Sea by Heidi Kling Page A

heard their stories. Saw the wave rising up and over ...
    The owner addressed them in Indonesian, and suddenly the kids started clapping and cheering. A tall older student, a boy, translated his words to English as we stood in front of the room. “These are visiting doctors from America who have come to meet you,” he said. “Orphans from Aceh, please stand.”
    A huge group, more than half the room, stood up; some of them stared down at their feet uncomfortably. I caught the eye of one little girl. She was standing in the front row of tsunami kids, a curtain of black hair falling out of her jilbab, veiling an eye.
    She looked just like the shy girl in the video! The one I wanted to meet. I smiled at her, hoping she’d notice me, but she didn’t.
    “Orphans from Papua, please stand.”
    The Aceh kids sat down and about fifty other kids stood up. Tom whispered to me that many of those kids suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder too, because many witnessed their parents’ deaths in street riots.
    His words hit me like an anvil to my chest. If you bottled up all the trauma in this room ... I couldn’t even imagine. And these kids were my age and younger. Suddenly I was very glad we were here. Like Dad said—these were people who really needed his help.
    “Thank you, children,” the pesantren owner said, and then he turned to Team Hope. “The Acehnese orphans have prepared a special welcome ceremony for you. Children?” He nodded to the crowd and led us against the wall, where we were apparently supposed to watch.
    A dozen mixed-age boys stood up off the floor and carried gold and red drums entwined with dark leather straps to the front of the room.
    One of the boys stood out immediately.
    He and his drum were the tallest, broadest, most striking. The other boys’ eyes were only on him, silently asking him where to sit, what to do next. He told them with gestures of his head, his hands. His lanky body moved with a sort of shrug, like he was almost annoyed to be there but had committed to going through the motions anyway.
    I totally got that.
    Once situated in a circle on the floor, the instruments splayed across their laps, the boys began lightly slapping both ends of the drums with their palms. The tone was soft at first, then elevated until the beat came harder and faster, their music creating a rich sound that vibrated through the flat-roofed room so frenetically that my pulse raced along with it.
    I couldn’t stop staring at the tallest boy, the one pounding his drum like he was out for vengeance. I didn’t know how he did it, but his music throttled its way through me, straight to my core. He glanced up. Once. Caught me staring. His eyes electric, but steady. I still didn’t break his gaze. Instead I sucked in a breath. Blinked. Took in the sight of him. The sweat trickling down his temple, his square-boned jaw, his rippling arm muscles as he beat the crap out of that drum.
    When his strong hands slowed to a quiet rhythm, when the thumping finally faded to a slow, easy pulse, applause erupted around me. Almost as an afterthought, I clapped along too but couldn’t stop looking. Couldn’t unlock my eyes from the drummer wiping his forehead with his sleeve.
    I hadn’t expected to find anything like him behind those carved doors.
    “The Aceh orphans are talented,” the owner said to my dad. Then he lowered his voice. “Talented, but problematic.”
    Did he mean their nightmares and anxiety were problematic? That they screamed out in the night like I did? That he wasn’t sure how to help them? But something about his tone told me that he meant something else. Something less kind than all of that.
    As the applause died down, as the boys packed up their drums and wandered back to their seats, I wondered why the owner referred to the kids as the Aceh orphans anyway.
    Just because they survived the tsunami, why should they be defined by it?
    I’d be beating the hell out of a drum if someone kept