Dirgahayu Republik Indonesia !

The weekend just past was a long one for me – I decided on Thursday afternoon to take Friday and Saturday off work and go back to visit the three coloured lakes at Kelimutu again. This time I went in the company of a friend from Maumere for what turned out to be his first holiday ever. On Friday we left Maumere and took our time getting to Moni, the village closest to Kelimutu, about 95kms from here and about 1600m higher (and therefore pleasantly cooler). The place we stayed was inundated with mosquitoes and didn't provide nets so fingers crossed...... On Saturday morning we joined the tourist trail (the lakes at Kelimutu are one of the "must see" sights for any visitors to Flores) on the climb to the lakes about 15kms above Moni.

We were lucky to have about two hours of great visibility there before the clouds started to roll in.

After our brief holiday we returned to Maumere on Sunday afternoon, just in time for a day off on Monday to celebrate Indonesia's 64^th birthday.

The day started with Apel (formal parade) at 7 am in the main public field in the town, with the Chief Inspector being the Bupati (regent). The Bupati is elected every five years at district level so the one in Maumere is responsible for the Sikka District, population about 300,000, of which Maumere is the principal town. This morning's 7am Apel finally got under way at 7.55 (not unusual) and consisted of a few formalities and most surprisingly, no speeches ! The main event was the reading of the declaration of independence and the raising of the flag.

The long delay and the relentless sun (even at that hour) took their toll on many of the schoolchildren on parade and I counted more than twenty fainting just in the section in front of me. As well as most of the schools in Maumere, all government departments, army and police were represented, together with the drum majorettes.

I have just tried to upload a video clip for the first time but the connection won't stay up for long enough to complete the upload - sorry !

Shipping news

This rather fine looking vessel has been anchored outside the harbour on and off for the last few days. I haven't been able to find out anything about her but I suspect that she is home to a large contingent of very conspicuous bule (white) tourists seen roaming the streets the other day.

[Don't forget, if you want to enlarge a photo, just click on it]

The usual harbour activity is more commercial, with daily arrivals and departures of larger ships and much loading (usually of bananas) and unloading (of everything else).

The harbour also serves as a departure point for many small ferries to neighbouring islands – here is one of them being loaded at the jetty, note the goat tethered at the bow ! The cargo includes motorbikes, steel reinforcing rods, drinking water and pretty much anything else you can think of.

Day one, month seven !

Today is the first day of the second half of my first year in Indonesia (got that ?). As mentioned in my last post, I celebrated the end of the first six months by being invited to a party which I knew was something to do with the tradition of belis (dowry/brideprice). As happens so often in a completely strange culture, what I thought I was being invited to and what I was actually invited to turned out to be two different things. What I THOUGHT I was going to was the formal exchange of belis beween the groom's and the bride's families. However, what happened yesterday only involved the groom's family (about 200 of them !) and really highlighted for me how much of a burden this tradition places on the extended family. This was a gathering of the family from about 10 a.m. at the family home at Wolowiro about an hour and a half from Maumere. The sole purpose of the gathering was to pass around a tray (think of it as a large collection plate as in a church) to collect contributions from all present to put towards the belis that has to be paid to the bride’s family before the wedding. The family provided lunch (a Sunday lunch for 200 guests just seems to happen without any fuss here), cigarettes and moke (local hooch) for the guests, plus some music. We just sat on the ground, snacked, ate, chatted and contributed. This is one of the many differences here - people are quite happy to sit around for extended periods without anyone feeling that they have to provide entertainment.

A while after the plate was passed around, the total was announced by the MC and to my surprise came to just under Rr12 million (described by one friend as "lumayan", not bad). To put this in context, I believe that a nurse earns about Rp600,000 a month and an elementary school teacher about half that. I don't yet know how much the total belis will cost but I presume that this will be sizeable chunk of it.

The wedding takes place next month and promises to be a big party...

This week sees the final preparations for next Monday's holiday - Independence Day. Indonesia will be 64 years old on 17th August 2009 and, if the preparations are anything to go by, it will be a big day with an awful lot of marching. For the last few weeks, the streets have been filled with groups of government workers and school children practising marching to the sound of kiri, kiri, kiri, kanan, kiri (left, left, left, right, left..) and punctuated by whistle blasts. Every single class seems to have to participate so it is not unusual to see four or five separate groups practising on one short stretch of road. These photos were all taken in one five minute period :

The anniversary is also a good excuse to give the whole place a bit of a once-over so there are plenty of flags and banners, etc. Much painting has been done, but the paint is watered down so much that it will all wash off in the rainy season and need to be done again next year.

