Tsunami Relief

Posted by Dan Fox 
on Aug 27, 2013
 

by Lorine Parks

Roy van Broekhuizen and his wife were asked to head up a Tsunami Relief Project for Indonesia in 2005 and have never looked back.

Roy showed us a short video of the tsunami, beginning with a simple wave with people running down the street before it, and becoming rapidly a two-stories high river, tossing automobiles and personal belongings into a killer debris-filled flood.

 
On December 26, 2004, in a moment of quiet surf and sunset beauty, in the village of Aceh, an 8.9 earthquake occurred, causing deep cracks and wide chasms, killing thousands.  Then came the worst part, the tsunami that followed.  Beginning by seeping into the streets and then rising to the tops of buildings, before receding, a rage of water killed 100,000, left even more, 150,000 missing. 

We saw pictures of rows and rows of dead, covered with colorful cloths and laid out in the streets.  No one had ever seen anything like it.  A football-sized field was covered with bodies.

The world came together with the villagers for the clean up, and there was no time to argue or bicker.  Homes and lives had to be rebuilt.

Roy credits his wife with the idea of their handbag enterprise, to put the people back into some kind of business.  They found girls in their twenties, orphaned and without family, and got treadle-powered sewing machines contributed.   These young women, with no more than a fourth-grade education, had been sitting glumly.  Now they are smiling in the pictures as they work.  After seven years, these handbags made of leather and stitched in native designs, are being displayed on the runway in Las Vegas fashion shows.

Roy, a native of Indonesia, born in Jakarta, the capital, has long been a U. S. citizen.  He owes his Dutch name to that fact that Indonesia has been a trading region since the 7th century, and was long a Dutch colony.  In fact, it was the Dutch East Indies Columbus thought he had found when he discovered America, and that is why he called the native people “Indians.”  Roy says there is peace in Indonesia now, no more guerrilla fighting, and the people respond to any opportunity to be self-supporting.As Christians in a Muslim country, Roy and his wife have worked through non-sectarian agencies, such as the United Nations, to make a difference in these people’s lives.  He wrote to Oprah in 2007 and she answered back immediately.  After appearing on her show in April of 2007, he received 40,000 orders in two hours.  It took him till that Thanksgiving to fill the orders.  The well-made bags retail from about $100 to $130, and can be googled at Laga-handbags.com.

 It was brought out in the question period that the United States has spent over six billion dollars in aid after the tsunami, and this has been money well spent, as it has earned the gratitude of the Indonesian people.  Indonesia is the fourth most populous country in the world and ranks high in land area, 243 million people living on an archipelago of more than seventeen thousand islands, and it is the largest Muslim country.  It’s good to have friends in the Islamic world.

Religion has not been an issue in this aid venture.  It is about people.  Roy says he has been a citizen here for 52 years, and when he goes on his mission there, he says, “I speak out for America.  This is my country.”

As President Paul said in thanking Roy and asking him to sign the children’s book for the Library, this is a great example of service above self.