For someone who survived over three months of blackout on a diet of instant noodles during a conflict in Ambon, it is easier to reflect on emergency situations.

While it sounds insensitive to say he's lucky to have lived through such a traumatic event, it somehow helps him take a constructive approach to some of the worst situations mankind will eventually face.

"We were barely able to leave the office. Watching clashes on the streets and seeing people killing one another with swords from our window's offices were the only breaks we had, being stuck in work premises," says Syahroni Effendi who is an official working at Hasanuddin Airport in Makassar.

"There were no flights except military ones. Logistics were disrupted so we had to live off instant noodles. Since water was scarce, we ate uncooked noodles. Sometimes we soaked them in our drinking water for a little bit of a change," he says.

His memories came back vividly when taking part in a desktop simulation of a pandemic recently held in Sanur.

Grouped in Indonesia's Eastern region, which includes South Sulawesi, Maluku and Papua, Syahroni and his team are posted to a regional command center, assigned to handle information flow, take instructions from Jakarta's command center, sift through an avalanche of updates on a number of cases and deal with faltering security in the region.

"The key is coordination. The flow of information must be shared both ways between the field and the centers so we know what measures are taken," he says.

Despite having lived through chaos in Ambon, Syahroni however was incapable of saying whether he would be able to be as tough as he was back then, were he to face a disease pandemic.

"It's going to be a totally different situation. There will be more chaos than during a conflict, where men can intervene and reconcile warring groups," he says.

Syahroni is one of 39 people taking part in the pandemic simulation - called non-pharmaceutical preparedness - jointly organized by the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA), the National Commission on Avian Influenza and Pandemic Preparedness (Komnas FBPI), and the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF).

The Sanur simulation is the end of a long series of events that kicked off early this year. Before Sanur, the same event was also organized in South Sulawesi's Toraja and North Sumatra's Medan, exposing participants to a different kind of geographical setting.

Indonesia, the world's largest archipelagic country that has been hit hardest by avian influenza (H5N1 virus) in the past, is giving officials - from across the board except the medical sector - a taste of what it would be like to handle an emergency situation such as a pandemic.

The H5N1 infection - which has so far caused 126 deaths - has always been considered a goose egg compared to other older ailments like AIDS, dengue, malaria and TB, but it raises global concerns because it will spread fast once the virus can be transmitted from human to human. But while the world is struck with the so-called pandemic-fatigue when it comes to H5N1-related news, another flu virus, H1N1, has been a wake up call for people who think pandemics are a make-believe notion - and that the threat of a pandemic is present and real. From late April, the swine-originated virus or influenza A (H1N1) traveled from Mexico to other countries, as a result of a more globally connected society.

The World Health Organization (WHO) has announced the world is now in the fifth phase of a pandemic, urging countries to take extra measures to prevent the virus from further spreading and causing deaths. As of Thursday, according to the WHO, 41 countries have officially reported 10,243 cases of influenza A causing 80 deaths.

Indonesian Health Minister Siti Fadillah Supari downgraded the potential of a global pandemic, saying the virus could only be found in subtropical countries and Indonesia - a tropical country - did not need to worry about it. But the latest update from the WHO shows that out of the 41 countries that have so far reported influenza A cases, Malaysia and Thailand - both tropical countries and Indonesia's neighbors - also filed cases of the virus.

Organizers of Sanur's pandemic simulation were quick to adapt their training to the current threats facing the world today, those of a pandemic in its fifth phase and a virus called H1N1 instead of H5N1.

Pandemics are not doomsday, especially in this day and age of more advanced medical infrastructure and faster information flow. It's not the end of everything. So trying to focus on getting our jobs done is what matters most, says Emil Agustiono, deputy executive chairman of Komnas.

Emil stresses establishing communication between the health and non-health sectors is the key to dealing with the current threat of pandemic. In many cases, he says there are clutters of information among institutions within the non-health sector that have to be cleared away. The pandemic simulation will help officials see what they should prioritize in times of emergency.

The question "Are we ready or not?" is no longer relevant according to Emil, because the pandemic threat is already out, and it is only a matter of time before it reaches Indonesian shores, he says.

Virologist from Udayana University I Gusti Ngurah Mahardhika, who has long been advocating non-pharmaceutical measures to prevent the spread of the H5N1 virus in Bali, says although the influenza A (H1N1) is now a low pathogenic virus that has a relatively low probability of fatality, less than 10 percent, it does not mean the world can rest on its laurels.

"Nowadays, pandemics should not be seen as situations where people drop and die like flies. But the virus is easily transmitted, and if you just look at how many people can potentially catch it, you can imagine what kind of effect it will have on the economic and social order," he says.