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Café manager’s family killed in Indon quake
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Posted on Jun 01 2006
Suyatna “Dodo” Widada endures his years on Saipan, just so he could offer his family in Indonesia a better future. But his dreams are now shattered; his world fell apart Saturday after getting a call from home saying that his wife and only child, a five-year-old daughter, were killed in the massive earthquake that hit Java, Indonesia, last weekend.
“He got a call Saturday from Indonesia that his wife and his kid passed away. He left the next day,” said Dodo’s employer, Café at the Park owner Gabriel F. Boyer in an interview yesterday.
Boyer said Dodo left the next day, Sunday.
“It’s very tragic. The sad thing about it is he never got to see even their bodies. His wife and child were buried within 24 hours, even before he arrived,” said Boyer.
Dodo’s family, whom he last saw a few years back, lived in central Java where at least 6,000 people have died from the earthquake.
Dodo, who is in his mid-30s, works as restaurant manager at Café at the Park.
Before this, he worked for five years as restaurant supervisor at Hyatt Regency Saipan.
“He called me that day [Saturday]. He was shaken but he was calm,” said Boyer.
He said that based on his last conversation with Dodo, the employee is willing to come back to Saipan “especially now that he has no family to come back to.”
Fundraising
Boyer said that he plans to begin a fundraising campaign to help Dodo rebuild his house, which was destroyed during the earthquake.
“We want to help him put his life back, maybe rebuild his home. Something to help him get through this crisis,” said Boyer.
He said he would place a donation box inside the café next to the cashier.
He said his employees would share a portion of their salary for Dodo.
“We’ve asked our employees to donate,” he said.
The magnitude 6.3 quake that struck soon after dawn on Saturday destroyed more than 135,000 houses and displaced an estimated 647,000 people, reports said.
As of yesterday, reports cited over 6,000 casualties from the quake.
Indonesia, the world’s largest archipelago, is prone to earthquakes as it sits along the Pacific Ocean’s so-called Ring of Fire, a zone of active volcanoes and tectonic faults.
