Elisia Yeo, Bantul – As thousands of Indonesian earthquake survivors held their first Friday prayers since the disaster, the United Nations warned the relief effort could take up to six months.
The faithful crammed into mosques or lined up in the scorching sun for weekly prayers across the area where more than 6,200 people were killed, and many said they believed the catastrophe was a warning from God.
"We want to make peace inside by praying and being closer to God," said local merchant Iskak, 40, at a mosque in the village of Giwangan on the southern outskirts of Yogyakarta, the main city in the quake zone. "The earthquake is because God would like to give a warning to people, that it is the fault of humankind."
In Jati-Wonokromo in hard-hit Bantul district south of the city, others prayed under makeshift canopies because their mosques had been razed in the disaster. "I feel that my life is more valuable because my life has been given to me by God. I feel much closer to God and I can face the situation in a more peaceful way," said Sukasdi, a 51-year-old police officer.
As the call to prayer sounded across Central Java, hospitals remained overwhelmed and some survivors spent a seventh day awaiting badly needed food and medicines.
The United Nations said aid was moving more freely but that the emergency response was far from over. "The height of the emergency phase will continue, I would expect, for another week to two weeks, and at the most be completed in a month," Charlie Higgins, the UN's area humanitarian coordinator in Java, told reporters.
The UN plan was "to continue relief in one form or another for up to six months," Higgins said. "By the end of that six months, you could consider that we would be into the recovery process. Certainly this transition (to the recovery phase) will occur fairly quickly in this emergency."
Saturday's 6.3-magnitude quake killed at least 6,234 people, injured some 46,000 and damaged or destroyed more than 139,000 homes across large swathes of Central Java and Yogyakarta provinces.
As area hospitals spilled over with patients, Georg Petersen, the World Health Organization (WHO) country representative in Indonesia, warned that the threat of infection and disease was growing. "The risk of infectious diseases has increased and there needs to be a surveillance system in place and a reporting system," he said.
Aid efforts were being hindered by looters, a disaster relief official said. The official from the government's National Coordinating Board for Disaster Management said increasingly impatient Indonesians were resorting to "stupid acts" in the wake of the disaster.
"If there are trucks with only civilians guarding them, then they will stop and extort bags of rice and boxes of noodles," the official told AFP on condition of anonymity. "Right now it's the people who are living near the roads who are getting all the goods. Once you go inside the villages, inside the small roads, there are places that have nothing," he said.
A semblance of normality resumed in some parts of the quake zone as shops reopened and traumatised students went back to classes. But authorities said more than 1,200 schools had been too badly damaged to hold lessons.
"Whatever the disaster is like, education should never stop. So we're trying our best in this emergency situation to keep the schools running," said Sugito, who heads the education office for Yogyakarta province.
"The most urgent thing we have to do is deal with the trauma among teachers as well as students," he told AFP in an interview. "We're all sad. We can't study any more," said 16-year-old Ari Katoni, one of an estimated 250,000 students without a school. "We were supposed to have started yesterday, but it was delayed." As nearby Mount Merapi volcano spewed lava and heat clouds for a seventh consecutive day since the quake, aid workers said authorities were ready to help villagers living on the slopes if it erupted. "The government has most certainly not lost sight of this. It's not been forgotten at all," said the UN's Higgins.