SPRAY PAINTED ABOVE THE WINDOW on a dusty piece of warped scrap metal are the house’s dimensions: 3.2 x 3.7. On each side, old addresses from previous government administrations have been marked and forgotten by the Department of Human Settlement. The current address, RVO 337, is hardly distinguishable from multiple previous endeavors. This is a classic “shack”: metal walls and roof rusting at each edge. A single, wooden door to the right of the windows allows a manageable space for entry before wedging stuck between the laminate floor and plywood ceiling.

The home displays a degree of “shack chic,” the je ne sais quoi that transforms a hulk of metal and wood into a livable space. A full-size bed, complete with decorative duvet and pillow covers, dominates the single room. The wallpaper features newspaper from 2008, horizontally plastered for ease of reading. I recently christened the crossword puzzle by the bed. I’m still contemplating a thirteen-letter word for “reconciliation.” The only additional adornments are three framed photos of 50 Cent.

Underneath one, and on a worn but still very comfortable sofa sits Themba. With his shy but goofy smile, the only obvious resemblance he has to his hero is a gold tooth, and a stab wound over his eye from a fight over a girl. My new roommate gazes at me through a vortex of flies at the center of the room, displaying a missing front right tooth. A tattoo reading “Eminem” adorns his left bicep. There is an artificial diamond earring in each ear. I soon discover that along with American rap music, he loves WWE “Raw” and the soap opera, “Generations,” which has hooked me, as well. A paraffin lamp sits on the bedside table next to a small, battery-powered radio that plays around the clock, even when he’s not there. He believes that it gives him good dreams.

As there is very little furniture in the shack, and no dresser or drawers of any kind, Themba hammered a few nails into the wall for me to hang my belongings. Two pieces of my luggage hang at the end of the bed next to my jacket. Every so often, I return home to find more objects suspended carefully from nails at various spots around the interior. He recently hung his tools—a crowbar, measuring tape, and handsaw—in the corner at the end of the couch, just over the area where we take turns sleeping.

The couch serves multiple purposes, one as Themba’s filing cabinet. Lifting a cushion is like opening a drawer on a piece of his life. Under one is information he picked up from a job fair. Under another is clothing from a recent female visitor.

Themba is meticulous about making the bed in the morning. Stripping the bedding from the couch, rolling up blankets, and placing throw pillows, he takes great pride in the appearance of his home. He manages a much more polished appearance than I can muster in the conditions.

RVO 337 is not your average bachelor pad, being largely a place of transience. Themba has been “commuting” for two years from this shack in Riemvasmaak to his parent’s house in neighboring Izinyoka for food, clothing, and bathing. Amenities are limited to a basin inside for bathing, and a recently acquired “primer” stove, with which I’ve nearly set the house on fire each morning. The toilet, which is outside in the dirt yard, consists of three walls and a shelf above a bucket. There is no roof, which makes it ideal for stargazing, but an unpopular spot during storms. I consistently bash my forehead against the two-by-four bracing the door.

When he speaks, Themba considers each sentence and repeats his phrases slowly. “You are welcome here. (Pause). You are welcome.” He honored me by bestowing upon me a Xhosa name, Elethu. He explained that it forms a piece of his full name, Thembalethu, symbolizing that we were brothers. The literal meaning is “our hope.”

Riemvasmaak

I moved to the township after becoming frustrated with the lack of accessibility to different cultures and contexts in Cape Town. I felt unfulfilled and unchallenged. After almost a year in South Africa, I had a nagging feeling that I had missed something intrinsically important. I felt like an athlete who trains for the big match and shows up at the stadium to find he must sit the bench. I wanted to experience more of South Africa, in a deeper, more meaningful way.

Thus, I left the stunning landscapes of the city of the two oceans for the shacklands of the Eastern Cape. My new home is in a small township on the outskirts of Port Elizabeth. I enter Riemvasmaak with a sense of anticipation, apprehension, and satisfaction.

Riemvasmaak is a four-year-old informal settlement technically known as Extension 29. The name means “to tighten your belt,” signifying a knack for survival that becomes evident in a brief survey of the surroundings. It is affectionately known to residents as “Riempi.”

Dusty, rocky paths are the salient feature of Riemvasmaak. The rocks present formidable obstacles to walking around at night, yet are convenient ammunition against the mangy, malnourished dogs that tend to block passage. During particularly strong rains, the paths turn to whitewater. Metal wires are strewn about at every conceivable location and angle to dry laundry and to provide protection against intruders who likely wouldn’t expect a wire at neck level as they’re running from the house. Visibility at night is limited to the full moon and the glow from steep floodlights up the hill in neighboring “formal” townships.

The legacy of apartheid is still alive in the spatial dynamics of urban and exurban residential areas, which functionally means that Xhosa live in black townships, Coloured live in coloured townships, and whites live somewhere completely different. A “mixed” township, Riempi prides itself on breaking those barriers. Before a recent protest march, the community chairman noticed that all the signs had been written in English or Afrikaans. He instructed Themba to make a few signs in Xhosa to accurately represent the people.

Often, I find it challenging to distinguish Xhosa from Coloured, and thus I struggle to know which language to use for greeting. I tried to explain this to Themba. In what has become a ritual in my debriefing, he shakes his head as if I had told him I had trouble figuring out where to put the hot tub in our shack.

“No, man,” he chuckles. “Here in the Eastern Cape, the Xhosa guys and the Coloured guys are mixing their vocabulary.”

Maria

Two laughing children do back flips on an old set of mattress springs as I hike up to Maria’s house where I often find myself for dinner.

Maria’s house is the one with the wheelbarrow on top. For weeks, it was the only way I could find it. I borrowed it a few weeks ago to start a garden, heaving her eight year old son onto the roof to shove it down. When I was ready to return it, I couldn’t find my way back to the house.

Maria lives at the end of a row that includes two of her three sisters. Between the three of them, they have seven children ranging from 4 months to 9 years. It’s a veritable crèche. The adults drag the kids from one house to the next, while the children drag little plastic baggies of chips and toy chain saws. Describing her approach to parenting, Maria says, “Bend a tree while it’s young.”

When her mother died, Maria’s father kicked her and her sisters out of the house.

“We decided to move to an informal settlement so that we’d appreciate a brick house when we got one. When I look at that house, I’ll say, ‘that’s my house’—and I’ll appreciate it.” I ask her why she thinks people move to informal settlements. “Because they don’t have any other choice,” she states rather obviously.

Though in outward appearances, Maria’s shack is of the same mold as Themba’s, inside it is an altogether different manifestation. Thin patches of carpeting are covered by a roomful of furniture, which is needed to accommodate her many and frequent guests. There is a small couch that can fit up to three people, a cushioned chair for a couple more, and two beds, one larger for mother and father, plus a small one for the two kids that during the day is pressed into service as another sitting area. The cardboard and plywood walls house two windows with ornate dressing, and can scarcely be recognized behind a houseful of appliances. They have most things a “wealthy” family would desire—stove, oven, refrigerator, washing machine, even an old PC which her husband uses to play fighting games when he returns from work.

To run the various appliances, Maria contacted a woman up the hill in a “formal” settlement and offered her R80 per week to connect to her electrical supply. This symbiotic relationship provides the unemployed woman with an income and Maria’s family with electricity. Electric wiring runs up and over three rows of shacks, a tarred road, and down again to link into the electricity of a brick house in the nearby township of Kleinskool. On any given road, you are likely to see tangles of wiring at your feet crossing intersections, connecting homes and collecting dust.

There is no running water. Riemvasmaak has seven outdoor taps scattered through the community and available to everyone. The water is clean and potable. For a family of four (and all of her guests), Maria makes an errand for water about every other day. She fills six ten-liter jugs of water that the family uses for cooking, bathing, washing up, and any other imaginable need. Two of the jugs are stored on the counter next to a plastic basin. Except for the initial effort of retrieving water and the end result of dumping the water outside, this functions very nearly like a sink in Glendale, Illinois. The washing machine is filled and emptied manually.

Whereas Themba’s toilet facilities lack a door, Maria’s toilet, perched between her house and her sister’s, has a proper address. Two brass numerals left over from a previous life announce that this is #33. I ask her if I can have my mail sent here.

Themba

Back in the house, Themba sits underneath a headline that reads, The World’s Most Famous Escape Artist and tells me about his plans for a family. His “future wife,” Disa, has given him a 10-month-old daughter named Liefie. He refers to Disa as “Future” to distinguish from “Beyoncé,” “Gorgeous,” and his many other girlfriends. Asked about this paradox, he grins mischievously and explains “it’s just how we do things.” Later, he tells me the story of one of his friends who “doesn’t like girls.” I was eager to hear about his peer group’s acceptance of this individual and the level of community tolerance, but before I could ask any questions, Themba elaborated. “He stays with the same girl all the time.”

Nevertheless, he confides to me, “The most important thing for me is to be able to take care of my family. It hurts me that I can’t take care of them.”

There is a photo of his daughter on his cell phone, which features the ring tone “I wanna’ be a billionaire, so frikkin’ bad.” Most people in Riempi can’t afford airtime, but everyone has a cell phone, anyway. The phone companies allow free text messages that read, “Please Call Me.” To send it, you simply enter a short code before the appropriate phone number. If you’re cagey, there is room for a message of 10 characters alongside the “Please Call Me.”

My friend, Andre, has saved every number he has in his phonebook with the code in front, meaning this is the sole function for which he uses the phone. Themba and his girlfriend have a ritual communication each day before she goes to work. She sends a PCM with a message that reads: t.ilu.d. Decoded, it means, Themba, I love you, Disa. If he doesn’t respond (typically at about 4:30 in the morning), she interprets it as a lack of love.

He visits the girl’s mother a couple of days a week when she is not working, but cannot stay too long, otherwise he will incite her parent’s ire. When Liefie was born, Themba’s parents had to visit hers to pay a damage fee for the pregnancy. Now, he has to wait until he can earn enough money to present a “labola,” the traditional Xhosa dowry, in order to marry her.

Themba and I have initiated plans to expand the shack to make room for a spaza shop (the equivalent of a corner store). Buying paraffin and peanuts in bulk, one can sell for a modest profit. In a few years, he reasons, there may be enough for his labola.

The first step in any construction project in the townships, whether it is a playground or a garden, is to build a fence for security. “50 and Eminem are working together,” Themba exclaims with amusement and, I sense, a touch of pride, as we work on mending the fence around the house. We use “umka,” a local bush with thorns as long and thick as a pinky finger to protect the grapefruit sized stones around the bottom. The orange plastic construction fencing previously surrounded an exposed water pipe before Themba “borrowed” it for his house.

Hansie

Port Elizabeth is known as “The Windy City,” and perhaps nowhere is this felt more strongly than in the township. People strike peculiar figures walking at forty-five degree angles, clinging to fence posts to avoid being swept away by unnaturally strong gusts. Dogs curl into themselves for warmth, while diminutive sparrows stumble around looking drunk, struggling to make progress against the headwind. The wind pelts people with sand and grit, covering everyone with dust as they walk.

Plastic bags, candy wrappers, and children’s homework circle into the air in a funnel before being pinned and held against fences by the wind. Church yards are adorned like Christmas trees.

Hansie, the chairman of the community board, often visits when the weather is bad or when he is trying to avoid his wife. I’m not sure which brings him today, but I am always glad to see him. He is a brilliant storyteller, naturally charismatic and animated. His sense of humor buoys and accentuates every story, while his voice runs the entire scale of inflection, often accompanied by outrageous sound effects. He looks in his mid-forties, which would place him squarely in the middle of the freedom struggle. Though he prefers ghost stories, he will pontificate on anything. Today, the topic is reconciliation.

“You don’t know how hard it is for me to talk to a white person,” he begins. “You can never erase that memory.” Fifty percent of South Africans never socialize with someone of another race. Twenty-five percent don’t even see anyone of a different race.

He studies me from under a headline on our newspapered wall that announces, It’s a New Ballgame. “You are the first white man I’ve ever met that says, ‘Yes, I will live in an informal settlement with you people.” I enjoy his monologues and urge him on by asking obvious questions. His story weaves through his childhood in the Great Karoo Desert (“I once had a baboon as a pet. He bit me and I killed him,” he brags) to his time in prison before he concludes, “There are so many things we’re missing by not living together.”

It is a calm night as Hansie heads toward home, and I hear a commotion three shacks down from ours that I first took to be a violent scuffle. After some time, I feared it had gotten out of hand so I ventured out of my shack to investigate. When I got right up next to the shack, my cheek resting on the cold metal, I realized that I was listening to the ecstatic, fervent prayer of a charismatic house church. There were multiple parties with multiple voice ranges, alto followed soprano that followed baritone; there were crescendos of moaning and shouting. It sounds like gamblers watching the stretch run of a close horse race in waves of horror and delight.

Zola

Mornings are filled with the sound of voices calling to one another between shacks. It is a sing-song back and forth, some voices near and amplified, others further afield and muted. Themba’s is a deep baritone, dominant among the others. They are like birds singing, communicating between the trees. Shacks are built so close and life uncertain; it is a natural beginning to each day.

I like to sit outside in the mornings to sip my coffee out of the reach of Themba’s radio. This morning, I face the sun while my neighbor croons over her washing. It is the old standard, “Count your many blessings, see what God has done…” Her voice hangs crisply in the calm morning air. It drifts up and up, above the orange construction fencing, over my house, and eventually, into the “bush” behind, filled with plastic bags, soggy pairs of tennis shoes and an armory of old tires well-situated for the next riot. Fifty meters on is Arcadia North, in line to be the next informal settlement to receive brick homes from the government. “Blessings” fades out as Themba opens the door onto the yard and Tupac’s “Until the End of Time” fades in from the ever present radio.

To his right, the spaza shop remains half-built, a wooden frame erected to the right side of our door and held together by pebbles and mud.

The scorching sun hinders movement while the smell of dagga (marijuana) wafts through the air. My neighbor, Zola stops by to rest, drawn to the last remaining shadow in a steadily decreasing area close to the shack. Behind him, a young boy, shirtless in the sun, pushes around an old tire with two short planks of wood pushed into the hollow core.

Zola wears a striped shirt, alternating stripes of dark and light red. The collar is turned up and it is ripped on one sleeve. He leans backward on the stump he uses for a chair, affecting a kind of self-cooling system by lifting his shirt and holding it between his shoulder blades and the wall to reveal a thin, muscular back. Light blue jeans taper off at incongruous black dress shoes, worse for wear and losing flakes of leather. The end of a “Black Label” lanyard hangs out of his back pocket. Dark eyes with yellowed whites rest on sunken cheeks above a scraggly goatee. A grey beanie with a single white stripe bunches up at the top of his head. I have never seen Zola without the beanie. During a blistering afternoon recently, he called to me from across the road, laughing, “Why is it so cold today?”

He worked as a fork lift operator for eight years before losing his job in 2008. He estimates the unemployment rate in Riempi at 70%, in line with most analysis of South African townships. Despite his long job search and struggles, today at least, he sounds determined and positive. “It is not only me suffering. I ate this morning. I should be grateful.”

Conversations in Riempi often veer into sermonettes. Zola is no different. He reveals a staunch faith that teeters between fatalistic and realistic, punctuating statements with “If I’m not supposed to die today…” and “It is God that gives you life.”

Just over Zola’s beanie, Arcadia North looks stunning, reflecting and deflecting the sun’s scorching rays like a prize fighter parrying blows. From this vantage point, it is a beautiful quilt work of color and light.

Phillip

Gaba’s Spaza Shop is one of the few places of commercial activity in Riempi. The energy is a welcome distraction and I enjoy visiting Phillip, the elder statesman of the family. Philip is a former Golden Boot rugby star, a devout Baptist, and has an infectious and ubiquitous laugh reminiscent of Dr. Hibbert from The Simpsons.

As I exchange pleasantries with Philip, a young boy of about eight years old steps up onto a blue milk crate, dirt filling its crevices. “One Chicago please,” he says, the black sweater of his school uniform baking in the afternoon sun. Philip passes the discount cigarette through the burglar bars protecting the Spaza window, holding it between his thumb and forefinger until the child will answer his question, “How was school today?” “Fine,” he mumbles reluctantly, prompting Phillip to release the booty. The boy marches off, crunching pebbles beneath his dusty shoes.

I need airtime for my cell phone, which is a bit like putting together a puzzle. It comes in pre-packaged amounts, so it’s a quest to put together the right combination of cash denominations to get nearest to your sum without going over. It turns out that I am R4 short of the voucher I need. Phillip shocks me by telling me to take the voucher and he will cover the rest. Embarrassed at the prospect, I began to search my pockets earnestly for forgotten coins. When I happen upon a R5 coin, I hand it to Philip, visibly relieved. He replies, “You don’t want to be blessed this morning, hey?” followed by his unforgettable chortle.

I walk back home pondering the prospect, battling the wind while stepping over crushed bottles and soiled diapers. A fire has destroyed another shack—the second this week—leaving only a charred, black footprint in its place. Gaunt goats wander through yards in search of grass while ravenous dogs prowl for scraps. A tiny Xhosa girl blows kisses to me as I pass her house.

Photo: Kevin N. Murphy

THE TURTLE WAS CRYING.

On October 9, 2011, 6 years, 10 months, and 275 days after the tsunami, Rizaldi sat with me in a coffee shop in Banda Aceh, Indonesia. He drew from his backpack his dairy of the catastrophe.

The memories were recorded in a typical Indonesian school exercise book, decorated with cartoons and fluorescent colors. The manufacturer’s official title, “The Turtle,” was stamped on the cardboard cover, but long ago Rizaldi had inked an unofficial name below, in Bahasa Indonesian, with a blue ballpoint pen: “The Book of Tragedy, Earthquake and Tsunami, in Aceh and Northern Sumatra.” Beneath that, thick capital letters declared, “BY RIZALDI.”

A cartoon turtle dominated the neon pink cover of the diary. It wore a red, floppy sunhat with a chinstrap, and a goofy smile. It looked for all the world like an unstylish turtle tourist. Except for the fact that seven years ago, when Rizaldi had been thirteen, he had drawn tears spilling from the turtle’s eyes. The tears and the awkward smile were unnerving, dissonant.

Penned on the turtle’s shell were the words, “This turtle is crying… Aceh right now is crying,” followed by the plea, “Look again in thirty years. Look at the back of the book.”

“I want it to be like proof that the tsunami actually happened,” Rizaldi said, “that it existed, that [the outside world] came to help Aceh… Acehnese don’t talk about that time. Even you, you don’t know about that time of the tsunami. I want to share it to America, to Australia, to those and the world. It is important they know how we felt.”

