Any description of our day on Saturday should by rights begin with an act of unwarranted voyeurism, with me standing on the steps to stranger’s kitchen, looking in at a stove and some dishes, presumably drying, me standing there for how long I do not know, staring in, transfixed by a vision of the mundane turned extraordinary.

            I knew it was a kitchen because there was a stove there, and those dishes, but aside from that there was little to distinguish it from the wasteland I stood in. Covered in ash, everything blasted or turned or leaning to the south from the force of pyroclastic flows carrying a heat cloud of 1100-1500 degrees Fahrenheit, moving at a speed of  around 150 miles per hour, the kitchen was part of a landscape in which familiar objects were monuments, a garage, or a siphon, or a clothesline, or the charred ruins of a mosque transformed into memorials of a lost normalcy.

            When we first drove onto the slopes of Mount Merapi, talking our way through one roadblock and bribing our way through another (my family and I were not involved in this talking or bribing, by the way, and none of the money donated by our friends and family was spent on said bribe), we passed through abandoned but otherwise normal seeming terrain, houses, small warungs (shops), farms, schools, in lush forests muted that day by a light fog. There were people around, allowed up for the day, in limited numbers, to attend to their property, though they would return to the refugees camps before it got dark. The emptiness, itself remarkable in this densely populated place, and the layer of ash along the road (washed off by the rain everywhere else) visible clues to the destruction wrought by the eruptions. Indeed, moving closer and closer on the 2 ½ hour drive, we saw a series of strange sights: the leaves of palm trees, broken and inverted by the weight of the ash; rivers torn by the flows of ash and mud carried by subsequent torrential rains; communities newly reoccupied, struggling to bring life back to the farms destroyed by the fallout. It was one of those drives that occasions increasing silence.

            Even so, nothing prepared any of us for the sudden and complete transformation, for what seemed like a crude and arbitrary line drawn, separating the dense green foliage and the colorful houses and the signs of daily upkeep from an apocalyptic landscape unlike anything I have ever imagined. There was a house, surrounded by bamboo, and trees, boarded up but otherwise apparently perfectly intact, and then twenty yards from it, the twisted and grey remains of trees and buildings stretching for miles, hills with the outline of roads winding through neighborhoods where no one will live again for years. There was a new graveyard for some of the first victims, and the smell of decay, and flies everywhere, in huge cloying swarms, that besieged us in the car as soon as we opened the windows to see better the surreal sight unfolding before us.

Graham, standing near a stand with a siphon on it, like stands everywhere in Indonesia that sell fuel in small glass bottles. "I could just imagine myself driving up on a motorcycle," he told me later, "buying some bensin, opening my gas tank and using that siphon to fill it up."

            I thought, after we stopped and I walked slowly through the debris, some still smoking, of power and of death, of the incredible force unleashed by that volcano that could turn this place into what we saw, a ripped skeleton of the earth, trees stripped and blackened, one wrapped in a piece of metal, and rows and rows of charred bamboo, lying on its side, all pointing the same direction, of the vast, and of the immediate, of the family whose broken dishes lied still neatly placed against each other.

            I don’t have the descriptive vocabulary to take this further. I need Cormac McCarthy or Dante to step in perhaps, to find the right Biblical syntax, or Shelley, maybe, to offer up the sublime with its terror and transcendence. I will never forget it, I cannot stop running the scene through my head. I just offer it, because it matters, it matters to the people who reached out over the distance of thousands of miles to offer a small but welcome helping hand. This is where the people you helped lived, until a month ago, until they moved to the cramped quarters of the schools and churches and mosques and dormitories and warehouses and whatever else that could be commandeered to take in the hundreds of thousands lucky enough to flee alive.

            Laura spent all of Friday in Semarang with Ibu Maria, shopping for the 300 individual bags we assembled (with ten people, total) on the ground floor of our house late into Friday night. Each bag had five packages of dried noodles, a can of sardines in tomatoes, a can of chocolate sweetened condensed milk, a bag of dried shredded beef, a container of kacip manis (sweet soy sauce, the Indonesian go-to condiment), three eggs boiled in a traditional Indonesian way, five small notepads, three pencils, and a package of feminine sanitary napkins. We also had several bags of diapers for families with babies. We passed these out in three locations – at two schools, where the teachers brought in students who were living in refugee camps and we gave a bag to each one, and at a refugee camp on the outskirts of Yogyakarta, in a school and a police station, with the army set up in a bivouac along the side and some aid workers in another canvas tent. There were 500 people in this refugee camp, some of them people whose homes were in the area we had visited earlier that afternoon, and the children and mothers (almost none of the fathers) lined up and took one bag at a time, along with three boxes of vitamins.

            It felt both very small, and very important – small because they are still where they are, and still without a sense of what the future will be, still, as one of the refugees I talked to put it, faced with “banyak kerja dan bukan uang” (“lots of work and no money”), with leveled houses and decimated farms. It was not a happy place, but the people were quietly grateful, and I was even more grateful, grateful that I could live in this place, at least, with a sense that I was a member of my community in a time of need, grateful even more for the community I was even more aware of from my home, who made our outreach possible, who supplied 300 families with goods and food to augment the rice most camps have in abundance.

            I was grateful, too, for my children, who took in the sight of the ruined landscape with silence and awe, who arrived at the camp with enthusiasm and compassion. Seamus ran across the street and bought bunches  of candy and two soccer balls, and went around to each person he could find, offering them candy, and passing off the balls to groups of eager children. Graham reached into some place deep, played a role he hasn’t played so much, that of the playful older kid, who swung small children in circles, threw kids over his back and ran around with hordes chasing him, put a box on his head and chased groups of laughing screaming kids.  And we spent a hour there, delivering the goods, playing with the children, greeting the soldiers, all of whom were from Salatiga (and who insisted, to my great embarrassment and reluctance, that I eat some rice and vegetables – I took as meager a portion as I politely could), talking to the refugees and the volunteers.

            Earlier that day, when I was addressing a group of teachers who had been displaced by the eruption (another amazing experience that I will write about next), I told them how glad I was to be there, what an honor it was to meet them. And I told them something like this: “I want you to know that my friends and my family in America know what happened, they are aware of your suffering, and they send their love, prayers, and money for you.  They know you are here, and they want you to know that.” After Ibu Maria finished translating that for me, the teachers applauded. They were applauding for all of you who reached out when we asked you, for all of you whose gift was not only the supplies a (large and grateful) handful of families got to help them through a part of their trials, but also to know that they have not been forgotten, ignored, passed over. Such is the looming plight of an on-going refugee crisis, and you lifted that, even if briefly, gently and with compassion that stretched from the other side of world, to a community of people whose world has been flattened, whose most intimate spaces are recognizable only by the destroyed detritus of their previous lives. I know they are grateful, and we are grateful too, and honored that we could be emissaries of a such a wonderful group. I thank you again and again.

Graham, playing games with the kids at the camp, who chased him and called him "Mas Graham" and who treated him, to his great delight and with his complete encouragement, as a human jungle gym.