22 weeks later

Not that I'm counting of course, but it is quite amazing how time flies (or maybe not flies, but passes anyway). It's hard to believe that I arrived in Indonesia not able to speak a single word of Bahasa Indonesia this day 22 weeks ago and here I am, five months later, not able to speak a single word of.... I jest of course ! Language is still a problem, especially in staff meetings at the hospital but normal conversation is becoming easier and easier, especially when the person you are talking to makes some allowances ! Anyway, another week dawns in Maumere and I am STILL waiting for the wheels of bureaucracy to grind their way towards issuing my KITAS visa with no sign of an imminent result.

Last week, we had a day off on Wednesday for the presidential election. This was only Indonesia's second ever democratic presidential election (the first was in 2004) but it didn't seem to raise much excitement here at any rate (apart from the novelty of having a day off !). Next week we have another day off on Monday (for the ascension of the Prophet Mohammed) so a few of us are thinking of using the rare opportunity of having two consecutive days to visit Moni again.

Some of my readers (both of them, in fact) have asked me to write a little more about the hospital and my work. The hospital is a 200 bed unit which serves a district with a population of about 300,000 people. The current hospital opened in about 1996 as far as I can work out and replaced one which was destroyed in the earthquake and resulting tsunami of 1992. About 1500 people died in Maumere in that earthquake and many of the town's buildings were destroyed, with a total of 90,000 being left homeless in the region. According to the US Geographical Survey, the wave ran inland for about 300 metres with a height of 25 metres. The hospital has two operating theatres and carries out procedures such as hernia repairs, appendectomies, and many Caesarean sections (between 1500 and 2000 babies are born in the hospital every year). The pace of work is generally much much slower than at home – some of this is due to the language problem but even if I were completely fluent, I would still not be working at the same pace as home. A lot of time is spent on social chatting here and meetings are really something else – the discipline (or lack of it) about use of mobile phones would have any meeting chairman in the west tearing their hair out. It is seen as quite normal to sit in a meeting, and not only send and receive text messages but also to receive calls and chat away while the meeting proceeds around you. Frequently, the meeting stalls while the chairperson answers their phone too... Recently, I have been helping out with a complaints survey. About 5,000 questionnaires have been distributed to wards, outpatient departments, local health centres, etc. seeking feedback from the local community about the hospital's facilities. While the methodology is maybe a little flawed (there is a preset list of complaints and participants are asked to say "yes" or "no" to each one), the results are proving to be quite predictable. The only problem with this is that someone has to summarise all of the returned forms - anyway, I guess it's good practice for my counting in Indonesian as we enter the results on a spreadsheet. Other tasks on hand for this week are an email appeal to a number of five star hotels in Bali to ask for cast-off bedsheets and blankets and to complete my first quarterly report for VSO. This is in preparation for my first placement visit which will take place after about six months in placement but it provides a useful opportunity to have a formal discussion about how the placement has been going and maybe adjust priorities and objectives.

Appeals : as mentioned above, mobile phone usage here is very high and everybody has a HP (hand phone). However, unlike at home, these are all personally owned rather than being provided by employers and are a significant investment for their owners. Also, there is no system of upgrades after a year or two and as they are a relatively recent phenomenon, there is no big pool of old phones available. This means that when a phone gets lost or broken, buying a replacement is a very big deal indeed. I know of some people whose phones have died and they now carry around a SIM card in their wallet and use their friends' phones to send and receive messages. So, if anyone has any old phones at home (with charger) I could do with a couple of them. They will need to be unlocked from the network at home before sending but this usually can be done quite easily. If anyone can help, send me an email.

While I'm at it - another appeal, this one for me. If anyone has any old paperbacks that they don't want, pass them on to my mother and she will make up a parcel and send them out to me. There are enough English speaking volunteers here to arrange a book exchange, we just need a few more books ! I'm not too fussy about what I read so long as it's well written – just avoid ones with pink covers !

In other news – the hospital yesterday admitted its first patient with suspected swine flu. The patient is a Dutch citizen who arrived here very recently but the diagnosis is not yet confirmed.

