Ambon – In Maluku terms Mrs. Em, a Muslim housewife in this violence-torn city, is lucky. She is alive and so is her husband, although their house in the Sirimau district of the city was burned down by a Christian mob in July last year, and they fled by ship to the Javanese city of Surabaya.
A normally-cheerful woman of 39, Em (not her real name) returned to Ambon in September, exhausted and demoralized by the squalor of the refugee trail and anxious to be close to her relatives.
She now runs a small beauty salon out of a room in her rented house in the Waihaong area of downtown Ambon. The new house is on a street of mostly one-storey bungalows, one of the few sections of the inner city not left in smoking ruins by the fighting that rages almost daily here.
Her husband clings on to what is left of his school supply business, and like many families in their street, they have relatives – a cousin and her two sons – crammed into the house with them.
Em, in the English term adopted by many Ambonese, is "stressed out" by the constant fighting, and when it gets close to the house, she throws up her hands. "When will it ever end? What will become of us?" she moans as she closes the shop and the windows, and the sound of snipers and bombs reverberates nearby.
She says that when her own house was burned it was her Christian neighbours who saved her. But that area is burned out now. And she doesn't know what has become of them; they are probably in a refugee camp somewhere.
All the customers in her beauty salon are Muslims, for the simple reason that in Ambon nowdays, no Christian dares venture into a Muslim area, or a Muslim into a Christian area. "If Christians came, I would give them food and drink as I would anyone else," she says sadly.
But she knows the cycle of violence and revenge has gone so far that that won't happen – at least 4,000 dead, Christian and Muslim, thousands of houses burned and more than half a million made homeless since January 1999, when the fighting erupted.
When it comes time for shopping, Em takes a minibus to one of the two nearby markets – Batu Merah or Mardika – both of them now only for Muslims. But only after checking on the neighbourhood grapevine. If the news is bad, and the supply in her refrigerator has run out, the family goes without fresh food.
When Muslims attacked the Pattimura University, once Ambon's pride, and set it ablaze last week, the market opened for a couple of hours in the morning, but Em refused to go out. She sat at home wringing her hands.
Like all her neighbours she has stocked up on essentials. Prices are high, but she knows they are much higher in the Christian areas, more isolated than the Muslim ones, because most food comes from other islands through Ambon's Yos Sudarso port – a Muslim stronghold. One egg could cost 2,500 rupiah (25 cents) in a Christian area – the cost of half a dozen elsehwere.
The crazy patchwork of enclaves for different religions also means that a Muslim must catch a speedboat to get across the harbor to the airport, and Christians can only get there from outlying areas by walking through the hills, or from inner areas, also by speedboat. The one road to the airport is intersected by Beirut-style green lines between the warring communities.
Most of the mixed marriage couples in Ambon have given up, fearful that what had once been public could no longer be kept a secret. They have joined the tens of thousands of "internally displaced people," from Ambon and the surrounding islands who have fled the Malukus. More than 100,000 others are crammed into overcrowded, vulnerable camps in the city.
Waihaong alone houses around 8,000 Muslim refugees, some 300 of them packed into an abandoned two-storey office complex. "So many babies have been born" in the complex since the fighting erupted 18 months ago in Ambon, Em says.
Tens of thousands of Christian refugees are in police stations and other camps in the city, many of them since the upsurge of fighting in the past three weeks running out of food and even water.
In the streets, children take pride in filching ammunition, instead of playing. Weapons are hidden in brief cases and food packages. Hidden snipers are a constant nerve-wracker.
Em – for whom movie theatres and strolls along Ambon's palm-lined bay are now just memories she'd rather not think about as the firing echoes through the streets after curfew – says she won't join the refugee trail again. But she is stressed, and keeps asking "When will it end?"