Living on the Fire's Edge in Flores

When Abdul-Wahid Jahrani tells you religion saved his life, he's not getting ready to take up a collection. "I'm just glad I'm a Muslim, and we build our mosques so high," says the 49-year-old fisherman from Wuring village, on the eastern Indonesian island of Flores. When a massive tsunami slammed into the island's north shore 10 years ago, Jahrani survived by clinging to the crescent moon atop the local mosque.

It was around 1:30 p.m. on Dec. 12, 1992, and Jahrani had just come back from the morning's fishing. "We didn't catch anything. It was like the fish...

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