Moving house again, on video this time

Kimang Buleng

Yesterday I joined a group from the hospital on a motorbike excursion to the top of one of the nearby mountains (Kimang Buleng). Ten of us altogether made the rather steep ascent with only one puncture (a rarity as most tyres here are long past their best and the quality is rubbish to start with so you never have to go more than about two miles without passing a "tambal ban" or tyre repair place).

On  the way, we had to pull off to the side of the road to make room for someone who was moving house (literally) !

This morning the working week kicked off with a meeting in the hospital which was a followup to the complaints workshop and survey that I wrote about some time ago. Today's meeting consisted of a  few speeches (as usual) and the public signing of a promise by hospital management, department heads and local government officials to make some very specific changes, many of which I suspect will be difficult to implement as they will involve spending money, a resource which is in very short supply. However, it's interesting to see how a country which is tied up in miles and miles of red tape still has institutions which adopt a very inclusive and open system of trying to deal with their problems. This is largely down to the enthusiasm of the hospital director, Dr. Asep, who engages lots of stakeholders in the wider community about decisions in the hospital.

Here Marlena, one of the finance team (renowned for her voice, she belts out Celine Dion numbers at weddings !) formally reads the complaints, promise and recommendations while the Bupati (regent) on the far left and Dr. Asep listen in.

 Next, Dr. Asep takes the stage and outlines the hospital management's response (using the analogy of a large ship for the hospital !).

 

 

 

Following this, the promise and recommendation is formally signed by representatives from the hospital, local government, Department of Health and other stakeholders.

 

While Dr. Harlin and Dr. Mario look on and enjoy themselves...

       

Tick, tock, tick, tock....

I found out very recently that the long running saga of negotiations about agreeing an MOU (Memorandum of Understanding) between VSO and the Indonesian government (which finally seem to be getting somewhere, what is hoped to be the final meeting takes place today, Saturday) will have one significant implication as far as I am concerned. The new way of working is likely to be quite different from current arrangements and the health programme (of which I am part) in particular is going to look very different in the future. As part of the move towards these new arrangements, the news came out last week that there would be no possibility of extending existing health programme placements. As my placement here is only for fourteen months (or sixteen including the introductory in country training) I had always had in the back of my mind the likelihood that I would probably consider extending my stay here for a while longer, if for no other reason than to feel that I was getting some value out of the investment that I have put into learning a new language at my advanced stage in life. Now, however, it looks as if this will not be possible although there may be the possibility of applying for a new placement, which would probably mean committing to a further two years here, making my total stay at least three and a half years. Hmmm.....

If I leave at my original end of placement date I will leave Indonesia in early June 2010, meaning that I am now more than halfway through my stay in this extraordinary country. This realisation has had the effect of suddenly focusing my mind on what I have done (very little) and what I feel have left to do (an awful lot).


Hmmmm again......

Litter

Maumere is not the cleanest place in the world. When I have showed Indonesian friends some of the photographs on my laptop from my hometown of Bray or of my travels in Australia and London, the initial reaction is always the same - "wah, bersih sekali" (very clean) !


As well as cash income, one of the big obvious differences between a rich country and a poor one is infrastructure (or lack of it) - which of course covers just about everything from transport to healthcare. In Indonesia, the smelly issue of refuse disposal is generally "self managed". When I moved into my house at the hospital, I asked a colleague here what I should do with my household rubbish. I received a rather surprised reply along the lines of "Well, burn it of course !" which is what everyone else does. There aren't any bin lorries making regular household collections although there is a skip at the back of the hospital which is emptied regularly. Where the contents end up is anybody's guess – I intend to follow the truck that empties it someday to see where it goes. This practice of burning everything means that there are little fires everywhere every day and would probably be all right if everything was harmlessly combustible but of course, it isn't. In particular the use of plastic bags here is quite staggering and reminds me of the days before the levy in Ireland (by the way, I see that the levy is soon going up to 44c per bag, probably about the only 100% tax increase which won't raise an uproar). As well as millions and millions of plastic bags, the littering habit here is quite something. Part of the problem, of course, goes back to the lack of infrastructure - there aren't any rubbish bins so if you want to be a good citizen, you have to take your rubbish home (and burn it there). It's much easier to just throw it away on the street so that's usually what happens.

