Another week half over and I am beginning to feel as if I'm settling into some sort of routine now. Many days start with a visit to the market at about 6.15 am – this morning I bought two huge bunches of bananas (about 30 in total) and four enormous avocadoes for a total of Rp15,000. The bananas are one of our staples here as we still have no cooking facilities other than hot water from a dispenser for tea & coffee. The avocadoes are great in a salad with diced cucumber and tomato and are also used in one of the most popular drinks here – take the flesh of an avocado (or two smaller ones), add a glass of water and a good dollop of Indomilk (sweetened condensed milk, the thought of taking an unsweetened drink is anathema to Indonesians) and whizz in a blender with some ice. Decorate the inside of the glass with some drizzled chocolate condensed milk and there you have it....jus alpukat !
After breakfast (banana sandwich and coffee) it's off to Appel for 7.30 a.m. and then into a meeting room which has wireless access to pick up my emails (when it's working). After that, the day trundles along slowly although I am starting to be little busier now. I have started meeting with some of the hospital managers to explore their areas of responsibility and their most important challenges but translation is still a major difficulty. Some days I sit through staff meetings and try to catch the gist of what is going on and I also have plenty of reading material to wade through. I usually head back to our house at about 10.30 am for a cup of coffee (one advantage of living in the hospital) and the working day then sort of fizzles out at about 1.30 – 2 p.m.
After work, many people have lunch and then retire to bed for an hour or two which is a fantastically civilised way of spending the hottest part of the day. Most of the shops in the town close at about 2pm and reopen for about two hours at about 4pm so there's not much to do then anyway.
The evenings are generally quiet but last week was unusually busy. I'm not going to let this blog thing turn into a daily diary which would make for very dull and tedious reading but (a statement like that is always followed by a but) last week's social diary contained the following :
On Wednesday I was invited to attend a mass for a girl who had died in an accident the previous week – I didn't go as I wasn't quite sure where it was and my motorbike was ill equipped at that stage for night driving on the roads around here (I have since got the headlight fixed and now I can actually see the holes just before I hit them).
On Thursday I was invited out for a birthday dinner by Yani, one of the people with whom I have worked most closely since arriving here and whose office I am sharing. Four of us had a great meal (ikan bakar/grilled fish) at a restaurant at the harbour.
On Friday afternoon, our programme support officer from the VSO office in Bali arrived for the weekend. The main purpose of Dany's visit was not to visit existing volunteers (my first formal placement review takes place about six months after the start of my placement) but to conduct a workshop with a local HIV/AIDS support group who are interested in having a new volunteer appointed to work with them later this year or next year. This occupied him for the day on Saturday but we easily managed to fill the rest of Dany's time !
On Friday evening, we headed off to a wedding reception in a village about one hour's drive away – the bride was the head pharmacist at the hospital and many of the staff had been invited to attend. The first speech at the reception was by Dr. Asep, the hospital director, who was later prevailed upon to take the microphone and sing a song !
On Saturday night a local band, Sparky, was launching their new album at a gig in the car park of Maumere's one and only department store. This was a great night out with a huge crowd and three support acts, including a three man rap group of the skinniest rappers I have ever seen (not that I have much experience of rappers).
Sunday afternoon was spent (again) at the local beach resort of Gading, which is fast becoming our regular Sunday afternoon chill out location.
Then on Monday it was back to work........
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