She was suffering severe burns across her back and arm, multiple shrapnel wounds and a deep gash in her wrist, but Megan Basioli knew she had to keep moving. Only she couldn’t. The searing pain was so intense for the 14-year-old from Perth that as she tried to stumble with her stepmother and stepsister down the dark, chaotic street in Bali’s Kuta district where devastating explosions had ripped through two nightspots, she kept falling to the ground. Then she felt herself being lifted from behind, as a stranger carried her to a nearby hotel, where other victims were being cared for by hotel staff, locals and tourists.
As she lay near the hotel pool, a teenager from Sydney named Craig, who was holidaying with his family, came and sat beside her.
“He just asked if I was OK,” Megan recalls. “He was staying at a hotel nearby and ran down with his family to help when they heard the explosions. I said, ‘Can you please stay next to me?’ And he did. He stayed with me the whole time. And when they took me to the hospital he stayed next to me there, too, just holding my hand.”
It is 20 years since the Bali bombings, a religiously
