Questions but no answers for bereaved parents

HIS eyes puffy and bloodshot, Datot Mendra prepared to spend the night lying next to his wife.

Today he will bury her - and his sister and two other family members killed by a magnitude-8.7 earthquake on Monday.

“What will I tell my children?” the 55-year-old said.

“I can’t face it. My faith in Jesus is helping me through this.”

Mendra’s wife is one of about 20 bodies wrapped in sheets, candles flickering at their heads, laid out on the street outside the Santa Maria church in the town of Gunung Sitoli on Indonesia’s predominantly Catholic Nias Island.

The death toll on the island stands at about 330, but government officials estimate it could climb as high as 2,000.

Elsewhere on the island of 600,000 off the west coast of Indonesia’s Sumatra island, the earthquake wrought mass destruction.

A football field in the town and close to the beach has been transformed into a centre where a dozen seriously injured people, some unconscious, lay waiting and hoping a relief agency helicopter can airlift them to a hospital on Sumatra.

“Four people here might not make it through the night!” yelled a Western aid workers. “Do you have space on a chopper?”

Only about 17 people were choppered off the island yesterday, officials said.

While the earthquake and tsunami on St Stephen’s Day killed more than 126,000 in nearby Aceh province, that catastrophe left the church-studded seaside town almost unscathed.

But Monday’s late-night tremor destroyed thousands of houses, shops and government buildings and sent residents fleeing to the hills.

People whose homes survived the quake don’t trust them, fearing aftershocks could topple the walls.

There is very little food or water.

Deli Iname sat patiently next to her nine-year-old daughter. The girl’s face is swollen, her legs draped in a bloody sarong.

“She’s so young; why is her life in danger?” Iname asks.

“She stood no chance.”