Magic Stone Ponari

MOHAMMAD PONARI was a typical kid in the impoverished East Java village of Balongsari. Then, quite literally, lightning struck.


The nine-year-old, who had been playing in the rain in his front yard, was hit by a thunderbolt. But to the astonishment of his friends, he was unharmed.

All the more bizarre, according to his village chief and family, was that when Ponari came to, he found a stone the size of an egg on his head, and became convinced he possessed special healing powers.

A boy next door afflicted by a fever was his first patient.

The stone was placed in a glass of water and the boy, Lintang, drank deeply. The fever vanished.

Then another neighbour approached him, a woman aged in her 30s who had suffered from a depressive condition for 15 years. She, too, was healed.

The miracles, big and small, kept coming, said Nila Retno, the local village chief.

"My arm was sprained. The water touched by stone was given to me and I applied the water to my sprained arm. Suddenly, I was OK again," she said.

The district police commissioner, Sutikno, a devout Muslim who will be making the pilgrimage to Mecca this year, recounted his experience.

"I was inside the house talking to the boy and his family. Together with me in the house was a boy of his age who hadn't spoken for five years," Sutikno said. "Ponari shook him. The boy reacted and they started fighting, like wrestling and pulling each others' hair … then, a few moments after the fighting, the boy started to talk."

What did he say? "He said 'I'm scared'." The tales of miraculous healing spread quickly. Within a week of the lightning strike, hundreds of local villagers were lining outside Ponari's modest home.

A week later, the ailing, the lame and the curious were coming from as far afield as Malaysia. Thousands queue each day in lines stretching for kilometres, carrying plastic bags of water ready to be transformed into an elixir by the magical stone.