In Indonesia, parents wait for children’s bodies to be pulled from church wreckage

“Yesterday I found her jacket,” said one father, his voice cracking.

“I hope I can find her just to see her again.”

The excavator clawed at the beige-colored pillars that jutted oddly from the debris. Then, it scooped concrete and wood and other remains of Jono Oge Protestant Church, including its metal cross.

Muis Pangallo watched the digging on Friday as he had done every day for the past week, hoping to recover the body of his daughter, Sharon Parilla.

The 17-year-old was among dozens of children attending a bible camp at the church when the 7.5 magnitude earthquake struck last week.

“Yesterday I found her jacket,” said, Pangallo, 45, his voice cracking, “I hope I can find her just to see her again.”
Jono Oge is one of several communities in the Palu city region that was hit by the devastating effects of liquefaction — a phenomenon in which an earthquake turns loose, wet soil into quicksand-like mud.

Search crews, volunteers and heavy machinery were struggling to unearth victims from the churned ground that had literally sucked houses and people into it. The grim task is now more difficult as the mud hardens in the tropical sun.The national disaster agency says 1,700 homes in one neighborhood alone were swallowed and hundreds of people killed.

The official death toll from the quake and the tsunami it triggered rose to 1,649 on Saturday according to Indonesia’s disaster agency, but it is almost certain to rise.

The government said it was considering making devastated areas into mass graves.

Pangallo carried a worn and dirt-covered booklet of photos showing kids who were at the bible camp. They were group shots of young men and women smiling for the camera — in one photo their hands were together in prayer.

Pangallo pointed to a girl posing with four friends, all of them dressed in grey and white school uniforms. She had shoulder-length dark hair and a dazzling smile. “My daughter,” he said proudly.

Dozens of them were at the church ahead of a Friday evening session of a bible camp when the massive earthquake hit, triggering a 20-foot-tall tsunami.The quake turned the ground beneath them into a giant wave of mud that uprooted the church and carried it nearly a mile into a rice paddy.

There are small clues in the debris that distinguish the church in the stretches of wreckage: the crushed steeple on its side, a white sign with a painted blue cross, a wooden collection box.

Indonesia has the world’s biggest Muslim population but also pockets of Christians and other religions, including on Sulawesi island. An archipelago of more than 250 million people, the country has been repeatedly plagued by quakes and tsunamis.

The national disaster agency says more than 148 million Indonesians are at risk in earthquake-prone areas and 3.8 million people also face danger from tsunamis, with at most a 40 minute window for warning people to flee.