The diary was decrepit. Two rusted staples clamped the cardboard covers together, but some of the pages had torn loose, fluttering to the floor as I opened the book. When I lifted the fallen paper, I found it soft with years, aged a nicotine yellow, the ink faded.

Seven years had nearly reduced the record to illegibility. Since the tsunami, Aceh’s villages and cities had largely been rebuilt. But as Rizaldi began his story in a quivering voice, his fingers drumming on the table, it was obvious he had not forgotten.

On the second page of the diary was an introduction.

“The terrifying occurrence of the tsunami,” it began in Bahasa Indonesian, “has left behind trauma and sadness. Everything I love and honor has been finished, swept away by the tsunami… Maybe this was all a warning, an answer to our actions, from Allah. Hopefully, the tsunami can make us understand the wisdom of Allah, so that we can improve the future.”

*

On 8 a.m. Sunday, Dec. 26th, 2004, the day after Christmas, the Indian Ocean was hit by a 9.0 magnitude earthquake, the third most powerful ever recorded on seismograph. The northern edge of the India Plate dove 15 meters beneath the Burma Plate. As the India Plate subsided, the Burma Plate shot upwards, displacing colossal volumes of water and unleashing the deadliest tsunami in world history. Geologists estimate that the energy released was about 550 million times more powerful than Hiroshima (equal to exploding 9,560 gigatons of TNT). Countries as far away as South Africa, 8,000 km. to the west, were struck, but the landmass closest to the epicenter was the northern tip of Sumatra Island—Aceh, Indonesia, Rizaldi’s home. The wave struck with such power that it literally obliterated barrier islands and swept over 5 km. inland. The wave was so strong it deposited a 2,600 ton ship 4 km. from shore.

Ultimately, the tsunami proved to be the deadliest in world history. Of the 225,000 victims, around 170,000 were Acehnese.

Before the wave struck Aceh, villagers living near the beach witnessed a miracle: the ocean retreated hundreds of feet from the shore, revealing swaths of glistening sand covered with stranded sea-life, from fishes to squid. Children, many of whom spend their Sundays playing on the beach, were the first to rush to gather the sudden bounty. Men and women from the villages soon followed. Minutes later, the wave blackened the horizon. It’s almost certain everyone saw the tsunami approaching—when it hit Aceh’s coastline it towered from 30 to 75 feet in height—but because it charged ahead at one hundred miles an hour, no one could flee.

Rizaldi’s village, Emperom, was 4 km. inland. Before reaching Emperom, the wave leveled Lamteh, a coastal fishing village. Photos of Lamteh after the event reveal the only things left standing: the concrete walls of the town’s mosque. The mosque’s decapitated dome was swept several hundred yards away to the middle of a rice paddy. Of Lamteh’s 9,000 inhabitants around 1,000 survived, most of whom were lucky enough to have been elsewhere that morning.

Abandoning the husk of Lamteh the wave trampled on, likely reaching Rizaldi’s home in less than a minute.

On Dec. 26th, 2004, Rizaldi’s father left the house at 6 a.m., just as dawn was turning the high cirrus clouds pink, to sell vegetables at the traditional market, Pasar Seutui.

When I first met Rizaldi he described himself as being from an “unpretentious background.” Before the tsunami, his father sold produce at the traditional market, his mother tended house, and his brother was studying at a technical high school to become a motorbike mechanic. They lived a simple life, but Rizaldi had great respect for his parents, especially his mother, who taught him extra lessons after school and checked his homework every night.

At the time of the tsunami, Rizaldi had already distinguished himself in his village’s middle school and been offered a scholarship to a prestigious private high school in Banda Aceh, the capital city 15 kilometers away. He had declined the award because his family couldn’t afford the daily bus fare. Still, his parents had decided to enroll him in an academic high school, rather than a technical school like his brother, ambitious that he could win a university scholarship and provide for their old age.

Already, Rizaldi was unsatisfied with anything but perfect marks in every school subject. He understood it was his responsibility to improve his parents’ lives.

At 7:15 a.m., Rizaldi asked permission from his mother to read the Koran at the balai ngaji. (A balai ngaji is a small informal mosque built in villages lacking a large enough population to afford a full sized house of worship.) She wrapped a lunch of rice and salted fish in banana leaves for him. He kissed her hand and scampered outside leaving her, his brother, and his five year old sister behind.

When the first earthquake struck the loudspeakers bolted into the corners of the balai ngaji fell, shattering on the tiles, and the stacks of Korans next to the pulpit collapsed, spilling onto Rizaldi. The floor shook so violently that Rizaldi and the rest of the worshipers were forced to lie down to stop from sliding around. As the wooden building shuddered and groaned above them, they prayed out-loud, their words overlapping to form a single greater appeal.

After the tremor finally subsided, the worshipers stumbled outside to discover palm trees uprooted, the town’s wooden houses collapsed or precariously askew, herds of disoriented goats and cows stampeding in circles, and the streets filling with other villagers bemoaning the devastation.

Less than two minutes after the first upheaval ended, the second began. As the earth rattled, someone started to sing the azan, the Islamic call to prayer.

Unlike the mutter of a Latin mass or the atonal chant of Buddhist monks, the azan is operatic and impressionistic, existing somewhere between prayer and keening song. Though the azan always employs the same words, each muezzin sings them differently, elongating favorite vowels, pitching different words to various keys, enlivening the familiar prayer like jazz musicians tweaking standards. Lā ilāha illallāh—a river of assonance and consonance too beautiful not to sing—ends the azan. Its meaning: there is no God, but God.

Rizaldi concentrated on the azan. The more he focused on the prayer and on Allah, the weaker the quake seemed. Soon the earth stilled. But the azan continued echoing over the wreckage. The villagers instinctively obeyed the call, picking their way toward the balai which stood tall amid the destruction. Rizaldi saw his family staggering towards him. His brother limped, blood smearing his leg, and his mother carried his little sister, who was weeping on her shoulder.

The third earthquake was the strongest, hurling everyone to the ground. Babies howled, children screamed, and the grownups restarted praying as the world trembled. The azan wailed on mournfully. But mixed in with the azan was a new low rumble, like the earth was growling, “or the sound of an airplane engine.” The roar intensified and transformed into an enraged shriek. That was when they first saw the tsunami.

The wave reared higher than the palm trees and was so thick with mud and silt it was black. Fragments of everything it had already consumed—houses, trees, cars, humans—swirled in its froth.

“When I saw the water, I thought I must run. But not even a motorcycle could escape it.” The crowd tried to flee. In the stampede, Rizaldi fought to stay close to his family. His brother disappeared in the mob. He lurched after his mother and sister into a garden of banana trees. They were holding hands, their knuckles white with terror. He wanted to link his fingers with theirs, but stumbled.

“When the wave hit me—I fell unconscious. I woke up at the surface. I thought, I must save myself. Then I thought: Where are my mother, my sister? The water was so high my feet could not reach the ground. I grabbed onto a floating board. I cannot swim so I was very afraid of losing the board. I believe an angel saved me.”

Rizaldi floated above the ruins of his town, scrutinizing the debris—uprooted trees, a dead cow, the wavy aluminum roofing of a house. The water was so thick with churned mud that he could not see his own chest. Flecks of mica and other minerals hung in the silt, winking in the sunlight.

He probed with his toe, but could not feel anything. His mother and sister had been right beside him. His mother had been holding his sister’s hand. For all that he could see he was the only survivor in a drowned world.

He did not see many corpses immediately. Bodies usually do not surface until several days after drowning, if at all, when the bacteria consuming the innards of the corpse have released enough oxygen to bloat the flesh.

Little by little, over the course of an hour, the water receded. Rizaldi was surprised to dangle off his board and be able to toe the muddy ground. When the water only sloshed around his waist he let go. Further out the ocean was calm, unimaginably flat and innocent, with only the faintest wind-swell. Wisps of cirrus cloud—favorites of Indonesian fishermen because they promise long spells of good weather—dabbed the sky.

Exhausted, he sat on the trunk of a collapsed mango tree which poked above the flood. For an hour he watched the water flow back towards the ocean. When it was gone he stared at the mud. Everything was covered in sludge, inches thick: silt dragged off the sea bottom by the wave. He didn’t see anyone else. “I was thinking, but not thinking, at that time.”

Around ten o’clock he noticed movement. He didn’t recognize the survivors gathering at the top of a nearby hill. It was almost difficult to tell they were human they were so crusted with muck. Only when he approached did he see they were his neighbors. “Have you seen my mother or my sister?” he kept asking. Everyone repeated a variation of that question. Many people were mumbling prayers.

The group walked towards the main road. The landscape had been scalped featureless by the wave, no trees or houses had endured, but as they stumbled inland they came across buildings which remained standing.
The edge of Emperom farthest from the ocean had been flooded, but not leveled, by the tsunami. It was there, in the shade of a corner store where he had often bought penny candy, he found his brother. Both were too shocked to do anything besides nod in acknowledgement and begin walking side by side.

The exodus continued, swelling as more survivors joined. The tsunami had left the road covered in debris—wooden beams, piles of shattered brick, overturned cars and motorbikes—so progress was slow. Water remained in standing pools, thin enough that the bodies were visible in them. “While we were walking, I came across many corpses: some men, although women, the elderly, and the very young outnumbered them.” Often Rizaldi recognized their faces: they were his neighbors.

One of the most unforgettable things about photographs of the tsunami’s aftermath is the positions of the corpses: tangled in the branches of a tree, their limbs dangling, or wedged under an overturned car in a slot too thin for a person to enter even if they wanted to. Neither the strong, nor the swift, nor the wise escaped: only the lucky.

Filling the headers of each page of the diary were illustrations and prayers. One drawing, titled “The Citizens Walking on the Main Road,” showed two groups of figures approaching each other, everyone throwing up their arms—it was hard to tell if they were excited at the meeting or exclaiming over the corpses on the roadside. The prayers decorating the headers of the next two pages displayed Latinate Indonesian script above twirls of Arabic: “We must happily give thanks to God!” and “Warnings from God on Earth are better than warnings from God at the final judgment.”

The brothers followed the crowd to Ajun Mosque, which had been converted into an improvised disaster relief center, in the neighboring town of West Lamteumen. They asked if anyone had seen their mother or younger sister. No one had.

On the steps of the mosque they sat and watched the wounded carried in, some on tarps and bamboo stretchers, others hobbling with an arm over a helper’s shoulder, and shivered at the wails of the bereaved as survivors began to arrange corpses in neat rows across the courtyard. “We’ve got to leave,” Rizaldi’s brother said.

The brothers began to walk south on the main road toward their grandmother’s house in East Lamteumen Village, reasoning that it was too far from shore to have been struck by the tsunami. “We felt exhausted, thirsty, shocked, and sad, all of these mixed into one emotion.” People crowded the street, fleeing inland or searching for family.

As the brothers picked their way through jagged broken boards, fallen lamp posts, and a herd of drowned cows, they learned that the tsunami had also inundated East Lamteumen. They stopped and squatted in the shade of an overturned car.

“Where should we go?” they asked each other, but quickly fell silent. There was nowhere left. For all they knew, they were the last members of their family alive.

Already, dogs were sniffing the dead bodies in the streets, chickens pecking at the inert flesh. For months afterwards, inhabitants of Banda Aceh refused to eat chicken and duck.

Then the brothers heard their names being called. Later, listing the moments during the tsunami for which he was thankful, Rizaldi rated his uncle’s miraculous arrival as high as the board he clung to while the tsunami swirled below him. He had hardly believed anyone in his family was still alive, let alone that they had rescued him.

The uncle took his nephews under his arms and steered them south towards his village, Ateuk. Just before the village they crossed a line: the farthest extent the tsunami had reached, marked by a layer of mud and debris. Within an inch, the grass went from silted, rumpled, to green and healthy. Ateuk had escaped the tsunami.

By 11 a.m. the brothers had arrived at their uncle’s house. Rizaldi’s aunt and cousins buried him in a hug. He clung to his aunt, even when she tried to gently disengage. He glanced over her shoulder, half expecting to see his father, his mother, or his little sister. But no one else ran towards him from the house.

The flashback was so strong that Rizaldi’s family members thought it was the beginning of an epileptic seizure and crowded around him, grabbing hold of his limbs. Rizaldi remembered the leaves of the banana trees waving in the wind before the tsunami, his mother’s and sister’s heads swiveling to look at the water.

As Rizaldi came to, he realized that if his aunt and cousins were alive, if he was alive, his parents and sister might have survived too. They could be picking through the ruins of Emperom right now, looking for him. They might be lying wounded under the rubble, calling for help.

Rizaldi wanted to start searching immediately, but his aunt and uncle sat him down and brought him food and water. He gulped down three glasses of water and cleaned a plate of rice. Then his aunt and uncle asked to hear what had happened to him.

“After telling our stories to my uncle and his family, I felt more natural. Until that time we had only been answered with sadness and horror. But there was my family! They ordered us to bathe with clean water, because our clothes, even our faces, were filthy with mud from the tsunami, and my body was still red, sore, and swollen from being hit by the tsunami.”

Naked, free of the ruined clothes, the mud washed away, Rizaldi still felt soiled.

Rizaldi’s uncle, cousins, and older brother returned to Emperom to search for his missing parents. Rizaldi had intended to join, but had been paralyzed by an agonizing migraine. So he and his aunt were alone when the aftershocks struck. He grabbed a box of instant noodles for provisions and rushed outside with his aunt.

A yell echoed over the crowd: “The water’s rising!”

“Excuse me,” he said, as someone shoved him. Then everyone around him was screaming, throwing elbows, clawing at each other, desperate in their struggle to reach the road leading away from the sea. In the crush Rizaldi slipped. Shoes pounded him. His aunt’s hand appeared and dragged him upright. They fled with the crowd. Soon, Rizaldi and his aunt were out of breath, far behind everyone else, but no tsunami arose.

Rizaldi and his aunt followed the crowd to the next village, Lambaro, before they had to sit from exhaustion. There was no food and water; “Above all, the rays of the sun stabbed us.” A rumor circulated through the refugees that someone had yelled the warning as a joke; “Surely that person was very cruel to say such a thing.”

All the corpses were being brought to Lambaro. The emergency authorities, afraid of contagion, were paying 100,000 rp. or about $10, a princely sum, for each body brought to Lambaro’s mass grave. “There were thousands of corpses all swelling and puffing up.” The deceased were laid out in neat rows. The first few hundred were stuffed into body bags, but the bags had run out so workers had shrouded the corpses with blankets, then shirts, then ripped- down advertising banners, before they had given up and left the dead staring at the sky. The uncovered corpses looked especially terrible because the mud and silt colored their skin an ashy gray. Rizaldi and his aunt sat beneath a tree, watching people bring stacks of bodies in pickup trucks or slung over the backs of water buffalos or horses.

Eventually, their cousin Imam found them and brought them to his house. When Rizaldi walked through the door he almost collapsed: his father, his brother, six cousins, his uncle, and more relatives were gathered there. In the lineup of ecstatic faces he immediately noticed two gaping absences.

*

My first sight of Rizaldi was of him pulling into the parking lot of the restaurant where we had agreed to meet. He was skeletally skinny, with a poof of fluffy dry hair, and a smile that showed off crooked incisors. He had heard I was a writer interested in the tsunami and invited himself to lunch.

When he introduced himself his movements were jerky, his handshake limp. He rushed through his sentences, words almost rear-ending each other. There was a strange intensity to his speech, as if he was imparting a secret, yet his tone was without affect, neither rising nor falling.

Rizaldi ordered an extra-large portion of fried rice then ate almost nothing. He ended most sentences with a shrill laugh and or an exclamation like, “Oh, I shouldn’t have said that,” or, “I know I should do better.” Out of the blue he declared, “I’m such a bad person, such a bad person.”

He fidgeted constantly, his fingers drumming the table top, foot tapping the legs. He admitted that he didn’t like the other university students: he thought they sneered behind at him behind his back for being poor and awkward. He avoided my gaze, but during our conversation watched what seemed to be an invisible fly circling over my shoulders. “My problem,” he told me, “is that I can’t control my emotions.”

When an organization like the Red Cross, OxFam, or Save the Children responds to a catastrophe time is pressing and information scarce. Thus, NGOs employ checklists to organize their response and make sure the essential needs of survivors are met. These lists usually start with basics like food and water, and continue to things like emergency shelters and prophylactics, such as pamphlets describing correct hygiene, to prevent disease outbreaks in refugee camps.

If mental health is even on the list, it is very near the bottom.

In many ways, this prioritizing makes sense. Food, water, and shelter are immediate needs. For donors and NGO workers those items are tangible, quantifiable help.

After the tsunami, the international community reacted to Aceh’s disaster in unprecedented ways. Help came not just in immediate emergency relief—food, medicine, and the construction of refugee camps—but extended over a six year program orchestrated by the United Nations Development Program (UNDP). Over 14 billion USA dollars were donated; the UK public alone gave over $600,000,000, around $10 for every citizen.

Whole villages were rebuilt by donor countries; Banda Aceh’s “Turk Town” and “China Town” are named after the countries who built them, not the inhabitants. In total, more than 1,000 miles of road and 100,000 houses were constructed.

But little attention was paid to mental health care.

The tsunami killed over 60,000 individuals in Banda Aceh, or about a fourth of the population. Many other towns along Aceh’s west coast were struck even harder—up to 95% of the residents of some villages died. Everyone lost a loved one—usually many loved ones. Most people saw friends or family swept away by the tsunami and heard their screams. Nearly everyone saw some of the 120,000 corpses while they lay in the streets or were collected, sometimes with bare hands, sometimes by pushing them into piles with bulldozers.

Four of the primary triggers of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) are: 1) being involved in a catastrophic event, 2) watching family or friends be seriously hurt or perish, 3) abruptly losing loved ones (especially many at once), and 4) prolonged exposure to the corpses of people an individual cared about.

Almost everyone in Banda Aceh experienced these triggers. Further exacerbating the risk for mental illness were the impoverished, uncertain, and dislocated lives tsunami victims led afterwards in refugee camps.

PTSD is a serious psychological disorder that can last for decades or even a lifetime. It affects an individual’s ability to control his or her feelings, sometimes leading to mood-swings and fits of violence, and often causes emotional numbing, from sobering cases of the blues to suicidal despair.

After the tsunami several NGOs provided short term PTSD counseling. Two, Save the Children and Northwest Medical Teams, offered art therapy for children. Others tried to get children to talk about their experiences using hand puppets. But all except the Norwegian Red Cross had packed up their operations within a year.

