Written by Kei Franklin
Stories & Interviews collected by Dr. Juniator Tulius
A Tsunami Arrives
On 25 October, 2010 a Mw 7.8 earthquake took place off the western coast of Sumatra, Indonesia. The earthquake occurred on the Sunda megathrust fault, the same fault that produced the devastating 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami. According to a publication by the EOS Geodesy group, the “earthquake was a ‘tsunami earthquake,’ a rare type of earthquake that generates a tsunami much larger than expected based on the seismic magnitude.” The tsunami’s impacts were felt most extremely on the Mentawai Islands, a chain of ~70 islands and islets about 150 km off the coast of Sumatra.
Besides their proximity to the active Sunda megathrust fault, communities on the Mentawai Islands also experience compounding factors that contribute to their vulnerability. An estimated 80% of the population lives below the poverty line, and traditional forms of livelihood have been compromised by extreme rates of unregulated logging and fishing, along with increased rates of tourism.
After the tsunami, communities on the Mentawai Islands waited nearly a week to receive aid from central and provincial governments. With a maximum water height of 16.9 m, the tsunami killed over 500 people and left more than 18,000 homeless. More than 700 homes were damaged and the estimated loss and damages were Rp 348,92 billion (~31 million SGD).
Bosua is a government village located in the southern part of Sipora, the second-smallest yet most developed of the Mentawai Islands. Sipora is a popular destination for surfers and has a population of ~22,000 people. On Bosua, the tsunami runup inundated 229m into the island and the water came up to 3.1m in some places.
Returning to Sipora Island
Dr. Juniator Tulius is an anthropologist and research fellow at the Earth Observatory of Singapore. He is a Mentawaian, originally from the east-central part of Siberut Island. In 2015, he travelled to Sipora Island to research the impacts of the tsunami five years after it occurred. “At that time,” he remembers, “people were quite open to sharing their emotions and experiences of the tsunami. They were still in the mode of storytelling.” However, returning to the same villages in 2023, Tulius was surprised to find that people were less willing to speak about their tsunami experiences.
In contrast to his last visit, when many villagers were still staying in temporary shelters, this time Tulius found most people living in permanent government-built houses and keeping themselves busy with life, finding work, and - at this particular time of year - harvesting and processing cloves. Alongside or perhaps because of their busyness, “I found that people seemed more resistant to recollecting memories from the tsunami,” said Tulius. “They told me that it felt heavy, traumatic, and tiring to remember.” He found that people preferred to share their experiences with him in groups, as they could help each other remember details and reconstruct memories.
Tulius’ Mentawaian identity and language fluency enabled him to build rapport with the community members in Bosua. He also hired a local community member to accompany him during his interviews, as he struggled to locate many of the people he met in 2015 because they had moved from temporary shelters into permanent houses elsewhere.
Karta
In 2010, 54 year old Karta Sakerebau lived with his wife Jainar Samangilailai and three children in a sub-village of Bosua called Gobi on Sipora Island. “It was an early Monday morning,” Karta remembers, “our hens were cackling, and roosters were not crowing, which was unusual. The hens started cackling at about 4am until the sun rose.” That day, Karta set out to go fishing at 8am. He went to the beach to prepare his motorised canoe, but found that the rudder was mysteriously broken. It did not have any visible signs of damage, nor did it look like it had hit anything.
“When I was out at sea,” Karta remembers, “around midday I heard a ‘boom’ like the sound of an explosion in the middle of the sea. It sounded like fishermen throwing handmade dynamite into the water, but I did not see anything. It just sounded like “boom” several times. [...] I did not see anyone else fishing, it was only me. I felt afraid being there, fishing alone, it was not normal. So I pulled my anchor in and returned home. I pulled my canoe onto the beach, turned it over, and told my wife ‘I was so scared out at sea today, I do not know why’.”
Karta sold some of the fish he had caught, and brought the rest home to his family for dinner. That night, for what would be their final meal before the tsunami, Jainar prepared subbet, ikan goreng sambal, and rice.
