Indonesia needs a Band-Aid

Indonesia has had its fair share of disasters. In fact, a lot of people would say that Indonesia is disaster-prone. To be fair, it's partly due to Indonesia being in an earthquake-prone zone, and partly due to the sheer size of the country - it will have a larger proportion of accidents. These disasters are both man-made as well as nature's gifts. Here is a brief listing of some of the larger scale disasters in the past few years:

- Dec 26, 2004 - Nearly 132,000 Indonesians are killed and more than 37,000 missing after a 9.15 magnitude earthquake triggered a tsunami in the Indian ocean.

- Feb 21, 2005 - At least 96 are killed in a landslide that sweeps through two West Java villages near a garbage dump.

- March 28, 2005 - Nearly 1,000 are believed killed after a quake of magnitude 8.7 hits the coast of Sumatra.

- Sept 5, 2005 - Domestic airliner crashes in residential area of Indonesia's third biggest city Medan, killing 102 aboard and 47 local residents in an inferno on the ground.

- May 15, 2006 - Mount Merapi volcano erupts with clouds of hot gas and rains ash on surrounding areas.

- May 27, 2006 - Earthquake rocks area around ancient royal city of Yogyakarta killing at least 5,000 and destroying or damaging 150,000 homes.

- July 17, 2006 - A tsunami after a 7.7 magnitude quake in West Java province kills at least 550 people. At least 54,000 people are displaced.

- Dec 30, 2006 - A ferry with at least 600 aboard sinks during a stormy night voyage as it travelled between Borneo and Java.

- Jan 1, 2007 - An Adam Air passenger plane flying from Surabaya to Manado with 102 people aboard crashes into the sea off the west coast of Sulawesi.

- Feb 22, 2007 - At least 42 people are killed when fire breaks out aboard a ferry which was heading from Jakarta to Bangka island off Sumatra.

- March 6, 2007 - Two strong earthquakes kill at least 31 people and injure dozens in the West Sumatra provincial capital of Padang.


Now, mind you, these are just some of the more major incidents that Indonesia has suffered. There was also a quake in September of 2007, but as you can see there has been a significant drop-off in disasters since John and I arrived in the summer of 2007. And yes, bringing this topic up does mean that something will inevitably happen (soon) but let's just say that we are grateful. Especially given the fact that the section John and I both work in responds to disasters!

Recently there was a gigantic Lego display at one of the malls here in Jakarta. This thing was huge, it took up a ton of space, and it depicted all sorts of scenes from life in Jakarta, with skyscrapers, traffic, the one park, etc. However, as we moved closer to inspect the detailed scenes, we started noticing all sorts of... ..you guessed it, disasters formed from the Legos! There were ferries half-sunk in the ocean, fires, traffic accidents and plane crashes with trees knocked down. The worst part, however, were the DEAD Lego people around the accidents! Needless to say it was mostly children there that day to check out the cool display....