A Very Important Visitor...and why not to eat mango for breakfast

Not a lot to report last week really, it's still mango season here so there are enormous delicious mangoes available in the market (about RP5.000 or €0.30 for four or five of them). They make for a great breakfast but apparently it's a well known fact among Maumereans that eating mangoes first thing in the morning is not a good idea. I can now report that there appears to be a sound basis for this wisdom as Tuesday was spent at home instead of in the office (fortunately home is only about two minutes from the office..).

Saturday saw two more party invitations, this time it was graduation day at UNipa, one of Maumere's third level institutions and I was invited to two family celebrations for newly qualified nurses. At the first of these, we were seated indoors (quite unusual for here but this was obviously a well-off family as was evident from the house construction and the furniture). The wealth didn't extend to air-conditioning unfortunately and the heat was unbelievable so I would have preferred to be seated outside in the gentle breeze rather than in a pool of my own seat on a squeaky sofa !

So, on to the VIP..

 On Sunday, the hospital was gripped with excitement as we awaited the official visit of the newly appointed Minister for Health, all the way from Jakarta. The new minister (who is a doctor) worked in Maumere for three years when she was newly qualified and her husband is either from Flores or also worked here (I couldn't figure out which) so she was keen to pay a visit to her old home. She was due to arrive at the hospital at 12 noon and spend two hours visiting three wards and meeting staff and patients, followed by a tree planting ceremony and a bunfight. She turned up bang on time at 2.15 p.m. (which is about normal) at the head of a cavalcade of at least twelve official cars all crammed with hangers on, was greeted at the front door by some traditional musicians and dancers and Dr. Asep (the hospital director) and whizzed around the three departments, including the ICU – I'm not sure what the still unwritten infection control policy will have to say about one hundred visitors all marching in there ! - in double quick time. Unfortunately the long awaited rainy season decided to start just as the tree planting ceremony was about to take place so that was quickly shelved and she was then running so late that the bunfight (carefully prepared by Dr. Candida, Dr. Asep's wife) in the conference hall was left to the staff to fight over after her departure.

Dr. Asep and the newly printed organisation structure in the main entrance hall of the hospital.

The musicians and dancers preparing for the Minister's arrival.

Dr. Candida (left) preparing the snacks

Dr. Asep greets the Minister

The hole is filled by the rain rather than the tree...

Everyone turned out in their best bib and tucker including my friend Petrus, who I suspect designed his uniform himself as he is the only security guard in the hospital who dresses like this (and he is really proud of it as you can see !)

Duck and chips !

It's not all rice here, there are quite good potatoes available also for about RP10,000 (€0.65) per kg. Last Saturday evening I bought 1.5kgs of big spuds, Peter made them into chips and our friend Teresa arrived with three portions of bebek bakar (grilled duck) from a local rumah makan. Enak sekali, as they say around these parts !

 

Corruption update

I see that Transparency International has just published the 2009 Corruption Perceptions Index (see this earlier post for more on this). It's interesting to see that Ireland has moved up the table to 14th place with 8 points (formerly we shared 16th place with the UK on a score of 7.7). The UK is now in 17th place, still with 7.7 points.

However, I'm also pleased to see that Indonesia's position has improved slightly too - up from 126th place with 2.6 points to 111th this year (2.8 points).

Somalia still languishes at the bottom in 180th place with 1.1 points while (rather surprisingly to me at any rate) New Zealand is in 1st place with 9.4 points.

Gestation Period ?

This is the beginning of my fortieth week in Indonesia, a duration which the same as the gestation period for humans. I could get very allegorical about what my 40 weeks here has produced (apart from the loss of about 13kgs !) but I'm not going to do that.

Last week, an Indonesian friend asked me whether I was enjoying living here and what were the biggest differences between my life in Ireland and my life here. I listed off a few of the obvious and easier to explain differences (weather, food, motorbikes etc.) but the question did prompt me to think about some of the larger contrasts between living in a rich country and living in a poor one (and believe me, for those of you in Ireland who are dreading the budget on 9th December, Ireland is still a very rich country).