Kaz de Jong, head of mental health services for Medicins Sans Frontieres (MSF, also known as Doctors Without Borders), acknowledged, “In areas like mental health care, which is not a high priority for development agencies, that third stage of somehow passing it along to someone else is seldom really done.”

Local facilities were similarly unprepared to handle any trauma lingering in the population. At the time of the tsunami, there was only one mental health facility in all of Aceh province, located in Banda Aceh. It had four full-time psychiatrists serving the province’s four million residents. The tsunami flooded the Aceh Psychiatric Hospital and many of its approximately 300 patents vanished in the ensuing chaos. The hospital did not return to full operation until three years later with the help of the Norwegian Red Cross. Though many Indonesian medical workers, including counselors, volunteered in Aceh immediately after the tsunami, most had returned home within a few months.

Today, it’s almost impossible to tell that Banda Aceh was devastated seven years ago. Ironically, the most salient evidence is that the capital looks fresher than most Indonesian cities, with (nearly) pothole-less roads, swooping modern bridges that contrast with the rest of Banda Aceh’s drab Soviet-like architecture, and rows of donated houses built to the exact same floor plan.

In 2010, the UNDP declared, “Aceh has been rebuilt, and in some ways rebuilt better.” Only the observant will notice a Brazilian Flag painted on a gifted university lecture hall, or the European Union’s halo of stars emblazoned on a city garbage truck, or a white and blue UN pickup truck honking a herd of cows out of its way. Even fewer will note the mass graveyards and the plaques memorializing the tsunami in every town, now largely overgrown, hidden under sprouting brush.

*

For three days after the tsunami, Rizaldi woke before dawn and spent the day searching the surrounding villages for his mother and sister. But he did not even meet anyone who claimed to have seen them alive.

On the fourth day Rizaldi refused to leave his uncle’s house. He remained indoors, sitting on the floor with his back against the wall. When family members tried to speak to him, he stared blankly into space.

At 3 p.m. his uncle ran in, exclaiming that his mother had been found: she was in Rizaldi grandmother’s room in Ketapang.

“My father and I went immediately to Ketapang. The instant we were there, I sprinted inside and I saw my mother, lying on a cot, sick. The three of us [Refanja, his father, and mother], were very joyful.”

Rizaldi only released his mother to look for his sister, excited to hoist her into the air and twirl her around. My sister must be in the bathroom, he thought, because my mother was holding her hand when the tsunami hit them and my mother would never have let go. But his sister’s absence grew longer and longer. Then he saw his mother weeping in his father’s arms and knew he could never mention his sister in his mother’s presence again.

Rizaldi barely left his mother’s side for the rest of the day. She seemed so fragile. He wanted to care for her. He slept that night on the floor beside her bed.

The next day, the family brought Rizaldi’s mother to the hospital. Because other victims filled all the beds, nurses provided them with a lounger. The doctors examined her, but could not discover the cause of the pain in her head, which spilled into her spine, or her exhaustion. They were worried enough to ask that she stay the night for monitoring.

Despite Rizaldi’s protests, “I wasn’t given permission to stay there with her because they were afraid I would catch a sickness,” from the other patients in the hospital.

Rizaldi’s mother did not improve. The mysterious pain squirmed from her spine into her heart and thundered in her head. They moved her to a bed where she barely sat up, even to eat. Mostly she cried.

Paralyzing guilt is often a symptom of PTSD as victims wonder if they somehow deserved the catastrophe.

Kaz de Jong, MSF’s director of mental health services, described the situation shortly after the tsunami as follows:

“Everybody is reacting differently. Some people are doing pretty well, for others it will take longer… Some people say they do not want to live anymore and they panic that it [the tsunami] is coming back and that when they wake up they get flashbacks… Some people can’t sleep, or can’t stop crying and there are people with problems of guilt. They say: ‘I could keep hold of two of my children, but I had to let the other one go, why did I chose the one I did?’

“I find it difficult when I talk with people who feel guilty about what has happened, like a 15-year-old-girl who couldn’t hold on to her mother in the force of the waves because her mother was bigger than her, or mothers that have had babies torn out of their arms by the water… But again, the feeling of guilt is a normal reaction and we do our best to show that they did all that they were humanly able to do.”

After the tsunami, the idea that natural disaster was punishment for Aceh’s misdeeds took hold of the whole province. Many Acehnese religious leaders preached it from the pulpit. Even today, if you ask people about the wave they will often begin by saying, “The tsunami was sent as retribution for our sins…”

One risk factor for adolescents with PTSD is having parents who suffer from the same illness. Some studies show that recovery rates for adolescents suffering from PTSD are halved if their caretakers are afflicted as well.

Rizaldi’s mother eventually left the hospital. The pain in her spine and chest never completely faded, though doctors were unable to explain its source. She still was occasionally leveled by bouts of exhaustion. She never talked about her lost daughter again.

After the tsunami, Rizaldi’s father was too “traumatized to continue selling vegetables in [the traditional market] Pasar Seutui, because when the tsunami happened, he was there.” Even when he could not find another job for two years, he still refused to return. The family could not afford their own house after the refugee camps closed, so they had to move in with cousins. Eventually, Rizaldi’s father found work as a janitor at Banda Aceh’s hospital, but he detested it, often spending the evenings complaining about the trash he picked up. Before the tsunami he had been a plump laughing man, but afterwards he smoked three packs of Indonesian clove cigarettes a day and dwindled to a skeleton, so thin Refanja could count the knobs of his spine in the back of his neck.

While Rizaldi was attending his mother at the hospital, he met many foreign volunteers, including his mother’s doctors.

“The people who investigated my mother were Australian and New Zealanders. Although I couldn’t speak much English, I tried to practice speaking with them.” The names of the foreigners were listed in the diary, all in capitals, “WADE, JAMES, DOOLAN, MCDONALD, MURRAY, MICHAEL, CAMPNY, ROBERTSON, BROWN. I studied a lot of English with them and I taught them Acehnese and Indonesian. Really, it’s an experience I can never forget.”

The last sentence was heavily underlined. He even remembered the day the volunteers left, the 13th of January, 2005.

One of Rizaldi’s last comments in the diary was a discussion of the eight things he was thankful for during the time of the tsunami. It started with, “Allah’s mercy given to us when facing the disaster of the earthquake and tsunami…,” continued to items like the wooden board which prevented him from drowning and the free medical treatment his mother received “because otherwise the expenses would have been out of reach,” and ended with, “I was able to speak directly with foreigners and learn about their cultures and their languages.”

Almost seven years later, when I met Rizaldi, he was an English student at the University Syiah Kuala, Banda Aceh. Only in his second year, he was already a standout, known for compulsively diligent study habits and his ruthlessness proctoring of freshmen students’ tests at the university’s language center.

The last thirty pages of the diary, after the narrative ended, were covered with attempts to learn English, Arabic, and Korean. Pillar-like lists of vocabulary translated between all three languages and Bahasa Indonesia. One page displayed a family tree, the captions written in English, the fluid curves of Arabic, and the glyphic boxes of Korean. A few teenager-appropriate doodles were interspersed with the grammatical declensions—Dragon Ball Z cartoon characters and sketches of popular soccer players, a page full of attempts to refine his signature—but already his desire to gain the ability to communicate his story, to learn the words to tell it, was evident.

About a month after our first conversation, Rizaldi stopped returning my calls or answering my emails and text messages. I was afraid I’d offended him. But one day I mentioned him to a mutual friend and her mouth stretched into an “O” of shock, “You didn’t hear what happened to him?”

Over the course of the last year, she explained, Rizaldi had been acting increasingly erratic. His once sterling grades had slid, despite what she described as “obsessive” study habits. He’d feuded with co-workers at the university’s English Language Center, alienating the few friends he’d had. Recently, he’d flunked a pre-examination for a prestigious scholarship in America and had a fit in the testing room, bemoaning that he was failing his parents. “The last time anyone saw him was a few of the guys from the office. They said he was so far gone, he didn’t know who they were.”

A week or so before, Rizaldi’s parents had called the English Language Center, wondering which friend’s house he’d been sleeping at: he hadn’t been coming home at night. He hadn’t even been considerate enough to text his mother.

Acehnese culture expects individuals to process grief internally, silently. To share trauma is to appear weak, to lose face, especially if you are a man. Talking about mental illness is especially taboo. Acehnese society views mental sickness as Allah’s judgment on an individual and that person’s family. Unwed relations can have difficulty finding partners. Customers might avoid the family’s store or produce from the clan’s farm. Acehnese folk wisdom declares, “It is only a problem if you make the problem larger than yourself.”

Nowhere is this reticence more evident than in traditional Acehnese solutions for mental illness: herbal remedies, reciting the Koran, and, especially, the pasung. The pasung is a contraption similar to medieval stocks: wooden hand- or foot-cuffs. Normally, family members clamp a pasung around an ill victim’s feet and chain the boards to a wall in the family’s home. The device keeps the potentially unstable individual from causing problems in the village. Even more, once the pasung is locked and the door of the family’s house shut it’s almost as if the illness—and the individual—doesn’t exist anymore.

But attitudes towards mental health in Aceh are slowly changing. Recently, in 2010, pasungs were banned. Health officials began combing the population, unshackling victims and transporting them to the new mental health hospital in Banda Aceh. In an effort to make mental healthcare seem more appealing, the government demolished the hospital’s high walls, topped with barbed wire. New laws provide free healthcare to impoverished Acehnese.

When I visited the Banda Aceh Psychiatric Hospital, Dr. Sukma, a kindly, stout psychiatrist, wearing a headscarf decorated with sequins, showed me the facilities. The old hospital was abandoned but never torn down, so its ruins still lurked among the new buildings; the waterline of the tsunami was visible as a shadow, about the height of my neck, on the walls. Nurses in snowy uniforms and headscarves shepherded ragged men with shaved heads from room to room. As we approached the patients’ dormitories I winced at a sewage-like stink.

“I am a little embarrassed,” Dr. Sukma began, “to admit that we are overcrowded. We only have a limited number of beds, but we don’t turn anyone away, so many patients sleep on the floor. We have beds for maybe 250 patients, but over 700 in residence.”

We peered through observation windows, guarded by rusted iron bars, into a long institutional dormitory filled with metal beds naked of sheets or mattresses; nests of clothing lay on the floor between the cots, even under them, marking where most inmates slept. Graffiti had been carved onto the walls by scratching through the paint to the concrete below.

The patients crowded at the far end of the dorm, receiving plates of rice and bananas handed by orderlies through a slot in the barred door. A man, his lids open so wide his pupils seemed to float in them like out-of-orbit moons, turned and saw us.

“Mental health is a serious problem here,” Dr. Sukma continued, leading me further down the hall. “Aceh has a much higher incidence of mental health problems—especially PTSD and acute depression—than the rest of Indonesia. Indexes for anxiety and depression here are around 15% vs. 8.8% for the national average. For individuals affected with psychosis, we have almost four times the national average 2% vs. 0.45%.”

The wally-eyed man let out a hoot and began to shamble through the rows of beds, heading towards us. The other patients took notice and abandoned their lunches to follow him.

“In America, if people have depression, anxiety, or something else, they know to go to the mental hospital, but here people only think of health for physical things. People will usually go to the normal hospital with physical symptoms—they can’t sleep, they’re having headaches. In Aceh, people don’t even consider the idea that they can have trauma. Most people don’t even know what that is. They wouldn’t know what a psychologist is supposed to do. And if something is wrong they don’t want to talk about it. They just keep working on the farm until they break or they get better. That’s Acehnese—that’s Indonesian—culture.”

The wally-eyed man reached the window and gripped the bars. “Tell me why, dammit, tell me why,” he said distinctly, in Indonesian, his stunned expression never altering despite the rage in his voice, his pupils continuing their drift.

“Just ignore them,” Sukma said. “It’s going to be a huge problem for Aceh in the future. I was doing work at a coastal village that was hit by the tsunami and every boy in that school still had trauma from the event. Can you imagine what it’s going to be like when those boys grow up? Can you imagine what it’s already like in some of the villages where nearly everyone died and the few survivors saw their families swept away?”

As we walked down the hallway outside the dormitory, patients shoved their hands through the bars, clawing the air. “Cigarettes!” some shouted. “Money! A thousand ribu, only a thousand!” “White man!” A chorus somewhere in the back recited every dirty English word they knew, “Fuck! Shit! Whore!”, before they settled on “Fuck!” and kept screaming it like an 808 bass line.

“It’s like a ticking bomb that’s going to go off who knows when. It will be like a second tsunami,” Dr. Sukma said.

An enormously obese man shoved himself into the next window well and screamed, “I am not crazy! I am not crazy!” He raked his scab-covered face with one hand and counted prayer beads with the other. Rolls of his fat squished out between the bars. As I slowed to a stop, he began an Islamic prayer in screeching Arabic.

“Don’t look at them—don’t look at them in the eye,” Dr. Sukma ordered.

But I couldn’t stop scrutinizing their howling faces for a familiar puff of dry hair and an off-balance smile with crooked incisors.

*

In the diary, below “Tamat” (“the end” in Indonesian), was a carefully alphabetized list of Rizaldi’s family members who were killed, stretching eighteen names long and finishing with “Gustina Sari, my younger sister: lost.” Rizaldi was very careful to use “lost” for people whose corpses were never found, as opposed to “deceased” for bodies positively identified.

After Rizaldi disappeared, I visited the tsunami memorial and mass grave in Lohkgna, a town close to his former home in Emperom. Despite accurate directions from a villager, I drove past the memorial twice before discovering the gate, smothered in overgrowth. The earth beneath the entrance path had heaved up, scattering bricks. Inside the commemorative garden the trail shrunk, pinched so thin I had to turn sideways to squeeze through the immature forest—brush, ferns, grasses, sprouting trees—which stood high as my head. Insects raised a cacophonic racket and, above that, clear and sweet, I discerned three different types of bird song. I noted wild pig tracks at the edge of a muddy puddle.

As I batted aside branches, I wondered whether Rizaldi’s sister rested here. If her body wasn’t sucked into the ocean by the tsunami’s backwash it likely was mixed into the earth below.

And yet, Rizaldi very specifically wrote “lost” not “deceased.”

Even seven years later, people in Banda Aceh still whispered about miraculous homecomings, about individuals who were swept out to sea, ended up in Thailand, and had only recently found a way to return. I swatted aside the last of the brush and found myself staring over the beach, past the silvery foam of the receding tide dissolving on the sand, into the turquoise and glassy ocean beyond.

It had been nearly two months since Rizaldi was “lost.”

Rizaldi’s final word was the back cover. The back cardboard was the same neon-pink as the front and it too featured the turtle, though it had removed its floppy wide-brimmed hat with chin strap. The turtle gaped, perhaps in happy exclamation, a yelling laugh, but almost seven years ago Rizaldi had drawn rows of boxy teeth into its mouth, making the expression look vaguely like a grimace. Written across the turtle’s chest were the words: “Thirty years ago Aceh was crying, but now Aceh is laughing, cheerful, and advanced.”

THE BLACK HYUNDAI bounced along Highway 21 en route to the eastern Ukrainian mining city of Torez, each pothole tossing me from my seat. I peered from behind as Alex, a journalist and friend of mine, carefully navigated the car around dump trucks, gas trucks, and 18-wheelers. With just one lane in each direction and no shoulder, every passing maneuver seemed especially precarious.

Denis, another journalist, rode shotgun. Every once in a while he’d turn around to point out something in the distance.

This is a metal factory. That is the home of Rinat Akhmetov — Ukraine’s richest person. This was the childhood home of our national finance minister. He recently named the street it’s on after himself.

We drove past roadside kiosks where locals were selling potatoes, onions, eggs, and all things pickled. Decrepit Soviet-era apartment buildings and steel factories popped up every ten kilometers or so. An elderly man watched his goats graze in a nearby field. In the distance, smoke billowed from the coal refinery chimneys dotting the horizon. We were on our way to visit the men working at one of the area’s clandestine illegal mines or, in Russian, kopanki.

Torez is located in the Donets Basin, also known as the Donbass. The hard-knuckled industrial region is a 13-hour train ride east of Kiev, the country’s capital. It sits in the plains of the lower Dnieper and Seversky Donets rivers, a vast area both blanketed in sunflowers and marred by smokestacks.

It was here in August 1935 that the Donbass’ most famous miner, Alexey Stakhanov, mined a record 102 tons of coal in under six hours, igniting an industrial boom known as the Stakhanovite movement that over the next 40 years brought a flood of mining and manufacturing jobs to the region. On December 16th of the same year, his face graced the cover of Time magazine. Inside he was profiled in a story titled “Stakhanovism’s Great Stakhanov.”

In the decades to come, coal shaped the Donbass into an industrial mecca, with Torez playing a central role. Record amounts of coal were extracted at record speeds. Apartment homes couldn’t be built quickly enough to accommodate a growing population. Toward the end of the coal boom in 1978, nearly 100,000 people lived in Torez, with even more residing in neighboring Makeevka and Donetsk. Torez, which still flies a flag emblazoned with a piece of black coal, once had more than a dozen large-scale mines, employing tens of thousands.

Now, though, Stakhanovism is long gone, as are many of the jobs it created. The development of coal, oil, and gas in resource-rich Siberia, which began after the 1917 revolution and accelerated in the 1960s, came at great expense to the Donbass region. Independence from the Soviet Union in 1991 all but finished the Donbass off. Ukraine, as an independent country, didn’t have the money to invest in the industry and was forced to close many of its mines. Others were sold to the country’s oligarchs, who invested little in them, interested only in squeezing out what they could to line their own pockets, leaving the mines unprofitable and insolvent. All in all, the industry is in about $200 billion of debt — more than a year’s profits.

The 12 large-scale mining operations that once dotted the area have been reduced to just four. In their place, hundreds of tiny, illegal mining operations have sprung up.

Since then, thousands of residents have left the area in search of remunerative work. A 2001 census showed Torez’s population to be 72,346. By 2004, that number had fallen to 68,230. The most recent census data, gathered in 2011, shows the population to be 60,032.

Now, Torez is surrounded by slag heaps and small, weathered village homes. Driving through town that October morning, I noticed the faded pastel-colored paint peeling off their walls, shutters dangling from the window frames. Across the road two men covered in black dust drank from beer bottles at a bus stop, broken glass strewn about at their feet. It was 10am.

Alex pulled over and asked a young man for directions to the quarry, and he pointed us toward a street two blocks back. We drove down flooded dirt roads speckled with glimmering coal dust and littered with empty mayonnaise packets, and arrived at a large pit filled with water.

