[Kabar-indonesia] ST: Susi to the rescue in Pengandaran, Java - where tsunami hit

[Joyo at aol.com]

also: ST: Beep, beep, tsunami's coming

The Straits Times (Singapore) 
Sunday, October 1, 2006

Susi to the rescue;

When the tsunami struck, Susi Pudjiastuti came forward
to offer relief to victims

Wong Kim Hoh, IN PENGANDARAN

SUSI Pudjiastuti points to several cold containers
outside her fish processing factory, a stone's throw
from her house in Pengandaran in Java, Indonesia.

'When the tsunami struck, we used those to store
corpses. There were hundreds of them. Every day, we'd
haul in 30 or 40 bodies,' she says.

The businesswoman is referring to the huge waves which
pounded Pengandaran - a fishing community of 30,000 -
in July this year, claiming nearly a thousand lives
and destroying hundreds of homes.

If not for her containers - used to refrigerate
seafood before they are exported - a lot more than the
100 reported unidentifiable bodies would have
decomposed beyond recognition.

Susi's sprawling house, too, was put to good use
during the crisis. It became a media centre for scores
of journalists who worked, ate, slept and bathed
there.

More than 20 soldiers also took over the kitchen for
two weeks, cooking 6,000 plates of rice daily to feed
the hurt and the dispossessed.

In Pengandaran, the 40-year-old is known as Ibu
(Indonesian for mother) Susi. She buys the daily
catches - both large and small - of the village's
fishermen; her factory employs more than 500 of the
local folks.

She also forked out a few hundred thousand dollars to
build the stately town mosque.

She has been called the town's 'unofficial mayor': The
people go to her with their complaints and she helps
them find solutions.

She is also their local hero: a spunky lass who
dropped out of high school at 17 but who went on to
found a US$10 million (S$16 million) a year business,
supplying live lobsters and other seafood to Japan,
Hong Kong, Europe and the United States.

Her father is a building contractor, her mother a
housewife. The eldest of three children, the
straight-A student shocked her parents and teachers
when she decided, at 17, that school just didn't agree
with her.

'I found it too controlling and stifling,' she
recalls.

To earn her keep, she got on a motorcycle and knocked
on doors selling bedsheets before becoming a petty
fish trader.

Brimming with streetsmarts, she soon 'doubled and
tripled' her initial investment of 750,000 rupiah
(S$130).

At 18, she married a fellow fish trader. She gave
birth to a son but the marriage lasted barely two
years.

She got custody of her child, now 23, but had to give
up the reins of the business. So she borrowed 5
million rupiah in 1985, bought a truck and hit the
road to start life anew.

Every day, she would get in her truck at 3pm and drive
through tiny villages in Indonesia's north coast,
stopping every two hours to buy and personally pack up
to 3 tonnes of frog's legs in ice.

'Can you imagine how hard it was? I'd spend 14 hours a
day in the truck before reaching the purchasing
factory in Jakarta in the morning. The factory would
give me a room to bathe and sleep in before I start
all over again,' she recalls.

Laughing, she adds in her deep, gravelly voice:
'People used to say I was crazy. I didn't think so but
in retrospect, I probably was. But I made really good
money in those two years, between US$400 and US$1,000
every evening.'

Her business expanded and her company, PT ASI
Pudjiastuti, was soon exporting to other countries.
She got married and divorced again in the early 1990s,
this time to a Swiss electrical engineer. They have a
daughter, now 10.

'I guess I'm not a very easy person to live with,'
says Susi, who's now married to German pilot and
aeronautical engineer Christian von Strombeck, 35. The
couple - who met nearly a decade ago - have a
four-year-old son.

Life for her has been a series of peaks and troughs.

In 1997, a Korean supplier urged her to build a
fish-processing factory in Pengandaran and promised
her lots of orders.

She raised 750 million rupiah and did exactly that but
the Korean and his orders never came.

She fell on hard times. 'Sometimes, I didn't even have
money to buy milk for my children.'

A Japanese client saved her by giving her a huge order
and a letter of credit which she took to the bank to
secure a loan.

Susi, who has a phoenix tattooed on her right leg,
hasn't looked back since.

Although the frozen seafood trade is lucrative, she
realises that the real money lies in the fresh seafood
market.

In 2004, she and her husband - who is also her
business partner - invested US$3.7 million in two
Cessna Caravan aircraft.

They spent another million dollars building airstrips
and runways in several fishing communities along the
Javanese coast.

Their gameplan: to use the planes to collect
high-value fresh fish and lobsters from rural fishing
villages in Java and fly them to Jakarta, where the
seafood can be transferred to commercial aircraft and
then delivered around the world.

This means that a lobster caught in the morning in
Pengandaran could very well be someone's dinner at a
Tokyo restaurant that evening.

The planes arrived on Nov 13, 2004. However, just six
weeks later, a tsunami devastated much of Sumatra on
Boxing Day.

Deciding they could not 'sit around and do nothing',
the couple immediately sprang into action.

Fighting bureaucracy and red tape, they became one of
the first to reach the disaster areas. They spent
nearly US$40,000 of their own money using their new
planes to ferry medical supplies, food and aid workers
to places like Meulaboh.

Susi earned a reputation for turning away
attention-seeking politicians, preferring to carry aid
supplies or medical workers instead.

'Some of these people wanted to take along a whole
army of assistants and journalists, it was
ridiculous,' she recalls.

The disaster saw various people and organisations
clamouring to charter her planes. The demand spawned a
new business division: Susi Air.

Another Cessna arrived in July last year. Today, each
of the three planes can do up to six chartered flights
a day, each trip costing between US$500 and US$1,500.