The big obvious one of course is money, but more importantly access to money. You need money to get money. Everybody that I have met here so far, whether living a hand to mouth subsistence existence in a village or working as a government employee on a regular salary, operates with practically no savings and therefore no backup in the case of emergency. There are government owned pawnshops in most towns and as most people don't have bank accounts, this is the first port of call in an emergency. The credit union movement is also quite well established here and VSO is planning to place a volunteer with the Credit Union head office in Maumere next year to help them develop their management skills. Of course, access to finance and seed capital is recognised as one of the biggest limiting factors in preventing people from becoming self sufficient in even the smallest ways - if you want to open a small kiosk selling cigarettes or a sewing business, you need some start up money to buy your initial stock or your sewing machine. This is why micro finance or microcredit operations are proving to be so important in helping to break the poverty cycle.

Another big difference between life in Ireland and life here is connected to lack of infrastructure. This one is pretty significant and affects many aspects of life, here are just a few examples :

Transport
Transport in Flores is privately provided and not subsidised. By Western standards it is cheap (a trip to Ende, about 160 kms away, will cost about Rp70.000 or less than €5 for one seat in an 8 seat car and will take about 4 to 5 hours) but for a poor villager this is a huge sum of money.   


Roads
Are not great (this is why the trip to Ende takes so long). In the rainy season many are impassable except by truck so connections between towns on the same island are difficult. 


Electricity
I am lucky to be living in the hospital as we rarely experience power cuts. However, another volunteer living in Maumere can now predict when her electricity will be off - every fourth night from 6pm to 10 pm. A volunteer in Ruteng (western Flores) tells me that they have no listrik every day between 12 noon and 4pm. Part of the problem is infrastructure - Maumere has expanded in recent years and more houses now have electricity but the power station can't keep up - but availability of fuel (diesel) for the generating stations is also a problem. As the rainy season approaches, there is a higher risk of sea tankers not being able to dock and unload and road tankers not being able to make it through the landslides.
           

Water
Again, I'm lucky. I have plenty of running water for washing which has been available almost without interruption and I can afford to buy 20 litre bottles for drinking. However, villagers who do have water have to collect it from a communal well or tap, drag it home and then boil it. Access to water in some villages is almost non-existent and the focus of many development projects is on providing access to clean water. The link between water and health does not need to be spelled out.   


Healthcare
Two of the biggest contributors to the stark difference in life expectancy between developed and developing countries are access to healthcare and education about healthcare. There is lots of reading material available on the WHO's site (HERE for example) and you can also contruct interesting comparisons between selected countries using chosen indicators HERE.


There are of course lots of other differences which I guess are really the luxury aspects of living in a rich country : entertainment options, internet access (with obvious implications for educationand business), nice restaurants, access to more than ten things to eat (but think of all those food miles), refuse collection services - ah, the list is endless but is often what your tax is spent on (apart from servicing the growing national debt of course !).

Anyway, that all got a bit serious, I'm off to do some  work now. For further reading, look up the UN's Millennium Development Goals here. 


   

Corruption

One of the topics covered by VSO's pre-departure SKWID (SKills for Working In Development of course !) training course is the issue of corruption, which is a major problem in many developing countries. From the distant remove of pure, umblemished Ireland (ha ha) I used to think of corruption in developing countries as being related to vast sums being siphoned off foreign aid by corrupt government officials and politicians. When I arrived in Indonesia, the first seven weeks was spent in language training every morning with local orientation taking place most afternoons. One of the topics covered in this orientation was corruption in Indonesia and this opened my eyes as to how widespread a problem this is. There are many ways by which corruption is measured - one of the most well known indices is the CPI (Corruption Perception Index) produced by Transparency International, about which organisation you can read more HERE.

In the latest index (2008) Indonesia is ranked at number 126 out of 180 countries. Somalia is at the bottom of the table and Denmark at the top. Ireland is at number 16, the same ranking as the UK.  

