Quotes of the Day

A common human reaction to the trauma of a natural disaster is paralysis. But extraordinary events also evoke uncommon bravery. Erwin, a 37-year-old flower-seller in Banda Aceh, Indonesia, was driving to his home by motorbike when the Dec. 26 tsunami hit. He found safety with hundreds of others on a humpbacked bridge arched above the swollen Aceh River. "The black water looked like heavy mud," he recalls. "It was filled with corpses, cars, dead animals. There was so much rubble you could hardly see the water." Suddenly, the crowd on the bridge heard a faint cry: "Papa, papa." Erwin scanned the river, but couldn't locate the source of the appeal. A man standing next to him pointed: "There's a little girl over there!"

A child of about three was clinging to a wooden plank in the middle of the river. "There were so many men on the bridge," Erwin says, "but nobody made a move." A policeman with a video camera contented himself with filming the girl as she drifted by. "I realized then that nobody was going to help, so I ran to the riverside and waded into the water. It was filled with debris, and my feet kept getting stuck in fishing nets." After struggling for nearly 15 minutes, he reached the girl. "I yelled to the men on the bridge to get the girl from me because I was getting tired, but again, no one moved. I guess they were very scared. I thought I'd lose hold of her. Then I saw a young man going into the water, paddling toward me. I will never forget that moment in my life. I will never forget his face."

The face belonged to Heru (Jack) Kurniawan, a 27-year-old who works at an amusement park. "It was obvious that someone had to do something," says Jack, "or both of them would drown." Jack waded to the middle of the river—"trying to avoid the dead bodies"—and when he attempted to lift the girl on his shoulder, she screamed in pain: her right foot was caught in a fishing net. Erwin struggled to untangle her while Jack concentrated on staying afloat. "I kept telling myself to hang on," Jack recalls, "or all of us would drown."

When the two men got the weeping child to the riverbank, they parted without introducing themselves. For eight months—until TIME reunited them last month—Jack believed Erwin was the little girl's father. He was mistaken. The two men were chance bystanders risking their lives to save a total stranger.

This is the fourth year that TIME has produced a special report on Asia's Heroes, and never has this project been more timely or satisfying. The tsunami, which left 250,000 dead or missing across Asia, was almost unimaginably destructive. After the waters receded, Banda Aceh, the most devastated city, resembled Hiroshima after the atomic bomb: only a few buildings survived. Corpses were piled on the streets and in pickup trucks. Yet amid the grief and loss and mortal dangers, ordinary individuals like Erwin and Jack proved themselves capable of extraordinary courage and selflessness—the very essence of heroism.

Of course, many of the people profiled in this report have shown heroism of a different sort in less traumatic circumstances. There is the American expatriate who has dedicated his later years to bringing education to young Cambodians, and the brave married couple who published a book on corruption in China that sold 8 million copies—despite government attempts to ban it. We spotlight people who exercise their talents to the fullest, in everything from dance to sports to business, reminding us anew of all that we are capable of being in our own daily lives.

For the five remarkable women on the preceding pages, daily life itself is an exercise in heroism. Their names are Cut Aisah, Neneh, Nur Azmi, Nuraida and Sulastri. When the tsunami struck their village of Lampaseh, Cut was washed to sea; she survived by holding onto a log but only after losing her grip on her 17-day-old granddaughter, whose body was never recovered. Neneh regained consciousness when soldiers, thinking she was dead, loaded her body onto a truck piled with corpses; seven of her nine children died that day. Azmi lost her parents and three siblings. Three of Nuraida's sisters and brothers were swept away. Sulastri's husband, daughter and youngest son died. All five women had their houses obliterated. The tsunami robbed them of nearly everything they had in life.

Except their indomitable spirits. After eight weeks in a refugee camp, the five women decided to go home, although there was nothing left of Lampaseh but flattened earth and a few ruins. "Everybody knew the place was not livable," says Azmi. "But we were determined." When they reached the abandoned village, soldiers erected a single, large tent for them. There was no electricity and the nearest water pipe was 2 km away. But aid organizations swiftly recognized their resolve. The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees provided four family-sized tents, and an Oxfam truck started delivering water daily. Another aid organization donated a generator. "The quicker you make a move to try to stand up on your own feet," says Nuraida, "the more assistance you get." A few weeks later, Oxfam enrolled the women in a two-month cash-for-work program to clean up the village: each woman started earning $120 a month. "With that money," smiles Sulastri, displaying a new, gold bracelet, "we became real women again." In the seven months since they returned home, almost 100 other villagers have followed. That's only a start—a scant 850 of the village's 6,000 residents survived the disaster. But thanks to these five women, Lampaseh is rising from the dead.

Sadly, tsunami stories from Aceh, even accounts of exceptional personal courage, rarely have completely happy endings. Last month, TIME brought Erwin and Jack together to take the photograph of them that appears on this page. As they recalled the events of that day, Erwin began to speak of how his own family had been affected: although his wife and two eldest children survived, his youngest child, a five-year-old boy, died in the tsunami. He does not know the fate of the young girl whom he and Jack saved. "It would make a big difference to me to know that she survived," Erwin says. "Then I could accept the fact that although I lost my own son, I helped save the life of someone else's child."

• Anthony Spaeth
• Confronted with the devastation of the tsunami, ordinary people performed extraordinary acts