10 July 1976: Missionaries will be the only people with any practical expertise on dealing with disaster on this scale

The major earthquake reported to have killed 9,000 people in the Baliem Valley area of Indonesia two weeks ago may have wrought a peculiarly desperate havoc. This is one of the most isolated areas in the world, and one of the most difficult to reach with aid.

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The Baliem Valley lies in the centre at Irian Jaya between the forested north and swampy south, and is a densely populated area of about 60,000 inhabitants living in wooden houses in small villages and subsisting mainly on the sweet potatoes they grow in communal gardens.

Travel and transportation, even for the American and Dutch missionaries who are the spearheads of Christian civilisation, here is by foot, apart from the handful of single-engine planes (capacity for 18-40 passengers) that operate a once-a-day schedule service between Wamena in the valley and Jayapura, the Indonesian administrative capital on the northern coast; a service constantly jeopardised by the area’s chancy and rapidly changeable weather was introduced in the valley area this year by one of the missions.

Communication relies entirely on radio. There is no telephone and no radar. Medical facilities depend entirely on the one-doctor stations in the villages staffed by Dutch and nineteen missionaries; there are just a couple of hospitals in Jayapura and a couple more on the southern coast. All supplies have to be air freighted, and – like the emergency clothing, food and medical necessaries sent out from Jayapura yesterday – can be prevented by bad weather from reaching the survivors.

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The missionaries – there are about 20-30 groups in this area in Catholic one-priest or Protestant married-couple units – will be the only people with any practical expertise on dealing with disaster on this scale. They have been in Irian Jaya since 1954, when they arrived to find cannibalism still in existence, and they have established the Christian faith in the country, built churches, worked in language studies and introduced simple medical clinics.

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These have been no inter-village wars for the past 10 years and the influence of witch-doctors is much reduced; on the other hand they considerably added to the area’s birth control problems. By tradition the Irian Jaya live in a communal house and the women in individual houses with their children, and a taboo inhibits sexual intercourse between a couple for four years alter the birth of a child. But the Christian emphasis on married couples’ cohabitation is now sending the birth rate soaring.

Gillian Cutress, a biologist and one of the few Europeans to have viewed the area within the year, returned to England from the Baliem Valley last month. In her visit she saw evidence of minor landslips, and explains that their effects can be devastating. The communal gardens terraced up the sides of the mountains that border the valley may be full of people working in them: and the mountains fall almost perpendicularly into the valley. Rushes of boulders brought instant death to 26 men gathered in their communal house in one village in February this year.

Ms Cutress acknowledges that the Dani – the name of the inhabitants living in this valley – are simple people who would be bewildered, terrified, and at a loss to know what to do when confronted by divination on the scale estimated in this quake.

She wishes however to put the record straight as to their capabilities. “People tend to think of this area as full of headhunters, wars, fighting and bows and arrows; but these people are far from primitive. They have developed excellent irrigation and agricultural systems and are, I suspect, highly intelligent.”

The Dani are healthy and agile people, well used to their terrain and rough tracks and – Ms Cutress believes – if unhurt, they would carry loads and walk without too much difficulty to an unaffected part of the valley. “They have very few possession, their houses are easily built, and though the nights are cold the temperature is not too severe; and I think their reaction will be to try to get to somewhere not affected as soon as possible. The main problem – apart from injuries – win be if a village’s gardens are destroyed; when there will be a tremendous lack of food.”