A group of private aid workers battled fierce swells and driving rain that kept most craft on shore, managing to deliver food and other supplies to desperate survivors on the islands hardest hit by a tsunami that killed at least 413 people.
Hundreds of miles to the east, a volcano that has claimed 36 lives in recent days erupted again early Saturday, temporarily forcing shut an airport. Plumes of heavy gray ash poured from the crater's mouth as rocks and debris cascaded down its slopes.
The twin catastrophes, striking on different ends of the seismically active country this week, have severely tested Indonesia's emergency response network.
Government agencies pulled back boats and helicopters Friday that had been ferrying tsunami aid to the most distant corners of the Mentawai islands and resorted to air-dropping boxes of aid from planes.
On a borrowed 75-foot cruiser, aid workers faced rough seas and sheets of rain -- plus miserable seasickness -- to bring noodles, sardines and sleeping mats to villages that have not received any help since Monday's earthquake. In one village, most people were still huddling in a church in the hills, too afraid to come down even to get the aid.
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