And finally, happy birthday to my parents today (yes, they share the same birthday) !

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).

Back home again

Another month begins and what I have got to report ?

Well, last Tuesday I took an English class for a friend who was away for a few days. The class consists of a group of ten year olds who are the children of, or related to, a local hotel owner. I was surprised to find that their vocabulary was better than expected – however, they had lots of problems with word order and sentence construction. From my own bitter experience, the temptation when learning a new language is to try and translate directly from your native language - this is almost always a recipe for mangling ! One example where this is particularly obvious in Indonesian is when speaking to someone older or of higher status (e.g. to a teacher, doctor or parent). In Indonesian, it would be perfectly normal (and very respectful) to address the person to whom you are speaking in the third person and refer to them as Ibu (for a lady) or Bapak (for a man). So, it is quite in order to say "has Bapak eaten yet ?" rather than the less respectful "have you eaten yet ?". However, many Indonesians when speaking English then translate this literally into English and also translate the work bapak into the literal translation "father". This resulted in an interesting conversation recently with a group of students at a local seminary who were keen to find out what I thought of Indonesia but kept asking me questions like "what does father think of the food in Maumere?". I eventually managed to explain to them that I was not a father of any sort !

On Saturday, Peter and I left home bright and early to head to the airport for our visa trip. This was a rather protracted business which involved spending four nights away from Maumere, one of which was in the bright lights of Singapore and three in Sanur (a suburb of Denpasar on Bali) on the way there and back. The time spent in Singapore was short (less than twenty four hours) but long enough to meet the passport agent twice, have a few big meals and a couple of glasses of red wine. Yesterday evening (Wednesday) we arrived back home in Maumere (writing that felt a bit weird !) and met the local passport agent who today starts the process of applying for my KITAS (temporary residence permit. This simple matter looks like it will take about a week to achieve as one of the documents needed has to be signed by the hospital director who is at a conference in Bali until the weekend. The pile of paperwork needed to support the application is very impressive and includes my CV from home (in English) and no less than fourteen photographs in three different sizes ! I can report that bureaucracy is alive and well in Indonesia....

On the work front, the last thing I did before leaving for Bali was to hit "send" on an email enclosing a completed application to an Australian foundation for a small grant to fund a project to promote Health Worker Safety. I received a quick acknowledgement saying that they've received the application and that it appears to fit their criteria so all I can do now is wait until the committee reviews applications. In the meantime, the work of gathering information on how to set up an Infection Control Committee in a "resource constrained environment" continues and I must thank all my friends, former colleagues and especially customers who have provided me with tons of useful information. One of the main priorities of the Infection Control Committee will be to establish policies and guidelines about hygiene (especially handwashing). However, one of the biggest challenges is lack of money (and therefore, equipment) so anything that requires spending money just ain't going to happen !

For instance, something as simple as a proper mop is an alien concept here – floors are mopped with water (no detergents) and a torn up bedsheet pushed around with a bamboo pole. Forget about the questionable hygiene aspects of this operation, the efficiency isn't great either as the area of the end of the bamboo pole must be only about 3 or 4cm square !

Week 19

As I post this, it is exactly nineteen weeks since I arrived in Indonesia, the longest period in my life that I have lived outside Ireland. One of my colleagues asked me last week was I "sudah bosan" (already bored) with Maumere and seemed very surprised that the ten weeks I have spent here was not long enough already. My placement is due to end on 8^th June 2010 (exactly 50 weeks from tomorrow) but there is always the possibility of an extension (however, that's talk for another day !). Most VSO placements are for a two year period - I have never understood quite why mine is only for fourteen months (or sixteen including the in country training in Bali) but I assume that it has something to do with the fact that I replaced a volunteer who had to return home early during his placement. Apparently about one-third of volunteers expend their placements, up to a maximum of three years in total.

