Working for the Weekend
Weekdays and weekends here are sort-of the same thing, we work. I had a conference call the other day Friday 20th October) that started at 8pm and went until about a quarter till ten, once that call was over I had to call my immediate supervisor and reshuffle my schedule to fit everything in once that was done I had to sit down and start mapping out how I could possibly get everything I need done, done. One advantage to being on the other side of the globe is having an 11 hour head start on NHQ, if I get work done by close of business (COB) my time it will be waiting for NHQ the following morning, the down side is that you wake-up to 30 emails filled with requests and still have your in-country deadlines and daily responsibilities.
This donor trip is a massive responsibility but I still have stories I have to write, interviews that I have to do to write those stories, and constant trips to the field. To make matters worse, this week is the end of Ramadan and the whole country is off on holiday, international staff get three days off, local staff get the whole week off and the city basically shuts down, it is a week of celebrations and festivities. There will only be about six of us in the office this week so getting anything done will be hard.
This last week was more hectic that I had thought. I spent Tuesday traveling all day; we went to a nearby island, Pulo Weh (pronounced poo-low way), and visited our water and sanitation programs and IDP projects. To get to the island we take an hour long ferry ride; it’s a smooth ride on a large ferry boat. Pulo Weh is one of those places that never makes it on a map but is so beautiful and filled with fauna that you get of the boat and wonder if this was Eden. The IDP village we went to was great, the villagers were so happy for the housing and water that we (our partners included) provide that they greeted us with smiles and laughter. I went from family to family taking pictures and visiting their homes, it was nice to have a warm reception and it was good to see an IDP camp that was clean and healthy. My NGO is very well received on Pulo Weh and we really seem to being doing things the right way their.
The next day we went to Calang (pronounced Cha-long), just getting there is challenge. The NY Times recently wrote and article on the road that takes you their, it was not a positive story and shows some of the failings of many of the organizations that spend so much money for so little results here (this is not a soapbox moment, we are no less guilty in this critique). For me to do my job properly, on a shortened time frame, I had to take a helicopter their, that leads me to my boy moment…
First, traveling by helicopter only takes an hour to get their and it is no luxury ride, 21 bodies crammed into a cargo helicopter that is operated by the UN and run by the Russians. Bench seats with dirty noise reduction head phones and seatbelts abound. We shake and shimmy of a tarmac and land in a grass field. But, pulling up to the airstrip in my NGO’s 4WD landcruiser and seeing the giant rustic UN helicopter on the tarmac made my insides flip for joy, I couldn’t help but be filled with excitement and pride, it is an awesome experience just to visualize. It’s a scene you’ve see a million times in cheesy movies but to actually experience it as part of your everyday job is humbling and totally awesome (I get extra points for alliteration).
Once in Calang you can’t help but be struck by the disgustingly slow progress that has been made. There is a good road but scattered along that road are tents and barracks that still house victims, nearly two years latter and people are still living in tents. After having spent a day their walking around I can tell you that I have rarely been anywhere more uncomfortably hot and humid, I could not imagine calling a tent my home for a weekend, these people have been their for nearly two years.
There are many reasons for this, land titles are a huge problem here, also, so are resources. Before the tsunami 10,000 houses a year were built, we are now trying to build 100,000 a year. Houses require wood and cement but if we cut down all the trees than we destroy the local vegetation and create long term ecological damage, if we import all the cement and wood we greatly limit the number of houses that can be built and become poor stewards of the donors’ dollars and create only a limited number of houses that only provide a short term solution. It is a horrible and difficult situation but one, we all agree, needs to be dealt with more efficiently than has been thus far.
The people of Indonesia are growing tired of the slow progress and resentment to the international presence is beginning to be felt throughout the country. It is hard to blame them for this; when you are told that billions of dollars are being giving to make your lives better and all these international organizations move into your small towns, renting enormous houses and bringing their western beliefs and practices to your backyard yet you continue to live in the same tent month after month it is easy to see why there is resentment. These are a proud people. Can you imagine if the US had been crippled by a tsunami and a group of Muslim countries sent NGOs to our aid, bought enormous houses flouted our system of beliefs and didn’t deliver the relief they promised…they would not last long. And many of our failures are true failures. In some cases money is being spent just so NGO’s can say they are doing something.
One group was given a large sum of money to build 5,000 houses, they built less than 500 and yet are not being held accountable by anyone because these funding agencies can say “we spend X millions of dollars working with our partners to ensure that the people of Indonesia receive quality housing…” You throw in a few pictures of some of the decent houses and people think you are doing a great job. A lot of quality work is being done here, I would not be here if I was not proud of the work my NGO was doing, and most everyone here has their heart in the right place, but failure persists. The same case could be made for Darfur or even New Orleans, huge operations backed by enormous amounts of donor money tend to evolve into chaos. But I digress…
After taking the helicopter back to Banda (so cool) I had less than an hour to race to the office, pick-up my ticket and head to the airport to go to Singapore. I didn’t arrive in Singapore until 1:15am, it was the longest day I can remember, I smelled ripe and was exhausted. I had taken two helicopter rides and three flights all in one day, that is too much travel (without including all the moving around in the crippling humidity of Calang). The next morning I spent intermittently shopping and working in Singapore (while getting my Indo. work Visa renewed). I bought a great new belt and three new bracelets that are perfect for me. Sing. is a beautiful city and is a lot of fun. I ran into some NGO friends of mine and we spent the day wandering the city and trying out great food and ambiance, a nice reprieve from Banda. The next morning I was off to the airport, I left Sing. at 8:40 am and was back in my office by 11:30, it was weirdly reassuring to be back.