Six months already !

Apologies for the lack of input this week, it seems as if not a lot happens on a day to day basis but when I think back, it wasn't all bad...
I had a favourable response this week from one of the hotels I've been chasing in Bali who have very generously offered to let us have a few hundred bed sheets and blankets that they no longer require - all I have to do now is somehow arrange to get them collected and delivered to Flores ! (another challenge...)

I started work this week on a project connected with the HR aspects of the hospital. Initially, this will involve job descriptions and will move on to include some HR policies, a simple performance management system and hopefully eventually some agreement on competencies. (To any HR pros reading this, I know that this seems like the wrong way around but, believe me, anything will be an improvement and we need to start with some very small steps...)





My radio career continues unabated, it's now Saturday morning and I'm on the air again at 12 noon for another hour of waffle in English.

This week sadly we said goodbye to another volunteer from Maumere. Jess has unfortunately had to return home to the US early for personal reasons. When I arrived in Maumere, there were seven VSO volunteers here - now there are three. Two left when their placements ended in the normal course of events, one has had to return home temporarily due to the continuing visa problems, and this week saw Jess's departure. Of the group of ten of us who arrived in Denpasar on 9th February (six months ago exactly), there are now two left in Indonesia. (Two are temporarily at home due to family illnesses but are expected to return.) The visa situation has still not been resolved and this week VSO informed us that they have reluctantly had to cancel the (already delayed) group of new volunteers due to arrive in September. This means that the next intake will be in January, almost a year after my arrival. Normally, there are three intakes a year so you can imagine what effect this ongoing disruption is having on VSO's volunteer numbers and work here.

Tomorrow (Sunday) promises to be an interesting one : I have been invited to a party which is part of the pre-wedding formalities for a friend who works in the hospital. There is a strong tradition of belis (brideprice or dowry) here and (as far as I can understand) tomorrow's event is the formal exchange between the families of the belis. More to follow...

Workshops and reports

Not a lot to report this week I'm afraid, mostly dull workshop stuff...


Since I checked in last week, I attended a two day workshop on workload calculation (really exciting stuff) which produced some predictably interesting results - the variation between departments in the hospital is huge with some producing results that suggest they are understaffed by a factor of about 50% while the results from others hint that they only need about half of the staff they currently have. Of course, any calculation such as this has many limitations in the context of a hospital given the need to be prepared for whatever emergency occurs at any time of the day or night. However, it is interesting and very encouraging to see the very participative process adopted in processes such as this in the hospital - largely, I suspect, at the instigation of the director.

Another two days were spent on the followup session to the complaints workshop that I wrote about some time ago. This was another long two days but I am encouraged by the fact that the task of keeping up with what was going on was far less arduous than the first workshop so my language skills must be improving ! Again, this was a particpative process with ward managers and department heads agreeing on solutions to the most frequent complaints (the one at the top of the list was dirty toilets...)

Also on the work front, we received the disappointing news that our application for a small grant from Australia (AUS$5000 - about €3000) was unsuccessful. Apparently, we were the next in line - they probably say that to everyone ! The grant was going to be used to help fund a Health Care Worker (HCW) Safety training programme which is one element of one of my tasks, helping to set up an Infection Control Committee.
Speaking of tasks, last week was the time for my first quarterly report. VSO has a well developed monitoring & evaluation (monev) system which monitors the effectiveness of placements and involves the completion of a report by the volunteer (in partnership with the employer) every quarter and a formal review meeting approximately every six months or so. The task of completing the report is not particularly onerous and provides a very useful formal opportunity to sit down with your employer and discuss what is working well, what is not working and what should be changed. In many cases (including mine) this leads to the original placement objectives being revised, although not significantly in my case. While this may seem strange after coming all this way, you have to remember that my placement description was written in August 2008, I saw it and accepted it in September but I didn't arrive in Maumere until April 2009 so many things have changed since the original document was written.

Outside work, no more parties to report, just another short road trip along the coast to the west of Maumere..

Moni, the hospital party and mud, glorious mud

Ok, the internet seems to be faster than usual here today so I'm going to take the opportunity to include lots of photos in this post..

