildings have been destroyed. Rebuilding a mosque was a top priority for the villagers. The evening prayer is a happy event, as two little girls spy on the worshippers.
Living in a provisional home isn't an excuse not to be tidy. Here, headscarves are carefully hung and shoes methodically aligned against the wall. Next to the television, a few jewels, some cosmetics and a pocket mirror are nicely displayed.
A mother bathes her baby where her house use to stand. She was pregnant during the earthquakes and had to camp several days on top of the hill with the rest of the village to escape a possible tsunami.
In the quiet streets of Bentek, whoops of excitement can be heard. Two boys are racing, forgetting about the surrounding rubble.
Tanjung’s public hospital: a ghost town
Healthcare is a sensitive topic in Northern Lombok. In Tanjung, the public hospital was severely damaged by the earthquake too, killing and injuring all the in-house patients and medical staff within seconds. Doctors from Jakarta and other parts of Indonesia flew in to help the injured victims of the area, working from orange tents that now stand empty around the building. Although dilapidated, with electric cables hanging from the ceiling, and with demolished walls and dirty floors covered in rubble, the hospital is a shelter for many people who lost their houses. Most of them are men, who work at fixing the building. In this hospital, absolute chaos and profound silence live together in a striking paradox. I walked past empty corridors only haunted by abandoned medical equipment and dead bodies. Less than five minutes later, I found myself in the middle of a scene full of life, with young people chilling on a couch that had been installed right next to the chairs of a former waiting area, chatting and playing on their smartphones. Looking out the window, I spotted a man doing his laundry in the central patio. All around it, small rooms were equally squatted, with people sleeping on the floor, cooking, praying or taking showers in public. Intimacy is a luxury that hundreds of people without a roof cannot afford anymore in Northern Lombok.
Even though external walls are still standing, the inside of Tanjung's public hospital was demolished, killing and injuring medical staff and patients in seconds.
Walls and insulation are missing at the hospital. Those who live inside must adapt to this hostile environment.
Squatted wings of the hospital stand alongside empty corridors filled with abandoned medical equipment and dead-bodies.
Tanjung's public hospital is squatted by men who lost their house and have no intimacy left. They work at fixing the building.
In Tanjung, people now live outdoor. Here, a fridge, a scooter, cleaning products and drying laundry share the same space. One of the towels reads "Hope for tomorrow".
Making an inventory of all the damages caused by the devastating earthquakes does feel like an endless task. Everywhere I looked, I saw other demolished houses, which always came along broken lives. People have adapted themselves to this new environment, because life goes on even in the darkest of times. They patiently wait for their government to fund their next homes, making plans to build wood and bamboo structures instead of concrete walls. They’ve learned their lessons, and they know the ground is likely to shake again. In the meantime, they install tarpaulin or sheet metal over bamboo sticks – walls are less important than roofs when it rains everyday. Families who have a house gather together and get used to sleeping with their snoring uncle and their crying newborn niece. They rely on the fact that this situation is only temporary. But my question is: how temporary is temporary? ■