A Bombshell Hits Home
I have mentioned the donor visit a few times now, it is where some of the top donors (and potential donors) to our projects here come and see what we are doing. These trips are always an immense amount of work, and when it is done right the donor will never realize that we spent months preparing for the trip. Our donors will be here for three days, my NGO will have spent more than three months preparing for it when all is said in done. One of the things that they have done to ensure a smooth trip is send someone from NHQ to come and help me prepare for it.
She is the most adorable blonde hair blue eyed angel you could ever hope to meet. She is staying in the house with me and since she has arrived we have had a dinner party where we both cooked a great past dinner with all the doings, went for two runs, made awesome steaks, shopped countless times, watched tons of movies, took a dance tutorial from a DVD and even managed to communicate only through song for more than a few minutes. Needless to say I think she is awesome.
We are both totally insane and our quirks compliment each other well. I have a need to be on time, she has a need to stick to a schedule, she needs to do dishes I need to make sure I go to bed in a clean house. We both got crazy excited shopping for cleaning supplies, we ran into our maid at the store while we were buying everything and were devastated that she wasn’t as excited as we were (both of us are far better cleaners and we’re thinking about doing the cleaning ourselves). Oh, and don’t worry ladies she is happily married. She is a newlywed (married six weeks ago) and her husband appears to be an incredibly caring and sweet man, she is my dorky sister type friend—I think that is what allows us to work so well together.
Ramadan Draws to a Close
Tuesday was Edul-Fitri, the breaking of the fast. It begins a long celebration that is marked by asking for forgivness and the sharing of wealth and love. In the Muslim faith people us this time to tithe their wealth to the poor and visit friends and family in procession of good will. It is also a time to give thanks to God for allowing them the strength to fast. The week long celebration is their Christmas, Easter, Thanksgiving and New Years all in row, each day is a precious day of celebration and adulation.
The Muslim community in Banda Aceh is very conservative. They are strictly governed by Muslim Law but it is not an oppressive hybrid of Islamic beliefs such as the Taliban practiced. The people here can listen to music and have national television (with horrible soap operas).
Local women must wear jilbabs (the head wraps) and are forbidden to date non-Muslim men, in fact, they basically can never be alone in a room with a man but they only apply these rules to local women, they do not expect expat women to wear the jilbabs. Recently, Sharia Police found a local women had “taken up” with an expat and so she was banished from the community (which was lucky for her, she could have had much worse) and the man was booted out of town. Most NGOs, mine included, have strict rules that prohibit us from dating locals, if we violate this we are subject to termination from our jobs. So of course anyone in a jilbab is like forbidden fruit (and the fruit is juicy here).
The weirdest part of all this is that the local women hate wearing the head wraps (it is so hot you would never want to suffer through added layers). They want to be seen as normal, especially the younger women. I was on the track the other day, just after the breaking of the daily fast, and a group of girls drove by on their scooters (everyone here travels by scooter, you can see a family of four on one scooter) and they all shouted at me in English. They said hello and then proceeded to shout out that they loved me and then giggled like a group of typical girls and sped off. If they had not all been in head scarves I would have thought I was anywhere else in the world (because women always shout that they love me and then speed off).
Young men are the same as the women, they want to go out and party and have fun and would love to land a cutie. They like speaking English and enjoy talking to Americans about America. It’s funny, everywhere you go in the world people are the same, they are just governed by different traditions, laws, beliefs and politicians (that know body trusts). I wonder how much easier Iraq could have been won if we had tried to understand the people we were “freeing” before we started our invasion. Winning hearts and minds should be more than a catch phrase politicians toss around to sound compassionate, it should be a strategy used at home and abroad to reach out to people that need reaching out.
I’m thousands of miles from my home town and yet I had the same conversation about how hard it is to keep a women happy here that I did back home. On Indonesian man even started singing “no women no cry,” by Bob Marley and we all started to sing along, we truly are only separated by lack of understanding.
Weekdays and weekends here are sort-of the same thing, we work. I had a conference call the other day Friday 20th October) that started at 8pm and went until about a quarter till ten, once that call was over I had to call my immediate supervisor and reshuffle my schedule to fit everything in once that was done I had to sit down and start mapping out how I could possibly get everything I need done, done. One advantage to being on the other side of the globe is having an 11 hour head start on NHQ, if I get work done by close of business (COB) my time it will be waiting for NHQ the following morning, the down side is that you wake-up to 30 emails filled with requests and still have your in-country deadlines and daily responsibilities.