I mentioned recently that there has been a great deal of uncertainty about the position of many volunteers in Indonesia due to changes in VSO's relationship with the Indonesian government. These changes have meant that the previous system of volunteers holding a "social and cultural" visa which is renewed in Jakarta every month could no longer continue, and VSO is seeking to have a more formal relationship with the Department of Manpower, which will mean that volunteers will instead apply for a KITAS (Kartu Izin Tinggal Sementara – Temporary Residence Permit). However, until this agreement is finalised with the Department (which could take months), employers such as the hospital in which I am working are being asked to sponsor their volunteers for their KITAS. This appears to be working OK for volunteers who are working with government bodies – however it seems to be impossible to arrange for the many volunteers who are working for Non Government Organisations (NGOs). As a result, many of these volunteers are having their placements end earlier than planned or are being sent home until the new agreement is signed (in some cases for up to three months). You can imagine the disruption that this upheaval and uncertainty is causing. Last Friday, I received the good news that my KITAS (supported by the hospital) has been issued in Jakarta. However, the bureaucracy doesn't end there - to change from my current social and cultural visa to a KITAS I must leave Indonesia and re-enter. This will involve leaving Maumere next Saturday morning, flying to Denpasar, then flying to Singapore on Sunday night, staying one night and returning to Denpasar on Monday and finally arriving back in Maumere on Tuesday. I'm looking forward to a big fillet steak and some good red wine in Singapore, two luxuries which are not available in Maumere !

For the last two Fridays, I have stood in for a volunteer friend who has been away on holiday (and a visa trip to Singapore) and presented the weekly English language programme "English Make Over" on SONIA FM, Maumere's very own radio station. The programme is a phone in discussion show and on my first week the topic was belis (bride price or dowry). This was an interesting opportunity for me to learn a little about this local custom and I was surprised that all of the callers to the programme were unanimous in their opinion that this was a tradition which should be ended. The amounts involved are quite staggering, and usually are counted in animals rather than money but often have the effect of saddling the groom's (extended) family with a huge debt which can take many years to pay off. As a timely example of this, I was privileged to be invited to a wedding last week by a friend at work whose sister was being married. This involved two functions – the first, two days before the wedding was similar to an "at home" where friends were invited to visit at any time after 3pm, and food and drink were provided. The second was on the day of the wedding. Non-family guests do not usually attend the church wedding but that evening, about 700 guests (yes, seven hundred !) were invited to the reception. There were a few speeches (but unusually for Indonesia, not too many and not for too long) followed by a marathon hand shaking session - platform party of 8 x 700 guests = 5600 handshakes. Then we hit the buffet. The food at this wedding was probably the best I have tasted in Indonesia and was produced by the family on fires behind the house.

Earlier in the week, they had slain two cows outside the house and these were the special treat but there were about five different meat dishes (plus rice of course !).

After eating, the moke was produced and we settled into a rather fast session behind the house with some of the bride's uncles. They explained that the belis or dowry in this case had been 20 horses, with a price tag of RP2,000,000 per horse. Now, converting this Rp40,000,000 into euros seems steep enough (about €2800) but consider this : a nurse earns about Rp600,000 per month and an elementary school teacher about Rp300,000 a month. This bride's belis was about five and a half years pay for a teacher ! This really put into perspective for me the comments on the previous week's radio show about what a burden this system was for families.

On my second week hosting the radio show, the topic was cheating – I was surprised to receive SMS requests from a native Maumerian who was listening online in the Netherlands so if you want to listen in to Sonia FM live from Maumere, click HERE and follow the link that you will find down a bit on the right hand side.

What happened this week ?

Well, not much really to be honest. I've set myself the objective of putting up at least one post a week here but I have to confess that it is sometimes a struggle to stop lapsing into a daily diary which would make for spectacularly uninteresting reading and have my already tiny hit statistics falling off a cliff faster than I could stop them.

Almost as interesting as Anne Frank's diary (with apologies in advance....)

For example :

Monday :

6.30 .am Got up, .took my doxycycline antimalarial, had some bananas, bread and coffee for breakfast. Washed.

7.25 am Went to work. Slow morning, internet wasn't working very well so not able to do much.

11.00 am Coffee break

2.00 pm Home, change and out for lunch to one of three of four regular places.

2.45 pm Back home, read or snooze for an hour.

