FAQ: Uz's family in Indonesia: natural disaster

Many people have asked me about recent earth quake, in Sumatera Island. All of my relatives and family are fine. They live far away from the earth quake. One of a hard hit area is in the city of Padang, it's in the middle of Sumatera island. The city is well-known for "Satay Padang", lamb meat on stick, rice flour paste with its special curry. Yummy. When I was in highschool I hitch-hiked trucks from Java island all the way to north of Sumatera. It was a 4 day trip going through mountains, so many turns. I passed through Padang area and it's so georgous. The road is narrow, on the left side is almost a vertical wall probably like 30-40 story building. On the right side is a very deep and narrow cliff, no way you could survive you fall into it. Next to it is another tall vertical wall. It was like driving through a slit. You have to look straight up to see the sky. It's an amazing view. Truck drivers were very nice people. They picked people along the way, hitch-hiking was pretty common (I don't know about now). I simply hopped one truck to the next one. In exchange I had to help them loading and unloading when they had to make some stops. They always went in a group, about 10 trucks to protect themselves from robbery. If one truck got robbed they all go down help each other. While driving at night, one of the drivers (2 drivers each truck taking turn driving) periodically climbed out of the truck to the top and checked if any thief jump on the back of the truck while the truck was still in motion !!! I thought it was pretty crazy. Along the way I saw many very poor people, prostitutions were easily spotted. People were very hospitable and wonderful. They would let strangers like myself to sleep over. There were so many things I saw that blew my mind away.

I grew up, to be exact spending my first 18 years, in Indonesia and heard a lot of natural disasters in the news. Fortunately I lived in a safe area, I have never even felt an earth quake, storm, flood nor anything close to a natural disaster in my hometown surrounding area. My hometown is in Sumatera island, near the east coast. The west coast of Sumatra is the meeting point of the Eurasian and Pacific tectonic plates, which have been pushing against each other for millions of years, causing huge stresses to build up. It is part of "Ring of Fire," an arc of volcanos and fault lines encircling the Pacific basin. The west coast has more history of natural disasters. But of course there is nothing is certain in this world. Even in Minnesota you could be hit by tornado or lighting for examples.