Surviving on coconuts and attacked by mosquitoes, an AIT student narrates her volunteer experience

Eating coconuts for a meal, sleeping under the stars without a roof, and being marooned on an island may not be an ideal situation for a young student. But for Ms. Albane Coerrquetin, a Master’s student at Asian Institute of Technology (AIT) and a volunteer of Téléoms Sans Frontière (TSF), it was a once in a lifetime experience.

While providing emergency telecom relief operations in the immediate
aftermath of the Indonesian tsunami in November 2010, Ms. Albane and
her colleague from TSF were marooned at Liosua village in Mentawai off
the western coast of Sumatra. What they had not accounted for was that
a routine visit to the affected villages would provide an experience
that they had never imagined. “We arrived at 4. 00 pm to provide
emergency telephone services to Liosua, which had been completely
destroyed by the tsunami,” she recalls. The TSF team had planned to
return to their base camp after providing a few hours of emergency
telephone operations in Liosua. “Suddenly there was a storm, and since
our boat was relatively small, we were not in a position to return,”
she says.

That night, the TSF team of Ms. Albane and Mr. Sebastien Sivadier, who
is also an AIT alumnus, had to stay in the village, with no food or
shelter. Afraid of the tsunami waves, the villagers were perched on top
of a nearly hill. Some of them descended to meet the TSF team. Reaching
atop the hill too was not an easy experience, since the area was full
of mud caused by the recent tsunami. “I fell into the mud, and without
an extra pair of clothes, it was becoming tougher every minute,” she
adds.

“The village chief told us that they had been without rice for four
days,” Ms. Albane says. With few options available, they resorted to
emergency practice of eating locally available coconuts. “The entire
experience was followed by mosquito attacks, and I was the one who
suffered the most”, she quips. Luckily, they had enough battery power
to crank up a call to the headquarters to inform them about their
safety. At the middle of the night, the village chief wanted to call
rescue operations seeking more food, a service which the TSF team
provided.

They managed to return the next day, and the emergency food supplies
for the villagers arrived two days later. The TSF team went around
eight such villages in Mentawai islands. Albane also served as a TSF
volunteer in Manilla in October 2009, following tropical storm Ketsana.
Earlier, she was president of the student association “Equiterre” which
promotes fair trade practices. She is graduating in Information and
Communication Technology (ICT) from AIT’s School of Engineering and
Technology (SET) on 17 December 2010.