4.00 pm Maybe go out for a drive on the bike

6.00 pm Darkness, usually back home by now. Spend the next four hours sitting on the front porch with one or more of our friends, some of whom are very keen to improve their English. One of my new friends, Frid, has become my new Indonesian teacher so it's a good mutual exchange.

Tuesday :

See Monday

Wednesday :

See Tuesday

Etc. etc

So, you will be pleased to hear that I am going to spare you this ordeal. Last weekend, we had a visit from a very good friend Nick, who is a VSO volunteer who has spent the last year and a half working in Yogjakarta with some deaf groups helping them to develop training programmes. Nick was one of the welcome party when we arrived in Bali all those months ago and so was one of the very first VSO volunteers I met in Indonesia. He has just returned to Indonesia after a holiday at home and is spending his last three months before his placement ends on some roving assignments, the first of which is a two week visit to Bajawa in western Flores. Instead of going out for dinner on Saturday we ate at home and my housemate and resident chef Peter excelled himself with pizza and apple tart. Pizza may not sound that difficult to make but consider some of the challenges : tomato sauce made from scratch, dough from scatch, chicken bought in a restaurant and shredded at home, mozzarella brought from Bali by Nick, the oven is a tin box on top of a paraffin stove.... and what a spread it was, as good as you could get ! Frid, my ojek friend, had made the arrangements for Nick to travel onwards from Maumere to Bajawa on Sunday (better pricing always available to locals !) and joined us for dinner that night also. The next day I went with Frid to visit his cousin in the hospital where I work and met his aunt. Frid told her that he had had dinner in our house the previous night and explained what we had eaten. I could see the puzzled look on her face as he described what a pizza was and when he had finished she asked : "What about the rice, was it fried or boiled ?"

Above : Indra & Dewa (you don't smile for photographs in Indonesia !)

Above : from left,Kristo, Daniel, Indra and Hartadi relaxing on our porch.

Nick departs for Bajawa with Frid (with apologies for a rushed and badly composed photo !)

Lunch under the Chocolate Tree

Well, another Monday dawns on Flores and after another one day weekend (this business of having to turn up for work on a Saturday is a real nuisance), it’s time for another week. Life has been pretty uneventful since last week’s post, the week at work has settled into a fairly regular pattern and one day is much like another. I spent a chunk of last week working on an application for a grant for Health Care Worker (HCW) safety training from an Australian fund which promotes good clinical governance and am also trying to explore some avenues to see if we can get our hands on second hand bedsheets and blankets from some of the five star hotels in Bali.

Yesterday we again went with our friends Hartadi and Kristo from the hospital to visit a friend in a nearby village for her birthday lunch. The main dish was as per last Sunday’s lunch (no further details will be provided) but the music was a little different. Outside the family’s house, we were greeted by a bank of 8 enormous speakers which pumped out music at an ear-splitting volume for the duration of our visit. Add this to the language difficulty and let’s just say that, while we received a great welcome, once the music started communications were limited to non verbal ones ! While having lunch, I asked about the trees under which we were sitting. I know plenty of people who would love to have a “pohon coklat” (chocolate tree) outside their front door – we picked a cocoa pod and split it open to investigate and taste the seeds inside – not at all like Cadbury’s Dairy Milk !

I brought my pocket binoculars with me yesterday and these proved to be a great hit with adults and children alike. Most of the people there had never seen binoculars before and were amazed at the magic of being able to magnify far off objects ! I had to keep repeating warnings about not looking at the sun...

Last night, we had (another) sort of going away party for a volunteer who left Maumere this morning. The reason for it being a "sort of" going away party is that Joseph's situation is a little uncertain. Recent changes in visa requirements have meant that many volunteers are now in a sort of limbo. Joseph needs to leave Indonesia this week as his current visa has expired - however, at the moment it is very uncertain when he will be able to return (maybe not for three months). The uncertainty associated with this must be very unsettling, to say nothing of the practical difficulties involved in locking up your house not knowing when (or if) you will be coming back. Fortunately for me, this uncertainty only affects volunteers working for NGOs and those of us who are employed by government bodies are not affected - or not yet, anyway..

