Following the collapse on Monday of a historic Islamic boarding school in East Java that, so far, has left three students dead and about 100 injured, the local bishop has said that Catholics are mobilising to take part in relief efforts. Source: Crux.
“I am deeply saddened and mourn for this incident,” Bishop Agustinus Tri Budi Utomo of Surabaya said.
“The Catholic Church is currently involved in taking part in a public kitchen for rescuers and victims’ families who are waiting for the discovery of the victims behind the rubble,” Bishop Utomo said, noting there was a Catholic parish about 2.4 kilometres from the school.
Reports suggest that at least 90 students are buried in the rubble after the collapse of the building, apparently caused by the unauthorised construction of an additional two floors atop the original two-story structure.
The National Disaster Management Agency had originally said 38 people were trapped in the rubble but revised that estimate upwards on Tuesday. A magnitude 6 earthquake that struck the area where the school is located on Tuesday briefly brought rescue efforts to a halt, but they had resumed by late in the day.
The collapsed building has assumed “a pancake-type structure with layers of concrete slabs leaving only narrow voids, unstable conditions, and the possibility of survivors still trapped,” Mohammad Syafeii, who heads the Basarnas search and rescue agency, said.
The students caught in the collapse were mostly boys aged 12 to 17. Female students at the school were praying in a separate location when the collapse occurred.
The Al-Khoziny Islamic Boarding School, in the town of Sidoarjo, is a traditional Islamic institution in Indonesia, known as a pesantren. Traditionally, pesantren focus exclusively on Islamic studies, such as memorising the Quran and learning Arabic and Islamic law, but many now also offer general education.
Indonesia is the world’s largest Muslim country, and while there are pockets of extremism in the country, relations between Christians and Muslims are mostly positive. Catholicism in Indonesia only represents about three percent of the overall population, but in such a vast nation with 284 million people, that still works out to about 8.3 million faithful.
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Indonesia bishop says Catholics joining rescue efforts for collapsed Islamic school (By Nirmala Carvalho, Crux)
