Inspired Magazine

Above Carina has gone
searching for clues on
Kuku Island, 2009.
Right Indonesian islands
are home to many stories
of tragedy and triumph.
“I remember
thinking it would
be best if my
brother and sister
died first and
then I could kill
myself.”
boats. Carina says the Malaysian police boarded
her boat, towed it back out to sea, stole the
refugees’ valuables, then cut the rope and warned
them never to return.
At one point a soldier aimed an M16 at Carina’s
brother’s head. “I can’t get that image out of my
head,” Carina says. “The solider put the M16 to
my brother’s head because he wanted his gold
necklace. I just said ‘don’t shoot, don’t shoot’ – I
was so fearful he’d shoot my brother.”
DEATH ON BOARD
The boat operators decided to try for
Indonesia. But by the sixth day they’d run
out of food and water and people started
to die, their bodies tossed overboard.
“I watched this woman’s body being
tossed into the ocean and her family was
screaming and begging them not to,”
Carina recalls. “They were hanging onto
her feet screaming that they wanted to
bury her.”
After seven days at sea, the boat reached
a small island fishing village in remote
Indonesia. The boat operators sank the boat
so they could not be returned to the ocean. Ten
days later the local government put them aboard
another wooden boat and said they’d be taken to
a refugee camp. Instead they were dropped off on
a remote island beach and left to survive in the
jungle.
DISBELIEF
At first they refused to believe it. Surely the
boat had gone to get fuel before returning to
take them to the ‘real’ refugee camp. They sat
on the beach and waited – a great ocean spread
out before them and dense jungle behind them.
Afraid of encountering wild animals in the jungle,
they remained on the beach, shivering through a
monsoon storm that night. By day they’d keep
their eyes glued on the ocean, looking for signs of
a returning boat.
After several days braver folks started venturing
into the jungle. It turned out two other boatloads
of refugees had already been dumped there.
Eventually villagers arrived, offering shellfish, fruit
and vegetables to the starving refugees in return
for their valuables.
Then another boatload of people was abandoned
there, and soon another. Food became scarce.
Malaria and diarrhoea broke out. People began
dying.
Carina and her siblings sat alongside a 21 and
23-year-old couple with an eight-month-old baby.
It wasn’t long before the baby died. “I remember
holding this dead baby in my arms. I washed
her and changed her. Every day someone died,”
Carina says.
“We just laid out in the sand in the open – really
hot and really cold with malaria, and I’d take
my siblings’ stuff to the ocean to wash out the
diarrhoea. It was more than a nightmare. I knew
our lives were being counted by the day – I didn’t
think we’d survive.”
DEATH’S DOOR
Carina remembers sitting there the night after
they’d buried the baby, imagining the scene of
her own death. “I remember thinking it would be
best if my brother and sister died first and then I
could kill myself,” she says. “I was so desperate
and scared. I just wanted them to die first – if I died
and they lived who was going to look after them?
The thought of those little kids having to bury their
sister was unbearable. In retrospect I think it was
them that kept me alive.”
After three months on the island a Red Cross
helicopter arrived, distributing medicine, food
and plastic sheeting for shelter. But the trio would
endure another seven months on this forgotten isle
before they were processed as refugees and flown
to Philadelphia to forge a new life.
NEW BEGINNINGS
While elated at their survival and at being
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CARINA HOANG