Floods in Indonesia: A Essay on Despair and Hope

This essay was originally written in Bahasa by Erlinda Ekaputri, Indonesia Country Director for Wildlife Works.

I have found myself at a loss for language lately, unable to summon words large enough to hold the horror of the floods that have swept through my beloved country. Numbers dance across the media, millions displaced, hundreds dead, thousands injured, and hundreds more still missing, their names hanging in limbo between hope and despair.

A mother claws at the mud, searching for the body of her child.

An old man spends hours walking along a raging river, calling the name of the wife who has not come home.

Group chats overflow with desperate messages, photos of missing faces, directions to temporary shelters, exhausted pleas for any news at all.

I have run out of tears to describe the pain of these people, not only victims of disaster, but victims of the greed of a few, those who have never learned the meaning of “enough.”

This morning, a friend wrote to say that in a beautiful, remote village I once visited in Aceh, only six houses remain standing. Six, out of sixty. I stared at my phone, silent, letting a prayer escape into the quiet. I am done crying and cursing; the well of those emotions feels empty.

What frightens me most, as disaster follows disaster, is not destruction, but numbness. The possibility that we might begin to treat these catastrophes as mere statistics. That we might scroll past suffering with the casual swipe of a thumb. That we might surrender to helplessness.

But perhaps, that fear is not entirely coming true.

Not among the grassroots.

Young people across Indonesia are organizing faster and more effectively than ever before. They raise funds that multiply in hours, not days. They mobilize networks, volunteers, supplies, at a scale we have never witnessed. And more astonishingly, they are talking not just about charity, but about causes: deforestation, palm oil expansion, mining, national parks devastated, elephants and wildlife dying in the mud.

They speak of collective ownership of forests, of ordinary people pooling money to save land from destruction.

Maybe hope has not collapsed.

Maybe, after years of trying to explain what deforestation means, after years of shouting into the void, the word finally carries weight. Maybe the realization that forests are life, not merely scenery, is finally being absorbed.

Maybe, stopping this destruction will grow into a movement larger than the tsunami that tore our land apart.

Maybe.

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Catastrophic floods and landslides across South East Asia  this month have so far killed nearly one thousand  people, destroyed more than 100,000 homes and displaced nearly 1 million people, in Indonesia alone. Community infrastructure and key habitats for endangered species have been destroyed and destabilized. This disaster highlights the country’s growing vulnerability to extreme weather intensified by climate change. Communities in Indonesia are again facing the compounded impacts of floods on their homes and farms, reminding us that the long-term protection of forests, which can mitigate the worst effects of floods, are more critical than ever.

Wildlife Works has been working with communities in Indonesia since opening our offices there in 2019. Today, through the Gerbang Barito REDD+ project and the Lokop REDD+ project in Ache on the horizon, we have forged deep relationships with our community partners in their pursuit to protect their forests. 

As Indonesia confronts the impacts of the latest floods, we stand with our partners and remain committed to creating local solutions that build climate resilience and protect the forests that protect us all. 

Learn more about the floods here: https://lnkd.in/gCY_VSCd