Recipe: Ikan Goreng Sambal (Spicy Fried Fish)
After dinner, it began to rain. Karta, Jainar, and their children remember smelling a very strong, unpleasant aroma coming from the sea. Karta said “ I had a hunch that a terrible event would occur but I did not know what it would be.” Just a few moments after he laid down in bed, he felt the earth quaking and heard a loud sound like a strong wind blowing from the sea. “I heard my daughter scream ‘tsunami!,’” remembers Jainar, “and the wave hit the back wall of our house. The kitchen was damaged and the wall of our bedroom was torn apart. The doors were blocked, so we had to escape through the window.” As soon as the family got out of the house, it collapsed completely.
The family members were torn apart from one another by the second wave, which took some of them towards the nearby graveyard and others towards the sea. They grasped onto coconut trees and driftwood in order to survive. They remember their bellies being bloated from accidentally drinking sea water. After the water receded, the family found one another and looked for other loved ones and community members.
“That night and the following day,” Karta remembers, “we did not eat anything. We went to look for missing people and dead bodies. We did not have any appetite to eat. Everyone who survived at that time tried to rescue fellow villagers, collecting our belongings scattered anywhere. We did not feel hungry until the next day. We drank regularly but did not eat.”
For the next four days, before humanitarian aid arrived, the surviving villagers cared for one another. They received help from members of neighbouring villages, who brought food, blankets and clothes. The women cooked communal meals in makeshift kitchens. They cooked subbet, rice, and noodles. The men went out to look for missing people and bodies.
Recipe: Subbet (Mashed Taro, Banana and Grated Coconut)
Four days after the tsunami, volunteers (from humanitarian organisations or touristic surfing communities) arrived with dry goods like sardines, biscuits, milk powder, instant noodles, and rice, as well as clothes, blankets, new tents, and cooking utensils. “When we received aid,” says Karta, “all the gifts were put together and used together. [...] When we were given tents we built them together.” This communal spirit endured for the next year until Habitat for Humanity came to help the villagers build permanent homes and shelters.
Juradis
On the morning of October 25, 2010, Juradis Tasilippet and his wife, Baniar Taikatubutoinan were in their coconut grove, processing coconuts into copra. They ate subbet while they worked, and were kept company by the zuilak (Ashy Tailorbirds) which sang unusually loudly from morning until noon.
They left their coconut grove in the afternoon in order to attend a meeting that evening about a villager who died due to what was believed to be a spell of black magic. Juradis is the head of his hamlet and the chairman of his church council and often hosts such meetings. That evening, as they were finishing up their meeting, Juradis and his guests felt the earthquakes. “The quakes struck several times,” Juradis remembers. “After a few minutes, we heard screaming from the shore ‘Tsunami! Tsunami!’ Everyone ran to higher ground, leaving the house empty and the generator still running.”
After spending a night without shelter at higher ground, Juradis, Baniar and their neighbours set out to assess the damage in nearby villages and to see how they could help. “When we walked to visit neighbouring settlements like Gobi,” remembers Baniar, “it was hard to pass through. A lot of ruins of houses blocked the roads, so we had to walk to the beach. On the roads, we found a lot of dead fish covered by an oily substance. [...] The next day we found dead bodies with the same oily substance in their hair. In Gobi there was only one house still standing.”
After the tsunami Baniar remembers not feeling hungry for several days. “We did not eat regularly,” she says. “People did not cook seriously. We were focused on looking for missing people, and as head of our hamlet, Juradis was extremely busy collecting data in order to share it with the regional, provincial, and central governmental organisations.”
As Baniar remembers, they stayed in makeshift temporary shelters for two weeks during which the women cooked outdoors because their tents were made of plastic and were flammable. In the period immediately after the tsunami, they focused solely on surviving, and did not have the capacity to take care of their gardens or livestock. After four months they began to return to their village in order to go fishing or harvest vegetables from their gardens. But their fear remained. “We felt traumatised,” remembers Juradis, “When the wind would blow a bit harder and the sea would become rough we would feel afraid.”
While the tsunami feels distant for some, it has created lasting impacts on the diets of many villagers on Sipora. “Nowadays,” Juradis says, “we eat more rice than taro and banana because we now cultivate much more rice than before. We eat banana and taro only when we have time to prepare it. [...] Now people work at different places and do many things, they do not have time to spend cooking. To cook rice is simpler, using a rice cooker.”
