This past June, she narrowly missed being hit by spraying bullets in a sudden assault by these militant terrorists upon her neighborhood. Desperately seeking to escape, Yanti and many of her neighbors ran frantically for the ditches in front of their homes. There they crawled a long distance through mud and rocks, finally emerging scraped and bleeding when they reached a place of relative safety. Unlike many others in this ongoing struggle, Yanti escaped with her life.
Thousands are dead.
Large portions of the city of Ambon are destroyed. Much of the population has fled, transformed overnight into refugees trying to survive in isolated and dangerous locations, often without access to food or shelter. You won t hear much about the suffering and death in Maluku on the evening news. Newspapers are largely silent. There are no heart-rending photos of suffering or orphaned children or of dead bodies in the street, though both are common.