He didn’t laugh. He wasn’t in that kind of mood. ‘Everything’s good at home. I mean really. But the good stuff never lasts that long for me. You know what I mean?’
He got swiped by a tumbling body as he came out of the surf. He stepped aside with the deftness of a wing forward dodging a tackle. His clothes clung to him like a second skin. ‘Keep her safe, yeah?’
‘I already told you, mate, of course I will. But it’s not as if I’m going to have to.’
He gave his eyes another wipe as we walked back towards the tents.
I glanced across at him and was rewarded with a sheepish grin. ‘Fucking sand.’
5
Our tent was a four-man job we could stand up in, a minging old grey canvas thing that stuck out like a sore thumb among the Gucci Gore-Tex affairs with blow-up frames the NGOs lived in.
BB sat on an aluminium Lacon box that contained fresh supplies of food and bottled water. It had looked lonely outside somebody else’s bivvy doing jack-shit that morning so we’d decided to give it a home. We needed something to sit on and keep our kit off the ground.
BB didn’t look up as we came through the flaps. He was stuffing some padding up his nose. Mong headed straight past him to his corner and peeled off his wet kit. The hubbub of French, German, American and Spanish voices in the background even subdued the chug of the generators. The NGO crews were holding a biggest-bollocks contest to see who was doing the most caring.
I brushed the crap from my cargoes, kicked off my boots and fell onto my camp cot. I’d leave the two cage- fighters to sort themselves out. We were due to set off in about three hours. We’d get the job done and then fuck off back home.
I watched the hi-tech campsite at work through our tent flaps.
I listened to the groan of aircraft overhead. Food and water were being flown in, only some of which would get where it was needed. There were already complaints that 30 per cent of the food and shelter equipment coming into the airport had been confiscated by the military as import duty. Yesterday we’d seen soldiers selling 20-kilo bags of rice — with UN stamped all over them — to the begging locals. Then the gangs demanded their cut before it could travel down the road. Even the pirates who worked the straits between Sumatra, Thailand and Malaysia were looking for their slice now there was fuck-all left to rape and pillage at sea.
Camp Hope — I had no idea who’d given it the name but they had a sense of humour — was to the south of Banda Aceh, the provincial capital and the largest city of Aceh Province. It was right at the north-western tip of Indonesia. Until 26 December last year, the only people with any interest in the place — apart from its 250,000 population — were oil companies and the Aceh separatist fighters.
Then the Indian Ocean earthquake struck about 150 miles off the coast and this part of the world was literally turned upside down. Banda Aceh was the closest major city to the earthquake’s epicentre. So far, they reckoned on about 160,000 deaths in the area, and they were braced for more in the weeks to come, once the rubble started to be cleared and the sea brought more bodies back to land. Cholera would soon be spreading like wildfire, along with the contamination caused by the yellow and green shit leaking from the drums that came in on every tide.
To make things worse, the area had been at war since the mid-1970s. Gerakan Aceh Merdeka, the Free Aceh Movement, was trying to force Indonesia to accept an independent Islamic state. Aceh had a higher proportion of Muslims than other areas of the country, and had been allowed to introduce Sharia law in 2001, but GAM wanted a lot more than just religious control. They wanted the revenue from the province’s rich oil and gas deposits, most of which went straight to the central coffers — no doubt with a few
Major disaster or not, the Indonesian military didn’t like us coming in. They didn’t like foreigners at the best of times, but this last week, in the wake of the tsunami, they’d had no option. Now they were re-exerting their authority. They were starting to restrict our movements, scared our supplies would go to GAM. They wanted to keep the fuckers starving, and didn’t give a shit if everyone else was too.
6
An argument erupted outside between an American and a German who sounded like Arnold Schwarzenegger with a wedgie. It was over what group was going to get the military permit to travel to some remote village with aid.
Over the years, I’d seen NGOs running around in places like Africa and I never really liked what I saw. It seemed to me that they were businesses, at the end of the day, and these two sounded like they were busy competing for a slice of the disaster pie. The locals didn’t just need food and shelter. They needed protection from this fucking lot.
The MONGOs — My Own NGO — could be even worse. They were the guys who thought they could get things sorted more cheaply and effectively than the real aid workers. Most of them arrived under their own steam. Tourist visa in hand — if there was anyone around to issue one — they rented a vehicle, bunged on an ID sticker and, bingo, they were in business.
I’d Googled ‘tsunami’ and ‘donation’ just before we left and got over sixty thousand referrals to MONGO websites, all brand new. Some of them, of course, were scams for cash.
Individual aid work was trendy in the UK, Scandinavia and Australia. And in the US, the tax authorities were granting exemption to an average of eighty-three new charities a day. More than 150,000 had been registered so far — and these were just the lads who’d bothered to go through the system. The only reason I knew all this was because Mong, BB and I had gone that route.
Aid 4 Tsunami. That was us. We carried accreditation to prove it; we’d printed it ourselves. It wasn’t the most original name for a charity, but it would do. There were far worse out here. And it was as well funded as any other MONGO.
7
Our stretch of tent city was heaving with Western MONGO medics who’d dropped everything to come and help — which mostly meant setting off alone in hired wagons with a first-aid kit on the passenger seat. Some of the local lads had been examined three or four times each, and didn’t have a clue what the doctors told them, what drugs they’d been given, when and why they should take them.
The docs ran around in full George Clooney mode, getting it all on video so their sponsors at home would send more money. A lot of them did a great job, of course, but others made incorrect diagnoses because they were moving at speed and didn’t know about the particular challenges of the landscape. BB had a better grasp of the local parasites and diseases, and he was only a patrol medic.
The God Squad MONGOs were the worst. I’d once come across a gang of Christian hippies with guitars in Africa. They were there to round up patients for what they called their ‘mercy ship’. It turned out to be an old cruise liner that had been converted into a floating hospital to bring ‘hope and healing’ to the poor heathens.
All well and good, but because the thing was only there for a week, they could only do operations that didn’t need much aftercare. The place was crawling with people dying of gunshot wounds and machete amputations, and all the mercy ship could deal with were cataracts and hare lips, followed by films about Jesus.
There were already about four groups of happy-clappies in the camp and a hospital ship on its way. The Scientologists were also on the loose. No guitars, but plenty of mind-over-matter techniques and no sense of irony
