Caltech scientist shares Nobel award in chemistry.

PALU, INDONESIA >> Tenyear-old Mohammad Zaki was climbing on a beachfront playground at dusk on Friday when the ground beneath him seemed to disappear.

Badly injured and disoriented, Zaki was then hit by a rush of ocean water, as hulking waves crashed down on this coastal city. He scrambled across the debris and when the chaos passed, found that he was bleeding heavily, his clothes ripped from his body. He staggered toward the city and was found by a police officer.

“He had to climb on top of a car from a hole in the ground,” said Rosmawati, his 33-year-old aunt who sat next to his hospital bed, fanning his wounds in the crushing humidity with a piece of a cardboard box. “He was brave.”

Zaki has been waiting five days for an operation to repair a severe laceration on his stomach, one of dozens of patients waiting for additional treatment at the state-run Undanta hospital — still without fuel to run its generators and so without electricity.

Indonesian President Joko Widodo visited this battered city for the second time Wednesday, and the neighboring region of Donggala for the first, where twin disasters — a magnitude 7.5 earthquake and a tsunami that followed — have taken 1,407 lives and counting. He has appointed his vice president to lead recovery efforts, and the government’s disaster management agency has deployed over 6,000 people to the area, ushering in convoy after convoy of fuel, planes filled with clean water, instant noodles and basic medicine.

They have begun to coordinate the arrival of foreign C-130 transport planes.

Still, residents believe these efforts pale in comparison to the mammoth task ahead of this community, which can’t shake their feelings of forlorn abandonment, after no help came for nearly six days.

Across this region on Wednesday, sign after sign continue to beg for help: “we’re hungry,” “don’t forget us.”

Of those who have been officially confirmed dead, only about a third have received any kind of burial.