Pigor and Sunday lunch

Monday morning and back to "work" again....

Yesterday was our one day of rest - the hospital, in common with most government offices here, works a six day week which is more than just a bit of a nuisance as it severely restricts opportunities to see more of Flores. Travel on Flores is a major operation and to get to any of the other towns is usually a full day trip. For instance, Ende is about 150km away but is an eight hour trip by car. Anyway, yesterday started with a visit from two friends who work in the hospital and live in the dormitory building near our house - Hartadi is a nurse in the operating theatre and Kristo works in Cleaning Services. They arrived at 8am (this was a lie in on a Sunday morning after a late night on Saturday) with a large bunch of bananas and took over our kitchen to produce a huge tray of pisang goreng or PIGOR (remember the Indonesian predilection for contractions that I mentioned before ?) - fried bananas or banana fritters to you lot.

Ok, how many types of banana can you name ? You're probably thinking, well a banana is a banana is a banana, isn't it ? Well, it may be at home, but here there are plenty to choose from. This list is not exhaustive :

• Pisang susu - milk bananas, very small
• Pisang merah - red bananas, not very common but are available
• Pisang meja - table bananas
• Pisang brangah - "normal" bananas
• Pisang bugis - green bananas with three sides, fatter than other, used for pigor. Originally from South Sulawesi
• Pisang Ambon - from Ambon, not sure yet what they are like.

After feasting on our pigor, we headed off with Hartadi and Kristo to visit a village called Wololora,near Lella - about thirty minutes' from Maumere. This is where a friend of Hartadi's lives, and in true Indonesian style, it was considered quite normal for him to turn up for lunch and bring along a few friends.
We had a very pleasant few hours there, drinking coconut juice (freshly harvested by Kristo), chatting to the children of the extended family, taking plenty of photos and then we sat down for Sunday lunch.

The tables were set outside and all the men sit down and wait for the food to arrive - we had rice (of course), cooked papaya flowers, tofu, some small pieces of smoked fish, and a big plate of meat. You may not wish to know what this was, so I won't spell it out except to say that it was a meat that is not normally eaten where I come from and comes from an animal usually kept as a pet in Western society. The meat was ok, dark and quite strongly flavoured but with lots of bones. As well as the plate of meat, most meals also consist of a large bowl of soup or stock with plenty of big bits and lots of liquid to spoon over your rice. I was glad that I didn't delve too deeply into this bowl but my friend Peter fished out some distinctly recognisable parts, let's just say that they gave him paws for thought. Hmmmm, maybe vegetarians have the right idea after all...
After the food has been served to the men, drinks poured and refills of rice brought to the table, the women all disappeared inside the house to sit on the floor and have their own lunch with the children.

There are a few things that always strike me about visiting these rural village communities : the first is that the whole family lives cheek by jowl and stays together - yesterday there were three generations of thirty to forty people all living in very close proximity to each other. The next is the willingness to share - it is an honour rather than an inconvenience to have guests visit and to have foreign guests is a special treat. Some of the smaller children were a little overwhelmed by the sight of their first bulehs (palefaces) and were very nervous about coming too close - one little girl kept sneaking up behind me and stroking my hand to see if my white skin felt different from her dark one !

Weather forecasts

I have deleted the "My weather" link on the left hand side of the page - for two reasons.
1) It seems to be not working most of the time and
2) Even when it is working, it always says the same thing (this is not the same as number 1)

I recently discussed weather forecasts with an Indonesian - the first difficulty was communicating the obsession that Western Europeans have with the weather and our interest in forecasts. Why do you need a forecast when the weather is the same today as it was yesterday and tomorrow will be the same again ? I found it difficult to explain that people at home will sit down and watch the television or turn on the radio specifically to find out what the weather will be like later today or tomorrow or at the weekend.

The only difference is the rain - it might rain today (less likely now as we enter the dry season) or it might not. Regardless of whether it rains or not, it will be hot - over 40 degrees in the sun if it is a clear day and about 35 degrees if it is a cool day, what is there to forecast ?