It's not hard to fathom why this straight-talking,
chain-smoking woman is respected by the fishermen she
deals with. She is tough but fair.

And she is convinced that rural fisherfolk do not have
to survive at subsistence level, but can supply
seafood to the world market.

A couple of months after the Boxing Day tsunami, she
spent US$150,000 of her savings transporting 20 boats
and fishermen from Pengandaran to Simeuleu, off
Sumatra's west coast. She wanted to encourage
Simeuleu's traumatised fishermen to go back to
fishing.

'They have to go back to work, they cannot expect to
survive on donations. Life has to go back to normal,'
she says.

'I have to help them. If my plan failed, that's fine
because I tried.

But it worked. Now every week, they're hauling in 2
tonnes of lobsters which can fetch US$20,000.
Everybody's happy.'

She readily admits she has a soft spot for fishermen.
'If not for them, I will not be where I am,' she says
simply.

While the outspoken woman is passionate about standing
up for their rights, she is also bent on banning their
bad fishing practices.

'No cutting of mangroves. No fish catching with
dynamite or cyanide.

No trading of lobsters with eggs. No catching of baby
fish,' she pronounces firmly.

She has been known to stop buying from fishermen who
persist in catching lobsters pregnant with roe.

'They have to understand. No point hauling in 10kg now
but nothing in the next season. People must learn not
to give in to greed,' she says.

Although she obviously can, she's not given to
ostentatious displays of wealth. Instead of a
Mercedes, she goes around in her old Mitsubishi L300
minivan.

She flies economy even on long-haul flights.

'I'd rather spend the money on a nice dinner,' says
the school dropout who regularly gives lectures on
business and organisational efficiency to MBA
students, bankers and police officers at various
institutes of higher learning in Indonesia.

Charismatic and very much a leader, she could have
gone into politics.

But she is not interested.

The reason, she says, is simple. 'I can't. I can lie
to others but I just can't lie to myself.'

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The Straits Times (Singapore) 
Sunday, October 1, 2006

Beep, beep, tsunami's coming

Going for a beach holiday? A new SMS alert service can
keep you posted on possible tsunamis

May Yip

SOCCER scores, TV programme listings and bill payment
reminders - these are just some SMS alerts available
to mobile phone subscribers in Singapore.

Now, add tsunami warning alarms to the list of text
messaging services.

A company here saw that such a service could find a
market in the wake of the 2004 tsunami and the more
recent tidal wave devastation of Javanese coastal
towns in July this year. So it has launched a service
aimed at beach-goers and travellers to coastal
destinations, warning them of potential tsunamis
anywhere in the world.

Mr Peter Dorney, managing director of Headline
Marketing which distributes the alarm service here,
says: 'What this offers is peace of mind when you're
on the beach, for anyone living in or visiting coastal
areas.'

Since it kicked off the service in July, more than 100
people have subscribed to it. It costs $20 for one
month or $5 a month when you sign on for a year.

This is despite the fact that Singapore is not a
tsunami hot spot.

Singapore's geographical position and the relatively
shallow water in the Strait of Malacca and South China
Sea make it highly unlikely that it will be affected
by a tsunami caused by an earthquake in the region,
says a spokesman for the National Environment Agency
(NEA).

'There are no records that Singapore has ever been hit
by a tsunami.'

Still, the SMS alert service has attracted the
interest of big names like The Intercontinental Hotel
group.

It is trying out the service to protect its
region-wide waterfront properties and guests, says Mr
Simon Loh, its Asia-Pacific director of risk
management.

The group's Holiday Inn resort in Phuket was hit by
the Dec 26 tsunami in 2004.

The text alert system, which has headquarters in
Germany, the Seychelles and the Caribbean, receives
earthquake and tsunami warning information from
international stations that measure seismic waves
originating from a quake.

The information is analysed by experts and an alert is
sent out if necessary.

British mobile phone operator Vodafone already offers
the service to its subscribers in Germany.

The alarm is also available from private distributors
in over 20 countries.

In July, the alarm system sent out alerts around 15
minutes before waves hit Java, says Mr Dorney, 55, an
Englishman who has lived in Singapore for 20 years.

Tsunami warnings are a new business for the company,
which has marketed products as diverse as an upscale
car rental service in Europe called Renault Euro Drive
and Get Slim slippers - footwear which claims to
stimulate a person's metabolic rate.

Mr Dorney says of his company's text service: 'One of
the problems with Indonesia is that out of a
population of 200 million, there are only about 50
million mobile phone users. Unfortunately, on coastal
Indonesia where the villages are, many people aren't
very affluent and do not have phones.'

Indonesian officials came under fire for the lack of
any warning ahead of the tsunami that struck the
southern coast of Java on July 17, despite regional
efforts to set up an early alert system after the
devastating 2004 tsunami.

But the Meteorological Services Division (MSD) of the
NEA says Singapore is prepared in the unlikely event
of a tsunami.

It is developing a national tsunami early warning
system which will become part of a regional warning
organisation. The system, comprising watch centres and
monitoring systems, will be completed next year.

The MSD is also working with response agencies such as
the Singapore Civil Defence Force to use existing as
well as new communication channels to alert the public
if a tsunami were to hit Singapore's shores.

But most Singaporeans might think the service
unnecessary.

'It's not like we live by the beach or a
disaster-prone area,' says Mr Lawrence Wong, 28, a
teacher and regular beach-goer who does not wish to
subscribe to the service. 'I've been to Bali four
times and an earthquake happened when I was there
once. But to me, there are bigger risks like being in
an accident or getting robbed.'

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Joyo Indonesia News Service
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