As our car neared the edge of the quarry, I spotted a man clad in flannel and wearing a backpack emerging from the bushes. His wild red hair jutted out in all directions from under his Rasta-colored knit beanie. His beard was bushy and matted from months — maybe years — of untamed growth. Alex motioned to me to open the rear passenger door and let him in. “This is our guide.”

Settled into the back seat next to me, the man said, in deep-throated Russian, “So you’re the American. Nice to meet you.” He smelled musty and of cigarettes. We shook hands. His skin was cracked and callused. “I’m Nikolai.”

Despite having an apartment in Donetsk, Nikolai’s lived the past two years in a small shack at the edge of the quarry, which he shares with one other man. A former journalist and current president of the Donetsk-based “Cohort of Light,” a non-governmental organization focused on helping recovering alcoholics and drug addicts, Nikolai is a respected community member. He’s also pals with many of the miners who extract coal from the kopanki. Some of them he’s even counseled.

Before we were to meet the miners, Nikolai suggested we stop at a shop to pick up a few things. In Ukraine it’s customary to bring gifts when dropping in unannounced.

On our way we passed a conspicuous mine sitting just off the road. Denis asked Nikolai if this was a kopanka. It was not. Despite its primitive appearance, it was a legally sanctioned mine. But like the kopanki, most mines of this type operate with numerous violations. Their owners, often public servants or businessmen in bed with them, have either forged or paid for proper documentation and fabricated production numbers. It’s because of this that they’re allowed to operate as normal during crackdowns on the kopanki. Nikolai suggested we stop to see if the men working it would mind speaking with us.

It turned out they did. From inside the car I couldn’t hear the conversation, but one miner waved Nikolai off, as if shooing a pesky cat away. After that, the miners retreated inside a small shack, peering out a window at us as we pulled off, their darkened faces illuminated by the light of burning matches held to cigarettes.

At the shop, Alex and Denis waited outside while I ran in with Nikolai. With a glint of gold in her teeth, a woman behind the counter wearing a blue apron asked what we wanted.

“Ten beers will be enough, I think,” Nikolai told her. “Let’s get cigarettes and two fish, too.”
The car bounced back and forth and bottles clanked in the space between Nikolai and I as we made our way back down the rutted road.

We paused briefly for a woman and her goats to cross; we pulled over to the shoulder so a tractor could pass. And then a little further on down Nikolai instructed Alex to stop the car and park.

We trudged five minutes through the forest, kicking aside fallen tree limbs in our way, across a rickety footbridge spanning the width of a narrow creek. Spindly, naked branches of the canopy disappeared into the fog. Crows cawed around us. Approaching a clearing in a small ravine, I could hear the clinks and hisses of something mechanical. The noises grew louder as we got closer.

Then, as the ravine opened up slightly, the mining operation appeared in plain view, just 20 meters from where we stood. Nikolai turned to me. “We’re here,” he said. “I will do the talking first.”

In the days of the Soviet Union miners were treated as celebrities and given their own holiday, Miners’ Day, the last Sunday of August. They even had a football team — Shakhtar — named for them.

A Ukrainian friend’s mother once told me to be a miner was to be a hero.

“We celebrated them,” she said. “Because they gave us everything.” Until the mid 1970s, one-third of every household in Ukraine was dependent on coal — and the coal miner — for power.

Miners used to be some of the highest paid workers in the USSR. Now their wages are in line with the nation’s average — about $300 a month. Those working at the kopanki, however, pocket maybe $200 each month.

Much like the miners do, Nikolai believes Torez itself is descending into a black hole. Each year there are more empty houses, fewer people, and even less coal. It’s been estimated that just 10 years of reserves remain here. Because of this, along with fewer public and private investments, the city — and its mining heritage — is at risk of disappearing. Already, it’s a shadow of its former self.

Residents have only themselves to blame for the deterioration of the city, Nikolai told me. “They squandered all their land in order to mine.” Instead of seeking alternative solutions, residents have opted to mine until the coal is gone.

“Poyekhali!” Let’s go, shouted a stout middle-aged man named Viktor, flipping the switch of a generator that powers a four-cylinder engine taken from a Soviet-era Lada sedan. Smoke puffed out as the engine bellowed and rattled. A winch began to turn, slowly hauling a weighty object to the surface from deep below ground.

A few minutes passed, and then a shell of a bathtub appeared from the black opening in the earth. Inside was a heap of coal, some pieces as large as a shoebox. The winch pulled the tub to level ground and lifted one end in the air, spilling its contents into a pile.

Viktor switched off the generator and, swiping his forehead with his forearm, said, “There it is — our black gold!”

This was what he and his fellow miners called “the hole,” one of hundreds of kopanki in eastern Ukraine.

Viktor’s mined for so long he can’t remember when he began. He didn’t always work in the kopanki. Like many older miners in the region, at one point he worked at a legal, government-operated plant. It wasn’t until he lost his job there that he resorted to mining illegally. “I wasn’t able to do anything else.”

The hole was as wide as a small elevator and nearly as deep as a football field, its opening supported by medium-sized fir trunks and old fence boards nailed together. Tubs attached to a rusted cable carried men, equipment, and coal up and down an earth track compacted from years of use. An engine more than 20 years old powered the entire operation.

Another miner, Aleksey, said that six men work the hole. His skin and clothes appeared mostly clean, except for a few black swipe-mark stains on the thighs of his pants. While speaking to me he sharpened the head of a jackhammer bit on a grinder. Despite sparks shooting off in every direction, he didn’t wear protection of any kind.

Three men were inside the shaft, carving away at the walls, filling the tub with coal and sending it back to the surface, all the while trying not to breathe in too much black dust, cause a cave-in, or ignite a methane pocket. That day, Aleksey had chosen to remain above ground with two other men, though it meant pocketing a little less cash at the end of the day.

“They’ve got the difficult jobs,” he told me, pointing toward the miners inside the shaft. In the time I was at the hole, from late morning to evening, no one mining below ground came to the surface. “If you want to see them, you will have to go down.”

“Poyekhali!” Viktor shouted again.

Another bathtub was being hauled up with the winch, its rocky contents dumped on the ground. I watched as Ruslan, a well-built 25-year-old miner, scooped the coal with a large, flat shovel into the bed of a truck. Around him hung a shadowy cloud. His face, hands, and forearms were blackened from the coal, but I could still make out the hastily drawn flames of a tattoo on his forearm. It took less than 10 minutes for him to shovel it all in.

Afterward he lit a cigarette, drew slowly from it, looked at me and raised his eyebrows.

I asked why he mined.

“The money is good and studies are a waste of time,” he explained. “And this is Torez.”

While speaking to Ruslan, Aleksey sauntered over. I wondered aloud how much a truck of coal was worth, and he began doing the math on his fingers.

“About 100 dollars for one ton,” Aleksey said. “And this truck can hold 10 tons, so maybe $1,000, every day.”

But this is split between each miner, with those down in the hole pocketing a slightly larger percentage. A majority of the profit — about fifty to sixty percent — goes toward expenses such as gas, repairs, and paying off local law enforcement.

Ruslan’s been doing this now for the better part of a decade. He left school to begin work and help support his family.

Aleksey began mining illegally when he was 18. He is now 32, and admitted he’ll probably be mining for the rest of his life. “Or until [the coal’s] all gone.” His reasons were much the same as Ruslan’s.

“I didn’t like school,” he said. “And I didn’t want to leave [Torez] and my family.”

Aleksey said he makes good money mining the hole, though he didn’t say exactly how much. He has a car, a house, and a beautiful young wife and child. He can afford to buy them the things they need.

A typical workday might last eight to 12 hours, sometimes longer even, depending on how many men are working. But they don’t think about time at the mine, Aleksey said. “We’re finished when the truck is full.”

Once the truck has reached capacity, the load is taken to a nearby storage center. From there, coal from the kopanki is mixed with coal from select legal mines in the region. All together, there’s no telling it apart.

Eventually, the coal’s shipped across the country; only some might be sold locally. In Torez, most people make less than the national average, and coal is expensive. A popular anecdote, the miners told me, goes like this: A miner works all day extracting fuel to heat the houses in the rest of the country, only to come home to find his own family freezing.

Aleksey turned to me and asked that I watch my step. A third tub was on its way up from the mine and I was standing in its path.

Ruslan tossed his cigarette butt to the ground and pulled on his gloves. The wench lurched to a halt, the tub spilled the coal and the shoveling began again.

Taking a break, I followed Aleksey over toward the miners’ shack, where Alex and Denis were snapping photos and taking video. Aleksey took one of the salted fish we brought out of its white paper wrapping and laid it atop a stump. With a large knife he pulled from his pocket, he slit the fish up the belly to the head, cut out the insides and tossed them on the ground. Then he chopped the fish into pieces to share with the other miners.

I asked about the police, and whether or not there’s a chance the kopanki could be closed. He said he’d explain the situation to us, but only if Denis, who’d been recording parts of our conversation, switched off his video camera.

As with many of the kopanki, he explained, about 30 percent of revenue from the hole goes toward paying off local law enforcement and government officials. Intermediary firms that are owned by people in positions of power, including some of the same authorities, buy the coal that goes to the storage containers. In that way, the kopanki are also protected.

Aleksey doesn’t expect that the kopanki would ever be shut down; there are just too many of them to regulate. It’s more likely that the coal will run out.

There was a time, not long ago, however, before current president Viktor Yanukovich came to power, when illegal mines were at risk of being closed.

During Orange Revolution leader Viktor Yushchenko’s presidency, from 2004 to 2010, a large-scale plan was enacted to shutter hundreds of illegal mines and fill them with water, rock, or other materials. A fervent opponent of eastern Ukrainian politics and Yanukovich’s Party of Regions, Yushchenko promised to put an end to the corruption and lawlessness that plagued the country, which included the kopanki of the Donbass.

But the closed kopanki didn’t remain that way for long. The defiant miners dug out their holes. “It’s not difficult to pull out rocks or pump out water,” Aleksey said. “We knew there was a chance [the authorities] could close us again, but we needed the money.”

He and others working at the mines breathed a sigh of relief in 2008, when Yanukovich won a tight presidential race against ex-Premier Yulia Tymoshenko. His hometown of Donetsk, as well as the rest of the Donbass it seemed, would be safe to conduct business as usual.

Officials, though, still want the public to believe that they’ve taken a strong stance against illegal mining operations. In September, the Chairman of the Donetsk Regional Council, Andrew Fedoruk, went as far as to say that all the illegal mines in the Donbass region had been “eliminated.”

Standing atop small, scattered pieces of coal, 10 meters from the opening of a pitch-black shaft in which men were scraping away at the walls for more, Aleksey laughed at the mention of this.

“Do you ever worry?” I asked Aleksey. “Isn’t this work dangerous?”

“Yes! Of course it’s dangerous,” he chuckled. “You don’t know what can go wrong down there. But it’s worth it, right?”

Alex, Denis, and I stood silent.

“Anyway,” he added a moment later, “usually it’s just the drunks that find trouble.”

Many men drink on the job. And those men, along with the safety risks and the poor image they foster, are the reason the authorities want the greater public to believe the kopanki have been shut down.

As we chatted, Aleksey was drinking a beer. But he pointed out that beer wasn’t the problem — the problem was samigon, or moonshine.

“Some miners drink samigon while they work, and– ” with his middle finger he flicked his throat, the eastern European sign for wasted. “That’s when accidents happen.”

And accidents happen frequently. Ukraine has Europe’s highest mortality rate among coal miners, according to Iryna Kurylo, head of the Department for the Quality of Demographic Processes at the Mykhailo Ptukha Institute of Demography and Social Research, Ukraine’s Academy of Sciences. Since Ukraine became independent in 1991, nearly 6,000 people have died in mining accidents, and those just in the legal mines. The statistics for the illegal mines are unknown, but thought also to be in the thousands.

When I asked if there have been accidents at the hole, Aleksey grinned but didn’t answer. Asked if he knew anyone who’d died in the kopanki, he nodded. “Of course. We all do.”

The causes of death in the mines range from explosions and collapses to cardiac arrest caused by methane poisoning. Colorless and odorless, methane is difficult to detect. And being lighter than air, it’s extremely flammable; a single spark can ignite a fireball within the mineshaft.

This past July, east of Torez, at a legal, large-scale mine near the city of Lugansk, an explosion more than 3000 feet underground killed 28 miners. Officials believe it to have been a methane explosion. In 2007, a methane explosion at another nearby mine killed more than 100 people.

“It is very important to be safe while working here,” Aleksey said, taking another tug from his bottle of beer.

“This work is not for everyone.” But it is for many, especially those lacking higher education. Plus, Aleksey added, there isn’t much else to do. “Here, we mine. That’s it.”

But for how much longer is anyone’s guess.

My close friend Igor once told me, “Ukrainians live day to day.” Though the country is now independent, the Soviet mentality of ‘whatever is done is for the better’ still exists. “We can’t know what will come tomorrow,” he added. “But we believe it will be good.”

With coal production rapidly depleting and the Donbass’ once-great industrial esteem no longer extant, the region has taken measures to ensure its mining legacy.

Stone monuments to the once-thriving industry dot the region’s city squares: Alexey Stakhanov, in the city named for him, with a jackhammer slung over his shoulder and his eyes on the horizon; in Donetsk, an anonymous miner offering a piece of coal in his outstretched hand; and in Makeevka a group of three miners standing stoically at the entrance of a mine shaft, equipment in tow. The Donetsk Shaktar football team, owned by billionaire mogul Rinat Akhmetov (he also owns Krasnodonugol, one of the country’s largest coal companies), has become an international success, winning the UEFA Cup in 2009. (This is due mostly, however, to the team’s $400 million, state of the art Donbass Arena and its imported Brazilian football stars, which Akhmetov himself financed.)

But it’s unclear what, if anything, has been or is being done to ensure the future of Torez and its people. When the coal is finally exhausted — and mined at its current rate, it will be soon — what will people in Torez do?

“Torez will be dead,” Aleksey said. “After coal, nothing. We can only wish this will happen after our time.”

It was nearly five o’clock in the evening and the engine thundered on, despite having been working for more than eight hours, and despite the fact that it was Saturday. The wench kept turning, tubs continued to be hauled up and emptied, and Ruslan kept shoveling.

I followed Alex, Denis, and Nikolai back through the forest and over the footbridge, fighting the cold the whole way. The sun had ducked behind the trees and dense clouds had rolled in. I could still hear the roar of that Lada engine, though it faded into the distance with each step I took toward the road. Soon, the only sound was the leaves crunching beneath our feet and our heavy breathing.

Smoke from village burn piles wafted through the forest and around the skinny trees. I watched two men shuffle down the road as we approached, tattered rugs filled with leaves slung over their shoulders.

We dropped Nikolai off where we found him, at a thicket near the edge of the quarry. We waited there for a few minutes until his friend came across in a raft to meet him.

Back on the highway, we passed trucks with beds filled to the brim with coal. Darkness covered the steppe and the refineries – ever so faint in the distance — spewed smoke. Somewhere beyond them, a wench reeled up a bathtub full of Torez’s black gold, one closer to the last.

AISHA HAS A DATE TONIGHT.

Aisha is twenty seven. Most of her friends are married. She’s still pretty, but worries she’s losing her looks. Her figure, which she once described as “professional,” has bagged down with plumpness, the result of a love of fried bananas.

And in Banda Aceh, Indonesia, where sharia (Islamic) law reigns, a single date means a lot more than in the West. Meeting for coffee often means agreeing to be viewed as a couple in the eyes of Acehnese society. Certainly, after a second date, friends will start gossiping—jokingly and not—about a wedding.

Aisha isn’t sure if other people are labeling her and Fajar a couple yet, but she hopes so. They work together at the bank: she’s up front as a teller; he’s in back as an accountant. They’ve never gotten beyond casual conversation when he drops papers off at her desk—the other tellers are watching. Most of Aisha’s information about Fajar comes from gossip and Facebook stalking, but she’s liked what she’s heard: quiet but still friendly, a diligent employee, loyal to his widowed mother. She’s also noted that he’s older, expected to be promoted soon, dresses well, and drives an expensive Honda Tiger motorbike.

But in some ways he remains a mystery. Take, for example, the bruise—birthmark?—a little to the right of the center of his forehead. It’s so faint she’s not even sure it’s there. Could it be a developing zabiba, the callus exceptionally devote Muslims earn through a great deal of prayer, bowing with each verse until their heads bump the tiles?

Everyone says Fajar never misses any of the five daily devotions, but he dresses very modernly in jeans, a soccer warm-up jacket despite the heat, and knock-off Adidas. Never has she seen him in a peci, the traditional hat religious men wear. She’s also seen how tired he is after staying up until 4:00 a.m. to watch his beloved Manchester United soccer team play halfway across the world.

But Aisha can’t waste too much time debating whether it’s a zabiba or birthmark. Her shift at the bank has just ended at 3:00 p.m. sharp; the date is 7:30 p.m. at Q&L Coffee. If the night is going to be a success she needs a new outfit, especially a jilbab (headscarf). She knows her best friend, Putri, is a terrible person to ask for fashion advice, but she can’t imagine sorting through dozens of veils without help, weighing the messages they will send alone; it is too daunting.

Her cellphone clock adds a minute: four hours and twenty nine more until she will sip coffee with Fajar.

Aisha abandons caution and calls Putri.

*

Aceh, Indonesia, is a scarred land. It is the northernmost province in Indonesia, on the tip of Sumatera Island, and the only place in the world’s largest Muslim country to implement sharia law.

It is still recovering from twenty five years of separatist rebellion and the devastating 2004 tsunami, which killed approximately 125,000 people in Aceh Province. In ten minutes Banda Aceh, Aceh Province’s capital city, lost about a fourth of its population: 60,000 souls.

The rebuilt Banda Aceh is a puzzle of crooked lanes where honking motorbikes swerve around stray cows and old men push kaki limas – wheeled food-carts selling meatball soup or fried pastries – ringing bells. The buildings are mostly drab and single story, shedding peeling paint. The needles of cellphone towers and domes of hundreds of mosques dominate the skyline, their calls to prayer filling the city with haunting music five times a day.

When the azan, or call to prayer, echoes through Banda Aceh, the frenetic city suddenly calms. Once choked streets empty into haunting stillness; restaurants and shops shut their doors and draw their blinds; the population files towards mosques and prayer rooms.

Islam is central to Acehnese identity. Banda Aceh was the first place in South East Asia to convert to Islam, around 1,200 C.E. It spread from there, eventually encompassing all of Malaysia, most of Indonesia, and portions of Thailand and the Philippines.

