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.

PORDAFTA 2009

You can't beat a good acronym – and I've mentioned before how much Indonesians like using them. PORDAFTA (Pekan Olah Raga se-DAratan Flores & LembaTA or sports week for the region of Flores & Lembata) is on this week in Maumere and has brought an influx of between 2000 and 3000 visitors from all over the island and the neighbouring island of Lembata (where I still haven't got to..)

Yesterday afternoon I watched a Takro match. This is played on a volleyball court with a lower net but with only two players on each side. The main difference from volleyball is that you can only use feet or heads – no hands ! This makes for some spectacular bicycle kicks, which I hope you'll be able to see if my first attempt at uploading a video clip is successful (there have been two power cuts already this morning while I'm trying to do this !)

Lastly,some more great diving displays were going on in the harbour yesterday afternoon.

 

Party season

Well, I may have had to miss out on the celebrations for my parents' golden wedding anniversary in Bray on Saturday night (although I did get up at 5 am to interrupt the party with a phone call) but that doesn't mean that I got through the weekend without a party as First Communion season continues unabated here ! I weaselled out of one on Friday afternoon after work but one of the first friends I met in the hospital, Kristo, invited mycolleague Peter and me to his kampung (village) on Sunday for his nephew's Sambut Baru celebration. This was a little quieter than the Maumere parties mainly due to the remote location, the family live about 30 minutes drive from Maumere but on a hilltop in a well scattered village and, as usual, with only close family living nearby. Apart from the local family members and Kristo, there were 5 guests from the hospital, one of whom had to leave almost as soon as we arrived as he is a nurse in the operating theatre and was called in for an emergency Caesarean Section (of which there seem to be a lot here, incidentally).

Thankfully, this family had not set up the enormous bank of loudspeakers which most Indonesians feel is an essential part of a good party so we had a very pleasant and peaceful day sitting around with the family in their home. Shortly after I arrived, I was invited to witness the formal ceremony which was another example of how Flores mixes and matches traditional animist ceremonies with Christianity. This ceremony preceded the meal and involved the laying out of most of the dishes that were to be served on the floor in front of the family while one of the family members makes a small offering of rice and meat to the ancestors before the meal is served. After the ceremony, a small dish is passed around for everyone to take a small taste from, very similar to the serving of communion.

After this ceremony, we all got up and moved out of the way while the food was reassembled and laid out in a buffet. Guests are always invited up first which is a little daunting the first time around but at least now I know what to do !

After eating (men in one room, women in another of course), the obligatory bottle of moke (locally produced arak drunk neat in shots) was produced along with the customary single glass which is passed from one person to another, being refilled each time by the "bandar".

Here's the young man who was the centre of attention :  

And here's the newest member of the family,just three months old (he's the one on the left) :

 

One of the highlights of any visit to a family in the villages is when the camera is produced - naturally enough, digital cameras are a real rarity here (this family doesn't have electricity) so it's a real novelty to see themselves on the little LCD screen on my camera after taking pictures. This week I am going to print a few of these pictures and give them to Kristo to bring back home the next time he visits his village. I imagine that the mother of the baby in the last shot probably does not have one photo of her baby yet, imagine how many photographs the mother of a three month old baby at home would have already !       

PS Do you like the wallpaper ?

On this day (well ok, tomorrow)

1959 was the year that Gigi won the best Picture Osar at the Academy Awards.

On 26th September, 1959 Typhoon Vera hit central Honshu (Japan) killing more than 5,200 people.

However, 26th September,1959 was also the day that Norma Pullan walked up the aisle of Rathfarnham Parish Church and walked back down the aisle a little later as Norma Henderson.

 The big party takes place tomorrow night (50 years to the day later) - it's probably the one event that will be taking place while I'm in Indonesia that I really feel I shouldn't be missing. 

Happy Golden wedding Anniversary, Norma & Gordon (aka Mum & Dad) !!!

Have a great party ! 

Ende, Moni and swimming

It's now Thursday and today (unlike yesterday) at least some people appear to have come back to work after the Idul Fitri holiday. This coincided with First Communion day in Maumere (which is largely Roman Catholic) and there were many parties all over the town on Tuesday - many people were invited to at least ten and I did quite well for a newcomer with five invitations. 

On Sunday, I headed off to Ende which is on the south coast about 160kms away, journey time about 4.5 hours plus a couple of stops for lunch and saddle relief. Ende is overwhelmingly Muslim so my timing was not very good as everything was shut for the holiday on Sunday (the end of Ramadan is marked by family visits to friends and neighbours houses). The small hotel I found fortunately served evening meals as all the restaurants were shut and, even better, had fish and chips on the menu ! Ende is surrounded by hills and is approached by a steep descent down a river valley with spectacular scenery - the town itself is pretty unremarkable.

On Monday, I left Ende and headed back towards Maumere at a a leisurely pace,intending to stay in Moni (the village near the coloured lakes at Kelimutu). As you enter Moni, there is a waterfall with bathing pool near the road so I stopped to cool off just as a truck and bus full of visitors from Ende arrived.       

