[Individual articles from the Winter 2020 issue of Intersections will be posted on this blog each week. The full issue can be found on MCC’s website.]
In my mind, I always think about “The Tsunami”, with two capital Ts, even though other tsunamis have happened. The tsunami that struck the Indian Ocean on December 26, 2004, became a major before-and-after reference point for my husband, Dan, and me in the course of our 12 years as MCC representatives in Indonesia. Reflecting back on MCC’s tsunami response that continued on over the ensuing years, several lasting learnings come to the fore.
The tsunami wasn’t just a natural disaster. The Indonesian province of Aceh had been engaged in civil war for independence from Indonesia for almost thirty years at the time of the Indian Ocean earthquake.
Context matters: The tsunami wasn’t just a natural disaster. The Indonesian province of Aceh had been engaged in a civil war for independence from Indonesia for almost thirty years at the time of the Indian Ocean earthquake. The Indonesian president at that time, Megawati Sukarnoputri, had declared martial law the previous year. The government prevented international human rights organizations and humanitarian organizations from entering the province and international news agencies were restricted to the provincial capital. For the first six months after the tsunami, the response took place in a war zone with people suffering multiple traumas. I remember an early visit in Aceh to a displaced persons camp on a sunny wooded hillside overlooking the ocean. Only later did we learn that the people in the camp were terrified by compounded fears—not only of the tsunami they had just experienced, including feelings of deep loss, uncertainty and on-going aftershocks, but also the danger of being near the forest with active fighting happening around them. In the earliest days of the response, we spent time with an Indonesian partner organization working with a group of Acehnese nursing students. I remember the fear and concern as two brave young men prepared to set out in a truck loaded with supplies over the mountains to find a way to Meulaboh through the conflict zone. The opening of Aceh to reporters and humanitarian workers was a contributing factor to a peace accord being signed on August 12, 2005, six months after the tsunami.
Interfaith connections matter: Recently, an Indonesian MCC worker came to visit Ohio. When he was asked in a chapel service, “Why did MCC build a school for Muslim people after the tsunami?” his answer was simple. “Because they needed it.” Aceh is known as the “Veranda of Mecca.” Its population is 98% Muslim. Many Muslims in Aceh continue to associate Christianity with the Crusades. MCC made a conscious decision to never hide our organizational identity as Christians who are motivated to help because we follow the way of Jesus. The tsunami was an opportunity for MCC and its partners to introduce a new view of Christians as those who seek the good of others.
Partnership matters: Because of the conflict and the isolation of Aceh, MCC had no partners in the province at the time of the tsunami. MCC was committed to working with Indonesian partner organizations rather than running our own operational programs in Aceh. Before the tsunami, through Indonesian Mennonite connections, MCC had been partnering with universities and the interfaith Forum for Peace Across Religions and Groups. Through those Mennonite Indonesian interfaith connections, MCC was able to connect with potential partners. Relationships of trust between Christians and Muslims on Java helped to build relationships of trust with Muslim people in Aceh. In some cases, this happened when Indonesian Mennonites “credentialed” MCC to Muslim people in Java, who then made connections for MCC among Muslim communities and potential partners in Aceh. Within a month of the tsunami, MCC opened an office in Aceh staffed by MCC workers from Indonesia, Canada and the U.S. The office enabled face-to-face working relationships with Indonesian and Acehnese local partners during the three-year duration of the response. The relationships were often complex and imperfect, but the partnership experience in a time of disaster solidified a way of working that makes sense in a post-colonial era. Groups that partnered with MCC, including the Indonesian Mennonite Diakonia Service, have been strengthened and have grown as a result of their experiences in responding to the tsunami in Aceh.
Since the tsunami, psychosocial support takes priority in many MCC disaster responses, alongside providing water, food and emergency shelter in the early days, and then recovery of livelihoods, education and longer-term shelter in the following months and years.
Social and emotional recovery matters: The unimaginable losses of entire communities from the tsunami brought the important work of trauma healing to the forefront in MCC’s relief work. Since the tsunami, psychosocial support takes priority in many MCC disaster responses, alongside providing water, food and emergency shelter in the early days, and then recovery of livelihoods, education and longer-term shelter in the following months and years. In the early days after the tsunami, no one in Aceh greeted each other in the normal ways. They didn’t even express sympathy for the losses in the usual way. Instead, when people would meet again for the first time after the tsunami, the greeting was, “How many left?” MCC worked with interfaith partners to develop trauma healing approaches for both Muslim and Christian contexts. In the years since the tsunami, those trauma healing approaches have been further refined and developed by MCC partners.
Last year, I spoke to a group of seventh graders about how the Indian Ocean tsunami of 2004 had affected hundreds of thousands of people in multiple countries. I was shocked to realize that The Tsunami that continues to occupy such a prominent place in my memory occurred before that class of inquisitive seventh graders had even been born. Those of us who were part of MCC’s response to The Tsunami will not forget the deep losses nor the new growth that came from that disaster.
Jeanne Zimmerly Jantzi is superintendent of Central Christian School in Kidron, Ohio. She worked for over 25 years with MCC in multiple roles in DR Congo, Nigeria, Indonesia and Thailand.
Fountain, Philip. “Mennonite Disaster Relief and the Interfaith Encounter in Aceh, Indonesia.” Asian Ethnology 75/1 (June 2016): 163-190.
Karan, Pradyumna P. and Shanmugam P. Subbiah. The Indian Ocean Tsunami: The Global Response to a Natural Disaster. Lexington, KY: University of Kentucky Press, 2010.
Intersections 