How 13-year-old Haikal survived Indonesia’s deadly boarding school collapse

Dewi Ajeng was at home in Probolinggo – a city in Indonesia’s East Java – when she received a chilling message in the group chat of her son’s school in Sidoarjo, located some two hours away.
The Al-Khoziny Islamic Boarding School had collapsed, trapping the young students, all boys, mostly aged between 12 and 18 years old, inside.

Dewi’s 13-year-old son, Selendra Haikal Rakaditya, was among those buried beneath the rubble.

“I just felt a range of mixed emotions. I was sad, frantic, crying. Then my husband messaged me to confirm the news,” she told Al Jazeera.

“I called my friend in Sidoarjo and told her to go to the school and find him, and that I was on my way.”

Dewi arrived at about 5.30pm, about two hours after the school collapsed during afternoon prayers.

Her son, Haikal, had not been found.

The names of children who were rescued and taken to different hospitals in the Sidoarjo area were pinned to large notice boards set up by search and rescue teams.
“Then someone sent me a video from the scene and I could hear a voice shouting, ‘Mama, mama, mama,’ and I thought, ‘Thank God, that’s him, he’s calling for me’,” she said.

“From then on, I focused on the scene of the collapse. I just knew he was in there, and I told the search and rescue teams that he needed to be rescued.”