Anyway, they're usually wrong, aren't they ?

Girls and Boys Come Out To Play

Indonesia has two seasons : a wet one and a dry one. When I arrived in Maumere I was told that the wet season was over and that we could expect to see very little rain until about October or November. The last two days have proved the forecasters wrong and have given a foretaste of the delights ahead.

Yesterday, while having lunch at the harbour, we could see the rain moving in from the sea and soon the heavens opened with what my youngest nephew recently described in an email to me as a "masaf rain pore" which lasted for about two hours. Unlike at home, where everybody runs indoors when it rains, the place got busier as the rain persisted and soon a very competitive barefoot football game was in progress - using the lakes to control the ball is part of the skill set of any footballer here !

Surveys, snorkels and spuds

It seems like a while since I've updated here so greetings to all of you in recession land. At the level I am working at, Indonesia is fairly recession proof – as one person said to me last weekend "when you don't have very much, you have little to lose". People here, as in most developing countries, generally live a hand to mouth existence with little by way of luxury or treats.

Since my last post, I spent two days (last Friday & Saturday) attending a workshop in the hospital which focused on complaints from the local community. This was quite a progressive idea and is a good example of the proactive style of the hospital director. The workshop, which was facilitated by GTZ, the German aid agency, had about 80 participants representing various stakeholders – former patients and their families, outpatient clinic clients, clients of the laboratory and blood transfusion service, etc. One of the activities of the workshop was an exercise in actual gathering complaints from those attending and the principal outcome was the compilation of a draft survey for monitoring future satisfaction levels.

It was very interesting to see the very genuine complaints and concerns that former patients and their families raised – here are some examples :

• Lack of personnel available – no doctor or nurse in attendance in various clinics and departments.
  
• Punctuality – late arrival of doctors for clinics
  
• Corruption – security guards seeking bribes of money or cigarettes for allowing visitors in outside official visiting hours
  
• Poor hygiene – smelly beds, dirty toilets, mosquitoes
  
• Lack of communication to patients
  
• Nursing staff busy texting on their mobile phones instead of looking after patients
  

Does any of this sound familiar ?

After the mental strain involved in trying to keep up with this for two days (and believe me, it was a struggle) it was great to have day off on Sunday. As I've mentioned before, Maumere is the home for a number of volunteers working in various different VSO programmes so there is a good social network available. Last weekend was the occasion of Jo Marie's last weekend in Maumere as her placement ends this week. Jo Marie has been here for three years (most placements are for two years but she extended for a further year so is almost a native now) and she is returning home to the Philippines for a month's holiday before starting work with GTZ in East Timor. To mark her departure, she arranged a day trip to Pulau Babi (Pig Island) so early on Sunday morning, we saddled up and rode about 60kms north east of Maumere to Darat Pantai, near Talibura where Pak Karno, a colleague from Jo's workplace lives. Karno had arranged for a local boatman to take us to the beach on the island where we enjoyed some fine snorkelling and a great BBQ on the beach with some fish Jo bought en route. On the way back home after our day in the sun, there was the most amazing pink sunset. This volunteering in developing countries really is a tough life, you know....

After the weekend, Peter (my housemate) and I decided that the lack of any visible progress on the housing front was no reason to put off embarking on some self catering forever and we took the plunge and purchased a stove (cost about Rp180,000 = €13). Household kitchens here are generally basic in the extreme with a stove (usually kerosene but sometimes gas if you can afford it), a rice cooker (if the household is fortunate enough to have electricity) and a collection of bowls, buckets and utensils (usually no sink). We bought an oil stove, oil and some bowls and tonight (Tuesday) had our first home cooked meal at home. We decided to mark the occasion by going western (lunch had been gado-gado) and so the menu for the first meal was sautéd potatoes and fried eggs... not exactly a typical Indonesian evening meal.

Medical bulletin !

Just a quick update to all of who were concerned enough about Joseph's condition to enquire as to how he was - I'm delighted to report that he has now been discharged from hospital in Bali and is due to return to Maumere on Wednesday of next week.

Thanks for your interest !

