BEBEKAN 14

8 November

The 52 MTR houses have been completed. We organize a meeting with all the villagers to officially announce the “end” of the rebuilding program. It will also be an opportunity to satisfy all the last requests for those which were not entitled to a MTR house, either because they had the means of building one before or because they were able to reassemble their brick house. We know that many of the villagers are still asking for more cement and tiles. In order to avoid a useless meeting (the people of Bebekan are fed up with bureaucratic meetings where the government tells them that the money for the rebuilding will come any time soon and of course it never comes) and to make sure that this meeting leads directly to concrete steps and not only empty promises, Asep met the day before with the RT1 chief in order to evaluate the last requests, the last “complaints”. That very morning we buy 95 cement bags, 5000 tiles and some bamboos. We leave my house on the slopes of the Merapi volcano at the end of the afternoon. Amid strong winds, stunning thunderbolts start to illuminate the black sky… the monsoon has arrived and it starts to rain heavily. In the south of the city, there is hardly any rain, and in Bebekan, just a brief downpour. The meeting is held on plaits, on the terrace of Pak Jamhari's house, the artist who carves the Reog masks and who drew the standard model of the MTR house based on the one he rebuilt himself without asking us for any assistance.

I open the meeting by celebrating the devotion of the RT1 chief who, for weeks, has had to endure all the complaints of the villagers, whereas he himself did not ask for anything and still has received nothing for his house which has been completely destroyed. He lives with his wife and her old father in a cattle shed (the cow has been installed cow under a plastic tarp between their bed and the TV). I explain to the assembled villagers that if the RT1 chief refuses to give cement or tiles to someone, it is not his decision, it is in accordance with our instructions. He is a remarkable man who really sacrificed himself for the people of his village. We then note down each request without promising to be able to satisfy it completely : here 5 cement bags, there 300 tiles, etc… Asep and I then make a quick calculation : the requests correspond more or less to the materials which were delivered that morning. We can thus satisfy the requests immediately and close peacefully, this very evening, the rebuilding program. We then read out loud the final attributions per villager of the number of cement bags and tiles: everyone is astonished and glad to see that their requests were 100% satisfied. And each one knows exactly what his neighbors have received. We also allot directly 10 cement bags to the RT1 chief who still hasn't asked for anything. As everyone gets ready to carry back their quota, the wind rises, the thunder rumbles, a strong rain starts to fall and the electricity goes out. Rain and darkness. The women bring two oil lamps. “Just like during the time of the Dutch !” says someone in the darkness. I ask: “When did electricity arrive in Bebekan? - In 1987. - In 1987 ?!? But Bebekan is only 15 km away from Yogyakarta!”


The oil lamps are thus not only reminders of the Dutch colonial era but also of the Soeharto dictatorship era and its so-called great economic development of Indonesia. We gather round the circle of light created by the two oil lamps set on a chair. No one dares to say it but the ambience is neither that of the colonial era nor of the military dictatorship, the ambience is that of the first evening of the earthquake. That evening, there was also darkness and a torrential rain. In the middle of the ruins. Slowly, the tongues are untied and the strange nostalgia of this first earthquake night comes back. A villager talks about that endless night where, crouched under a tree and holding his children between his legs and in his arms, soaked to the bone, he had not been able to sleep. And all this amid unceasing aftershocks and thunder. It was impossible to say if it was the earth or the sky which shook. Another man talks about the tsunami rumors that morning, when people of the other villages ran here to seek refuge in the Bebekan cemetery on top of the hill, and how while passing in front of one of the rare houses of the village still standing where the people of Bebekan had made a point of celebrating the planned wedding, they were given a handful of rice with gravy in a teak leaf torn off from the surrounding trees. Without this rice from the wedding all these people (about a thousand) would not have eaten anything during the whole day. While everyone speaks, I notice that Pak Hadi – who lost an arm that was crushed in a soya-peeling machine – and Pak Miskijo – who is still handicapped because his hip was fractured when a wall of his house crashed on him at the time of the earthquake – are leaning against each other. Is this a coincidence brought about by the darkness or the instinctive fraternity of the only two maimed persons of the village ?


