The Year in Pictures 6

The man on the left is giving us a tour of his village, which was completely flattened in the quake.

After the interview, he apologized for wearing a helmet on his head. He’d been wearing it for several days to cover a really nasty open head wound he got from a falling door jamb as he was carrying his children out of the building. He hadn’t received any medical treatment.

Picture taken May 30^th 2006. Earthquake struck on May 27^th. It lasted less than a minute.

The Year in Pictures 5

For a story about the one-year anniversary of the Yogyakarta earthquake, I visited farms in the area that were affected by the quake.

The public relations office of the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) set up an interview with the woman in pink on the right. Her farm missed two planting cycles, and the FAO helped her (along with 132 other farming communities) because most laborers were busy surviving after the earthquake or rebuilding their lives. In this fertile climate, the fields quickly grew over with weeds and it took months to get them ready to plant again. In Javanese rice farming, women provide 60 percent of the field labor.

The funny thing about this photo is that the woman showed up for the interview dressed in her best clothes. I asked if there was someone who could show me how the work in the field is done (I wanted to record the splishy sound of rice paddy tending), she immediately took of her shoes, rolled up her pants, and jumped in. Note the muddy feet.

Picture taken May 2007.

The Year in Pictures 4

Hours after Garuda flight 200 crashed on March 7th, the woman on the right waits with her sister at the Jakarta airport to hear whether her husband was on board.

The Year in Pictuers 3

Me interviewing volunteers during a huge cleanup operation following a flood which covered 70 percent of Jakarta in February 2007. Our apartment in the Pejompongan district of central
Jakarta was high enough to escape flooding, but the neighborhood was surrounded by water in each direction for a few days.

The Year in Pictures 2

Trish knee deep (and sinking!) in silt, interviewing fishermen at the mouth of a river where the sludge run-off has killed off most fish stocks. The mud was also full of little pinching crabs. Taken in March 2007.

The Year In Pictures 1

Me in a tippy wooden canoe floating through the remains of a town that was inundated by toxic mud from a botched mining operation. The man in the front, a construction worker named Untung, is showing me the house he built and lived in for 15 years. Taken in March 2007.