Now that life feels relatively stable, Baniar has returned to cooking some of her favourite dishes. When Dr. Tulius visited Bosua, he was treated to a meal of subbet samba manu siboikboik (mashed taro with chicken soup).
Recipe: Manu’ Siboiboik (Chicken Soup)
The ‘Recipe’ of this Disaster
The 2010 Mentawai Tsunami led to death, displacement, and exacerbation of the marginalisation of already precarious communities. The disaster was a result of several contributing factors, including lack of relevant disaster science literacy, lack of sufficient public infrastructure and services, lack of knowledge regarding comparable past disaster events, precarious livelihoods, and environmental change that make the coastal areas more vulnerable to destruction by tsunamis.
After the devastating Indian Ocean tsunami, from 2004 - 2009 Mentawains received extensive disaster-preparedness training by different NGOs and governmental bodies who hoped to equip them with the knowledge and skills that they would need in the face of an earthquake and tsunami closer to home. Based on these trainings, some Mentawaians voluntarily built their homes and shelters on hilltops and higher ground. They regularly took part in evacuation trainings between 2005 and 2007, and successfully evacuated to a shelter when a Mw 7.8 earthquake occurred in 2007 between southern Mentawai and Bengkulu. Unfortunately, however, this extensive knowledge-building and training did little to help the Mentawaians in 2010 as the characteristics of the earthquake and tsunami did not match what they had been preparing and looking out for.
The shaking of the 2010 earthquake lasted longer than the one that occurred in 2004. The earthquake’s magnitude was also significantly smaller than the one and those in 2005 (in Nias), in Padang (in 2009), and so on. As such, despite their preparation, the Mentawaians misjudged the severity of the 2010 earthquake because it was unrecognisable.
Moreover, many of the villages on the Mentawai Islands have a notable lack of sufficient public infrastructure, which exacerbated their vulnerability to the 2010 earthquake and tsunami. The lack of reliable electricity, safe roads and other public services and systems made the disaster’s impacts more pronounced and hindered the communities’ processes of recovery.
A major tsunami occurs in Mentawai rarely (every 50-100 years, and sometimes as infrequently as every 400 years). As such, there is a significant generational gap between people with living memory and experiences of major earthquakes and tsunamis. Vital knowledge is thus rarely passed between generations meaning that people are unprepared.
Economically, Mentawaians depend on their coconut gardens, and on being able to fish. As most of their land is located near the coasts, this means that their two major livelihood sources are potentially vulnerable to tsunami risk. Moreover, in recent years many coastal mangroves have been removed, creating more potential tsunami exposure and vulnerability for villages and settlements.
Final Thoughts
When I asked Dr. Tulius what surprised him most during his visit to Bosua, he said that it was the ways in which the villagers' diets and relationships with food changed as a result of the tsunami. “The people I spoke to,” Tulis said, “told me that - while living in temporary shelters - they often ate aid food, such as instant noodles, packaged and processed food, and rice. This caused high blood pressure, stomach problems, and skin irritation especially in older people. But what surprised me is that, despite this, after two years of living in these shelters it was actually very difficult for them to return to their traditional lifestyle and ways of eating. Whereas before the tsunami, they largely ate taro, banana, coconut, chicken, and fish, many households now have generators and therefore electricity and access to amenities like rice cookers.” Many residents still receive government support in the form of rice, instant noodles, eggs, and other processed foods. Despite the health impacts of this, Tulius found that this means that rice has replaced subbet as the staple in many households, as people are working more and have less time to cook. In fields that once grew taro, people have begun to grow rice.
Moreover, many people also no longer have access to the tools and instruments necessary for making traditional foods like subbet. These changes have also changed the flavours of age-old foods. For example many households now use a blender rather than a mortar and pestle to create sambal. This new technique changes the texture and flavour of this familiar accompaniment to any meal.
The circumstances of their lives have led to their priorities shifting from a more communal and time intensive way of eating to a more time-efficient way of cooking and eating within a nuclear family context. Now that most people live in permanent shelters built for nuclear families, and receive aid packages, they are disincentivised to share with one another or to cook communally. “The easiest way to avoid conflict and establish ‘fairness’” says Tulius, “seemed to be to focus on feeding your nuclear family and let everyone else focus on feeding theirs. As soon as the aid systems arrived, people adjusted themselves to the systems, their mindsets changed.”