Covering the Tsunami

Rohati's house must have been the first on the seafront, and so it was the first to be destroyed. When we found her, she was running her fingers through the wet sand that now covers the foundations of her house.

Her husband and four children had all been swept away by the tsunami, but she had had the good fortune to be at the market selling vegetables. Or was it a curse? Because now Rohati was convulsed by grief. Like so many of those who survived, she wished she had not.

I suppose we can all imagine losing a loved one but to come back from market one day and find everyone and everything in your life simply washed away—well, to me at least that is incomprehensible. Perhaps that's why we decided to tell her story for our television report that night from Meulaboh, Aceh, the town that had lost a staggering 40,000 people, almost half its population.

We started off by filming Rohati on the beach, beginning with what we in the business call a 'walking shot', the reporter and interviewee strolling along together. But this was no ordinary interview, just as the tsunami is no ordinary news story. She was hysterical with grief, her body jerking and shaking. And as we walked side by side, she suddenly reached out to grab hold of my left arm. Then she pulled me closer and started to sob uncontrollably on my shoulder. A small woman, that was as high as she came.

In my Home Counties public-school sort of way, I was stiff and uncertain how to respond. My awkward body language seemed to tell her: come on woman, don't invade my space, pull yourself together. Didn't she know she was breaking the grammar of television news, where the correspondent—especially the BBC correspondent—can never be seen to 'cross the line'?

Down the years, I have interviewed more victims than I care to remember of wars, famines and disasters. Rohati, though, was the first one to clutch hold of me and let her grief pour out in tears that dampened my immaculately pressed TV shirt.

But then I thought, why the hell shouldn't she? There she was standing all alone on a devastated beach with absolutely nothing and no one in the world. Out of the blue, a man from a faraway land has come to talk to her, and she has seized him like a submerged victim of the tsunami seizes a passing palm tree. I was the only available source of comfort to her.

And so gradually, I felt myself loosen up. Who cares if it ruins my film? Who cares if it ruins my shirt? Who cares if this particular 'walking shot' has gone against convention? Ocean waves that swallow up 150,000 people go against convention, too.

I started to hold her tighter to me, to console her as I would a grieving relative at a funeral in Britain. But now she wailed even louder than before, rubbing her hands up and down her chest with a frenetic energy. My interpreter, Sonny, translated her words for me. 'I have lost my children! How can I live now? What am I to do and where am I to go?'

Sonny, also Indonesian, was not only translating her words, he was sobbing them too. He, unlike me, was not afraid to get caught up in the maelstrom of her grief. And now I could feel my eyes welling up, too, however much I resisted it; however hard I tried to keep my emotions locked up in their corporation straitjacket. In turns I patted her back, then rubbed it, then gently hugged her. But it all seemed so absurdly, pathetically inadequate.

'I'm so sorry for your loss,' I stuttered. 'I hope...' Hope what, for God's sake? That things improve for you? That somehow you just get over the loss of your house and all your possessions, not to men tion the man you loved and the four children you adored?

Finally, after what seems like an eternity, Rohati broke away from me, as if she had realised how entirely useless a grief counsellor I was turning out to be. Later I thrust several hundred thousand rupiah in her hand, which sounds a lot but actually is only a few pounds. And then I was gone from her life, and she from mine.

But I fear the pain etched on Rohati's face will always haunt me, as will the vision of grotesquely bloated bodies lined up at a makeshift morgue in Thailand, the stench of death there so bad it made me want to retch. For many of us in the media, this has been easily the most harrowing story we have ever covered.

Reporters, producers and camera crews out here in Aceh are permanently exhausted, and it's not just because of the punishing time difference with London or the burning Asian sun. No, it is the relentless smell, that smell; the smell of rotting corpses that permeates the air. And also the knowledge that wherever you go here, you may be walking on or over or very near the body of a human being. It's like being in some ghoulish horror show: you never know when a corpse is going to leap out at you next. One of my colleagues stood on an overturned door, and a dead child's hands flopped out. Another noticed dogs sniffing around a pile of rubbish outside our BBC office: on closer inspection he realised that amid the rubbish was the body of a dead baby, riddled with maggots. The tiny corpse had to be burnt.

With relentless deadlines there is not much time to pause or reflect on the daily horror that we witness as soon as we venture into any street in any town or village here. Perhaps it's better if we don't dwell on it too long. But when I met an Australian surgeon in a hospital in Banda Aceh, I realised it's not only journalists who are being emotionally drained here. The doctor told me that he could not stop crying.

It was not the round-the-clock operations—the surgery was the easy part—it was the sight of young orphans in his wards who had lost their parents and siblings and now faced the rest of their lives alone.

The surgeon refused to do an interview with me, on the basis that he would burst into tears the moment he started talking. I felt like telling him he had made the right decision, because, as Rohati could have told him, I'm not much of a shoulder to cry on.