Eyewitness: In the parking lot of a hospital in Bandul, Pardio (34), a rice farmer lay on newspapers among hundreds of wounded villagers, many of them moaning and clutching their heads and legs.
Intravenous drips hung from trees and dustbins. One man stood barefoot on the asphalt, cradling a crying, injured infant and holding a wooden stick supporting an IV bag. The child's mother was dead.
Pardio had been asleep in a bed with his wife and two daughters when the earth began to rumble. He leapt up and grabbed his six-year-old, Putri, while his wife, Sri Nissi, clutched 13-month-old Uli.
"I can't recall exactly what happened next, but I remember my daughter falling from my arms, because I remember I heard a sound - braaak!" Pardio said. The next thing he knew, Putri was under rubble.
A wall crashed on him as he tried to retrieve her, and his wife and Uli tumbled on his back. Then he fell unconscious. Pardio, who sustained injuries to his head, chest and arm, came to at a hospital but did not see his family.
Word spread that another earthquake was about to hit, so he ran outside. "I just followed everybody running, even though I was in pain," he said. Eventually, a stranger gave him a ride back to his neighbourhood. His home, along with the houses of virtually everyone else, was a mess of corrugated tin roofing and timber. Finally, he found his wife and Uli wandering around.
Soldiers took the three of them to Panembahan Senopati Hospital in Bantul. All 152 beds were filled, but the injured kept coming. Victims were placed on mattresses on the blood-spattered tile patio, on benches and under trees in the parking lot, and on the asphalt under tarps.
"It's better out here - in case of another earthquake," Pardio said, echoing the fear voiced by survivors of the 9.1-magnitude earthquake that triggered the 2004 tsunami that hit Indonesia's westernmost province.
At a hastily erected Red Cross camp in an open field, volunteers brought the wounded in on stretchers, jostling them and, in one case, dropping a woman as they stumbled in the dark.
Sugiantoro, a Red Cross volunteer, began the day at a soup kitchen in a village near Mount Merapi, where evacuees were being fed. He felt the tremor. He saw a huge cloud of steam and smoke above the volcano. "I thought it was the eruption," he said.
A few hours later he was at the camp in Bantul, helping to triage the wounded. "Here, the problem is there are hundreds of injured," he said. The Merapi volcano, north of Yogyakarta, spewed ash and debris immediately after the quake.
Pardio recalled how his daughter had been so full of energy. She looked like him, he said.
"People said she has my nose, for sure - my flat nose," he said, his brown eyes filling with tears. Pardio's brother, Suparman, buried Putri behind Pardio's house on Saturday afternoon.
Pardio began to cry again as he recalled how he had reprimanded his high-spirited daughter a day earlier.
He said he would forever remember his daughter's last words: "Daddy, I know I'm a bit naughty, but I promise I won't do anything naughty tomorrow."
- (LA Times-Washington Post Service)