One Family

Nurbahri, a trained midwife, and her husband Iwan run a midwife clinic in the Lamdingin neighborhood of Banda Aceh. Women used to come to their clinic to get contraception, seek help becoming pregnant, obtain prenatal care during pregnancy, and have their babies in private birthing rooms. The clinic was open 24 hours a day, and Nurbahri was known to make house calls occasionally as well. If complications arose during delivery, a specialist would be summoned or an ambulance would be called. Nurbahri and Iwan lived with two of their children on the second story of the clinic, while two of their other children studied medicine in Medan.

On the morning of December 26th, Nurbahri was in the middle of a delivery. The mother-to-be lay sweating on the table, with two assistant midwives attending. Suddenly they heard a boy running down the street yelling, “The water is coming!” Chaos ensued, and in the panic of people rushing through the neighborhood, Nurbahri lost sight of her husband. She and her patient ran out of the clinic away from the sea. Somehow she and the pregnant woman climbed onto the roof of a three-story house to wait. They watched in horror as the wave rushed inland, brown and fast-moving, littered with bits of broken furniture, shattered homes, shredded clothes, crushed cars, dismembered bodies. The water engulfed the first story of every home, and they sat on the roof for the next five hours witnessing their neighborhood disappear. The baby decided to wait, too.

When the waterlevel began to drop again, the survivors ventured down from their perches to find their loved ones and what was left of their homes. Nurbahri and Iwan tearfully reunited at the midwife clinic, which still stood. The interior was three-feet deep in mud, and all the equipment and drugs had been washed away. Several walls had been knocked down, and all the windows were smashed to bits. Corpses lay strewn in the yard and twisted in the garage. Amid this scene of destruction, they helped the woman finally give birth to her baby.

It took an agonizing day for Nurbahri and Iwan to find their own children – alive and safe, although shell-shocked and trembling. For the next few days, the reunited family dragged the mud and debris out of their home with their bare hands, with nothing to eat or drink and no shoes on their feet. Eventually they found buried in the mud several bottles of mineral water and packets of children’s biscuits, which sustained them for a few more days until relief arrived. People wandered around dazed and crying. Many of the homes surrounding the clinic were completely destroyed, and 47 people were killed on Nurbahri’s block alone.

Once the house became habitable again and the family began to try to live normally, the first thing they did was hang the shingle out in front of the clinic reading “MIDWIFE NURBAHRI”. Iwan and Nurbahri dream of restoring the clinic to its former state so that they can help the women of Banda Aceh for many years in the future.

Today Northwest Medical Teams signed a deal with the clinic to provide them with equipment and support for their newly reopened clinic.

I asked Nurbahri: After seeing her neighbors’ houses destroyed and families torn apart, did she think herself lucky to have her family and her house intact? She said yes. I asked her if she had ever asked herself why Allah had given her such luck, and she said she was sure He wanted her to deliver many more babies.