Kelimutu

The weekend before last, we (Peter, my fellow hospital volunteer and I) had the opportunity to visit one of the "must see" sights of Flores in the company of some friends who were visiting from Kupang on the island of Timor. These are the three coloured lakes of Kelimutu, about 1650m high in the hills of Flores and about 100km east of Maumere. 100kms, I hear you say, that's an easy enough trip...

Well, I can tell you that a 100km trip with two people on a 160cc motorbike on the tortuous roads of Flores is an undertaking and a half ! We left Maumere at about 11am and reached Moni (the village near the lakes) after a trip of over 3 hours actual travelling time, with frequent stops for lunch and helmet rests. Moni is a small village high in the mountains (and beautifully cool, I needed a long sleeved top there for the very first time since arriving in Indonesia) and has a small bar with a great view over rice paddies and green hills. We stayed in a family run homestay (Rp75,000 or €5 for two people including breakfast), and spent some of Saturday night watching a local traditional dance performance before partaking of some of the local hooch.

Early the next morning, we headed further up the hills to the lakes of Kelimutu. These are three lakes in volcanic craters – not particularly unusual in an area known for its volcanic activity until you hear that they are all different colours and that the colours change from time to time depending on changes in mineral composition, making this quite a spectacular sight. When we visited, the lakes were vivid turquoise, black and a sort of murky brown. Local legend has it that this is where the souls of the departed end up, young people to one lake, old people to another, and those whose lives have been less than exemplary to another (you are probably guessing that that's the black one but it isn't).

While at the lakes, most of the other visitors were Indonesian and, as usual, I was engaged in conversation by many of them (many Indonesians are delighted to get an opportunity to practice their English language skills). One of the people I met there was Andrew from Timor. He is a student at the seminary in Ledalero, about 10km away from Maumere. As he visits Maumere frequently, I expect to see him again for some mutually beneficial conversation practice.

The worst part of visiting the lakes was the journey back home again on Sunday – another long and twisty trip, this time mostly downhill back to sea level. However, the weekend was well worth it as this was our first opportunity to see some of the spectacular countryside of Flores and experience just how long it takes to get anywhere. There are frequent bus services linking most towns on the island but I have yet to enjoy the delights of one of these journeys. Apparently, conditions can be a little cramped (the passengers' luggage is often alive) and the twisty roads mean that many passengers suffer from travel sickness so it sounds like a motorbike is a "fresher" option.

Photo update

I've used the opportunity of having access to some reliable bandwidth in Denpasar to upload some more of my photos to Photobucket.

Click for the appropriate album :

BALI


MAUMERE


MONI & KELIMUTU

These should open up in a slide show view - you can play around with the settings to speed up, slow down, etc.

To view all my albums on Photobucket and pass a completely unproductive hour or two, either click HERE or go to :

http://s492.photobucket.com/albums/rr289/markhenderson_photos/

Live on air

Apart from the BBC World Service, the other station that my radio is tuned into most often is Sonia FM, a local radio station in Maumere (very local, in fact – the station is about 5 minutes walk away from the hospital). I find that listening to the ramblings of callers to he various request programmes and the attempts of the DJs to decipher what they are saying is good practice for my Indonesian listening skills ! One hour of Sonia's weekly output is given over to the English language when Teresa, a fellow VSO volunteer who has been in Maumere for about a year, hosts a phone in programme called "English Makeover". Normally, she chooses a topic for discussion (litter, alcohol abuse, smoking, etc.) and invites callers to phone in with their views (and of course, requests for music). Last Friday night, she invited me to come along and join her for the programme but I was a little surprised when I turned up and asked what the topic for that night was. "Didn't I tell you – it's you !" was the reply.

The programme got under way at 8pm and I spent the next hour answering a selection of questions from the callers, most of whom seemed to be regulars as they were known to Teresa and her producer, Martin. Most of the questions were not about where I came from or my background but focused very much on what I thought of Maumere and the hospital. I think my honest answers went down OK. Not only were the callers well known, but the requests were all lined up in advance as the same listeners request the same songs each week - the top choices are Bryan Adams and Celine Dion.

