Medan, Indonesia – As floodwaters burst into Nurdin and his wife’s home in Indonesia’s Aceh Province last week, the elderly couple crawled onto their bed.Nurdin, who uses a wheelchair following a stroke, resigned himself to his fate.Recommended Stories list of 4 itemsend of list“I was just waiting to die. I didn’t want to leave my home,” Nurdin, who lives in the city of Langsa, told Al Jazeera.“I decided I would just die there, but my wife insisted we leave.”As the water continued to rise, Nurdin’s younger brother called on the couple’s neighbours for help.By the time Nurdin’s neighbours arrived at about 4am on Wednesday to carry the pair to safety, the water was chest-deep.“As I was being carried, we got hit by a strong water current, which knocked my neighbour off his feet, and we both plunged into the flood,” said Nurdin, 71, who, like many Indonesians, uses a single name.“I started to drown as I couldn’t stand up, and I thought ‘This is it’.”Nurdin and his wife reached their neighbours’ home unhurt, but torrential rains soon made the building uninhabitable, forcing them to seek the assistance of the army, which evacuated the pair to a local mosque using a table as a makeshift stretcher.“There were no clothes there, so I just had to wear a sarung,” Nurdin said. “I was there for four days.” Wreckages of vehicles litter a village affected by a flash flood in Agam, We …
