What do you do when you've lost a plane with one hundred people on board and the search has drawn a blank? You slaughter a buffalo of course! The Adam Air plane is still missing but searchers have not given up as this article from today's daily paper confirms:
Searchers slaughtered a buffalo in a traditional ceremony and consulted psychics Friday, the fourth day after an Adam Air jetliner went missing over Sulawesi. In Majene, West Sulawesi, a search and rescue team enlisted the help of local shamans and slaughtered a buffalo in a traditional ceremony, where food offerings were made to the spirits of the jungle and prayers were offered to ancestors to "clear the path" for the operation. "When we come to a new place we greet the spirits here," Majene military chief Zakariya told AFP. "You can see that even when using very hi-tech devices and enlisting the help of Singapore, we have still not found anything. So this is an alternative measure that we are using", he said.
I think this local article nicely complements my previous post concerning the camel sacrifice in Turkey. It's refreshing to know in 2007 that in this corner of the world reliance is not being placed solely on "hi-tech" solutions to solve problems and that traditional methods are still being embraced.
This is indeed a search that has not gone well from the outset. Initially it was reported that wreckage of the plane had been found and that there were ten survivors. This turned out to be totally fictitious. Waiting relatives and friends of the missing passengers were outraged but there is little they can do but wait.
On a final note, it occurred to me that Adam Air could be an unfortunate name for an airline company in Indonesia because "air" means "water" in the Indonesian language. It would seem very likely that the missing plane has gone down in the sea. Meanwhile, about 400 ferry passengers are still unaccounted for and the chances of their survival look bleak.
No comments:
Post a Comment