BANJAR, Indonesia, 19 July 2006 — Saudi national Hamed Abukhamis struggled to understand how his holiday at a picturesque Indonesian resort turned into a nightmare — with his wife and three-year-old son dead.
Abukhamis had been enjoying a drink at a beachside cafe in Pangandaran, one of Java’s most beautiful and popular beaches, with his wife and two of his three children, when they saw the tsunami approaching and tried to flee.
“My wife said, ‘you take the girl, I’ll take the boy!’ Suddenly they were swept away by powerful water,” he told AFP, choking back tears.
Abukhamis held onto his eight-year-old daughter as both were dragged into the waves and almost drowned.
“I was inside a spinning washing machine, inside a tunnel,” he said, describing how he was thrown to the back of the restaurant where he’d been relaxing a few moments earlier.
“At one point when I was underwater I told myself, that’s it for me — but I didn’t give up,” he said.
His 30-year-old wife and three-year-old son were not so lucky. After combing through the wreckage of the pulverized beachfront, he found the lifeless body of his wife Sahar, smashed against a wall by their hire car as she still clutched their dead son.
“I lost my wife and my son,” he said in a half whisper at the Banjar district hospital where Abukhamis and his daughter, along with his 12-year-old son who was hit by the waves at his hotel, were being treated.
“I don’t know how I’m alive — it’s a miracle,” he said, sporting cuts, bruises and swollen ankles.
Abukhamis said he saw dozens of schoolchildren playing on the beach who had no chance to run before they were suddenly swept away by the waves on Monday, which claimed more than 300 lives.
A few hundred meters away, his 12-year-old son Yousuf was sitting on the hotel balcony when the disaster struck.
“When I saw waves coming, I shouted ‘Tsunami, tsunami!’ People didn’t believe me at first but when waves came closer they started to run, and I also ran too,” the boy told AFP.
Abukhamis and his family were on their third visit to Indonesia but this was the first time they had stayed at Pangandaran, a small fishing village on the beach with a national park on its peninsula, because they wanted to see something new.
His wife, having heard of the devastating Aceh tsunami which killed some 168,000 Indonesians in December 2004, had been reluctant to holiday again in Indonesia.
“She was afraid of a tsunami,” Abukhamis said, as his son and daughter sobbed at the mention of their mother.
“I just want to go home because I can’t stand it here. Every time I close my eyes, I keep seeing my wife’s face and hearing her last words to me: ‘You take the girl, I take the boy.’”