The desire for sharia law has fueled separatist Islamic rebellions since the 1950s, as Indonesian’s central government insisted the province remain subject to the country’s secular constitution. In 2001, Aceh was granted the right to implement sharia law for Muslims (though not for Aceh’s minority Christian or Buddhist populations) in an attempt to appease separatists. Special sharia courts and a sharia “morality” police were created.

All forms of Western modernity in Aceh accommodate themselves to Islam: little signs hang in Internet cafes asking men and women not to share computers; the wide-screen TVs that hang in every roadside coffee shop stick to soccer, rarely showing the provocative music videos common elsewhere in Indonesia; and though Acehnese women might wear jeans, they also always cover their hair with headscarves. For a Muslim woman to show her hair on the streets is an offense punishable by law.

It is the responsibility of the sharia police to enforce prohibitions on infractions such as drinking, failure to attend Friday prayers, and all actions mesum (sexually inappropriate), from premarital sex to failing to wear a jilbab. Punishments can include: caning, fines, and public shaming, including having buckets of sewage dumped on offenders in front of a crowd. Although such cases are extremely rare, sharia courts can also sentence adulterers to be stoned to death. The most powerful enforcer of Islamic standards, however, is Acehnese society, its censure and gossip.

Correct dress and fashion for women are fraught issues in many Islamic communities. According to most Acehnese interpretations of the Koran, it is only appropriate for women to show their faces, hands, and feet. The neck and ears are a gray, verging into black, area.

But Banda Aceh is not Afghanistan or Pakistan. Burkas, the black “body tents” that conceal everything but a woman’s eyes, are extremely rare. Instead, walking down the street reveals a kaleidoscopic-whir of different jilbabs: headscarves of all colors and styles, combined in inventive ways with Western, Acehnese, and Islamic outfits.

A daring student sports a sheer lime-green jilbab above a knee length dress and leggings; an old woman carries a basket of mangos home from the traditional market on top of a tightly wound pashmina, her loose robe tangling around her; a housewife hurries down the street to buy sugar at the neighborhood convenience store, wearing only pajamas decorated by a motif of teddy bears and a jilbab songkok, a pre-made headscarf favored for its ease of use; a rich woman keeps her chin high, careful not to jerk her head and disturb the elaborate, almost sculptural, folds of her glittering sequined veil…

The number of styles is almost endless, as are the signals they send, in a society that very much judges a woman on what she wears.

*

Aisha and Putri shop at Suzuya, Banda Aceh’s biggest store, whose selection spans from durian to knockoff Calvin Klein underwear. It has the feel of a scaled down Carrefour or Wal-Mart. They like it because they can try on clothes in the aisles and not bother folding them back up correctly, unlike in claustrophobic traditional market stalls where the owner always lurks, peeking over customers’ shoulders.

Around 3:45 p.m., Putri stops Aisha at a table of discount tablecloths, picks one up, and wraps it around her head. “Here, this is it! And cheap too! Wouldn’t you look beautiful?” Putri says, laughing.

Putri describes herself as a “firecracker” and “a modern person who lives” – she highlights the irony – “in this place.” Certainly, her style calls a lot more attention to itself than Aisha’s. Putri wears a black and teal headscarf, the bold colors alternating in zebra stripes. The headscarf matches her outfit: a black pullover and shimmering aquamarine dress, and beneath that tight black jeans and flip flops pounded paper-thin by long use.

It’s harder to notice Aisha next to the flamboyant Putri. Aisha’s headscarf is black without pattern or texture, wrapped in a clean style, and pinned with an unobtrusive plastic rhinestone brooch. She wears a baggy maroon shirt with knockoff Louis Vutton symbols stitched onto the sleeves. Her pants and flip flops are the same mud brown. She thinks of herself as, “A good girl. Simple. Modest. I don’t demand a lot.”

When someone talks to her, she has a habit of stepping back so that if the person reached out to touch her she would remain just beyond their fingertips. She lives at home with her mother who spends most of the day studying Arabic so that she can read the Koran without translation.

“Oh, so you’re ready to serve?” Aisha says, slapping away Putri, who is trying to wrap the tablecloth around Aisha’s head.

They continue through the aisles, heading towards the jilbab section. The women appreciate the air conditioning: headscarves and full body clothing are hot, especially in tropical climates. The loudspeakers play the Indonesian equivalent, in both sound and sappiness, of an American Christmas pop tune—“Insyallah,” last Ramadan’s big hit. When it is time for one of the five daily prayers, the market broadcasts the azan over the same loudspeakers.

They start sorting through the hundreds of jilbabs scattered across the table.

*

There can be almost infinite variation in what constitutes a headscarf. Throughout history, women in cultures across the world have implied modesty and piety by covering their hair, from Catholic Nuns who wear wimples, to the women of modern-day Afghanistan who veil themselves with burkas.

The Islamic practice for veiling derives mainly from the following passage in the Koran, though there are other shorter elaborating verses and hadith. In them, Allah commands through Muhammad:

O Prophet! Tell your wives and your daughters and the women of the believers to draw their jalabib [cloaks or veils] all over their bodies. That will be better, that they should be known [as Muslim women], so as not to be bothered. And Allah is Ever Oft-Forgiving, Most Merciful.

What exactly women are being ordered to do has been heatedly debated ever since. Some Muslim religious authorities have interpreted the passage as a directive for women to cover everything except their eyes—or even a single eye, which is all that is necessary to see with.

Others take a more relativist approach, recommending that women should be modest within the context of their society and time. Anthropologists have suggested that the full body burkas worn today are nothing like those worn in Muhammad’s time.

Westerners often think of headscarves as designed to cover only a woman’s hair, but they are technically supposed to cover a woman’s breasts as well. This directive is often obeyed only cursorily, with women arranging a perfunctory corner of scarf so that it dangles down their fronts. A more orthodox woman, however, will wear a veil that covers her chest, or even extends to the waist.

The word jilbab in most Islamic countries denotes a longer veil that fully covers a woman, often to the ankles, but in Indonesia refers only to headscarves. Indonesian jilbabs come in a diversity of colors and materials, and can be arranged in an infinite variety of styles, from loosely flowing veils to artistic arrangements held together with seemingly hundreds of pins. All sorts of accessories can be added, from glittering pins and brooches to hold a veil’s folds in place, to sun-visors that integrate with the headscarf. For every occasion, from playing volleyball to praying, there is a different kind of veil.

Today, in Indonesia, the first choice a potential jilbab buyer has to make is “pre-made” or “loose.” Pre-made jilbabs, also known as jilbab songkok, are already formed, with a hood, facial opening, and drape sewn into place, so that a user only has to slip it on to be presentable. These kinds of jilbabs are especially popular for children; many are made up to look like popular cartoon characters or animals. A jilbab songkok with stuffed ears sewn onto the hood and tiger stripes has been especially popular lately in Banda Aceh.

Mature women wear “pre-made” veils around the home, for yard work or gardening, or to run down the street to complete a quick errand. Jilbab songkok are considered unfashionable in Banda Aceh, partly because of their popularity in the province’s many remote villages, where women are more concerned with ease than style.

Aisha chooses a “loose” jilbab.

A “loose” or “free” jilbab starts as a square, rectangle, or triangle of cloth, usually measuring around three feet long and two feet wide. Additional fabric allows for more elaborate designs, such as sculpted intricate folds and whorls, while smaller cloths create tighter sleeker fits.

Scarves come in all colors and patterns, each with its own meaning. Dark solid colors convey conservatism or modesty; intricate patterns of sequins or fancy stitching, often depicting flowers or religious themes, indicate wealth; western or non-traditional symbols, such as leopard print or even the anarchist “A” show the wearer is “less fanatical,” in Putri’s words.

Paying attention to color is especially important when a woman is choosing a jilbab because Indonesia’s standards of beauty favor pale skin. A woman with dusky skin can’t wear a dark hue for fear of making her skin shade blacker, while those with middling skin tones tend towards neutral light colors like pinks and creams to whiten their complexions by association. Only the luckiest, and fairest, can get away with bright hues; sometimes, Aisha gets jealous just seeing an orange jilbab float through a crowd. Her favorite color is orange and it has always seemed unfair that she cannot wear the color because of her complexion.

*

“How about this?” Putri says, holding up an ocean blue scarf with a light blue pattern, like watercolor clouds, brushed on. By 4:15 p.m., the friends have thoroughly searched all the jilbabs on the tables and winnowed them to four selections.

“I don’t want Fajar to think I’m already married to the American president,” Aisha answers. The headscarf Putri is waving is known as the “Obama headscarf” because of its popularity after the first lady of the USA wore it on a diplomatic visit to Indonesia in 2010.

So they’re down to three jilbabs: the first is simple, black and unadorned except for a thin fringe of lace; the next is a leaf-green scarf that signals conservatism—the color reportedly was Muhammad’s favorite—and is a little more eye-grabbing than the black veil; and the final headscarf is a thin, almost sheer, magenta, decorated by tassels strung with ruby-colored plastic globes. But now the friends are stuck.

Part of the problem is that they can’t figure out what, exactly, Fajar would like. Does he want a modern girl, someone with a little bit of flair and westernized views? Should they signal with the magenta jilbab that Aisha is bolder than the average girl? Or does he want someone more traditional? Will he be embarrassed by a showy jilbab, but impressed by Aisha’s modesty and humility in wearing a simpler scarf? Or might the black or leaf-green jilbab strike him as dull and chilly and turn him off?

Aisha also thinks about her neighbors: what would they think if they saw her in the tasseled veil? They argue the choices over and over.

“You say he has the zabiba, that he’s so religious. So chose something that would appeal to an imam,” Putri says, exasperated. She’d been pushing for something bolder even than the magenta jilbab, pointing out the tasseled scarf isn’t that radical.

Eventually, they decide it is better to play it safe. No one will be offended by a conservative jilbab, but Fajar could discount Aisha immediately for wearing the magenta scarf.

“Even if many guys say they don’t want a traditional wife, they really do, deep down. Or want you to act like one, for most things,” Aisha points out. That advice has been rattling in her head since reading an article in Paras, an Indonesian fashion magazine. The magenta scarf is flung back onto the table.

Next, Aisha decides, “Green makes my skin look yellow,” and picks up the black jilbab. Aisha recognizes the black headscarf as closest to what she’d wear in everyday life.

“If I wear that one,” she says, pointing to the magenta headscarf with the tassels, “it’s like false advertising.” As she looks at herself in the mirror, the black jilbab wrapped around her head, she sees a version of herself which is just a little bit prettier, a little bit more elegant with the edge of lace softening her face, than the everyday, but which is still her.

“You do look really pretty,” Putri says, laying her head on Aisha’s shoulder.

Now it’s time to assemble the rest of the outfit. Putri parades graphic t-shirts with snarky cartoons on the front, but she knows Aisha won’t bite—she’s mostly doing it for her own amusement. Aisha has taken out a selection of Paras and is paging through the magazines for inspiration. Finally, she settles on a flowing white shirt/dress, with a collar and a row of buttons like a man’s formal shirt at the top, but billowing out into a shin-length skirt at the bottom.

“I’d like him to think I am a business woman, that I’m successful, but the dress shows I am still a woman,” Aisha explains.

In the shoes department, as it strikes 4:30 p.m., Aisha falls for a pair of gleaming white pumps, with a tiny window at the front so her big toe can be seen, but which otherwise cover her skin. No arguments from Putri: the shoes are that nice. Since the shirt/dress and shoes are both white, they decide that color is obviously the theme of her outfit.

So that Aisha doesn’t look like a blank canvas, they add purple waist-belt and cream colored slacks. Putri likes the first pair of pants Aisha tries on, which show a half-moon of plump bottom, but Aisha decides to buy a size up.

“Better safe than sorry,” she says again. That too is a sentiment from an article in Paras.

*

Jilbabs and headscarves around the world are part of a greater Islamic practice known as hijab, an Arabic word which means “cover” or “curtain.”

Hijab usually refers to appropriate Islamic dress for women, of which a jilbab is just a part. Body contours can be vaguely discernible, but too-tight clothing is looked on as “cheating” and “and not much different from being naked.” Hijab can also mean the veil, impossible to penetrate, drawn between man and Allah.

Some Islamic theorists, especially those supporting burkas, suggest that hijab was established not only to protect female modesty from men, but to guard women against their own vanity. A black featureless sheet, they argue, makes it hard to be vain about one’s body or clothing, allowing an individual to focus on spiritual concerns.

In Islamic countries where burkas are not the norm, hajib has often had the opposite effect, making women extremely conscious of their clothing. Women are brought up to see their clothes as expressing their religion and identities. Expecting to be judged on their dress, women calibrate their outfits down to the smallest accessory. Because so much attention is focused on women’s clothing, fashion becomes especially important to the population. The Middle East plays a key role in supporting the French haute couture industry, though most of the designer garments are shown off only in private.

Just as there are glossy fashion magazines in the West, they exist too in Indonesia, albeit without an inch of skin, besides the face and hands. Walk into any bookstore and you will find magazines pitched to every degree of religiosity. The most liberal magazines are generally international stalwarts—Vogue, etc.—translated into Indonesian and with a few country-specific articles, but they are difficult to find in Banda Aceh.

Magazines specifically for Muslim women, such as Paras, are significantly more conservative, showing only hand and facial skin, and occasional tight suggestive outfits, but they still include articles like, “Sex: The First Night” and “Asymmetrical Jilbab Arrangement”. Truly conservative magazines feature burkas. All of them are filled out with recipes, gossipy profiles of Indonesian or Arab pop stars, light reportage, informative articles about Islam (a sample title, “Islamic Info: the Tradition of Kissing the Hand”), and encouragement to remain true to the magazine’s interpretation of Islam. They also, of course, display fashion shoots, advertisements, and pages of outfits.

In one advertisement titled, “Secret Garden Collection,” a light-skinned Indonesian woman poses before the ivy entangled wall of an English manor, leaning slightly into the vines as if pushed by an invisible force. She wears a duchess’s riding jacket with a pattern of roses, a high-waisted Victorian dress which nearly screams “corset underneath!”, and a red velvet sunhat with a gift-wrap bow. Mixed in with all this is a jilbab and, in a quirk of some Indonesian models, a wedding ring.

Many of the fashions displayed in the magazines, and most of the outfits seen in Banda Aceh’s packed cafes on a Saturday night, rely on suggestion. Putri, for example, has been noticing a certain style: a bang carefully combed so that it dangles just under the lip of the jilbab, almost like gravity has innocently teased it into that position. What is that lock hinting at?

Aisha and Putri analyze the bang like it’s evidence in a murder mystery. When Putri tries to explain her reactions to the hairstyle, she finds herself tripping on her words. Perhaps what she means, calling it “sexy but not really sexy,” is that the hair is not explicitly seductive, rather hinting that the woman has sexuality, which is what the headscarf is supposed to hide. More importantly, that twist of hair suggests the girl disagrees with the authorities, that she’s braver, a little westernized…

Aisha points out that maybe the bang signals the girl is “approachable,” that you could “ask her on a date.” Putri picks up on this, “Some women in Banda Aceh do not date before they get married. Sometimes the guy shows up, asks her father, asks her, and right away, that day, it’s agreed. Maybe it’s a way to have a choice about guys. Because it’s a lot harder to ask someone on a date if they’re in a very religious jilbab.”

In the end, neither Aisha nor Putri can quite pin the styled bang down. They agree it probably has meanings they can’t puzzle out. What is the bang trying to say? Maybe only the woman knows. Maybe the woman couldn’t quite say herself.

*

By now, it’s 5:15 p.m., and Aisha is supposed to meet Fajar at 7:30 p.m., after the magrib evening prayers. As they hustle towards the cashier, Putri stops and pulls a headscarf from a discount rack: it’s crimson with a leopard-skin pattern of black spots.

“How about this one?” she giggles.

Aisha can’t stop laughing. “Do you want him to think I am a wild animal?” But Putri gets her to try it on and pulls her to a mirror. The face that Aisha sees staring back is recognizable as her own, but also different: someone she only vaguely knows, capable of doing deeds she would never be brave (or stupid) enough to dare. It’s like meeting a lost twin, someone she shares a primordial connection with, but who she doesn’t know how to talk to.

“It’s so amazing. If you’re not going to buy it, I am,” Putri says.

When Aisha and Putri get home at 6:00 p.m., they take off their jilbabs. Jilbabs are required in public by sharia law, but not in private or among family members. Even Aisha is glad to be free of the scarf now that it’s appropriate. The cloth was starting to feel scratchy where it rubbed her cheek and one of the pins holding the folds together kept poking her in the neck.

A bucket shower is Aisha’s first order of business. Aisha’s mother takes a break from translating the Koran to cook the two a fortifying snack of fried bananas. After washing, Aisha stands in front of a fan to dry her hair enough to get a headscarf over it.

Once Aisha is dressed, it is time for the jilbab. She gathers up her hair, bunching it so that Putri can slip a songkong on (not to be confused with jilbab sonkong), an extra tight-fitting hood that lies under a loose jilbab to make sure no hair escapes. Putri sighs in disgust, “Your hair’s so pretty, at least let a few pieces out.” Putri wants to comb in a slight bang, so that it’s just visible under the brim of the jilbab.

If Putri could, she wouldn’t wear a jilbab. There were times in a tumultuous youth when she didn’t, but she soon learned that her protests created more trouble than she could handle. This was before 2001, when sharia law was made official, so she was never arrested, but she got plenty of verbal harassment, “advice” from teachers and authority figures, and knew the rumors tip-toeing around the neighborhood.

Eventually, she proved the whispers true by dating a Western NGO worker after the tsunami. One might think she’d be numb to the criticism by now, but that’s not the case at all: she’s just gotten better at hiding her frustration and hurt. She hopes to get a scholarship soon, to America or Europe, somewhere she can abandon her jilbab and all the baggage that goes with it.

When travelling in more liberal parts of Indonesia—in parts of Jakarta or Indonesia’s Christian provinces jilbabs are the minority—Aisha has experimented with not wearing a headscarf. She liked how the wind blew in her hair, that her hair didn’t smell of sweat after taking her veil off, but ultimately she decided to keep wearing a jilbab.

It’s not that she felt naked or threatened without it, she’s tried to explain to Putri, it’s that she felt like the style wasn’t her. The jilbab is part of her faith, part of how she sees herself, part of her identity.

In the West, many organizations and individuals have attacked headscarves as anachronistic and repressive. There is an assumption that if women had a choice, they would remove them. Aisha knows many women for whom this is true, but she doubts the majority would. All the other provinces in Indonesia lack sharia law, she reasons, and most women in those places still wear headscarves.

