What Would You Do If You Knew You Could Not Fail? by Nina Lesowitz
Author:Nina Lesowitz
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Cleis Press
Published: 2013-12-04T05:00:00+00:00
In December 2004, with the yacht Mikumba set to sail the next day, Patra Rina Dewi and her sister, Ulya Uti Fasrini, told their parents about their plan to join the team of California surfers who formed the impromptu Surfzone Relief Organization (SRO). “My parents said, ‘Be careful.’ They have always taught us to be brave. I believe my sister never felt as scared as I did. We knew that we would be in the middle of the ocean with these strangers who we did not know before. Some friends reminded us of this, but as long as our parents felt okay, we felt okay. We truly believed their intuition.”
Another challenge: their faith. “In Islam, we have some rules to protect woman from the violence including how to manage ourselves to be around the man,” Patra says. Some parents teach their daughters not to be so friendly with men because they are afraid that their daughters will have sex before marriage—strictly forbidden in Islam—“or a broken heart because of man and distract the daughter’s life.”
“Fortunately, we have parents with high education,” she adds. “My father used to work in the Education and Culture Department and my mother was a lecturer. Even though they also have rules for us, we still can have argumentation with them. We had to convince them that we could take care of ourselves.”
Parental challenges tackled, the sisters set sail. The boat was one of the first rescue teams to leave Padang headed for the Mentawai Islands, and it was loaded to the gunwales with rice, dried fish, potatoes, fresh fruits, tools, medical supplies—and even live goats and dugout canoes. All these items were absolutely essential for the survival of the Sumatran island villagers.
Their voyage was spearheaded by an unlikely field commander—Matt George, at the time a 46-year-old San Francisco journalist and contributing editor for Surfer magazine. George had known of these islands from previous surfing trips, and he recruited a couple of his buddies—Tony Litwak, 35, Peer Court Program Director for the California Community Disputes Services, and David Lupo, 36, an organizer for Carpenter’s Union Local 22 in San Francisco—as a SWAT team to deliver supplies to these remote locales.
The surfer guys wore bandanas and shades. Patra and the women wore hijab (head scarves) and the modest clothing of their Muslim culture.
For two and a half weeks, the Mikumba team traveled from island to island, delivering 70 tons of food, water, and the other desperately needed supplies and medical services to the more than 4,000 isolated survivors. Also stacked on board were more than 60 dugout canoes, carved by Indonesians from one of the other islands. In the months to come, the team would embark on three rescue missions.
Throughout the trip, the crew had to make difficult choices. On one of the first days, after traveling about 10 hours north, they were ready to drop off the buckets of food for stranded residents. But after arriving at the first island, they found an eight-month-old boy with tuberculosis fighting for his life.
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