from the horizon

This Wednesday was the day before the Muslim fasting month of Ramadan. This makes a huge difference in an Islamic area such as Banda Aceh. From the hours of sunrise to sunset, Muslims must abstain from food, drink, smoking and sex. Typically people will wake up around 4am, before the morning prayers, and take a large meal together as a family before sunrise, and then go back to bed. When the sunsets around 6.40pm, people will immediately have a drink (usually a cigarette too), take some small sweets, or sometimes dates, and then perform their evening prayers before having their Puasa Buka (Open Fast) meal with the family.

The atmosphere has totally changed around town during Ramadan.

The pace at work slows down, as people are having to go through the whole day without eating or drinking, plus they are getting less sleep (the mosque will often broadcast readings from their speakers all night, which also effects the amount of sleep I get).

Also, there are no food shops open during the day, which means that I sadly miss my breakfast of rice and coffee Aceh, and my lunch of Gado Gado. I need to be conscious about not eating or drinking in front of people during the day, and even when I do in private, it makes me feel like more of an “infidel” as usual (Which is silly of me, because the locals are actually really tolerant).

Toward the end of the day the streets come alive, with an assortment of stall selling sweets and drinks for people to break their fast with. The traffic is crazy until about 6.30pm, at which point the streets are empty, as everyone has gone indoors, awaiting the siren which indicates that they can end their fast.

I do admire the discipline, faith and tradition which is displayed during Ramadan. I can’t imagine it being the easiest thing to go all day without eating, and especially drinking. I have aspired to experiment with trying to fast myself, but unfortunately with everything else going on (especially work), I just haven’t had the spare energy.

Being the day before Ramadan, the office closed at midday, however being a consultant I only get paid for the days I work, so I was still stuck working in the deserted office (queue tumble weeds). At about 6pm my boss came into my office asking, “Did you feel that?”. I looked up puzzled, and then realized that I probably just missed another earthquake.

“See the door, It’s swaying”, she said. I readjusted my eyes from having spent the last couple of hours gazing at my computer screen, and saw, quite correctly the door was swaying. Small tremors are relatively common here so I was too concerned. This one hadn’t even set off our earthquake alarms.

“Do we have to evacuate the office?”, I asked, apathetically. It seemed unnecessary, but security protocols can be a pain. Fortunately it was deemed necessary, so I could leisurely pack up my laptop and head home.

That evening I was heading round to a friends’ place for Yoga. They’d set up an informal class in their house, which has been running since I was first in Banda Aceh, almost 2 years ago. The person who had previously been teaching the class had gone to Sudan, so I was taking over the teaching. I arrived at the house at the same time as the 2 women who lived there. They had been a bit more “rocked” by the earthquake than me, especially considering that one of the women was the Information Advisor for her organization. This meant that she was straight onto her laptop, while we lit candles to compensate for the power cut (which have been a regular occurrence recently). The power cut also meant she could only get online with dial-up - the wireless network they usually used in their house, linked by a point-to-point radio connection to their office, needed electricity, and they didn’t have a back up generator.

As the NGO yogis started arriving for the class, we gathered around the laptop to find out the details of the earthquake, as she answered calls on her mobile phone, coordinating the organization’s response to the earthquake (and to the media). The earthquake was a 8.4 Richter magnitude, which is relatively big, and then there’s the potential of Tsunami. Fortunately although the epicenter was in Sumatra, it was much further south, closer to Jakarta, Singapore and Kuala Lumpur than to Banda Aceh. I texted my boss the updates, but she had already heard, and wasn’t too concerned, as it was reasonably far offshore. I knew that if our organization was responding, I wouldn’t be involved – I still had databases to finish.

Although the Information Advisor was still working at her laptop, we decided to continue on with the Yoga class, as we thought the rest of us could do with some chilling out. While we were moving into the forward bend, the guy who was working on Tsunami models got a message with reports of a 3-5m Tsunami. We continued on with the class, but unfortunately none of us really found our “Zen”.

After the class we sat around outside in the candle light, catching up on the situation update. The Tsunami warnings had been cancelled – the Tsunami report turned out to be unfounded, based on an article on Dutch TV. The Information Advisor’s laptop battery had died, so the work she could do tonight was limited to her mobile phone.

All around us we could hear the sermons, blaring from the Mosque speakers celebrating the start of Ramadan - they obviously had back up generators.