![]() The following day, the couple were reunited with Elis’s mother and father, who were also injured quite badly when the wave swept through the village. “That night, we finally got word that our daughter was safe and she was with my sister,” Elis said. As they waited for treatment they desperately sought information about their family. When they arrived they saw many other people who had been injured in the tsunami. Along the way, they met a man on a motorbike who offered them a ride. The couple walked about a mile towards the health center. They had no choice but to leave their ruined house and head to Labuan’s health center, not knowing if their loved ones were alive or dead. But they could not find their daughter or Elis’s elderly parents. What I heard was my husband’s voice calling me.”įortunately, despite his injury, Purwanto was able to free Elis from the wreckage of their home. “I tried hard to protect my pregnant belly so that it would not be hit by anything,” she said. Purwanto, 35 years old, was injured when the building’s tin roof hit his left thigh. This powerful wave, estimated to be 20 to 40 feet high, instantly destroyed the house. “When he came back inside the house to help me, the second-and bigger-wave hit.” “When my husband shouted, I put on my clothes as fast as I could,” Elis said. When the first wave hit, Elis’s husband, Purwanto, cried out: “Tsunami! Tsunami!” He rushed to their daughter and Elis’s parents, who lived next door, so they could seek safety. She was trying to escape the day’s humidity at her home along the seashore in Indonesia’s Labuan sub-district. “I was taking a bath when the tsunami hit,” recalls Elis, a 30-year-old mother of one and seven months pregnant.
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