Martunis was seven years old when one of the deadliest natural disasters in modern history struck Indonesia, and other parts of Asia on the 26 December 2004, ripping apart life as he knew it. Save the Children worked to reunite Martunis and his father.
ACEH, Indonesia, 16 December 2024 – Martunis was seven years old when one of the deadliest natural disasters in modern history struck Aceh, Indonesia, and other parts of Asia on the 26 December 2004, ripping apart life as he knew it.
“I was playing football with my friends when suddenly an earthquake struck. I rushed home and gathered with my mother, older sister, and younger sister, and we hugged each other. When our wardrobe fell due to the earthquake, my mother asked me to call my father, who was working at the fish farm, to come home. Someone shouted that the water was rising, so my mother, sisters, and I got into a pickup truck.
As the water got closer, my family and I were hit by the tsunami. I tried to lift my sisters who were drowning, but we got separated,” said Martunis, who is now 27.
“I passed out several times, and when I woke up, I found myself on a mattress. As the mattress started to sink, I grabbed onto a school bench, but that also sank. Then I saw a coconut, and I hugged it like hugging a football until I climbed onto another mattress. Suddenly, I was stuck in a tree.”
Martunis was eventually found in a swampy area near a beach three weeks after the tsunami struck by a British television crew who were filming with local fishermen. He had survived on puddle water, packets of noodles and anything else he could find but was dehydrated, malnourished and badly bitten by mosquitos.
Martunis was taken to Save the Children where staff were waiting to help him and later took him on to a local hospital to be treated. It was at the hospital that Save the Children was able to reunite Martunis with his father and grandmother that same day.
Save the Children had set up a family tracing system in the aftermath of the tsunami and had set up strict protocols to make sure that people claiming to be relatives were who they claimed to be.
“It was an extraordinary feeling, and I was so thankful to be reunited with my father. I didn’t realise I had been at sea for 21 days; it felt like only 3 days to me. When I first saw my father, I immediately asked where my mother and sisters were. My father told me they had passed away, and I cried as I embraced him.”
The 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami began with an earthquake off the coast of Sumatra, Indonesia. It was so powerful that it caused a shift in the earth’s mass and changed the planet’s rotation. The tsunami’s waves travelled across the Indian Ocean at 500 mph – the speed of a jet plane.[1] About 230,000 people died in the tsunami which hit several countries including Indonesia, Thailand, Sri Lanka and India.
Save the Children reached over 140,000 people, including over 70,000 children, as part of its post-tsunami response and distributed shelter, hygiene and water kits to over 25,000 households. The charity also set up 50 child-friendly spaces to give children an opportunity to recover from the trauma they had experienced and to play before focusing on longer-term solutions such as building learning centers and delivering psychosocial support.[2]
Al Fadhil, 45, was a Save the Children staff member who began working as part of the post-tsunami response in February 2005. He now runs his own foundation, the Guetanyoe Foundation, one of Save the Children’s local partners in Indonesia.
Fadhil said that walls began to quickly fill up with photos and fliers of missing relatives, incuding at Save the Children’s office in Aceh.
“Save the Children, together with other agencies, launched a family tracking and reunification program. Save the Children took on a leading role, coordinating the search for children who had been separated from their families. Some families held onto hope that their children were still alive and continued searching, while others were simply looking for their children’s remains.”
“We reached out to the children's closest relatives, such as grandparents, uncles, or aunts. If no immediate family members were available, we would contact village leaders to help locate a safe home for the children. Some children were placed in boarding schools or shelters when their families were severely affected by the tsunami.”
Martunis was one of the beneficiaries of that reunification programme.
He spoke to Save the Children in October from the living room of his family home in Aceh, surrounded by newspaper clippings recounting his miraculous escape and framed photographs of the family members that he lost in 2004, including his youngest sister.
Ian Dovaston, a former news reporter and part of the team in Aceh who found Martunis on the beach, said:
“We’d been at Save the Children the day before - and they had shown us the impressive system they’d put together for tracing family members. We rang ahead and they were waiting for us coming in in our car with Martunis, who clearly needed medical help. From our call, I think, they’d already gleaned enough information to make a link to his father, who they now knew was alive and in the hospital. We went straight there with our friends from Save the Children and watched and filmed as father was reunited with son.”
Sarbini, 68, Martunis’ father, remembers how Martunis was reunited with him:
“Martunis was treated for two days at the hospital and afterwards he was brought to his grandmother’s house.”
In 2015 Martunis, who was found wearing a Portugal football jersey, was signed to Sporting Lisbon’s football academy but these days he’s back in Indonesia and has stopped playing football professionally.
Now married and with a young daughter, Martunis has his mind set firmly on the future.
“Moving forward, I hope I can become a successful and helpful person in whatever field. I trust that God’s plans are always beautiful.”
In Indonesia and around the world, we do whatever it takes so children can fulfil their rights to a healthy start in life, the opportunity to learn and protection from harm. Together with children, families and communities, as well as supporters the world over, we achieve lasting results for millions of children.
Notes
[1] https://www.history.com/news/deadliest-tsunami-2004-indian-ocean
[2] https://www.savethechildren.org.uk/what-we-do/tsunami
For more information and media interviews please contact:
Amy Sawitta Lefevre, Global Media Manager (Asia): amy.lefevre@savethechildren.org