Putri does not agree with Aisha. She is sure that if sharia law were lifted, “90%” of the population would fling off their veils. She believes most women, like her, wear the jilbab in frustrated acquiescence.

“Just look at the teenagers downtown on a Saturday night. Already some of them are getting braver. Sometimes they wear very loose veils, sometimes none at all. I like seeing their hair. It is beautiful.”

The exact number of women who would choose either side is uncertain. Apocryphal stories about how many women wore jilbabs before sharia law was introduced in 2001 vary wildly, usually depending on the teller’s religiosity or secularity. (Though perhaps it is telling that liberals confidently claim ninety percent of people would abandon their jilbabs, while conservatives hedge and haw, before asserting that “less than half, maybe forty percent, would remove their veils: many of the young people don’t like it.”)

Both sides claim a silent majority. Both parties allege a higher moral ground. Liberal activists claim the practice is barbaric. Some male imams warn that failure to wear a jilbab damns a woman to hell.

One point, however, most women, liberal and conservative, seem to agree on, is that individuals who abstain from wearing jilbabs are not going to hell. “How do people even know,” Putri asks, “exactly what someone was saying a thousand years ago meant? Maybe Muhammad only meant it for his time. And there are a lot of interpretations of those verses. They can’t say I’m going to hell for not wearing it.”

“Allah,” Aisha agrees, “is very kind. Allah is mostly concerned with people not doing evil, not hurting each other. It is pretty silly saying you’ll go to hell for not wearing a jilbab.” Most women they know hold a similarly benign view of future punishments. It is usually men who make more drastic claims.

As for accusations that jilbabs are barbaric and anachronistic, Banda Aceh’s women are acutely aware of the image of headscarves in Western eyes. Less than two weeks before Aisha’s date with Fajar, students from Banda Aceh’s universities took over a main intersection in the city, waving placards which read, “I am beautiful in my jilbab.”

Some of the women wore very conservative dress with their headscarves; others matched their veils with jeans and other western clothes. They were protesting French laws that ban headscarves in public institutions and burkas outside the home.

Putri cheers the French ban on headscarves, the smirk on her face suggesting she sees the irony of other Muslims being forbidden to wear veils, while she is forced to. When asked to describe what it feels like to wear a jilbab, her voice roughens with frustration and humiliation; it stretches until it is tenuously controlled.

“Yes, it represses me. How can I be myself wearing this? Headscarves stop me from being myself; they stop society from being fair in judging people because no one sees me when I don’t wear this. They only see—,” she flails her hand towards her head. “It makes it impossible to be equal between men and women. And it stops me from being normal and accepted in the international community. They will always look down on me because I am a Muslim.”

While burkas certainly strip women of their identity, according to Aisha, jilbabs do not always limit personality. Part of the rationale driving feminist’s support of France’s ban on veils is that they obscure a woman’s identity. A burka is very different than the jilbab Aisha now models, but as Aisha looks into the mirror, she recognizes herself. The simple black cloth with the fringe of lace—it’s her—the same way the aquamarine and black zebra stripe jilbab is, in some way, Putri. Aisha would be concealing something if she didn’t wear it.

*
At 6:45 p.m., Putri paints Aisha’s toenails red so that her big toe shines bright as a diamond, emphasized by the oval window in the toe of her white shoe. The single drop of color is glaringly evident in the otherwise white and black outfit.

Aisha dusts her face with whitening powder. The hesitant sweet smell, its crisp dryness on her cheeks, sooths her nerves.

Aisha completes her preparations by pinning the folds of her jilbab across her chest with an heirloom brooch once worn by her grandmother. The brooch has only one of its three original pearls: the spaces the other two used to occupy are blank dents in the metal. Her grandmother, long dead, who lived before the implementation of sharia law, used the brooch to fasten her jilbab on holidays or when her children came to visit.

That is, when she wore a jilbab. Sometimes she chose not to.

*

Aisha pulls into the parking lot of Q&L Coffee fashionably late, at 7:40 p.m.

As she parks she glances around, wondering if she’ll see Fajar lounging at a table, smoking, scrutinizing her. Instead, a young couple rushes by, almost elbowing her into the gutter. Aisha prepares to snap at them then notices the girl’s headscarf: it is not crimson, but it is decorated with a leopard skin pattern of black spots. She stares at their retreating backs, noticing how close they walk, a thin inch apart, with such comfortable familiarity that they must touch when no one else is around.

She remembers the girl’s face, pouty, a little defiant, certainly in love. What if Aisha had worn the crimson leopard-print headscarf? She has a vision of herself in that jilbab, strutting into the café, a different person, another future waiting for her. Some part of Aisha will always be wondering what it would be like to sport a provocative jilbab, even to let her hair free, just as she knows Putri will always be questioning, in the attic of her heart, if it is her God-given duty to happily wear a jilbab.

Aisha shakes the image away. I am who I am, she thinks. She takes out a pocket mirror, adjusts the black jilbab, and reapplies her lipstick.

She has made her statement. She is ready to be seen. She walks into the café.

Photo: David Stanley

“I WASN’T HUMAN,” Joseph recalled. “I had no fat at all, no muscles, just skin. My hair was falling out. My eyes were sunken in. Looking in the mirror, I asked myself, ‘Is this me?’”

Joseph (a pseudonym this defector has adopted for protection) left North Korea nearly three years ago – something which, up until the last decade, very few people did. With North Korea’s weakening economy, mid-1990s famine, and easing of border controls with China, there are now some 23,000 defectors living in South Korea. Many experience forced labor, starvation, human trafficking, sexual assault, and other abuses in their journeys to get to the South.

Upon their arrival in South Korea, where they are considered as citizens, defectors continue to face enormous challenges. On average, they tend to be physically smaller, less educated, and less healthy than South Koreans. They experience language and cultural differences, face discrimination and stereotyping, and struggle to find employment in a competitive, capitalist society.

Despite government programs and a growing number of organizations that provide support to defectors, many are discouraged to discover the small extent to which most South Koreans seem to care.

*

In the hip Hongdae neighborhood of Seoul, Joseph opened the door to his office in a drab anonymous building, where he works as a volunteer for the Young Defectors’ Alliance for North Korean Human Rights. He was thin with an earnest face, wearing pressed black slacks and a white button-down shirt. Clutching his stomach from a bout of mild indigestion, he apologized for his illness and offered me a seat.

From a young age, Joseph had a special talent for fixing televisions and radios. Since he wasn’t able to attend school, he apprenticed with his friends who fixed electronics to learn enough of the basics to make a living. One day while making some repairs, he stumbled upon a strange voice.

Despite the fact that North Korea fixes the channels for all televisions and radios to receive only government broadcasts, Joseph had happened to pick up a signal from KBS radio in South Korea.

Listening to South Korean radio is considered a grave offense in North Korea – a crime worse than murder. Getting caught means facing punishment for three generations: not only endangering yourself, but also your parents and your children. Though Joseph realized the seriousness of the situation, he was immensely allured by the South Korean announcer’s voice.

“The voice was too attractive not to hear. Why? Have you ever heard a North Korean announcer? Their accents are very strong, so harsh, as if they would hit you if you were to dare to even slightly touch them. Compared to that, this voice was so nice and gentle, so inviting and sweet, like it was melting my flesh. I fell in love with her voice. I realized there is another world where people use that sweet voice—and that completely shocked me.”

Hearing that voice made Joseph question why Kim Jong Il had kept him from knowing this different world. He continued listening to South Korean radio for the next two years.

“It completely changed my thoughts,” he says. “I learned the truth through the radio.”

When Joseph became a listener in 2000, he was just a young soldier positioned at the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) separating North and South Korea. He was only seventeen years old – the standard age for joining the North Korean army – and weighed 41 kilograms; a year and a half year later, his weight had dropped to 31 kilograms, or 68 pounds.

In 2003, Joseph made his first escape into China. Though only 198 kilometers lie between the capitals of Pyongyang and Seoul, the journey of a defector is a circuitous one. The most common route involves escaping to China before crossing to other countries to locate a South Korean embassy or consulate. Defectors often make their first escape into China by crossing the Yalu or Tumen Rivers. North Korean border guards are instructed to shoot anyone trying to pass, but many accept bribes and allow people to wade through or walk across frozen waters.

Joseph crossed at Musan, a county in the central North Hamgyong province that borders China across the Tumen River. North Hamgyong is one of the poorest areas in North Korea and one of the most prone to famine; it is the region from which most defectors come.

Just seven days later, Joseph was caught by Chinese police officials.

Citing a bilateral repatriation agreement with North Korea from 1986, China claims it is obligated to return all border crossers. As a formal ally of North Korea, China seeks to avoid straining its relations with the regime or encouraging a situation in which a mass increase of defectors destabilizes the region. This means that defectors live in constant fear of being found and sent back. North Koreans in China live in danger of being discovered not only by the Chinese authorities, but by anyone who might turn them in as undocumented immigrants in exchange for a monetary reward.

Defectors suffer severe consequences upon their return, from sentencing at prison camps to death by firing squad. North Korean authorities interrogate defectors for their crimes and motives for defecting, and are particularly brutal toward those suspected of coming into contact with South Koreans, religious groups, or other foreigners.

When Joseph was repatriated to North Korea, he was ordered to return to Shinuiju, his hometown on the west coast of North Korea, where he was to face a second investigation. The train Joseph boarded en route to Shinuiju was in poor condition, operating without any glass in its windows. Guarded by North Korean officials, Joseph waited as the train began to depart, thinking of how he could time his escape. If he jumped from the window at that moment, the train would be moving too slowly and the officials would easily catch him. But if he waited too long, the train would be moving too quickly for him to survive.

Finally Joseph jumped. Moments later, the train stopped suddenly, in one of the regular electricity shortages that result from North Korea’s poor infrastructure. Though he tried his best to run away, he had so little energy and muscle that he couldn’t get very far. His voice lowering, Joseph describes how the North Korean officials caught him and beat him. Holding him against the train rail, they stomped on his knees, forcing them to fold backwards until he heard the cracking sound of his leg breaking.

After his interrogation in Shinuiju, he was taken to a political prison camp.

“I can’t even say what I endured [at the prison] was painful because the women endured more pain than me. There are certain things I saw them do to women that I can’t even talk about because it’s too shameful,” Joseph says.

He remembers hearing about one woman in particular who had served in the North Korean navy and had been regarded as a loyal party member. When her term was finished, she struggled to feed her family. She decided to cross into China, where she was sold and raped, and ended up living with a South Korean man. She was pregnant with his child when she was repatriated to North Korea.

“North Korea talks about ‘Korean nation’ and reunification, but if you are impregnated by a South Korean,” says Joseph, “you are considered a political prisoner.” The officers waited until the woman’s pregnancy had reached its eighth month, then tied her arms and legs down on a table to perform an “abortion.” One of the men introduced himself as a doctor. Without giving the woman any anesthesia, he thrust his bare hands into the woman’s vagina and yanked the baby from her uterus.

“They did this because they considered the woman and her child to be traitors of the country. When they did it, the baby was alive,” Joseph says, quietly. The woman pleaded for the doctor to spare her crying baby, but he only tossed it to the military dogs. Watching her baby get torn into pieces, the mother passed out, laying still while bleeding. The guards took her for dead and brought her to a pile of cadavers.

Thankfully, she was still alive and managed to escape again crossing the Tumen River. In China, a kind Joseonjok man, or Chinese person of Korean descent, helped her until she recovered and came to South Korea, where she lives today. She has given numerous testimonies to the U.S. Department of State and international human rights organizations, which arranged for her to receive an experimental surgery to repair her uterus. She gave birth to a healthy daughter last year.

At the prison camp, Joseph tried to kill himself. When he failed, he considered his three options: being shot to death, fleeing, or attempting suicide again. The only way for him to possibly live, Joseph realized, was to escape from the camp. After about six months of imprisonment, he fled North Korea for a second time in June of 2003.

In the following two years, Joseph was caught again by Chinese border agents, deported to North Korea, and once more, escaped.

“I looked so small and so weak that they didn’t keep a close watch on me. They didn’t think I would have a chance to escape, and that’s why I was able to,” Joseph explains. There were so many people where Joseph was imprisoned that the guards ran out of handcuffs and started tying the weaker men and women using shoelaces.

When he defected to China for his third time, Joseph immediately set his sights on getting to Vietnam, in order to go from there to South Korea, where he would be considered a citizen.

The defectors who choose to leave China often use what’s referred to as the “underground railroad,” a loose connection of individuals who guide them to other countries where they can apply for political asylum. The underground railroad generally has two main routes from China: over the Mongolian border; or passing through Cambodia, Vietnam, Laos, or Burma to Thailand.

The paths change constantly to avoid detection, but the most preferred route goes through either Burma or Laos, and crosses the Mekong River to end in the Chiang Saen district, located in Thailand’s northernmost province of Chiang Rai. Although Thailand has intensified measures to prevent the illegal entry of North Koreans, it does not repatriate them for humanitarian reasons. Instead, defectors are sent to overcrowded refugee detention centers while their cases are processed by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees in Bangkok. Due to the sheer numbers of people, the process usually takes approximately seven to eight months, but can take up to three years.

Some defectors are guided in their escape by South Korean religious groups, while others pledge to pay local brokers anywhere from $2,500 to $15,000 USD once in South Korea. These brokers are usually Chinese or Joseonjok who are familiar with navigating the border areas.

The journey is difficult and dangerous, involving hikes through minefields, mountains, and jungle, bumpy bus rides on back roads, scattered police checkpoints, and random crackdowns at rail stations and aboard trains.

In July of 2005, Joseph escaped by traveling south through China and crossing the river to Vietnam. In Hanoi, Joseph was stopped by a security guard at the entrance of the building where the South Korean embassy was located. Upon questioning, he claimed he was a South Korean teenager who had been traveling with his father and had lost him in Hanoi. Because his father had all of his documents, he explained, he would need help from the embassy in order to return to home. The guard let him into the South Korean embassy located on the eighth floor. There, he revealed himself as a North Korean refugee to a South Korean official and pleaded for asylum.

Little to Joseph’s knowledge, a new round of six-party talks had begun that same month between South Korea, North Korea, the U.S., China, Russia, and Japan. In addition, border controls in Vietnam had grown significantly tighter since the year before, when the Vietnamese government jeopardized its relationship with the DPRK by permitting 468 defectors to fly to South Korea. This combination of factors made the South Korean government less willing to compromise in its dialogue with North Korea. “South Korea is not as good of a country as you think,” the official told Joseph. “If you speak Chinese, go live in China or return to North Korea.” Then he turned Joseph over to the Vietnamese police for arrest.

About a week after his capture, Joseph was deported back to China. After Hanoi, Joseph says, “My hope vanished completely.” Feeling resentment and hatred towards South Korea, Joseph decided to stay in the southern part of China, where he spent the next two years living in poor conditions, and struggling to learn the language. Although China’s sizable Joseonjok community of over one million citizens of Korean descent makes it easier for defectors to blend in, they face the constant threat of being caught by the Chinese police or North Korean agents.

The number of defectors hiding in China is estimated at anywhere from 10,000 (the official Chinese estimate) to 300,000 or more. The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees believes that at least some or all of the defector population in China is wrongly repatriated and should be granted refugee status under international law with certain rights, resources, and protection. According to the UNHCR, even if North Koreans were not refugees when they crossed the border, the fear of persecution upon their return qualifies them as such. But per international law, the right to identify a refugee’s status and to protect refugees belongs to the territorial country, and the Chinese government considers all North Korean defectors not as refugees, but as illegal “economic migrants” who cross the border for economic reasons.

Consequently, North Korean defectors in China are ineligible to seek aid from the UNHCR. The Chinese government severely restricts the UNHCR’s activities —refusing UNHCR representatives entry in northeast China where many defectors and Joseonjok reside, and guarding foreign consulates and the UNHCR office in Beijing to prevent North Koreans attempting to seek asylum. Intended to be nonpolitical and strictly humanitarian, the UNHCR is not mandated to politically intervene.

Joseph describes his time in China as “living in fear like an animal.” Once in China, defectors find work and shelter through relatives, activists, or strangers, but must move continually to avoid being detected by authorities. During this period, Joseph eventually became a Christian, and through his religion, found himself overcoming the misconceptions he had once held of South Korean people as godless.

Choosing to believe there was a purpose behind everything he had endured, he decided it was his mission to help others like him. With that in mind, Joseph resolved once more to get to South Korea.

This time, he escaped to Russia, jumping a barbed wire fence marking the high-security zone where the Russian, Chinese, and North Korean borders meet at the Tumen River. It is estimated that there are some 40,000 North Koreans employed in the far eastern area of Russia, where laborers were dispatched as prisoners to generate hard currency and help pay off Pyongyang’s debt to Moscow after the two countries struck a deal in 1967. Now, only those North Koreans in good government standing are allowed to come to Russia and work for private logging companies.

By some accounts, 50 percent of a worker’s salary goes to the North Korean government and 35 percent to certain Russian and North Korean companies. Working as loggers, the North Koreans serve as cheap labor for the Russian timber industry. They toil for 15-hour days, cutting huge amounts of timber and living in either humid or freezing forest conditions, isolated from the local people. Camp guards subject them to frequent beatings and sentence those who criticize the North Korean government to solitary confinement cells for “ideological crimes.” An estimated 10,000 workers have fled their logging sites and live in hiding. The fear of being returned to their work site, or worse, to North Korea, prevents many from contacting the Russian authorities.

Although Russia is generally unwilling to grant refugee status to anyone from outside the former Soviet Union, it has adopted a policy of tolerating North Korean defectors on its territory. But its officials have not always abided by this—while some grant asylum to defectors after they complete a prison sentence for charges of illegal entry, others deport them.

In Russia, Joseph planned to get stamped by the UNHCR, but while seeking refuge at a Korean church, he was arrested by the Russian authorities. He spent the next 100 days in prison, which was directly across from the North Korean embassy. The North Korean government claimed him as its citizen, and accused him of two crimes: believing in God and escaping from the army, offenses akin to treason.

As he waited for the verdict, Joseph was bewildered to find himself surrounded by bread and television sets.

“Even when North Korean people don’t go to jail, they don’t have anything to eat. In Russian jail, there is so much bread that the prisoners don’t even eat it. They give food to pigeons, throw it away in the trash, flush it down the toilet…I was crying on the inside, just watching it,” he says.

From his prison cell, Joseph watched crowds of South Koreans on television, shouting and demonstrating in the street. It was 2008, and President Lee Myung Bak’s deal to resume importing U.S. beef had led to a series of the country’s biggest anti-government protests in 20 years. Joseph wondered how it was possible that while he was risking his life just to enter the country, its citizens were worked up over mad cow disease.