I followed them down to the waterfall and joined them in the pool, so it was not the most peaceful or relaxing dip. The novelty of having a bule (paleface) in their midst who was able to speak a little of their language meant that I had to have my photograph taken with every single one of them, usually individually. They were especially intrigued by my chest hair ...

   

On my back to Maumere on Tuesday, I was able to understand how travel becomes very difficult in the rainy season, which I have yet to experience. Although it has not rained in Maumere for weeks and weeks, higher in the mountains there had been a little rain over the weekend. In at least four places this small amount of rain had caused some minor landslips - I can't imagine what it will be like after three months of rain !

In one of my earlier posts, I wrote about typical houses but didn't have any photos to hand at the time. Here's one I passed on my way back to Maumere which is a cut above many others.

 

Last photo group of this post : the swimmers were in action in the harbour yetserday with some spectacular jumping and diving displays !

Motorbikes and ferries (and buses and trams)

Seeing as I've had to turn up unwillingly for work today instead of being halfway to Larantuka by now (I'm joking of course...) I thought I'd post a few more photos of yesterday's harbour activity (there ain't a lot else to take photos of in Maumere except a huge black pig that snuffles through the rubbish but I never seem to have my camera with me when I see it).

Everybody (well, almost everybody) here has a motorbike. Private cars are very much a rarity and most four wheel vehicles are either government owned (easily identifiable as they have red number plates), public transport of one form or another, or commercial vehicles. A traffic jam consists of motorbikes, not cars. In Maumere I can think of at least five places where I could go to buy a new motorbike where a brand new version of my Honda MegaPro 160cc would set me back about Rp19.000.000 or just under €1400 but I can't for the life of me think of one place where I would buy be able to buy a car.

Yesterday at the harbour, there was a shipment of new motorbikes being unloaded, one by one, and being driven off to their new owners.

 

 Meanwhile, elsewhere in the harbour, this ferry was arriving from one of the outlying islands ready to load up and depart again.

And, at another pier, these ferries were completing loading and were about to depart. Note the passenger with the cockerel in his left hand near the back of the boat in the first photo - he leapt aboard just seconds after I took this.

Finally, this one is not from Maumere ! While not wishing in any way to detract from the seriousness of the recent Dublin Bus & Luas accident in Dublin city centre, I was amused to see the advertisement on the side of the bus involved in the accident. (Click on the photo if you want to enlarge it.)

Thanks to Grahame N for pointing this one out to me !

   

What do you mean, "a mistake" ?

 

Ok, so it turns out that the elation caused by finding out that we were to have a whole week off for Idul Fitri was a little misplaced - it turns out that the Bupati (regent or governor of Kabupaten Sikka - Sikka Regency) issued a letter to all the government departments giving this information. However, quite understandably, the hospital management has said that the hospital functions on a 24/7 basis and so hospital staff will only get the minimum leave of two days (Monday & Tuesday). This rules out any plans for a trip to Lamalera, it's not really feasible in that short a time so will just have to wait. Ah well....

I'm writing this in the office on Friday morning at 9 am and it appears that many of the admin staff have just decided not to turn up anyway - there was a certain air of disillusionment around yesterday when the news filtered out so I'm not surprised !

And one of my projects is to write a policy dealing with absenteeism - I wonder if there'll be anyone here to read it.  

What, a whole week off starting now ?

As a followup to my recent mention of Capt. Bligh arriving in Kupang in 1789, I was interested to read in today's Irish Times (available online free of charge at 8 a.m. here or 1 a.m. Irish time, what a service !) that the Bounty (not the original one, but the schooner built for the 1960 Marlon Brando/Trevor Howard) is in Irish waters at the moment. Read more HERE.

Indonesia is a very religious country and I have written before about how religion is very much a part of daily life rather than just being something you do on a Sunday morning. In Flores of course, the predominant religion is Christian (of the Roman Catholic variety) but it seems to sit quite happily alongside many animist traditions, such as making offerings to your ancestors before important events. For the last month however, it has been Ramadan and although Maumere does not have an enormous Muslim population, this has meant that one of my regular restaurants has been closed for the month while the family who run it are fasting every day. This weekend is Idul Fitri, which marks the end of Ramadan, and the calendar in our house had two holidays marked on it - Monday & Tuesday. I was rather surprised, therefore, to hear yesterday that in fact we finish work today (Thursday) and "masuk lagi" (come back) next Thursday. In my experience, it's not often that you find out at a day's notice that you have a whole week's holiday ahead of you and I guess that this highlights yet another difference between people here and in the more affluent West. My immediate reaction was, of course, "Wow, a week's holiday- let's go away somewhere". Going away somewhere of course requires money and so is not an option that even gets considered for most people.

However, at times like this I look on myself as a tourist and think that in my limited time here I should try and see as much of the country as I can so I'm now busy planning a trip somewhere - maybe to Lembata, one of the Lesser Sunda Islands to the east of Flores - this will mean going back to Larantuka yet again !

Lembata is known for the village of Lamalera, famous for its whaling. As the number of whales caught here in this subsistence hunting operation each year is so small and no endangered species are hunted, this community has been granted an exemption from the international bans on whaling.