The Day the Water Rose

The Day the Water Rose

I recently learned a new word in Indonesian: Banjir, meaning “flood”. Anyone who knows anything about life in Jakarta knows it involves risk of flood. I had heard tales of the Flood of 2002, the year before we moved to Jakarta, a flood which had our predecessors in a hotel for several days. I have kept that thought in my mind every February as the rainy season lubes itself up and dumps rain upon our little corner of the world, Kelapa Gading, a northern section of Jakarta, below sea level, I might add. Two years ago, I remember starting to move rugs and small furniture when I saw the water overflow the gutter outside our house. That was as high as it got that year. Enter February, 2007. It has not really rained much at all so far this year, and we were beginning to wonder if the rainy season might pass us by totally. In parts of Java there has been a serious drought for months and water has had to be trucked in to villages there. But this past week, that all changed.

On January 31 it rained much of the day and the water in the canals rose, as expected. By Thursday, it rained again all day and school was let out early, to help give people extra time fighting traffic and rising water levels. When I woke up on Friday, the water was lapping at our driveway. It was a school day and I wondered how people would get to school, so I phoned our new headmaster, in position barely three weeks, after the sudden death of our former headmaster. I asked him what the plan was and was told he would check it out. Thirty minutes later I received the news that school was canceled. By this point, the water was up to the front tire of our car and had filled the street up to our knees. We got the kids in order, moved rugs and a few other things to higher ground, and set out for school to help with any kids who might not have heard that school was closed. The road out front was in chaos. Cars were barely getting through, as the canal had overflowed hours before.

A few kids arrived on foot, after drivers had abandoned them a few blocks from school. Imagine how happy those drivers were to get a message, moments later, that they had to return to pick up their charges. A few kids had to stay for several hours, while their cars dried out. We began to worry that the water would continue to rise and that maybe we should move a few more things out of the way. Indeed, the level was creeping ever higher and was lapping at the back tires of the car by now. The girls who work for us, Sri and Asih, have been residing in our garage for two and a half years (the alternative being a small closet off the kitchen!), and it was clear that the water would enter through their room first, and that the hour was nigh. We frantically moved their beds, all of our storage boxes, and their few belongings into the living room up on chairs.

A few hours later, the water entered the garage and made its way back towards the kitchen. At this point, the hundreds of cockroaches who had been using our garage rent free for God knows how long, decided to evacuate to higher ground. Within moments they were crawling everywhere – the walls, the doorways, the living room floor. Sam grabbed our golf ball extender apparatus which is made for retrieving golf balls from ponds and such and began to thwack at the little buggers who tried to enter our realm. Jared would then try to grab them with paper towels and chuck them mercilessly into the toilet. He had a bunch of the critters fall through his shirt and crawl down his leg. Fun stuff. Sophia, our resident roach lover, would go up to the critters which had turned upside down, grab them by the wing and chuck them in the toilet. That’s my girl!

The day progressed with only a small change. It had stopped raining for the whole afternoon, but the water level continued to rise, albeit slowly. That’s when we heard that the unabating rains up in Bogor were causing more water to flow into Jakarta. We prepared to retire for the night and took one more look at the water level outside the house. By this point it was slowly entering up through the back terrace drain, and our downstairs bathroom had water seeping in through the drain and floor tiles. Clearly the ground was saturated and one more downpour would tip the scales. At that moment, we heard the pitter patter of raindrops on the roof. About two minutes after that, the water began to slowly wend its way underneath the front and back doors, in through the kitchen doorway and under the bathroom door. I went to bed and Jared stayed up for hours, keeping an eye on the rising water level and watching DVDs on the computer. Amazingly, we had internet and electricity throughout the night.

At 7:00 the next morning we heard a loud thunk, and in the next instant the electricity was gone. We went downstairs to see our murky living room full of about a foot of water. At this point the adventure lost its sense of fun and entered the realm of crisis. We decided it was time to evacuate to the school, which was a two minute walk on a normal day. Jared carried Sam over and they brought an inflatable boat back with them. Then we piled the important stuff (do you know what you would bring with you in an evacuation?) as well as Sophia and later me, onto the boat and floated over to the school.

We had heard that, due to the heavy rains in Bogor, the city was opening up a damn to let the water out and it would flow into Jakarta, likely causing the water levels to rise up to a meter higher. Luckily, this never appeared to happen. In Kelapa Gading, we stabilized at about 1 meter of flood in the road, with water lapping at the second step of our indoor staircase throughout the next few days.

At school, the local staff was hunkered down. Poor things, they were not allowed to go home to tend to their families. At this point, we thought of weathering out the storm at school and prepared a makeshift home in my classroom. Several teachers have apartments up on the second floor and they opened up their places for cooking and showering. We spent that whole day going between home and school bringing supplies from our bedraggled house. Just before dusk we got another scare of increasing water levels, at which point we rushed home to move still more things upstairs. By this point, we could barely see a thing inside the house and the entire second floor was filled with the flotsam and jetsam that we call our belongings. Now I do not purport to understand what the many victims of Hurricane Katrina went through, but this experience has brought me an inkling of the horrific conditions many of these poor people had to endure….for months!!!

By now it was Saturday night, and a truck was sent to take us all to higher ground at a hotel in the city center. We heard that life was going on as normal in many parts of the city and could hardly imagine it. We did, however, at school have cleanish running water and a generator with enough fuel to last two weeks. When the truck came and said it could take hours to get through to the hotel, we decided to tough it out at the school, along with most of the rest of the gang. About 6 people left that night and 10 of us stayed behind.

