Oh, yes, the tsunami. How soon we forget.
Almost a year has passed since the event last winter that staggered our imagination—300,000 people dead and more than a million homeless. Then and now those numbers defy understanding.
Recovery efforts in Indonesia and other areas hit by the killer wave have gone on virtually unnoticed by the rest of the world; most of the media left a couple of months after the disaster. And when Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans and the Gulf Coast in August, the tsunami receded a little further from memory.
So when I read Joel McCormick’s story about Kuntoro Mangkusubroto, the Stanford-trained engineer who spearheads rebuilding in northern Sumatra, the region’s hardest hit area, I was reminded of the scope of the disaster and its enormous human costs. I also learned what a formidable task it is to put a country back together.
Most of the people who lived on or near the coast in the northeastern reaches of the Indonesian archipelago lost at least one member of their family. Many lost their whole family. They lost their house, their livelihood and everything they had ever owned. Unlike a “typical” flood, the tsunami struck with such ferocity and suddenness that survivors had no time to save anything except their lives.
For the past several months, most of these people have lived in tents. They may have wanted to go back to where their house had been and rebuild, but they had no documents to demonstrate where their property lay, or that they had even owned the property. And neither did any of their neighbors.
When the Indonesian government established an agency to oversee the process of repairing what the tsunami had destroyed, one house and one neighborhood at a time, it needed a person with the humility to listen to people’s stories, to know their needs before acting, and with the confidence and skill to make something happen. It required somebody who could organize and mobilize not just his own agency but also dozens of international relief groups already in his country; who could coordinate the disbursement of billions of dollars in aid; who could walk into village after devastated village and meet people who had lost mothers and fathers and sons and daughters and houses and everything else, and who had been living in a tent for six months, and work out a plan to give them back a life.
The government found that person in Kuntoro; his deft handling of the recovery has won praise from everybody from the U.S. deputy secretary of state to local villagers in Aceh province.
The fact that Kuntoro earned a degree at Stanford is a footnote in a story of such profound human suffering. However, it strikes me as emblematic of one of the University’s greatest exports: its international alumni. Kuntoro is representative of the thousands of students over the years who have come to Stanford from distant shores, learned what they needed to make a difference, and gone back home to do it.
Those are stories I never get tired of hearing about.