The most talkative person is the old man who until now has always been grumpy, the man whose house was totally cracked but who refused to bring it down. This evening, he is very merry. With the assistance he has received, he built a hut right in front of his house, on the main road of the village where all the children pass in the morning on their way to school. It is a highly strategic location. In this hut, his wife opened a “warung”, a small restaurant where, from 5 to 7 o'clock in the morning, she sells “bubur” (overcooked rice, like a soup). The warung is a success. She cooks at the end of the afternoon, and gets up around 1 o'clock in the morning to fry small fishes. Formerly, she sold silver jewelry in Bandung, a big city 500 km to the west of Yogyakarta. She went there several times a month by train. But two years ago, the Asia-Africa Congress (the counterpart of the famous congress of non-aligned countries in the Fifties) was held in Bandung and the authorities of the city cleaned up the city and chased away all the circulating venders. She was one of them and she went bankrupt. She also played gamelan in the hotels of Yogyakarta for many years. But the tourist industry collapsed in 2002 after the Bali bomb. Her true speciality is the manufacture of baskets, plates and plaits in braided sheets of pandanus, but it is not profitable any more. Her husband, the old grumpy man, is a shoe-maker. Every morning, he takes the bus to Yogyakarta, he settles down at one the corners of the palace walls, with nothing, without even a stand, because he doesn't have an authorization. He only has his shoe-maker case and he repairs the shoes of the passers by. When it rains, he must stop working because the glue won't hold. He could be a shoe-maker in Bebekan, which would save him the bus fare (4000 rupiah for a return ticket), but none of the villagers would pay 5000 rupiah to repair a shoe. Downtown, yes.


Pak RT1 shows us the project of a set of 4WC proposed by an international NGO. A very ugly concrete building, of the kind we see in a French campsite, with a small tower for the water tank. The RT1 refused the project because, on the one hand, there is no space in the village where it would be possible to build such a structure. This lack of a large communal ground explains why we had made the project of 6 public WCs grafted around 6 wells distributed in all of the village. And furthermore, who will pay the electricity for the water pump? In Bebekan, apart from the house of Pak Jamhari, all people draw water by hand from the well. As we closed the chapter of the rebuilding, we also did the accounts. In a few days, we will post Bebekan 15 on the blog with a list of the total expenses since the second day of the earthquake, including the rebuilding expenses. But here is a preliminary overview :
- For the rebuilding we spent a total of 85 million rupiah. Our first estimate, established three months ago, house by house, came to a total amount of 101 million Rupiah (approximately 9000 euros). Therefore we did not exceed our budget. You will see the details on the blog, but here are the amounts spent for various materials:
Coconut wood : 47.676.000 rp (approximately 4500 euros)
Cement: 7.695.000 rp (approximately 650 euros)
Bamboos: 10.160.000 rp (approximately 900 euros)
Tiles: 9.174.000 rp (approximately 820 euros)
Sand: 1.000.000 rp (90 euros)
Tools: 3.836.000 rp (approximately 300 euros)
Carpenters’ wages: 5.710.000 rp (approximately 500 euros)

Since the second day after the earthquake, we have spent a total of 175 million rupiah, approximately 15.000 euros. Of these 15.000 euros, which have come exclusively through your donations, i.e. personal donations from friends (an association did give us 2000 euros, namely AISA, the Sufi association of Sheik BentounPs, but it was also a friendship gift even if he forwarded it through an association), we spent 1500 euros, that is to say 10%, in operational expenses. Since August 15, we have cancelled the student posko. We were thus only two people, Asep and I, to take care of the rebuilding, in close cooperation of course with the people of Bebekan. I thus gave Asep an amount of 90 euros per month for his operating expenses, gasoline and food, because most of his time was devoted to Bebekan. We also bought a second-hand motor bike for 500 euros. He had no means of transportation and as I did not go any more myself every day by car to Bebekan, it is Asep which went there daily to supervise the orders and the deliveries of materials and the ongoing work. For one month, he used the motorbike of my daughter who could not drive any more, since she had broken her arm at the time of the second earthquake. But when my daughter needed her motorbike again, a solution had to be found. To go by bus to Bebekan from the north of the city where Asep lives is a long journey since we live 35 km north of Bebekan. The other purchase, which goes back to July, is a portable computer costing 500 euros. It is Asep who created the blog and updates it. Knowing that the collaboration with Bebekan will doubtless continue in the coming months in the form of a small arts center, the motor bike and the computer will continue to be useful.