There is however, one form of recycling taking place which I haven't yet quite managed to figure out. This consists of a group of three children, very dirty and ragged, who traipse around the town sifting through piles of rubbish to salvage empty plastic bottles which they stuff into sacks and drag off to somewhere. I don't know what happens them after that but I'm going to try to find out.

Strangely, this offers a strange contrast with the cleanliness of all the houses that I have visited. Dust is everywhere (especially now in the middle of the 8 mont dry season) so the women of the household spend large portions of every day sweeping up and so the areas surrounding houses are usually spotlessly clean.

Another of the major causes of litter are these :

These small plastic "glasses" hold 240ml of drinking water, and have a sealed plastic lid which you have to stab violently with a pointed straw (provided). They are available in every shop and kiosk for about Rp500 (Rp1,000 in Maumere airport though, some things are the same the world over !), are included in every snack box handed out at meetings and are given to guests at home. When you're finished with it, you just throw it on the ground - or burn it, causing all sorts of unpleasant and dangerous fumes....  

Wha' ?

Firstly, apologies for the recent lack of posts. My laptop had an emergency trip to hospital last weekend due to the charger getting fried after the last repair fell apart. Thanks to Rudi in Toko Digital, his hacksaw, soldering iron and friendly expertise, I am now back on the air again.

Following that, I was confined to barracks (or at least a radius of about 10 metres from my bathroom) due to a rather vicious attack of mencret (translate it HERE if you really need to) for three days but thankfully that now seems to have passed.

When I came back, one of the things I have been working on is a grant application to a Portuguese NGO for funds for the hospital. All of their paperwork is in English (thank goodness as my Portuguese is non existent) and the application documentation is rather formally worded. For example :

a) Principal Objective (general condition, desired in a long term, that a Project may help to achieve. The concretization of the specific objective facilitates the materialization of the principal objective)

I will try to write my proposal in simpler English ! 

Corrections & clarifications

I got my blue and yellow boxes mixed up yesterday on the earthquake map - the size of the box (not the colour) denotes the magnitude, the colour will tell you how recent it was. Look below the map for a more coherent explanation !

Earthquake update

I came in to work this morning and logged on to receive a few emails asking if I had been affected by the earthquake. I have to confess to asking "what earthquake ?" until I looked at the BBC News website and found out that Padang in Southern Sumatra had been badly hit yesterday. Latest estimates of the number of deaths vary from 75 to 200 depending on which news service you look at but there are also thousands trapped so the toll will have risen even further by the time you read this.

Since I arrived here, I have felt two very slight tremors although I managed to sleep through the most significant quake here (it happened at about 2 am). If anyone is interested in keeping an eye on things in my part of the world, bookmark this link :   http://earthquake.usgs.gov/eqcenter/recenteqsww/Maps/10/125_-10.php To find Maumere, look for Ende (about 150km WSW of here) on the map. Maumere is on the north coast in the large bay at the thinnest part of the island (just where the red arrow in the copy below is pointing to).

Recent earthquakes (if any) are indicated by a yellow square (or blue for larger quakes - there's an example of a yellow one on the top right of the map above ) which you can then click on for further details. I've added this site to my list of "favourite sites" which appears on the left hand side of your screen, just scroll down a little to find it. 

On a different note, today is 1st October so I took a quick look at my blog hit statistics this morning and was pleased to see that in September it had a new monthly record of exactly 1400 (the previous highest was 858 in February). I am guessing that this is related to my decision to try and post more frequently (16 posts in September as against 7 in August) rather than a huge influx of new readers ! So, thanks for keeping on reading and I'm sorry if your inbox is being filled up by alerts from Feedblitz. For those who don't know what I'm talking about, you'll find a place near the top on the left hand side to allow you to "subscribe" - this means that you will receive a short notification by email whenever I add a new post.