The Trembled West Java

Few days ago at around 2 pm in the afternoon, we West Java island inhabitants were shocked by 7.3 in Richter scale earth quake. It made us all panic and somewhat perplexed since we were actually rare to have this pretty big tremor, besides we were doing fasting since that day still in the Ramadan month; we started fasting on August 20 and will last for 30 days.

The damages were emerged in some cities in this province; they were Cianjur, Tasikmalaya, Garut, Bandung etc. The worst happened in Tasikmalaya as the epicenter was quite nearby that city - about 140 km southern Tasikmalaya, it was also said that 70 people were passed away. In Bandung, my campus (Indonesia University of Education) had even more breaks in some buildings compared to other campuses – they were Islamic Center (mosque), library, social & economics faculty, while faculty of language and art had the worst one. One billion rupiah was reported as the financial loss caused by this occurrence.

Many things we can take as lesson from this, first, we need to make better building since it seems that Indonesian contractor companies don’t really pay attention to the earth quake, at least I assume that. The snatched buildings at my campus are all the example of this. Yeah, the broken buildings were all the new ones, only 1-2 years old, while on the other hand the JICA building which was constructed by Japanese developer in 2002 just fine. I don’t intentionally wanna say that all building constructors in this country are bad; at least two constructors (I won’t mention here) that built some buildings at my university are might be quite okay to be called so. Therefore it’s wiser to be stricter in allowing a company to build the building after winning the tender. The next lesson is that, we need to learn to mitigate and socialize what to do in the midst of earth quake to the public since many people just frightened, screamed and did nothing but panic, indeed we can manage that and I suppose there won’t be many victims. Government, universities NGOs and all those who care about humanity need to realize this program since such trembling can’t be predicted, it can happen everywhere, whenever it wants. The last, we (especially Moslems) must aware how small we are, we can never measure God’s might since we’re too fool and too weak to know those all. We just know miniscule thing in everything. Hence, let’s keep on striving to be closer to God, do good deeds just for the sake of Him, Wallahuallam.
(Unedited yet)