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Shipwreck survivors held on, prayed

By ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published January 10, 2007

MAKASSAR, Indonesia - Sigit Hariyanto and the other men on the life raft screamed as the ship got closer, daring to believe that five terrifying days of storms, hunger and ravishing thirst might soon be a memory.

"Help! Help! We are over here!" they shouted, standing and waving their arms.

But the ship turned away; no one on board saw the survivors from a sunken ferry floating in the ocean. The men fell silent, turning to dreams of their families or to prayer, the near-rescue only heightening their despair.

"After that I became resigned to my fate," Hariyanto said Tuesday, recounting the lowest point of a nine-day ordeal that ended Sunday when the raft was finally spotted. "God gave me my life. If he wanted to take it back, then I was willing to give it to him."

Hariyanto, 25, runs a small computer school on Borneo island, the ferry's departure point.

Although one man died shortly after the rescue, the survival of the 14 others on the raft was a rare piece of good news in Indonesia after a string of disasters, including deadly floods and landslides and the presumed crash of a jetliner with 102 people aboard.

The rescued men were among nearly 630 people aboard a ferry that went down in the Java Sea during a storm Dec. 29. Nearly 400 people are dead or missing.

On the raft, the men endured monstrous seas that almost capsized their flimsy craft and forced them to hold on for hours in terror, shivering as temperatures fell at night and burning during the day in the tropical sun, Hariyanto said.

They survived on emergency rations stored in the raft, with each man limited to three servings of a fingernail-sized piece of biscuit and a sip of water daily.

[Last modified January 10, 2007, 01:29:11]