When I started hearing more about corruption in Indonesia, and after living here for a while, I began to realise how endemic it was and how it affects every level of society. Here are three specific examples from my own very limited personal experience :

1. Booking airline tickets here is a rather haphazard affair. Recently some friends (fellow volunteers) who were leaving the island but couldn't get seats for the next four days eventually managed to get tickets by buying them at their hotel from an airline employee who happened to have some "spare" tickets which had "originally been bought for some family members who were now unable to travel" (yeah, right - a nice easy one to swing for an airline official). The tickets were of course in the wrong names but for an "administration charge" (paid in cash at the hotel) this was all sorted out.

2. When someone dies here (and there are usually between 1 and 3 deaths a day in the hospital) the remains are brought back to the home village almost immediately for burial the following day. This removal is done by the hospital hearse and the family have to pay for the transport. However, in many cases, the money is paid directly by the family to the driver and it never makes it into the hospital accounting system.

3. The lack of systems and controls means that it is very easy for cash payments to quietly disappear (and almost all payments here are cash, credit cards and cheques are non-existent for ordinary people). Medicines sold from the hospital pharmacy are cheaper if you don't want a receipt - now, why would that be do you think ? 

There are many other examples but there are a few fundamental problems :

1. Systems  - most organisations have very simple or almost non existent accounting controls in place.

2. Money  - salaries for most employees are very low, making the opportunity to supplement your income quite attractive.

3. Cutlure - unfortunately, this is now so much part of the system that it is almost seen as an entitlement by many and as a semi-legitimate means of supplementing your meagre salary. Add to this the Asian reluctance to tackle problems in a face-to-face confrontational way and it is easy to see how these situations are allowed to continue.

 

The recently re-elected president, Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono (commonly known as SBY), has pledged to do his bit to improve Indonesia's corruption problem and things do seem to be improving with the establishment of the Corruption Eradication Commission. However, this topic has hit the headlines here again this week with the uncovering of an alleged plot by senior police officials aimed at weakening the commission by falsely implicating commission officials in bribery allegations. This has now led to the resignation of a deputy Attorney general and a senior police officer and more fallout is expected.

You can keep up with this story at the Jakarta Post (story HERE) or at the BBC's South Asia site HERE.

Athletics display outside my front door

Catching up...

I seem to start a lot of posts recently by apologising for the length of time since my previous post so this time, please take it as read this time ! In my defence, all I can say is that there hasn't been very much to report recently. Things at work continue to trundle along slowly, especially as Yani (the colleague with whom I work very closely) was out sick for almost two weeks and returned to work just in time to go to a meeting in Jakarta (which will take about a week by the time you add in transit time, shoppping time, etc.).

Add to that the fact that our internet connection has been very unreliable recently and that half of the buttons on blogger.com seem to be missing most of the time so sometimes I can't change fonts or upload photos...

Last Sunday week we visited the village of Kristo, a friend in the hospital for another long day of sitting around on plastic chairs doing nothing much but drinking moke and eating RW (as the K9 delicacy is known). RW stands for Rintek Wuuk which is Sulawesi for "fine hair" and is the euphemism by which the meat of our four legged friends seems to be universally known. Nobody has yet been able to explain why they don't just call it daging anjing (dog meat). Another of those mysteries which will remain a mystery I guess. One of the most welcome parts of that particular visit was being offered es kelapa muda (young coconut drink) as soon as we arrived, it's deliciously refreshing and there is something special about enjoying a drink like this while sitting under the tree from which it has been plucked 5 minutes earlier. We're also in mango season now so there are plenty of mangos to be had everywhere, I bought three huge ones at the side of the road this weekend for Rp5,000 (about €0.30).

Another recent highlight was the visit of Geoff, a previous VSO volunteer who I more or less replaced in the hospital here. Geoff unfortunately had to return home early due to personal circumstances but came back on holiday to visit Lamalera on Lembata (the whaling village I wrote about HERE) and also, after visiting Flores, went to see Krakatoa. By coincidence, I was just finishing reading "Krakatoa : the day the world exploded" by Simon Winchester while he was here so was able to give him the book to take on his onward travels. I recommend this book very strongly to anyone who wants the full story of what happened in 1883 with a good introduction to the story of the geology behind the eruptions.

Here's Geoff, what film star does he remind you of ?

Lastly, some of the kids who hang around outside our house in the afternoons trying to destroy a wasps' nest (despite at least one of them getting stung every day).