What's for dinner ?

As the rainy season continues (although last week we had hardly any rain at all here), the number of children in the hospital continues to cause great concern. As of this morning, 72 out of a total of 170 patients were children, more than half of them suffering from Dengue fever (see previous posts). The children's ward has 37 beds so you can imagine the difficulties that this is causing. Unfortunately, almost every day also brings more news of childhood deaths in the hospital, and last week two of these also suffered from "gizi buruk" or malnutrition.

Unfortunately, it looks like things are going to get worse instead of better. Recent reports in the Pos Kupang (newspaper for this region) have highlighted price increases in the last few weeks for basic foodstuffs such as corn (increased from RP5.000 for 7 ears to RP5.000 for 5 ears), sugar (increased from RP10.000/kg to RP12.000/kg) and rice and there have been warnings from the Vice-President that the some parts of the country are likely to face food shortages in the coming months. It almost goes without saying that the province in which I live (NTT) will be one of the worst affected. Rice is the staple food for about 230 million people here, many of whom live in an almost cashless environment so increases such as those that have been seen recently cause major difficulties in poor areas. For this reason, the government intervenes in pricing and supply arrangements to make sure that supplies are available at affordable prices to the poorest sections of the community. One of these programmes is called Beras Miskin (given the Indonesian penchant for contractions, more commonly know as RASKIN). However, the programme has lots of problems, as can be seen in this interesting 2005 paper from the World Bank, ranging from poor administration to corruption, which means that much of the help does not reach those in greatest need. The latest available WHO data reports that 20% of under 5s in Indonesia are underweight for their age.

So, the next time you are dithering about what to have for dinner and thinking "Oh, I had that last night", spare a thought for those who struggle on a daily basis to buy just rice for their family and who are worried that they may not even be able to afford that soon.....

   

Dogs and the Beeb

I mentioned in an earlier post the amazing number of dogs that are everywhere in Denpasar – roaming the streets, grazing from the offerings left at entrances, sleeping in the roadway, frequently lying dead in the road after being hit by a car, and an extraordinary number of them show visible signs of having given birth very recently so the problem is not going to get any smaller anytime soon. While I was taking a shower this afternoon after returning from school, there was suddenly a lot of shouting and screaming in the laneway outside Pak Agung’s house and when I emerged I found that his daughter had been bitten on the arm by a dog just outside the house as she walked home from work and had rushed off to hospital for a rabies shot ! Rabies was one of the many jabs that I had before arriving here but we are constantly reminded that the course of vaccinations doesn’t immunise you against the possibility of contracting rabies, it just buys you a little extra time in which to start the course of injections after being bitten, licked or scratched on broken skin (yes, a lick from a infected dog, cat, squirrel, bear or raccoon is all it takes). The WHO estimates that about 30,000 people in Asia die every year from rabies - as you probably know, there is no cure and death is inevitable once the symptoms have started (and they can start anytime between four days and two years after contact). Cheerful stuff, eh ?

Ok, on to less gloomy stuff : one of the best known lifelines for Anglophone ex-pats worldwide who crave news and other programmes in their mother tongue is the BBC World Service’s English language service. Reception in Denpasar is reasonably good at the times I tune in (usually about 12 noon GMT, about 2000 hrs here) and every time I switch on I am grateful to the boys and girls of The Stedfast Band for their generosity in presenting me with a very good Sony world radio before I left the band last year. In honour of my arrival in Indonesia, the good old Beeb has started a series on Indonesia focusing on some of the issues which the country is facing in the run up to the general election later this year. These short programmes (about 25 minutes long) are being broadcast on Wednesdays but are also available after broadcasting to download as podcasts, so if you are interested in learning more than you will get from my humble mumblings, click HERE. For those of you who are not (yet) into podcasts, here’s how to get started : right click on the “download” button and select either “save target as” or “save link as” to save the recording to your computer. I suggest that to start with you choose your desktop as the location to download the recording to. When the downloading of the recording has finished, just double click on the new icon on your desktop to play back the recording. (You will of course need to have some speakers either built in or connected to your computer and make sure that you have the volume turned up !). That’s the end of the IT lesson for today.