This pic shows Martin (the show's producer) and me after the broadcast. Note the religious influence !

I am writing this post in the waiting room of BIMC, a private hospital in Denpasar, Bali. Although I have become used to being in a hospital all day, I did not really expect to be in this particular one (on a different island and two flights away) at 10 am this morning. Before my mother gets on the phone, I will explain quickly. Joseph, another VSO volunteer from the Philippines, who has been in Maumere since mid 2008 was admitted to Maumere hospital on Monday morning with a high fever and yesterday afternoon (Tuesday) the suspected diagnosis of malaria was confirmed. The decision was taken yesterday to evacuate him to Bali to the more advanced facilities available there, not so much due to an inability to deal with his current condition in Maumere but as a precaution in case he became even worse. I was asked to accompany him on the flight, along with a nurse from Maumere so we left the hospital in an ambulance at 6 am this morning and arrived at BIMC in Bali in another ambulance at 10 am. Joseph has now been admitted and I am awaiting further instructions from VSO about my return to Maumere – the first available seat is not until Saturday, three days away, but VSO will want to ship me back there sooner than that if at all possible. I'm glad I brought a change of clothes and my laptop with me just in case ! In the meantime, I'm holed up here using the wireless access in the cafe across the road from the Yulia homestay.

I must go down to the seas again...

One of the busiest and most interesting places in any coastal town is the port or harbour – it is here that most of the comings and goings take place and there is generally plenty of activity to sit and watch (and sitting and watching are, of course, themselves important activities in Indonesia). As anyone who knows me will testify, I have a keen interest in sailing, shipping and things nautical in general so the harbour in Maumere has a natural attraction for me and I pay the Rp1,000 entrance fee (about €0.07) most days to see what is going on. In a country of 18,000 islands where air links are relatively expensive, sea transport provides a vital link between the islands and is the means by which most freight and passengers are transported.

Maumere harbour is a busy place with both ferries and freight ships coming and going on a daily basis and is also the centre of activity for fishing and swimming - after school every day, there are lots of young boys leaping into the sea from the jetties and ships and later in the evenings, dozens of people fishing. The harbour also has some of the best restaurants in Maumere (but believe me, it's all relative !) so is also a regular haunt for lunch or dinner.

Flores has plenty of volcanic activity – the most recently active volcano is Mt. Egon, to the east of Maumere. In this rather dusky shot, you can see where the summit of Mt. Egon used to be just in front of the bow of this ship. The light grey coating below the top is the ash from the eruption about a year ago.

Every evening, there are usually half a dozen or so large trucks like this loading up and waiting for sailings later that night.

Most of them arrive at the harbour already fully loaded but there's always room for a few more bananas.

Indonesians love having their picture taken – these two guys spotted me with my camera on the jetty opposite where they were and gestured to me to take their photo.

I duly obliged but it was only after I had taken the photo that I spotted what the guy seated was holding ! (Look at the photo again if you missed it the first time around.) I hopped onto my bike and sped around to the other side of the harbour to where he was sitting and spent some talking to him. He was a policeman from Jakarta on a tour of duty on a police boat with about 20 on board spending a few weeks in the province of NTT. He had just bought this 3 month old sea eagle for about Rp130,000 and appeared to be planning to take it with him when the boat left the following day. The one question I did ask but didn't receive an answer that I could understand was "kenapa ?" (why ?). I have seen some of these sea eagles in the air and they have a wing span of up to 2 metres. This little baby was not yet able to fly and I have no idea what he thought he was going to do with it on a relatively small boat when it starts stretching its wings...

Like I said, harbours are interesting places, you never know what you'll see next !

New Seven Wonders of the World

Some of you may know that there is a campaign afoot to identify (by popular vote) the "New 7 Wonders of the World". Visit the website or slide your eyes across to the left of this post and vote for the Komodo National Park, the nearest candidate to me and the home of the Komodo dragons.
To find out why clicking on a "vote now" button is probably the closest that you will ever want to get to one of these lovable, cuddly, friendly creatures, look at this Google news search for some heart-warming stories about them.