on the coast

Most of the NGOs are based in the southeast corner of Banda Aceh, in an upper middle class neighborhood that was minimally affected by the 2004 tsunami. The walls of my room are ringed by a line, albeit one that took me several weeks to even notice, about 4 feet off the ground, but if anything this is a testament to how unobtrusive the tsunami seems in this quarter of the city.

However, once you leave my neighborhood, things change drastically. The road out to the harbor is long and straight, and conspicuous in its newness as it runs northwest out to the coast. I had been on this road before, but always inside a car, and never out in the open air.

I drove the road the other evening (to go look at a scooter), on the back of a motor bike with one of the transportation guys from the office. That which struck me the most was the inescapable flatness of the landscape. Five hundred meters off to the right the sea lolls rather stagnantly, but all around the crusty land, crisscrossed by scars from earth moving machines, is terrifyingly flat. Distant one thousand meter hills tower, screened by a detaching haze, over the coastal plain, but the sheer lack of relief seemed as nightmarish as the thistles of steel rebar that sprouted from the crown of every cement pillar.

We eventually found ourselves in a neighborhood, not two hundred meters from the tepid looking water, where every house, each the identical mirror image of the house adjacent—four cement corners framing the rough wooden walls of a bedroom, center room, and a kitchen out back—was crisscrossed by ad hoc bamboo scaffolding. Everything, including the dirt, bore an eerie and unmarked newness.

It being prayer time, and all the men away at the mosque, I was invited into someone’s house for some ‘cappuccino,’ the super sugary type (Indonesians would not have it any other way) that comes in an individual serving satchel. The house was pretty bare, TV, rattan mat on the floor, refrigerator, rice cooker, double burner gas stove. The people were very gracious and pleasantly surprised to have a bule in their home, especially one who could BS in Indonesian and keep up a steady stream of crazy white person witticisms.

After a while my host told me that he had something to show me and he produced from his wallet a folded up triangle of paper. Carefully unwrapping it, he shook out two razor thin gold flakes, each one about the size of a pencil eraser. Upon closer examination, these delicate little wafers appeared to be some sort of coinage, decorated on both sides with beautiful ornate script. They were brilliant; when I asked him what he had used to polish them he just laughed, clearly proud of my assumption, and flicked his head.

And, indeed, they were of an impressive lineage, as he found them on the beach, not far from his home, the day after the tsunami. As he told it, they were resting with a 250 year old underwater wreck when the waters reach down and dragged them back to terra firma. I asked them if he would sell them because, after all and especially in a culture that values charms and cosmic items (later that same evening someone tried to wow me with the invisible powers of their pet photoluminescent stone), they must have some value, but he vehemently assured me that he never would.

I must confess that I went home wowed by my host’s gold. For some reason I could not shake the utter contrast that his treasure embodied, how these of the most delicate and pristine were eventually repatriated by an event of unprecedented physical power and destruction. And, sitting on his new cement floor, while the mosques echoed through the twilight, I could not help but feel and admire the bravery and strength of the peoples of Aceh.