Let me check my diary...

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........

Flores at last !

Last Thursday afternoon we (three new volunteers and one accompanying partner) arrived in Maumere to begin our placements in earnest. Peter & I were fortunate enough to be met at the airport by one of our friends from the hospital and were brought to our “temporary” accommodation at the hospital. This consists of a small two bedroom house behind the hospital designed for use as doctors’ accommodation – the hospital, in common with many other district hospitals in Indonesia, has great difficulty in attracting and retaining medical staff due to the perceived unattractiveness of the location and lack of resources available to do anything and needs to provide accommodation to doctors working here. The house we are in is basic enough but is reasonably clean but needs a new bed in my room so I am currently sleeping on the floor.
Although Indonesia is predominately Muslim, the province of Nusa Tengara Timor (NTT) is mainly Christian. As I have mentioned before, when Indonesians do religion, they really do it properly, especially where observance of holidays is concerned. As a result, our arrival at the end of Holy Week meant that many of the shops were closed for Easter weekend and things only started moving again on Tuesday morning.
On Saturday we moved outside Maumere to a small hotel at Gading Beach, about 10kms along the coast to the west. This was a very relaxing weekend with a total of nine volunteers from Maumere, Mbay (also on Flores), Rote (another island south west of West Timor). The resort itself is a small hotel in the throes of a slow building project but offers nice food, peace and quiet, and good standard bedrooms.

On Monday morning we turned up for work at the appointed hour to find (not surprisingly) that we were among the first to appear. After morning Appel, we attended a regular Monday morning staff meeting with heads of department at which the main topic of discussion might as well have been the price of fish for all I was able to understand ! The rest of the day was spent meeting new colleagues, assembling some light reading material about my placement, and (finally) visiting our new house. This was a bit of an eye opener as it is in a pretty appalling state inside and needs a cleaning and painting blitz. We have been promised that this will happen as soon as a tukang (handyman) can be found and we have agreed with the hospital what they will be providing for us and what we will need to buy ourselves. (VSO has an agreement with employers about certain basic requirements for accommodation – bed, table, chair, stove, etc.) Most of the other stuff we will buy for ourselves out of a household equipment grant from VSO given to all new volunteers (equivalent to about €90). At the time of writing (Wednesday) we are waiting to hear news about how long this work might take but my expectations are that we will continue to live in the hospital accommodation for at least another two weeks. As the hospital is a little way out of the town, I am anxiously awaiting the arrival of my promised two wheeled motorised transport from Bajawa later this week. Until then, my involuntary enforced weight loss program will just have to continue – down 8 kgs (in nine weeks) at the last count !