Still not legal...

In my naivety, I thought that leaving the country last week to go to Singapore and returning to Maumere was all that was required to validate my new visa. It turns out that I was mistaken; this was only the means of switching from my previous "social and cultural" visa to a new single entry visa. After returning, I then embarked on the process of applying for my temporary residence permit. I met VSO's passport agent (Father Hubert, a local priest !) in Maumere last Wednesday immediately after returning and handed him my passport and a stack of documents so that he could start the process. Since then, I have visited his office on four further occasions with yet more bits of paper, most of which have to be signed by the hospital director as my employer. The latest visit (Monday morning) brought the news that I am to stand by and wait for a summons to be fingerprinted (for the third time since arriving in Indonesia) but that the lady who does the fingerprints was sick on Saturday so we're not sure when this will happen ! There must be only one person in the immigration office who can do fingerprinting.... As with most things in Indonesia, there are no prescribed forms to be completed for the visa application, just a bundle of miscellaneous documents certifying this, that and the other.

My burgeoning radio career has reached new heights since last week with the successful (well, adequate anyway) completion of my first solo broadcast on the newly established hospital radio MEDIKA 107 FM. Last Saturday, I was persuaded to present a one hour English language programme – the big difference between my previous SONIA FM broadcasts and this one is that there is no producer on hospital radio so it really is a solo effort ! I think it went ok, I even received one or two SMS requests during the programme so it looks like being a regular feature – one of the things about hospital radio, of course, is that the audience changes from one day to the next so the concept of regular programmes is not as important as on a local station. MEDIKA 107 FM broadcasts to the town of Maumere (about 10km range) but nobody knows that yet as the official licence has not arrived so it has only been publicised within the hospital! I suppose that makes me a pirate broadcaster....

On Saturday 4th July we "celebrated" Independence Day with Mik & Jess at their beachside house at Gading Beach, including mokehitos, a new take on the local hooch which went down very well !

This week is being interrupted by the presidential election which takes place on Wednesday 8^th July and means a day off work. The run up to the election (in Maumere at any rate) has been extremely low key compared to the hoop-la that I witnessed in Bali for the general election in March but it will be interesting to watch. Anyone I have asked expects the incumbent Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono (known as SBY and the country's first directly elected president) to be re-elected even though they all also say they won't vote for him themselves (I'm not sure how that will work). As this is only the second ever presidential election here, I think that many people are not completely au fait with the system. SBY has two opponents for office - Megawati (former president Sukarno's daughter) and Kalla (the current vice president).