Kampung Melayu Floods

Despite the fact that it had been flooded since Thursday night and it was Sunday when we visited, some people were still being rescued from their houses in rubber rafts. Apparently this family had been forced to drink the flood waters while waiting for rescue.

For those that have just joined us, Jakarta has been receiving enormous amounts of rain over the last few days, newspapers around the world are reporting figures of 60-70% of Jakarta being flooded, with 40cm (almost a foot and a half) of rain having fallen on Thursday night/Friday morning alone. The worst hit area of Jakarta is Kampung Melayu, and the worst hit neighbourhood in Kampung Melayu just happens to be Poncol, where most of the core members of KFJ reside.

The field Discindo plays on on Sunday afternoons tends to turn to a big swamp if there's even a little bit of rain, let alone the torrential downpours that we've been having over the last few days. With this in mind, Discindo felt that it was better to use the money that we normally paid for the field in Senayan to buy emergency supplies for the families affected by the severe flooding in Kampung Melayu; in addition to this, pledges from a few generous members brought the total donated up to Rp. 2.1 million (around US$200)

Rp. 2.1 million may not seem like a lot of money, and its not compared to the scale of the disaster, but you can buy a surprising amount of stuff for it. In fact, our main concern was how to get the most value for the victims that would still fit in a taxi. We ended up spending Rp. 700,000 on basic medical supplies, Rp. 200,000 food, and the rest in cash donations to be used as Ardy and the kids that I gave it to felt best.

The medical supplies we gave included

• 13 bottles of betadine, 4 bottles of antiseptic solution, cotton wool, plasters, and q-tips for cleaning wounds;
• A few hundred sachets of Pharolit (rehydration salts for diarrhea), a few hundred blister packs of Diapet (over-the-counter diarrhea medication);
• 16 tubes of Autan (mosquito repellent);
• 10 packs of sanitary pads; and
• a few hundred blister packs of generic paracetamol tablets to reduce fever.

We would have bought much more of a lot of those things (sanitary pads, and Pharolit in particular), but it was a relatively small chemist and we cleared them out.

The stuff we gave was really just basic hygiene stuff, although, in these situations, the local knowledge of these sorts of things is really less than satisfactory. When I was telling the kids to go and get any wound cleaned up, no matter how small, because the water was absolutely filthy and they could get horrible infections, they all proudly showed me their open sores that they had been swimming around in the water with for the past 3 days. Also, for those not keeping up with the local news at the moment, the newspapers in the weeks leading up to this flooding had been filled with stories of outbreaks of Dengue Fever. With all this standing water around, people going hungry and lacking sleep immune systems are going to be low so we thought the medical supplies would be the best way to go.

So, I loaded up the car, picked up a few donated t-shirts (lots of people are cold and wet) and Howie and Haviva, and headed off to Kampung Melayu.

Handing over the donated goods to Pak Eddy, the sports teacher from SMP Perguruan Rakyat II and participant in the Poncol Cup in August last year.

Pak Eddy helping Tamara unload supplies

Yoyo and two other KFJ members helping unload boxes of water

We arrived at around 5pm and were followed not long after by Tamara and Chris, dabblers in Discindo who answered the call and brought a carload of supplies including big boxes of water, instant noodles, biscuits, and bags and bags of old clothes. After unloading the supplies we took up the invitation to have a wander around the neighbourhood to see what we could see.

Over lunch I had maintained that there was no way I was going to set foot in that filthy water, but it soon became obvious that we weren't going to see very much unless we took the plunge, so we rolled up out pant legs and waded in. Here are some of the photos:

Sugi, Yoyo and Howie knee-deep in the surprisingly cold floodwater

People crowding to see who is being rescued from their house. Sibuk, one of the stars of KFJ is behind Ardy (in the red and white t-shirt).

I had thought that the Town Hall I had visited on Friday night was the extent of the refugee problem in Kampung Melayu, but it soon became obvious that it was much, much larger than that... The below is some video footage of the mosque just east of Tebet train station. It's packed, and most of the Klub Frisbee Jakarta kids have been staying here for 3-4 days. Sugi, Desti, Soleh, Ardy's younger brother and all of their families to name but a few.

The mosque near Tebet train station. Soleh is near the middle of the photo wearing the orange life jacket and talking to his mother.

One of the meal tickets entitling Ibu Mul and her 4 family members to 3 meals a day at the mosque cooked in the communal kitchen

Looking onto 2 lanes of the completely flooded 8 lane Kampung Melayu Besar

Deni is staying in the mosque alone at the moment because his grandmother and younger siblings are still stranded in their house, the alley is too narrow for the rubber boats to pass.

As you can see from the photo above, surprisingly, people seem to be in relatively good spirits, in fact, the kids seem to be enjoying the time off school and living in one big room with all of their friends. We'll see how they go in the coming days. Ardy said that while the waters normally take 3-4 days to subside, families can take as long as 2 weeks to get back to work as they clean out their houses. As I mentioned in a previous post, the school is completely submerged along with all of the schoolbooks, teachers' records and so on. It will be a while until things are back to normal...