“I couldn’t believe what was happening in South Korea. Maybe it’s beautiful to do this [in a] democracy to better the world, but I really couldn’t understand. They have meat, but they don’t want to eat it? And they demonstrated because they don’t want to eat it?”

“But if you cross the DMZ, there are tons of people starving to death. North Koreans really want to eat, but they can’t demonstrate. You try to escape because you want to have freedom of speech, freedom to say what you feel, but that’s a crime in North Korea. It’s two different worlds on either side of the 38th parallel.”

About three months later, Joseph was released from prison and granted amnesty by the UNHCR in Russia, under protection of the South Korean embassy. He finally succeeded in obtaining official refugee status and was entered into the international registry of refugees. After his release in Moscow, he discovered that South Korean NGOs, civic groups, lawyers, and Christians had been working on his behalf.

“I realized democracy is a really good thing because a lot of people made petitions to the government for one person—just me,” he reflects. “You can’t ever imagine that in North Korea.“

At the end of October 2008, more than five years after his first escape, Joseph set foot in South Korea.

*

Young Hee rose to the podium at the University of Seoul, wearing a navy blazer top over a skirt and sneakers. A pretty girl with long bangs and an ivory face, she smiled calmly before addressing the audience that had gathered for the Young North Korean Defectors Forum.

Growing up in North Korea, Young Hee was sometimes happy, such as at birthday parties or family gatherings to celebrate traditional holidays.

“But we had so much limited freedom,” she says. She remembers 1996 as being the most difficult period, saying, “Back then, there was no running water, so every day we would get water from the river. There was no electricity so we were always living in darkness. The markets were full of beggar children just wandering around and so many of them lying down in the street. You may have seen pictures and documentaries of this – it’s not part of some public relations campaign, it’s real. Back then, I thought [such starvation] was natural and didn’t even question it, just like how I thought Kim Jong Il was God. When I used to see [children] in the street, I used to wonder why they were lying there. I didn’t realize they were dead from starvation.”

Young Hee first left North Korea with her mother when she was ten years old. The only reason she agreed to go, she says, is because she “really wanted to eat bananas,” a rare fruit in North Korea.

“My mom said if I went to China, I could eat a lot of bananas, and I was hungry, so I followed her.”

Young Hee and her mother crossed the border into China, leaving her father and younger sibling behind. Because men are used for manual labor in North Korea, it is much harder for them to leave undetected. Nearly 80% of North Koreans who flee are women. Eight or nine of every ten of these women are then sold by trafficking gangs who approach women along the border areas to lure them with promises of finding food, shelter, and jobs in China. North Korean women are not technically considered victims of trafficking, however, because they cross the border voluntarily.

In China, the women are lined up against a wall during the night to be assessed, picked, and bought. Many of the slave brokers are men, former North Korean refugees who have settled in South Korea but face job discrimination and struggle financially. Depending on their age and appearance, the women are sold for between $260 USD and $2,600 USD; the going rate for a 25 year-old is approximately $720 USD. Their children, meanwhile, are usually sent to orphanages.

It is when the brokers bring the women to a buyer or confine them in an apartment that most of them realize they have been deceived into forced marriages. China’s one-child policy and preference for boys, combined with the exodus of Chinese women to urban regions, has created a shortage of women in rural areas and strong incentives to buy North Korean wives. The bachelors tend to be Chinese or ethnic Korean-Chinese in their forties or fifties, who seek someone to care for their aging parents or give them children. Many live in poverty or with a disability, making them undesirable candidates as husbands to Chinese women.

It is common for women to be trafficked in criminal circles, being sold to one farmer, raped, and then swapped to another farmer as prostitutes or brides in exchange for younger girls. Other women work their promised jobs in the Chinese “tech” industry, which ends up meaning stripping for webcasts or acting as sex slaves in brothels or karaoke bars. The women who are forced into prostitution face even more risks than those forced into marriages: if caught, they face far more severe punishment back home. Some brokers further take advantage of the women’s vulnerability by sexually harassing or raping them and threatening arrest.

Young Hee’s mother was sold to a Chinese man, so they went to live with him in a village located deep in the mountains.

“We tried to escape, but it was impossible,” Young Hee recalls. “It was a very secret area, and all the villagers kept a close eye on us.”

When the Chinese police arrested her and her mother two years later, Young Hee says, “We literally thanked them because they got us out of that village.”

Many men take advantage of their wives’ illegal status by physically and sexually abusing them, and women are helpless to go to the authorities because they fear deportation. Women who have plans to return to North Korea to provide their family with money are distraught to discover they are essentially trapped. To prevent the “bride” from fleeing or slipping back to North Korea, the husband’s relatives take turns watching her, or the women are locked up, chained, or stripped of their clothing.

When Young Hee and her mother were captured by the Chinese police, they were repatriated and imprisoned in the city of Shinuiju in February of 2000, just months before the first inter-Korean summit between Kim Jong Il and South Korean President Kim Dae Jung, which was scheduled to take place in June.

North Korea was busy preparing for the historic North-South meeting. “Kim Jong Il was in such a good mood that all of the defectors [in our area] were released,” Young Hee chuckles.

When Young Hee and her mother left the prison, they headed to their hometown in Hoeryong, located in the far north of North Korea. The journey from Shinuiju normally would have taken a single day, but because the train kept breaking down, the journey lasted a week. Young Hee says, “We had no money. We had nothing to eat. We literally didn’t eat anything—for seven days on the train. After seven days, I was so hungry that for the first time, I nearly could have grabbed and eaten humans in front of me.”

After getting to Hoeryong, they found that Young Hee’s father had remarried and had another child. Young Hee and her mother escaped to China again one week later. They lived there for the next six years, during which they were repatriated another three times: in 2002, 2003, and 2005. While each time, Young Hee’s mother was subject to severe forced labor, Young Hee suffered much less because she was a minor.

There’s another reason why Young Hee was able to escape harsh punishment, she says. Starting around 2001, there were too many people to imprison, so the North Korean government began giving leniency to those who had avoided interacting with South Koreans and Christians, and to those who had escaped out of hunger. To free up space at the prison camps, defectors were sentenced for shorter periods of one or two months before being released to their hometowns.

As Young Hee got older, she began noticing differences between life in China and North Korea.

“The size of the corn in China is so big, even though technically it comes from the same earth or ground across the border. Geographically it’s so close, but the lifestyle is so different. And then on this side of the border, everyone is always hungry. People are living only to eat. In the morning, you eat wondering when the next time you eat will be—those are the kinds of things you think about. But in China, you live so freely. People are living because there is another reason to live. This is what I was comparing.”

Although Young Hee had some relatives in China, they never offered help, leaving her mother little choice but to marry again each time they crossed the border.

“Yeah, my mom did marry quite a lot,” Young Hee laughs quietly.

Consensual marriage of North Korean women to men in China has become increasingly more common, with women consenting to be sold as brides or agreeing to arranged marriages by brokers to avoid repatriation or the risks of living as a single undocumented migrant. Many marriages, however, fall in the middle of the spectrum between forced and consensual. In these cases, marriage is a means of survival, providing basic needs like food, shelter, some means of security and protection and, in some cases, emotional attachment or contentment.

Marriages with undocumented North Korean women, however, are not legally binding, and if the wives are caught, they face deportation. Any children resulting from these marriages are also considered illegal residents, ineligible to receive health care or schooling. Only if the mother is caught without proper documentation and repatriated back to North Korea can her children obtain Chinese citizenship. In such cases, fathers are often unable or unwilling to accept the responsibility, leaving the children homeless and stateless.

Thanks to special arrangements made by the man still married to her mother – or “that father” as Young Hee refers to him – she was able to start going to school in China when she was 12 years old. Young Hee attended school until 2006, the year when she and her mother made plans to leave for South Korea.

But Young Hee didn’t want to go. Not only would the trip would be life-threatening, but she also felt negatively about South Korea.

“In North Korea, from when we are young, we are raised to believe that South Korea is the colony of America,” she explains. “The Hallyu [the South Korean pop culture wave] was happening while I was in China, so I knew about Rain and Lee Hyori and other pop stars, but my impressions were so strong that I still didn’t really want to go.”

In the end, what convinced Young Hee was her dream to go to college – an aspiration that would be nearly unattainable with her illegal status.

“In China, I can’t get citizenship until the day I die,” she says. If she went to South Korea, her mother promised, she could become a legal citizen and attend university. For Young Hee, this was a risk worth taking.

To get to South Korea, Young Hee and her mother took the Mongolian route by crossing the Chinese border into Mongolia and passing through the Gobi Desert. Although Mongolia’s policy is not to repatriate North Koreans, the journey to get there is a risky one.

The trek through the desert is grueling, the environment is harsh and disorienting, and in order to survive, refugees must be found and arrested by Mongolian border police, who turn defectors over to be deported to South Korea.

“There were still people trying to cross [the desert], dying there if they weren’t found by the army,” Young Hee says, remembering those she encountered along her path.

“It was February then. It was freezing, and the wind was blowing so hard,” Young Hee recalls. “Since it was winter, there was nothing around, no trees. So you can’t get a sense of direction or figure out where you’re going. You go one way, then end up retracing your steps and realize you’re back on the same path.”

After wandering the desert for fourteen hours, Young Hee and her mother were finally rescued and brought to the South Korean embassy in Mongolia’s capital, Ulaanbaatar.

Young Hee is now a student at Seoul’s Yonsei University, one of the top three most prestigious academic institutions in South Korea.

“I’m so happy,” she says.

But she can’t forget the South Korean film Crossing, which depicts the true stories of defectors who crossed into China before passing through the Mongolian desert.

“I cried so much watching it,” Young Hee says, thinking back to the number of her escapes while growing up. “Once I knew what freedom was, I started feeling like even if I were to get caught ten times, I would still return ten more times to China. I believe that is why North Koreans keep escaping even if they are punished for it. It is because of freedom.”

*

Handsome with a tanned, broad face, Gwang Cheol looked preppy in his khaki pants, white v-neck tee, and light blue blazer as he greeted a group of volunteers at a language academy in Shinchon, Seoul.

Gwang Cheol saw his first public execution when he was just 14 years old, on a mandatory school field trip. Education in North Korea is free and compulsory from age four to fifteen. There were other students younger than him on the field trip, he recalls. He watched four soldiers be shot to death, three bullets each. It was “the cruelest thing.” He understood the regime’s message immediately, thinking, “I should never do anything the country doesn’t want me to do.”

Viewing public executions, Gwang Cheol says, is a part of North Korea’s education system, particularly for teenagers who are beginning to build their identity.

“We learn that other cultures exist because we learn about geography. But documents show us how capitalism makes you so poor and live in devastation.” Other defectors have testified to being frequently shown pictures of starving people in Africa as evidence that the rest of the world suffers more than North Korea.

Hunger, however, was what ultimately drove Gwang Cheol to first escape in 1999 at age 17.

“Everyone was trying to escape because of the famine,” he says. “I had a fantasy of China. I thought life was good, that you can earn a lot of money there.” Gwang Cheol lived close to the border, making it easier for him to escape, but his experience in crossing was still “really hard.” He was astonished by the abundance of wealth he encountered on the other side.

“But the big shock was about South Korea,” he goes on. Gwang Cheol was disappointed to discover his education had been based on misinformation, and surprised to learn that South Korea was so economically prosperous. “North Korea doesn’t even refer to South Korea as a country,” he says. “I only knew it as a colony of America.”

North Koreans are educated to believed that the famine will end once reunification happens, Gwang Cheol says, but that the two countries should be unified under the rule of Kim Jong Il.

In China, Gwang Cheol realized he would have to live in hiding. Because male defectors usually find work outdoors in farming or construction, they are more likely to be deported than women.

“They think of North Korean women as money,” Gwang Cheol says, recounting a story about a woman he knew who had married an ethnic Korean. She’d been kidnapped and sold by a neighbor while the husband was out of town.

Fearful of being found, without any rights or identification, Gwang Cheol realized he needed to get to South Korea. He attempted to approach the South Korean embassies in China, but this only led to his capture by the Chinese police, who arrested him and put him on a flight to North Korea. Although Gwang Cheol was terrified of what awaited him when he landed, he was elated to board an airplane for the first time.

“It was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity,” he recalls, acknowledging the cruel irony of the moment. “I didn’t know if I was going to die, but I was excited to take a plane. I saved all the bread I was given on the flight, but it was taken from me as soon as I got off the plane….I had never been to Pyongyang. It was my childhood dream because it’s not a place where just anyone can go.”

Back in North Korea, Gwang Cheol faced interrogation about his activities in China, and denied having any South Korean or Christian ideologies. He was taken to a political prison camp to perform hard labor and undergo reeducation. Given a single handful of corn to survive on each day, Gwang Cheol was so hungry that he started to go blind.

“I woke up one day, and couldn’t see for 10 minutes. I would wake up and try to wake up my friends, but they wouldn’t wake up.”

Gwang Cheol saw many people die from malnutrition in the camps. He says, “In burials in North Korea, they just dump the body in soil as if it’s nothing.”

At the camp, Gwang Cheol also witnessed the cruelty imposed on the female prisoners, particularly those found to be impregnated by Chinese men. After the baby is born, the mother is humiliated, and then separated from her child. Even pregnant women, he says, are forced to do hard labor and malnutrition causes many to miscarry.

Since Gwang Cheol was a teenager, he was imprisoned for a period of four months. (The average sentencing term in North Korea can range from six months to three years for first-time offenders.) After he was released, he didn’t believe he would dare go back to China. But returning to life in North Korea was frustrating. It was painful for him to listen to others who hadn’t experienced what he had, and it was impossible to intervene:

“Kim Il Sung and his son, being the greatest people, are the main topics of conversation in [North] Korea, but now I know they’re the ones who made us suffer. The hardest thing is that I wanted to tell [others] the truth, but if I did, I would be killed.”

Once he finished his sentence in prison, Gwang Cheol lived in North Korea for six months before making a second attempt to escape back to China. With the help of a missionary, he escaped through the Mongolian route and came to South Korea in 2002.

One year later, in 2003, the United Nations got involved for the first time: it adopted a resolution urging North Korea to improve its human rights record. Gwang Cheol served as a witness, testifying before a committee of U.N. delegates.

“I really felt grateful,” he recalls. “They didn’t know many details about the situation, but because of my story, they voted for us.”

He continues, “That was my first time to be curious about what human rights is. I had never been educated or told about it, so I looked up ‘universal declaration of human rights’ on the Internet. There were 30 clauses. I read them all, and I was shocked—none of them were fulfilled in North Korea. That was when I realized how bad it is there. I’m living in South Korea where human rights are respected, but my friends and family are still in North Korea. What can I do? Spread the truth to South Koreans.”

When Gwang Cheol started university in 2004, he began speaking to his friends to raise awareness.

“While I was in school, I studied a lot,” he says. “But I still thought I had to spread the truth about North Korean people.” Now a 29-year-old living in Seoul, Gwang Cheol works for the Network for North Korean Democracy and Human Rights, an NGO promoting human rights and democracy in the DPRK.

For many defectors, their assimilation into South Korean society accompanies a passionate fight to raise awareness about human rights and to bring change to the North Korean regime. Young Hee and Joseph also volunteer as activists at the Young Defectors’ Alliance for North Korean Human Rights, an organization that encourages defector students to become bridges between South and North Korea through their involvement in issues related to DPRK human rights and democracy.

“We want to be intellectuals in South Korea so that we can be strong and have power here,” says Young Hee, who is majoring in political science and policy. “That way, we can do something for North Korea.”

As the group’s Secretary-General, Young Hee helps to organize educational programs such as seminars for defectors to learn about North Korean history, as well as bicycle tours for South Korean and defector college students to ride to Imjingak, a town near the DMZ border. Programs like these are a small but concrete step towards facilitating discourse about the prospect of North-South reunification.

Government polls show that 56% of South Koreans believe unification is essential, compared to the more than 80% in the 1990s. In a survey conducted this year by Seoul National University’s Institute for Peace and Unification Studies, 59% of South Koreans in their twenties did not believe that unification was necessary.

Perhaps surprisingly, neither does Young Hee—at least, for now.

“I don’t want a radical reunification,” she says. “When the economic status between the two countries is similar, when North Korea starts changing and accepting foreign investment—that’s when we can be unified. North Korea must change their system, so for now, we’re trying to get South Korean university students interested. If North Korean students can meet with South Korean students, that’s another form of unification.”

Joseph serves as the group’s Communications Director, spearheading outreach and promotional activities to put on street campaigns, photography exhibits, academic seminars, and student retreats.

“We created the group to speak for ourselves, to let people know the truth about North Korea,” he says. It’s often a challenging and frustrating task. When he speaks about his experiences to South Koreans, he tells them life is so difficult in North Korea that people are starving to death with no rice to eat.

“Some [South] Korean people don’t understand or believe me,” Joseph says. “They say, ‘If you don’t have any rice to eat, why don’t you eat ramen?’ I can’t even say a word afterwards. I’m just left speechless.”

Since the Young Defectors’ Alliance for North Korean Human Rights is entirely volunteer-run by defector university students, members struggle with dividing their time and resources. But everyone’s conviction to liberate North Korean people has kept the group going through adversity, Joseph says.

“Some people say, ‘Why are you doing this? It doesn’t make you any money, it’s not worthwhile, and it doesn’t show any immediate reward.’ But we firmly believe in what we’re doing. Our parents and families are there. Twenty-three million people live there and suffer.”

A student at the Hankuk University of Foreign Studies, Joseph is majoring in Media & Information, an area he sees as having great power and potential to liberate others.

“Personally I’ve come to believe that rice and bread are not the only things North Koreans need now. I absolutely believe in giving food aid to North Korea; my father and mother live there, so why would I oppose that? But you can’t give them freedom with rice and bread.”

That’s why he believes taking a harder political stance is necessary.

“The administrations of [former presidents] Kim Dae Jung and Roh Moo Hyun supported North Korea a lot. I admit their actions [in taking a reconciliatory approach to North Korea] were humanitarian,” he says. “But that’s the period when the greatest number of people died in North Korea. So where did all the rice go? Not only South Korea, but also internationally, a lot of countries gave food aid to North Korea. But I learned about this only after I came to South Korea and read about it. How is it that with all of the rice the countries gave to North Korea, still the greatest number of people died? How are we supposed to understand this?”