Miraculously we still have 34 million rupiah left (about 3200 euros). I say miraculously because since the beginning of this adventure, we never asked for donations : they all came spontaneously. My banking account number is not on the blog. It was a deliberate decision, since we did not want to interfere with the magical financial logic which has been guiding us since the beginning in Bebekan. More precisely, we did not draft a specific budget detailing the amounts we needed for this and that, and please help us if you can. No. As soon as I received the first amount, a spontaneous donation from my parents who did not know what I was going to do with it, I asked myself : what can I do with this money ? Simple : buy food and flashlights and plastic tarps. These were the things that were urgently needed in the days following the earthquake. Then a new donation arrived: what can I, what must I do with it ? Ropes and dust masks to bring down the wall sections that were still standing and threatened to collapse. And from day to day, week after week, we continued to improvise with the flow of spontaneous donations. We told ourselves: we are helping Bebekan because we are receiving money, and when we won't have any more money, we will stop, our mission will be finished. During the first weeks, not for one single moment did we think that we would get involved in rebuilding the houses of Bebekan. For a very simple reason : the villagers themselves did not think of it because they were too busy trying to clear the ruins. The thought never crossed our mind since it was a gigantic project which was clearly the responsibility of the Indonesian government. Click here for the expenses table

We invested in a sort of intangible rebuilding: the Reog dance group, the communal meals, the school uniforms and stationery… We thought only of building communal spaces, such as our dream of a small arts center which would have been the only sheltered and comfortable place, where the villagers and their children could meet while waiting for the rebuilding of their house. Or the public WC. But at the beginning of August, we realized that we had nearly 8000 euros, in spite of the previous expenses. We saw that the assistance of the government did not arrive, but that the rainy season was going to arrive in two months and that most of the people of Bebekan lived under plastic tarps. They really started to become concerned. We then established an estimate, house by house, and we saw that we had enough to get involved in such a rebuilding project. We organized meetings with the Bebekan villagers and told them that we were going to begin work. We did not promise a 100% completion but assured them that each family would receive an equal share. And amazingly we did finish at 100%. What is miraculous, it is that this financial logic, by its very absurdity since it was based on a day by day improvisation and carried by a spontaneous network of friendships and a kind of grace, does function. And it has functioned for six months in Bebekan.

Sanggar Gino

What are we going to do with the remaining 3200 euros ? We still have the dream of the small arts center, which people here call “sanggar”. Since the very beginning, the people of Bebekan kept showing us a piece of land which they said belonged to the village. It is located at the foot of the hill, slightly away from the dwellings and directly facing the ocean of rice fields. In fact, this lot goes up the slope of the hill almost to the level of the cemetery. At its base, the committee of the village built a rudimentary nursery school in 1983. It functioned for three years, then it had to be abandoned because the villagers did not have the means any more of paying the personnel. Insects devoured the beams and the earthquake destroyed the walls. Some say that this house is haunted. The site is very beautiful, and located at an intersection with plenty of wind, it is always cool with a far-ranging view of the plain. For six months, each time we passed in front of this collapsed house, we thought of the “sanggar” and visualized it. But all the money that we thought of possibly devoting to this small center was spent in rebuilding the houses. And that, finally, is better. Still, we felt a bit uneasy to leave Bebekan without having built at least a rudimentary structure for the children, with a modest library. The remaining 3200 euros would allow us to go ahead with such a project. But quickly, we learned that the ground in question does not belong to the village. It is a “gantung” lot, i.e. “in suspension”. It belonged formerly to a man called Gino. In 1942, when Gino was 30 years old, still unmarried and his parents dead, the Japanese (who had invaded Indonesia) requisitioned him and sent him to the forced labor camps in Sumatra. He never came back to Bebekan. A man of Bebekan went to Sumatra in 1985 and met the wife of Gino and his three sons which told him that Gino probably died in 1965 in a detention camp for Communists or people suspected as such by general Soeharto who had just seized power in a blood bath. A few years later, the wife and two of the sons died. So there is still a third son remaining but no one knows where he is.

We went to meet Pak Camat (the chief of the county) who had been wishing for a long time to meet us and thank us for our assistance to Bebekan. He is an intelligent, congenial and enthusiastic man. And especially quick and efficient. We told him about our “sanggar” project and asked him his opinion about the lot. He advised us to give up our plan and instead rent another ground for 20 years or so. But we insisted that it was this specific place which had made us dream since the beginning. A few days later, Pak Camat came to Bebekan. We met on the battered terrace of the old nursery school around a tea service served by the villagers. He told us right away : “I now understand your stubbornness, it is a dream location! ” He gave at once instructions to his secretary to find the title deed in the land register. A few days later, he organized an evening meeting in Bebekan with all the elders of the village. Were also present the chief of the commune and both chiefs of RT1 and RT2. The meeting was in fact a “musyawarah”, an Arabic word meaning meeting of deliberation. A decision taken during a musyawarah has legal authenticity, according to the common law as well as the republican law of Indonesia. One has recourse to a “musyawarah” when the republican law cannot legislate any more. Which is the case for this piece of land which has been “abandoned” for 64 years and which is still owned by an heir which has disappeared. But the people of Bebekan feared that, following our visit to the county chief, the commune would recover this land and transform it into a communal ground, which would have dispossessed them of it by inserting it in the infernal circle of the local bureaucracy. But no. The secretary of the county chief first read the genealogy of the Gino family. Then he explained how the inheritance law functions. He asked the man who met the family of Gino in Sumatra to testify and he duly noted that there still remained an heir. He asked the assembly of the elders if they agreed that Elisabeth could build a “sanggar” on this ground, to be at the service of the village. The answer was a unanimous “Yes”. He then asked if they agreed to restore the ground to its rightful owner if that heir should ever return. Once more, an unanimous “Yes”.

