One Expat's Story

Expatriates are an interesting group. Most have carved out a life of traveling from country to country, exploring, growing and enjoying all the world has to offer while working for a company willing to pay them to live abroad. Others move to a new country and make that their temporary home for a decade or more. Anyone who has been an expatriate for any length of time is likely to have an interesting story to tell. This is one of them of a person I’ll call Luke.

Luke arrived in Jakarta early in 1998 working for a large multi-national as a software consultant. In May, then president Suharto was struggling to maintain control of his 20 year reign of power. Rioting was common throughout Indonesia and students began demonstrating to demand Suharto resign. Before one such demonstration could begin, armed police shot several students from an overpass at a university. This lead to some of the worst rioting, pillaging and genocide in Indonesia’s history as plain-clothes military and police stormed through Chinatown raping the women and burning their shops and homes.

The multi-national company he was consulting for evacuated all expats and senior management to Singapore on a chartered plane. He was not on their evacuation call list because the company assumed the consulting firm had him covered under their evacuation plan. Unfortunately for Luke, the consulting company’s evacuation plan assumed the multi-national would evacuate him. He didn't even know an evacuation had occurred.

In the midst of this turmoil and confusion the system he supported crashed. His boss in the US, who was unaware of the situation in Jakarta, contacted him and asked him to go to the office and restore the system from backup tape. Unencumbered with family obligations, and braver than I would have been, he took the risk of going into the office.

He hailed a cab and, laying below the windows in the backseat, told the driver where to go. Other than tanks, very little traffic joined them as they navigated the main thoroughfares of Jakarta. After restoring the system, he chose not to return home. Instead, he checked into a hotel with a tank parked out front figuring that someone important must be holed up inside and it would be a safe place to spend the night.

Undeterred by the two days of rioting, Luke remained in Jakarta, married, and began a family. In 2004, radical groups were making a lot of noise throughout Indonesia. It had been two years since the Bali nightclub bombings that killed 202 people. In recent months terrorists had thrown bombs over the walls of various Western embassy compounds and the homes of the ambassadors. Expatriates were once again on high alert and Western embassy were issuing travel advisories (some of which remain in effect today).

Luke was working in a corner office on the top story of a building across the street from the Australian embassy. The building was undergoing renovations and, as a result, he was asked if he would mind swapping offices with another manager. He would be moving from a corner office with new wood furnishings, to a standard office with older furnishings. When he agreed to the move, the manager said he couldn’t believe Luke was willing to give up such a choice office.

Luke’s reply: “You won’t be saying that when they bomb the Australian Embassy.”

Two weeks later, Luke’s offhanded sarcasm proved prescient. Noordin Top, the mastermind behind the recent bombings of the Ritz Carlton and JW Marriott hotels, sent an operative of his Jemaah Islamiyah organization in a small delivery van filled with explosives to attempt and blow up the embassy . The blast did very little damage to the embassy itself, but Luke’s original office was destroyed. The new occupant had a severe gash in his head as the glass from the windows came crashing in. He was fortunate that he was not facing his computer, which was placed near the window, at the time of the blast. Instead, he was facing away from the window reviewing some papers. Had he been at the computer, he likely would have lost his life.

Luke was now at an office at the rear of the building. The shock wave from the blast took out the windows in the rear of the building and knocked the ceiling tiles loose. He was on the phone when the blast occurred and climbed under his desk. He remembered from the Bali bombings that the first bomb blast was to scare everyone into the streets where they set off a second bomb that achieved the most casualties. He wasn’t moving until he felt certain the bombs were done. He remained under the desk for several hours as everyone else evacuated the building.

Today, Luke remains an expat in Jakarta. He took the recent hotel bombings in stride: “been there, done that, sent the postcard, have the T-shirt”. His heart still races when a small delivery truck drives near his car, though he has stopped asking his driver to either speed up or slow down to avoid being next to it. One day he knows he will return to his homeland. For now, Indonesia is his home, for better or worse.


Discussing his story with him recently reminded me of a conversation I had with one of our expat friends who makes frequent trips to Pakistan as part of his business. We asked him if he feels safe with all the recent bombings. He said he did and shared a conversation he had with a Pakistani local whom he had asked the same question. The local answered:

“You know, I’m 58 years old and have lived in Karachi all my life. I see the reports in the press today of the ‘new security situation’. What is new about it? This is the way life is here. I’ve never known anything different.”

How we perceive and react to the events in the world today are, in large part, formed by the history we’ve seen and experienced. What I’ve learned in the last several months it that safety is a relative experience. Every place has hazards – earthquakes on the U.S. west coast, tornadoes in the Midwest, New Yorkers in the east – and everyone in those communities feel they are safe. So it is in Jakarta with bombings every few years.