After the excitement of finally getting my KITAS last Saturday, three of us from Maumere headed off to Moni in the mountains on Saturday afternoon to meet Dany, my programme manager from the VSO office in Denpasar who was here on a holiday trip for the weekend with some friends before a few meetings on Flores next week. The trip to Moni seemed much easier this time around than the last time, I think that the inside of my helmet has now adjusted somewhat to the shape of my head and I'm able to wear it for much longer periods before the discomfort becomes too much, also I'm better used to going around endless corners ion steep hills. As usual, Moni was a lovely spot – we didn't go up to the lakes this time around but chilled out (literally – Moni is about 1600m high and so much cooler than Maumere) on Saturday night.

On Sunday morning I left at about 10.30 am as I wanted to get back for the hospital party at Sao beach near Maumere. This was partly a farewell for Dr. Hendradi, an ENT specialist who is leaving the hospital soon after two years here but mainly just an excuse for a party for hospital employees and their families. There were about two hundred people there, including lots of children and plenty of party games (including one which involved transporting leeches in a glass of water...).

The first group I met on arrival was the breakaway "adult" group, engaged in a more traditional Maumere activity !

Echae McQueen, chief MC for the day :

Pak Edmon on keyboard, still going after last Thursday's wedding !

Dewa, the hospital gardener, strikes a cool pose in my sunglasses...

Okto and Igo skiing in the sand

A serious spectator..

Marlena and Ika

Igo & Okto celebrate something or other (probably the end of another bottle..)

Igo with a covering of soy sauce after one particularly messy game

Transporting leeches (well, it is a hospital after all...)

Echae rallies support

Ika

Party games

Dr. Asep always organising

Monday was a tanggal merah (literally, a red day which means it's a holiday) so the morning was spent relaxing and reading Patrick Leigh Fermor's fascinating account of a walking tour from London to Constantinople in 1933 and 1934 (sent to me all the way from Canada – thanks, Robert !). In the afternoon I headed out with Daniel, who works in the blood transfusion unit in the hospital, to explore the coastline west of Maumere and travelled about 45kms along far better roads (and flatter too) than I experienced between here and Moni. Some really spectacular scenery, with rice paddies in the foreground and mountains behind, and also some sunbathing water buffalos. My journey took me into the Kabupaten (regency) of Ende, the next one to Sikka (which is Maumere's Kabupaten).

Daniel with rice paddies in the foreground.

Flores is at the top of this map - Sikka District is the purple one towards the eastern end of the island and Maumere is on the north coast.

Cooling off..

Mud, glorious mud !

They're going to let me stay after all..

Well, this is what all the fuss was about. As of this morning, I am now the proud possessor of a shiny new KITAS (Kartu Izin Tinggal Sementara - temporary residence permit) and the subject of a massive file in the Kantor Imigrasi in Maumere. This little card neccessitated six flights, four nights hotel costs, numerous visits to the passport agent's office, a mountain of paper, a collection of official seals, a fingerprint session (my third in Indonesia) and more signatures than I can count.

The wedding season continues unabated - last Thursday I was invited to the wedding of Pak Robby, who works in the finance department of the hospital. This was a quieter affair (i.e. more sober) than the last wedding I went to but the music and dancing were quite something. Instead of a DJ, there was a real band, headlined by Pak Edmon who is the HR manager at the hospital. His talents are wasted on such mundane matters as absenteeism policies, this guy really knows how to work a crowd (aand he's also a great jazz pianist) ! The wedding was also a chance to see some colleagues from the hospital in other than their rather drab official brown uniform !

Wind and eggs

Two random thoughts :

Everybody will tell you that there are only two seasons in Indonesia : a dry one and a wet one. However, they forget about the one in between - the windy one. For the last two weeks, it has been blowing a gale most of the time. There are a number of consequences to this - dust and roof noise. The first is self explanatory, the second relates to the fact that the tin roof on our house does not seem to be held down very securely and rattles and vibrates noisily right above my head ALL NIGHT LONG.
Yesterday, I was invited to a first communion party in a village called Waigete, about 20kms from Maumere to the east. While driving there, I was following a guy on a motorbike (semi-automatic type so he didn't need to use his left hand to drive). In his left hand he held a small plastic bag containing some eggs (this is how you buy eggs here, loose in a plastic bag). After a while he got tired of holding the eggs carefully in his left hand so he leant down and very carefully worked the handles of the plastic bag over the passenger footrest on the left hand side. All this while driving at about 45 km/hr, weaving in and out of other traffic, I'm just sorry I didn't have my camera !