But it was also clearly specified that, in this case, the buildings and the material of the “sanggar” would remain the property of the foundation that we have committed ourselves to setup with the villagers in order to create the sanggar. Following this meeting, we obtained an official document, signed by all the members of the “musyawarah”, giving us the legal rights to this ground for a duration to be determined during the creation of the foundation. The county chief didn't ask for any fee nor any under-the-table payment for handling this affair.

I believe that he is already dreaming with us of this “sanggar”. More so since an unexpected benefactor (a company actually) proposed to finance not only the construction of the “sanggar”, but also its operating expenses for two or three years. The proposal is being studied by the foundation of his company. In this case, we could widen the activities of the “sanggar” and build a center on several levels, the lot being ideal for this : on the ground level, a “pendopo” for dance rehearsals and various shows; at the intermediate level, toilets and a kitchen; and at the top level, the library, the office of the foundation and two rooms as “artist residence”. This residence could accommodate foreign artists, students or any volunteer person willing to teach during one week or more a subject they deeply love. The friends of Bebekan, of which you are, would also be welcome. If this unexpected benefactor goes ahead with this sanggar adventure (he will let us know in one month at the latest), we will still strive to preserve a village character, architecture and economy. But no matter what happens, we will make a “sanggar”, even if it must be very modest. In Bebekan 15, we will say more about the mission and the operation of this “sanggar”. On the blog, you will be able to see its future location on the site of the abandoned nursery school. We have already found a name for it : Sanggar Gino, in homage to the tragic destiny of this man. “Gino” in Javanese means “useful”, “beneficial”.

Before concluding, just a word about Pak Miskijo, the only severely wounded person of Bebekan. I had an appointment with the surgeon who operated my daughter and who seemed quite competent. But he fell sick and the appointment was postponed indefinitely. Our friend Vincent then got me at once an appointment with a surgeon whose wife is the director of a small private clinic in Imogiri, the epicenter of the earthquake. After the earthquake, it was the only building and the only private clinic still standing. They thus took care in one week of some 15.000 wounded persons, all for free, since the government had promised to refund them afterwards. The surgeon operated almost around-the-clock : his private clinic, which until was not authorized to perform surgery, received the status of “field hospital” for three months. After these three months, the government withdrew the status and refunded absolutely nothing. A rich Indonesian woman then got very interested in this private clinic, its director and her husband, and decided to gather funds to build a true hospital for them. Vincent became a friend of this rich woman and, through the WHO, obtained for her crates of very expensive and invaluable medical material. Through this network of solidarity, the surgeon examined Pak Miskijo for free and with extreme kindness and attention.

His diagnosis : successful operation of the hip, but severe atrophy of the leg which has not been used for six months. He at once took away one crutch in order to force him to lean on his leg. And Pak Miskijo, although suffering, started to walk while leaning on only one crutch. The surgeon also noted a difference of 4cm in height between the two legs due undoubtedly to the crushed head of the femur. There seems to be a piece of bone missing to his operated hip. He recommended to make an orthopedic shoe with a 4cm sole. Pak Miskijo doesn't wear shoes but only common sandals, so when we went back to Bebekan, we asked the local shoe-maker to design custom-made sandals, with several superimposed soles, glued and carefully stitched. With the full agreement of Pak Miskijo, we left one of the two crutches at Pak RT1 so that he is not tempted to use two crutches again. And he goes twice a week to s small private clinic for physiotherapy treatments. According to the surgeon, it will take three to six months to get rid of his leg atrophy. My sister (a rheumatologist) who had examined Pak Miskijo when she visited Bebekan in August, advised all the same to redo an X-ray (the small and poor private clinic does not have an X-ray machine!) and to make him go through the “roller” test, a sort of joint handling of the hip and the knee. We will take care of this.

Thank you.
Elisabeth