That night, the Rodgers family crashed on makeshift beds in my classroom, and I went to sleep with visions of rushing waters and earthquakes and other natural disasters floating in my head. Sometime in the middle of the night, we awoke to the sounds of the pouring rain outside. Moments later I heard Sophia wheezing, and it dawned on me that I had not considered the scenario in which someone gets sick and we might need to seek medical help! I tossed and turned until morning, determined to make it my mission to get the heck out of Kelapa Gading the next day. Luckily, the others were not hard to convince. We were promised that a truck would come get us by one o’clock. We spent the interim hours cooking food, talking to our maids, and making last trips home to grab longer term supplies. We ended up leaving all of the maids at the school – about 12 of them at last count. One teacher and his family decided to stay behind as well – he ended up being the mediator when food worries got the girls in a tizzy the next day. We left everyone with lots of food as well as a classroom of over 2,000 cans of food – we had just finished a school wide can drive, which was fortuitous.

Shortly before two o’clock that day, a military vehicle pulled in the school driveway. Our chariot had arrived! We clamored aboard, eight families and six children we were. We were off!! This truck would be stopped by nothing. Sure enough, we soon made it to higher ground, the nearest mall which was open and thriving. The driver turned to us and told us to get out…that was as far as they would go. But we were worlds away from our hotel – we could see the toll road up above us, but the access road to get there was totally submerged. We would have had to seek out eight taxis and beg them to risk their cars to get to the toll road and bring us to safety. There was not a taxi to be seen (above water level, anyway). A few frantic phone calls later, we continued our journey, with the military guys grumbling that saving us would take hours away from them returning to help more refugees (which was true!). We did, however, pick up a few more people from a floating taxi and brought them to the city center with us. Two hours later we pulled up in front of our hotel, the Sahid Jaya, a place whose former glory had faded long ago.

We checked in without further ado, and I raced upstairs to take a refreshing shower. I had purposefully waited to shower before leaving the school. Imagine my chagrin (and that is the mildest word I can find) when I turned on the faucet to see nasty brown water emitting from the tap. Jared, undaunted, cleaned himself with the foul stuff and then I decided what the heck, only to find that by that time the water had totally run out! When we asked downstairs what was up, they said some water pump had broken, but that water trucks would arrive soon. They did, and the water was still brown, but at this point I, the beggar, was not in a position to be a chooser.

We dined that night on snacks from the nearest Mini Mart and slept fairly well. At this point, a seed was germinating in my mind; that of taking refuge in Bali with the kids. With talk of more rain and potential threatened water quality throughout the city, I had images of huge cholera outbreaks and increased stress on medical care. The next day we spent hours getting our physicals at our local medical center. We needed this for our move to Abu Dhabi, and it was a perfect chance to get them done. The somewhat conservative doctor there thought Bali was a great idea, especially for the kids. We packed up once again and, leaving Jared to watch the replay of the Super Bowl at a local bar, the kids and I went to a friend’s house in a dry part of town …with clean running water. A pizza and a shower later, I was feeling much better. By now I also had the electronic Bali tickets in hand and had packed my bag.

It rained again that night and confirmed our decision to abandon ship. The next day we spent two and a half hours getting to the airport. A combo of nasty Jakarta traffic and some flooded streets made my last hours in Jakarta nail biting ones. We were in Bali by sunset and I spent the next day by the pool, watching the pool water lap at my feet, glad that it was not laced with all the bacteria and sludge of the lapping water of Kelapa Gading. At this writing, Jared and the two maids have cleaned out the bottom floor of our house, and though it still smells a bit, looks like normal. It continues to rain and water is slowly rising again, according to Jared. At this point, time will tell how the rest of this tale will play out.

My theme songs for this past week are two: one is the theme to the movie “Beverly Hills Cop”, thanks to the cheap light-up toy Sam procured outside our hotel in Bali. You twist the guy’s head and out blurts the theme song to “Beverly Hill Cop”! Needless to say, this melody has accompanied me throughout the past few days, unrelentingly. The other theme phrase comes from the movie, “Hoodwinked” at a point in which a hyperactive hillbilly character is hurling down a mountainside screaming out the words, “an avalanche is coming, and I am not prepared!” I close with a chuckle to myself at the ridiculousness of it all, as the only other option is to sit down and bawl my eyes out at the wreckage which now defines the lives of almost half a million displaced people in Jakarta.

Addendum: It is now February 17, and, with Valentine’s Day behind us, we have felt the love and are getting on with our lives. Our house is still in disarray, but we are healthy and lucky. On this final day of the Year of the Dog, I am troubled by how to help those victims of the flood, some of whom I know personally, who have lost everything. We are trying to raise money here at school, but, to my bewilderment, the giving is slow to come. I have decided to appeal to my outside circle of friends and family, many of whom can afford a nice lobster dinner on any given day, which could pay for a new set of furniture for someone less fortunate here in Jakarta. I am hoping to raise some money to donate directly to about twenty families whom we know have lost everything in the recent floods. The money will go directly to rebuilding their homes and providing them with food and furniture to begin to salvage their lives. These are people who work for the school, and to see smiles on their faces when told we can help them get back on their feet would bring me a much needed sense of happiness and satisfaction, knowing that we can make a difference in peoples’ lives. If you, Dear Reader, are interested in participating in this mini fundraiser, please e-mail me at jared_mimi@hotmail.com by March 1, and I can tell you how best to donate to this cause. It needs to happen quickly, as these people are already in the process of trying to rebuild. I leave you with that thought, on the eve of the Chinese Year of the Pig, 2007. Happy New Year!