North Koreans are dying not only from lack of food, but also primarily from lack of news, Joseph says. “They’re hungry for outside information. If you don’t have a mirror, you can never see if you are okay. North Koreans don’t have a mirror for themselves.”

Joseph goes on to describe the bags of food aid typically labeled with symbols from the U.N., the U.S.A., and South Korea.

“In the past, the government tried to hide those labels from people. But now, they don’t try to hide them anymore; they openly show the ‘U.S.A.’ signs on the rice pack. In North Korea, the biggest celebrations are the birthdays of Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il—that’s when they distribute the rice to the people.”

He begins to speak quickly.

“But do you know what the government says when they distribute the rice? They say, ‘You have to thank Kim Jong Il. Look at how excellent Kim Jong Il is in diplomacy- that’s why we can get this rice from the U.S.A. and the U.N. Kim Jong Il is so great that a lot of other countries are trying to bribe him.’ And North Koreans genuinely believe that. They’re clapping, thanking Kim Jong Il, and tears are falling down their faces, they’re so grateful.”

“Why do you think that is? It’s not because of the rice. It’s because the government in North Korea blocks their ears and shuts their mouths. When babies are born, the first things they see inside their house are the portraits of Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il hanging on the wall. The first words you learn are, ‘Thank you, Kim Il Sung’ and ‘Thank you, Kim Jong Il,’ instead of ‘mother’ and ‘father.’ The first songs you learn are songs about Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il.”

The successor of North Korea’s current leader is expected to be his son, Kim Jung Eun. “They’ve heard about Kim Jung Eun, but they don’t care about him at all,” Young Hee says, relaying news from a relative who’d recently arrived in South Korea. “They’re too concerned with trying to survive in their daily life to care about politics. Even if Kim Jong Il were to make an announcement that Kim Jung Eun is ruling the country, I’d guess that people would never question it.”

Through connections in China, Gwang Cheol is occasionally able to communicate with relatives living near the North Korean border. When he spoke with an aunt, though, she only tried to reeducate him, telling him, “You can’t live in Seoul.” Although Gwang Cheol’s friends try to contact his parents, they won’t listen to their son’s pleas to make the journey.

“Because they can’t see it for themselves,” he says, “North Koreans can’t be convinced.”

Joseph explains why.

“That’s the only world we know. We don’t even know what’s in our minds. We are so small living in our own small world; we only see the sky from where we are standing. If you are standing there a long time, you’ll never try to escape. That’s why they need us. They need us to help them to realize where they are, and to rescue them. We have to help them know the truth.”

*

Folding a polka-dotted umbrella as she gets on the bus, Jung Ah wears skinny jeans and a bright yellow windbreaker. During the ride through her neighborhood, she points out the Seventh-Day Adventist church she attends.

“It’s so hard to meet men there,” she says; it’s overrun by single women seeking suitable husbands. “Maybe you’ll meet someone nice on your trip,” I offer. She nods, looking unconvinced. On the phone, she said she’d be leaving for my hometown, San Diego, in less than a week. I give her a little travel bag, filled with candy, luggage tags, a sleeping mask, and travel-size containers for lotion and makeup. It looks juvenile, sitting on her lap. She smiles when I compliment her high heels, studded with sparkly rhinestones.

We get off at our stop and enter a room closed off by a heavy wooden sliding panel, settling on two floor cushions from a pile stacked near the wall.

“I never meant to escape from North Korea,” Jung Ah begins.

Jung Ah has many fond memories of living with her parents as an only child in Pyongan, a historic province in North Korea that has since been divided into North Pyongan, South Pyongan, and Pyongyang, the country’s capital. There, Jung Ah says, she lived comfortably growing up and describes her childhood as a happy one.

“I was trying to be number one in my school and be my class president. We were competitive there,” she says. “I had fun playing and studying with my friends. We tried out for the Arirang [Mass Games] festival. If you got selected, you got trained on a team, which was fun and meant you got to go to the national festival. We were not abundant and we did not know anything else. That world was it.”

As one of the country’s educated elite, Jung Ah was able to attend university. She studied North Korean literature, graduating when she was 22 years old to secure a job at the post office. She says things didn’t get too bad until after 1994, the year marking the death of Kim Il Sung.

Due to its declining economy and disastrous government policies, North Korea was already experiencing a chronic food shortage in the early 1990s, and it was devastated by massive floods and storms in 1995 and 1996. With widespread damage to crops, emergency grain reserves, and national infrastructure, the state stopped distributing rations to most people, which for many was their primary source of food.

It is estimated that as many as one million people died from starvation or diseases related to hunger during what is known now as “The Arduous March.” It is considered to be one of the worst famines of the twentieth century.

By 1997, food distribution in Pyongan had decreased by 50%. To supplement her family’s rations, Jung Ah began crossing the border into China and smuggling goods back to barter for food. On one of her trips, due to tight border surveillance by Chinese officials, she was denied entry back into North Korea. According to Jung Ah, many other North Koreans doing business in China have found themselves in similar situations.

Deaths peaked the year Jung Ah was denied reentry into North Korea, and the U.S. began shipping food aid through the U.N. World Food Programme. The fact that she lived in a relatively privileged segment of North Korean society may explain why Jung Ah does not speak of being very affected by the famine, and why she did not choose to defect.

“In Pyongan, at least in the first part of 1997, no one was starving to death,” she says. “I heard people started dying in the latter part of 1997, in 1998, 1999, and so on.

“For a while in China, I felt like I had committed treason,” Jung Ah says. She lived there for ten years, receiving some help from ethnic Korean-Chinese and moving every year to avoid being caught. To find defectors in hiding, the Chinese government conducts regular house-to-house searches in border villages such as Yanbian, home to the biggest community of ethnic Koreans in China.

When Jung Ah went to sleep, she always kept her essential belongings packed so that she could run away as soon as she heard a car approaching her house. But one evening, the Chinese authorities parked their car a good distance away and walked. This time, without the sound of a car engine to alert her, Jung Ah wasn’t quick enough to escape.

The officers arrested her and brought her to the police station, where they did a routine body search. A small bottle of rat poison dropped to the ground – something she always carried around with her so that she could kill herself if she was ever captured. Each year, she replaced the bottle to ensure its content was still potent. Upon questioning, she told them why: she couldn’t bear the thought of returning to North Korea to confess and endanger her mother and father, who would be severely punished on account of their daughter having fled. Like most defectors, she had also adopted a pseudonym and avoided having her picture taken, in order to protect her family members.

Since the last group of detainees had already been sent to North Korea, Jung Ah would have to be kept for several days.

One evening, the officers invited her to join them for dinner, knowing she would be returning to a country plagued by famine. Initially, she refused—she had no appetite knowing she was going to die.

Then she changed her mind, telling herself, “I may as well have one last meal.”

After dinner, the head officer brought Jung Ah to her prison cell located on the first floor of the facility, with a window left slightly ajar. He left her with a chain tied loosely from her leg to one post of the bed. Once he left, she lifted up one side of the bed to drag the chain out from underneath. That night, she escaped to another village. When she called the police station the next day to thank the head officer, he only warned her, “Don’t show up to our village for a while.” She discovered he was later prosecuted and imprisoned for the crime of having helped other North Korean defectors.

Having just evaded repatriation, she knew South Korea was her only hope.

“I was looking for freedom of life, and I heard the South Korean government was accepting North Koreans who escaped,” she says. She spent two years praying and figuring out the best escape route. Then, in 2006, with fake passport in hand, she headed to the airport in Dandong, the largest border city in China.

“China is the king of producing copies of the real thing, so my fake passport looked like a real one,” she says.

The problem was that Jung Ah’s passport stated her age as 41, when she was really only 31. In a rapid-fire series of questions, an airport inspector asked about her date of birth, hometown, destination, education level, and even her zodiac sign.

“The zodiac sign of the woman from the passport was the horse. I don’t know why or how I would have thought to have prepared for that question, but I can only thank God for that,” she says. She was able to slip through security and board her flight to South Korea.

Defectors who continue the journey to South Korea face an array of challenges upon their arrival. After landing in South Korea “very uptight and anxious,” Jung Ah spent her first two months at a government screening facility, where she received a health screening and was investigated by the National Intelligence Service, the Defense Security Command, and the Ministry of Unification. It is mandatory for all defectors to undergo this process, which is designed to gather any sensitive intelligence and weed out ethnic Korean-Chinese or spies posing as defectors.

The screening usually takes about two months, though it varies depending on the individual and the amount of space available at Hanawon. Hanawon is the government resettlement center where defectors undergo a three-month compulsory adjustment program. First established in 1999, it means “House of Unity” and is designed to ease defectors’ transition into South Korean society. Hanawon has expanded over the years to accommodate 750 people; a second Hanawon center is expected to be completed at the end of 2011 and hold a capacity for 500.

At Hanawon, defectors have access to health and counseling services, and learn how to use ATMs, browse the Internet, write resumes, and study subjects such as health, history, basic English, and personal finance. Jung Ah describes her time at Hanawon as “very difficult” and “stressful.” There were a lot of personality clashes between all of the people that led to a lot of fighting and alcohol abuse, she tells me.

“But when I left, I realized it made sense because everyone there had been through so much tragedy.”

Joseph remembers the attitude of one teacher he encountered at Hanawon. “The instructor indirectly suggested, ‘You could have stayed living in North Korea, and even in South Korea, we have our own difficulties and problems.’ I sensed I wasn’t welcome.” In general, he feels South Korea’s government does not welcome North Koreans.

Joseph is frank about problems with the changing nature and implementation of Hanawon’s educational programs, and the effects these changes have on the way in which defectors are integrated into South Korean society. Whenever the government changes, so does Hanawon’s policy scope and level of support. South Korea’s current conservative government, for example, tends to take a more supportive stance for defectors because of its strong opposition to North Korean policy. But in the past when the liberal progressive party ruled, the government’s desire to get along with Kim Jong Il prevented the country from actively supporting defectors who fled the North Korean government.

“So in terms of Hanawon’s education system, there’s been no consistent policy,” Joseph says. “There’s no real good system for how to lead and educate North Korean refugees to become good, adopted South Korean citizens.” To address this need, he sees potential for Hanawon to groom defectors into becoming a key resource for driving reunification efforts. “Right now, it doesn’t have that kind of system in place. All [the government] can do is provide living conditions and basic necessities,” he says.

After graduating from Hanawon, students receive a temporary monthly stipend for living costs, a subsidized apartment, and a four-year university scholarship. In the past, defectors received a lump resettlement sum of approximately $30,000 USD. The figure has decreased and fluctuated over the years; Joseph says the amount has since dropped to $6,000 USD. It is common for defectors to use the settlement money to pay brokers who helped them in their journey, or to defection specialists to guide family members from China, at prices starting at $2000 to $3,500, which rise when North Korea increases border security and surveillance. While the South Korean government claims the cut was meant to prevent exploitative broker practices, others say it was simply intended to discourage defections.

Adjusting to South Korea’s highly competitive, capitalist society poses a significant challenge for defectors.

“When North Korean people come here, their situation is 180 degrees different,” Joseph says. “The North Korean system is a planned economy. You work in a field or farm, but you don’t get the crops you raise. The government takes it and later distributes it.”

While jobs are allocated in North Korea, many defectors struggle to find employment without having the family relationships or alumni networks that many South Koreans rely upon. The Ministry of Unification, a branch of South Korea’s government that works on reunification efforts, reported in January 2011 that only 50% of defectors were employed, and more than 75% of these jobs were in unskilled manual labor—a figure that has remained largely unchanged over the past five years.

Although there are 30 regional Hana Centers scattered throughout South Korea that provide assistance with paperwork, job training, and employment to defectors after they graduate Hanawon, there is little detailed follow-up to evaluate the efficacy of most programs. Defectors need more structural support, Jung Ah asserts, when it comes to acculturating to their new country.

“I think [South Korea] should not feed us fish, but teach us to how to catch fish,” she says. “The government gives us money for six months, but instead of that, we need a job!”

Among the obstacles Jung Ah describes facing upon her arrival in South Korea, one of the most difficult was overcoming the difference between the two countries’ dialects. Following Kim Il-Sung’s Juche philosophy of self-reliance, North Korea adopted policies to purge foreign words and the use of Chinese characters, which show up in 60% to 70% of the standard Korean language.

Meanwhile, the South Korean language, Hangukmal, is peppered with a significant amount of English vocabulary – taxi, bus, shirt, banana, interview – words that aren’t just slang, but that are spelled out phonetically and printed into South Korean dictionaries. The differences in terminology have grown distinct enough that in 2004, North and South Korea began creating a joint dictionary. This project was suspended after the sinking of the Cheonan last year.

Jung Ah’s first goal was to learn Hangukmal to avoid being identified as North Korean, but it was tough with the little English she knew. When she started working as a company clerk, her first lesson came when her boss asked her to bring him his diary planner.

“I didn’t know what a ‘diary’ was, and I spent a lot of time in his office trying to figure it out,” Jung Ah recalls. “After he waited a while, he finally came in and pointed to the diary on his desk saying, ‘Is this not a diary?’ She pauses. “Even when I answered phones, I couldn’t understand what anyone was saying.”

Although the basic vocabulary and sentence structures of both languages have remained similar, they have distinct differences in tone and pronunciation. Gwang Cheol echoes Jung Ah’s struggle to learn the South Korean language and mask a North Korean accent.

“50% of it is different. The intonations are different,” he says. “Even on my way here, the taxi driver asked me where I’m from. I just lied and told him I’m from Gangwan because I can’t say I’m from North Korea.”

Although it’s been nearly ten years since he arrived in the South, Gwang Cheol admits he has still not adjusted. Transition into South Korean society can be intensely isolating, especially since defectors feel pressure to hide their identities to avoid prejudice and discrimination.

“There are glass walls that aren’t seen, but that are very present and limit our growth and prosperity,” Jung Ah says. “I know this man who had five different degrees, but because he was North Korean, he couldn’t get hired. That’s a huge problem. So in the end, for the last place he interviewed, he completely hid the fact that he was North Korean. He was hired the very next day.

“Young South Koreans say how difficult it is to get a job,” Jung Ah continues. “So if it’s hard for them, can you imagine how hard it is for us? I can’t even tell you how difficult it is.”

For this reason, after nearly seven years in the South, Jung Ah finds it is better to tell strangers that she is from China. When she first arrived in Seoul, she attended an English language center so that she would have more value in the workplace. Upon hearing her accent, her classmates guessed she was from Gyeongsang, a southern region of South Korea.

“When I told them I was from North Korea, the expression in their eyes changed. They were like, ‘So this is what a North Korean person looks like?’ I realized there would be lots of pain before becoming assimilated.”

Defectors have commonly been referred to by South Koreans as talbukja or “people who fled from the North.” Seen as derogatory, talbukja was replaced in 2005 by a new term: saeteomin, meaning “people of new land.” Jung Ah dislikes both terms because they imply North Koreans are people of a different race—contrary to Korean ethnic nationalism of “han minjok.”
She says, “Someday I’d like to be able to say naturally that I am from Pyongan. I hope that day comes soon.”

Defectors have an inferiority complex, Joseph says. “[South Koreans] treat North Korean refugees with indifference and a lack of empathy. They consider them as inferior in education and cultural background.”

While the first ripple of defectors came mainly from the North Korean elite, recent defectors tend to be younger, unskilled, and poor.

“People think that we were poor and hungry, so they look down on us,” says Jung Ah. South Koreans can view defectors as reliant on government handouts and therefore a drain on taxpayers, and some South Koreans believe they are North Korean spies merely posing as refugees. This societal stigma has led to cases in which some defectors willingly returned to the DPRK to escape their frustration and loneliness.

Shifting tensions with the North Korean regime and continued controversy about reunifying the peninsula further complicate how defectors are received in the South.

“A lot of North Korean defectors here are disappointed,” Joseph says. “We have hopes and fantasies before we come to South Korea. But the first impression we receive is a sense of coldness from South Koreans—that they have emotions against us, that they don’t want to be unified.”

Jung Ah agrees.

“It’s sad,” she says. “They say what happened to the North Koreans is unfortunate. But then they ask if reunification is really necessary. They think North Korea can improve its own economy; that they can live their lives there, and we can live our lives here.

“It’s an inevitable pain,” she says. “We’ve been separated for 60 years. Even for a family that is apart for a long time, it’s bound to be strange and strained. We are the sacrifice for the mistake made by the older generation. But I don’t know when this pain will end.”

She mentions a friend who works for Open Radio for North Korea, a radio station that broadcasts programs to listeners across the 38th parallel.

“He tries very hard towards advancing reunification, but he struggles to even make ends meet. I don’t feel the government supports him; he is alienated. On television, politicians claim to be pro-reunification, but that is just for the sake of image.”

Jung Ah also remembers watching the 2008 Olympic games from Seoul.

“I felt bitter seeing the women of the North Korean cheer team cry when Kim Jong Il’s placard got wet in the rain. But I was like that, too. We were brainwashed; Kim Jong Il was our idol. We had no way of knowing anything. We were talking mute, listening deaf in North Korea, like frogs in a well.”

A 37-year-old university student, Jung Ah now dreams of continuing her education in the U.S. to become fluent in English. Referring to her own ambition as “greedy,” she aspires to use her fluency in Mandarin and become a Korean-Chinese businesswoman or educator.

“The China market is huge,” Jung Ah says. “But you can’t be successful just knowing Korean and Chinese. You need to know English too.”

While a growing number of defectors hope to go to the U.S. in pursuit of economic and educational opportunities, international law dictates that without proving a credible fear of persecution, they are no longer eligible for refugee status elsewhere once they have resettled in South Korea.

The U.S. has the world’s largest refugee resettlement program, bringing a total of 73,293 refugees into the country in 2010. Of this number, only 25 came from North Korea. Since Jung Ah now has South Korean citizenship, she would have to go through the same visa process as any other applicant.

Because studying in the U.S. will require Jung Ah to fund her own education, she hopes to find employment leads while visiting the family of a California-based minister who assisted her in getting to South Korea.

She’d be back to Seoul in two months, she tells me, if things don’t work out.

“I don’t know if I am dreaming too big,” she says, hesitantly. “I don’t know if I’ll be able to get there, but it’s what I want to do.”

*

When Jung Ah asked me to help her, I wasn’t sure how. Her basic level of English would make it difficult to find many opportunities for work. Her best chance, I guessed, would be to reach out to the Korean American community.

Less than a week later, she flew to San Diego. During her time there, she gave her testimony at a California regional church conference, where she received a few donations and several unwanted photographs.

Two months later, Jung Ah returned to Seoul. Hearing her voice on the phone, I expected her to sound defeated. She didn’t.