Our first team of 6 left for Yogykarta on the May 31st. We went to Patuk, a mountainous area above Yogyakarta and spent the afternoon meeting people, hearing their stories, assessing the need and distributing what few supplies we had been able to bring with us in the van. We had large truck arriving that night from Jakarta with several tons of aid. So this first day was mostly to get familiar with the local situation and get some ideas about what we could do. The truck arrived in the night and a good portion of our time between 2AM and 4AM involved unloading around 4 tons of rice, sugar, oil, sardines, noodles, etc. into the yard of the place we were staying. After a few hours more sleep, it was back to the villages we had surveyed the day before to distribute some of the aid and to begin doing programs with the kids.
Three days after this first team our second team of 7 arrived which was later joined by 2 more. One of our missions was to do trauma counseling which we do by providing puppet shows, children activity pages, singing songs, etc. It was encouraging for us to read in the paper the following day as we were getting ready to visit a village: 'Children are under a lot of stress. Help needed!' Our fist puppet show performance was for the children in the neighborhood where we were based. It was a puppet show version of a Treasure Attic episode performed in the local language.
Family Care’s next trip consisted of two objectives; on-the-job training for our young volunteers and helping those in need. Our team consisted of 17 volunteers traveling in 2 vehicles doing relief work over an eight day period. We concentrated our relief efforts mainly in the Bantul region outside of Yogyakarta where the teens learned to organize disaster relief work, experiencing firsthand exposure to Indonesian Culture and the local language as well as enhancing their team-working skills. Our projects included helping to clean up debris from houses that had been destroyed in the earthquake and continued with programs and activities for the children. We worked with other local student volunteers in the area and also provided comfort and encouragement to those affected by the earthquake.
