Army major honoured for role in tsunami recovery

By MERANIA KARAURIA merania.karauria@wanganuichronicle.co.nz
New Zealand army Major Charmaine Pene watched the 2004 tsunami devastation unfold on television, and wished she could do something.
Two days later she was summoned to head a team of 30, including herself, and spent three days planning and packing ? they were off to Banda Aceh, on the island of Sumatra.
Major Pene's first priority was the welfare of her team. They were headed for a city that had been flattened three kilometres inland from the ocean rim ? basic hygiene was not to be taken for granted. However, they were taking their skill sets with them.
But the major was responsible for her team and the tasks the New Zealand Government had sent them to carry out.
On January 1 the team flew out ? some from Ohakea on a Hercules with their supplies, and Major Pene with others in the team, from Wellington on a commercial flight to Kuala Lumpur ? then on to Penang, where they had a three to four-day wait before they flew to Medan, on the eastern side of the Sumatran island.
There was another two-day wait in Medan and then it was on to Banda Aceh.
"I walked out of the plane ? the adrenalin was running high. "An Australian team ran toward us ? our plane was required to get people out of Banda Aceh.
She said planes were lined up, engines running, taking off and landing. Boxes were piled up everywhere. It looked chaotic.
"I thought, 'Where are my stores?' and felt the weight of my responsibilities and what we were there to do."
And through the chaos she noticed the locals of Banda Aceh ? faces etched with bewilderment ? queued to leave their devastated city on the next available flight.
There were no toilets, no running water and the sewerage system had completely flooded and now contaminated the land ? liquid mud covered everything.
It was tent city, and the New Zealand team was metres from an aeroplane, engines running throughout the night.
The team's stores had not arrived, and the major tried to track them down when they waited in Medan.
And out of chaos comes order.
Major Pene said it was a small miracle when their stores turned up ? food, water, petrol and environmental health equipment made it through to its destination ? shared by the Australian team until theirs arrived.
The Kiwis' footwear was the envy of the Australians ? their practical black gumboots were just the thing for cleaning mud and debris and then easily slipped off to go indoors.
When she was asked what other supplies she required in Banda Aceh, Major Pene requested gumboots.
The Australian engineers were grateful when 20 pairs of fluorescent yellow gumboots, a gift from the Kiwis, turned up.
The Indonesians had collected all the bodies before the foreign teams arrived and the Kiwis spent their first three or four days cleaning the hospital, which had been flooded up to a depth of five feet. Mud was thick. The director of the hospital had survived but had lost his family. He was back on the job two days after the tsunami hit.
The Kiwis shared the hospital with the Australian team and they had three or four buildings between them.
Kiwi ingenuity played its part when the Kiwis hammered nails into the ends of poles, attached planks of wood and used them as squeegees to scrape the mud off surfaces.
The Kiwis spent a month on the island, working tirelessly to resurrect a city flattened by huge waves.
Germans, Norwegians, Singaporeans, Chinese and Indonesians from Jakarta all helped to clean up and rebuild the city.
PICTURED: Officer of New Zealand Order of Merit? Major Charmaine Pene, whose whakapapa is to Koriniti on the Whanganui River, was last year on the ground in Banda Aceh, and will receive the ONZOM award, and a Special Services Medal for her work in the tsunami-hit country.