The Fly Island

Flies were everywhere, by the million. No wonder Kuku was given the nickname Fly Island by the refugees. Anyone trying to sleep during the day would be covered by them from head to toe. And with people relieving themselves in the grass everywhere, the fly population multiplied by the day and helped to spread diseases that began to kill people. Most of the deaths were due to malaria and diarrhoea. During the first few months, at least one person was buried in the jungle on most days. I used to sit with skeleton-like children and old people in a small hut, feeling helpless as I watched them die. Two male nurses and I took turns in staying with these desperately sick people so that they wouldn’t feel abandoned. My sister, brother and I all contracted malaria. When we were shivery and cold, we had neither blankets nor clothing to keep us warm, and when the fever came there was no relief from the heat of the tropical jungle.

We also came down with diarrhoea, and I had to make many trips each day to the beach or up the hill to empty our waste bucket. Later, I developed some kind of rash on both hands, so my little sister had to do all the cooking and washing. My thirteen-year-old brother became so thin he looked like a ten-year-old, but he still went into the jungle every day to find wood for our cooking fire.

When people died, we had no coffins and usually could only bury them in their clothes. I will never forget the first time I held a dead baby in my arms.

One dark night I was sitting outside a hut that belonged to the owner of our boat, who was also a good friend of our family. There were about twenty people in his family, all adults, and they had built the first and biggest hut on the island. At this time they had given Mimi and Saigon shelter in the hut, as they were ill with diarrhoea and fever. Leaning against the hut, with my arms through the slats, I was able to hold their hands.

Near me was a young couple with a ten-month-old baby girl who’d had diarrhoea for four days. They had given her some medicine but it hadn’t helped. I noticed the woman was whispering to her husband, trying to wake him up. Then I heard her cry out ‘Oh God, no! Oh God, no’. Then both husband and wife held each other and sobbed.

Many people were woken by their cries, and they started to whisper. An older woman, an older man and I were sitting closest to the couple and the dead baby. We lit some candles and followed the old woman’s instructions. I washed the baby with a wet cloth and put clothes on her. Then the woman told me I must remove all the buttons from the clothes. I didn’t know why, but I did it anyway, using my teeth because I couldn’t find the pocketknife. The older man took the baby’s bed apart and cut it up to make her a coffin. I lined the coffin with plastic bags, then placed on them her other (buttonless) clothes and laid her on top. She was cold and stiff like a doll.

When the old man had closed the coffin and placed a candle on it, the mother threw her arms over it, rested her face on the top and cried out over and over, ‘My baby, my baby, don’t leave me’.

When I returned to check on Mimi and Saigon, they were asleep. Sitting in the dark, I stared at the coffin and had all kinds of bad thoughts. At one point I broke down and cried. What would I say to Mum if this happened to Mimi or Saigon? And if they both died here, how could I live? Should I even go on living?

I remember negotiating with God to let us live – but if we must die, then let us all die. Or take Mimi and Saigon first, and I will join them. In retrospect, I find it interesting that it didn’t occur to me that I might die before them, I guess because my responsibility for them was so immense that I just couldn’t allow that to happen. Who would look after them then?

While on this deserted island I witnessed birth as well as death.

In the middle of the night I was woken by tapping on my hut. Then a male voice whispered, ‘It’s Dr Tan, I need some help’. I peeked through the raincoat that served as a door to the hut and asked him what he wanted. A woman was in labour, he said, and he wanted me to come and help. ‘I think you are mistaken’, I replied. ‘I don’t know anything about childbirth.’ He insisted: ‘Don’t worry, I’ll tell you what to do. There’s no-one else.’ I told my sister and brother where I was going and followed him.

Minutes later we arrived at a thatched hut. It was quite dark inside, but from the light of a small oil lantern hung from the roof I saw a woman lying on a table made of tree branches. I walked closer to the table and was embarrassed to see that the bottom half of her body was naked. Dr Tan exchanged a few words with her, and then her husband arrived with a small kettle in his hands. Many times he went back and forth between his hut and where we were to fill a bucket with boiled water that we could use for washing the baby and mother later.

Dr Tan told me to hold her hands and caress her tummy in a circular motion. He washed his hands and some instruments he’d brought with him.

Every few moments the woman moaned and squeezed my hand very hard. Then Dr Tan came to the table, spread her legs wide and began doing something to her with the instruments. I was too embarrassed and scared to watch. Now he told me to stroke her tummy downwards. The woman was breathing very hard, her hair and face covered in sweat, her eyes tightly shut, her teeth clenched firmly.

‘Take a deep breath and push hard’, Dr Tan said. Then, after a few moments: ‘It’s a boy!’ I turned to look. He held a baby in his hands. In the dim light I could see it was covered in what looked like slimy blood; then I noticed a cord hanging from between the woman’s legs and extending to the baby’s tummy. I’d heard of the umbilical cord so I thought this must be it. The doctor asked me to take a pair of scissors that was at the foot of the table and cut the cord about the length of my finger above the baby’s belly button, while he held him. I managed to control my shaking hands enough to cut it. Then I helped Dr Tan wipe the baby off with a warm cloth while the husband helped by cleaning up the woman. Dr Tan wrapped the baby in a cloth and handed him over to the father, then walked me back to my hut.

That was when I learned about childbirth. Sometimes when I remember that experience I wish I knew the name of the boy.

From the air Kuku looks like a tiny rock in the South China Sea. One of more than 17,000 Indonesian islands, it was probably known only to the few people who lived on other islands nearby. Then, beginning in May 1979, this beautiful half-moon-shaped beach would be inhabited by thousands of desperate boat people from another country thousands of kilometers away.

Regrettably, Kuku became the resting place of some two hundred people, most of whom died of disease, but it also welcomed new lives to the earth.

It was on this isolated island that, thirty years ago, I transformed from a teenager to an adult more or less overnight. My strength and my character grew as I learned to survive and protect my siblings under difficult circumstances. The experience taught me how to handle fear and pain, and how to love other human beings. 

Now that I am a mother, I fully understand how agonising it would have been for my mother then. Allowing her children go away on their own, knowing that they might face danger, that she might never see them again, took her more than just courage: it was her love for us that enabled her to let go.