This donor trip is a massive responsibility but I still have stories I have to write, interviews that I have to do to write those stories, and constant trips to the field. To make matters worse, this week is the end of Ramadan and the whole country is off on holiday, international staff get three days off, local staff get the whole week off and the city basically shuts down, it is a week of celebrations and festivities. There will only be about six of us in the office this week so getting anything done will be hard.
This last week was more hectic that I had thought. I spent Tuesday traveling all day; we went to a nearby island, Pulo Weh (pronounced poo-low way), and visited our water and sanitation programs and IDP projects. To get to the island we take an hour long ferry ride; it’s a smooth ride on a large ferry boat. Pulo Weh is one of those places that never makes it on a map but is so beautiful and filled with fauna that you get of the boat and wonder if this was Eden. The IDP village we went to was great, the villagers were so happy for the housing and water that we (our partners included) provide that they greeted us with smiles and laughter. I went from family to family taking pictures and visiting their homes, it was nice to have a warm reception and it was good to see an IDP camp that was clean and healthy. My NGO is very well received on Pulo Weh and we really seem to being doing things the right way their.
The next day we went to Calang (pronounced Cha-long), just getting there is challenge. The NY Times recently wrote and article on the road that takes you their, it was not a positive story and shows some of the failings of many of the organizations that spend so much money for so little results here (this is not a soapbox moment, we are no less guilty in this critique). For me to do my job properly, on a shortened time frame, I had to take a helicopter their, that leads me to my boy moment…
First, traveling by helicopter only takes an hour to get their and it is no luxury ride, 21 bodies crammed into a cargo helicopter that is operated by the UN and run by the Russians. Bench seats with dirty noise reduction head phones and seatbelts abound. We shake and shimmy of a tarmac and land in a grass field. But, pulling up to the airstrip in my NGO’s 4WD landcruiser and seeing the giant rustic UN helicopter on the tarmac made my insides flip for joy, I couldn’t help but be filled with excitement and pride, it is an awesome experience just to visualize. It’s a scene you’ve see a million times in cheesy movies but to actually experience it as part of your everyday job is humbling and totally awesome (I get extra points for alliteration).
Once in Calang you can’t help but be struck by the disgustingly slow progress that has been made. There is a good road but scattered along that road are tents and barracks that still house victims, nearly two years latter and people are still living in tents. After having spent a day their walking around I can tell you that I have rarely been anywhere more uncomfortably hot and humid, I could not imagine calling a tent my home for a weekend, these people have been their for nearly two years.
There are many reasons for this, land titles are a huge problem here, also, so are resources. Before the tsunami 10,000 houses a year were built, we are now trying to build 100,000 a year. Houses require wood and cement but if we cut down all the trees than we destroy the local vegetation and create long term ecological damage, if we import all the cement and wood we greatly limit the number of houses that can be built and become poor stewards of the donors’ dollars and create only a limited number of houses that only provide a short term solution. It is a horrible and difficult situation but one, we all agree, needs to be dealt with more efficiently than has been thus far.
The people of Indonesia are growing tired of the slow progress and resentment to the international presence is beginning to be felt throughout the country. It is hard to blame them for this; when you are told that billions of dollars are being giving to make your lives better and all these international organizations move into your small towns, renting enormous houses and bringing their western beliefs and practices to your backyard yet you continue to live in the same tent month after month it is easy to see why there is resentment. These are a proud people. Can you imagine if the US had been crippled by a tsunami and a group of Muslim countries sent NGOs to our aid, bought enormous houses flouted our system of beliefs and didn’t deliver the relief they promised…they would not last long. And many of our failures are true failures. In some cases money is being spent just so NGO’s can say they are doing something.
One group was given a large sum of money to build 5,000 houses, they built less than 500 and yet are not being held accountable by anyone because these funding agencies can say “we spend X millions of dollars working with our partners to ensure that the people of Indonesia receive quality housing…” You throw in a few pictures of some of the decent houses and people think you are doing a great job. A lot of quality work is being done here, I would not be here if I was not proud of the work my NGO was doing, and most everyone here has their heart in the right place, but failure persists. The same case could be made for Darfur or even New Orleans, huge operations backed by enormous amounts of donor money tend to evolve into chaos. But I digress…
After taking the helicopter back to Banda (so cool) I had less than an hour to race to the office, pick-up my ticket and head to the airport to go to Singapore. I didn’t arrive in Singapore until 1:15am, it was the longest day I can remember, I smelled ripe and was exhausted. I had taken two helicopter rides and three flights all in one day, that is too much travel (without including all the moving around in the crippling humidity of Calang). The next morning I spent intermittently shopping and working in Singapore (while getting my Indo. work Visa renewed). I bought a great new belt and three new bracelets that are perfect for me. Sing. is a beautiful city and is a lot of fun. I ran into some NGO friends of mine and we spent the day wandering the city and trying out great food and ambiance, a nice reprieve from Banda. The next morning I was off to the airport, I left Sing. at 8:40 am and was back in my office by 11:30, it was weirdly reassuring to be back.
A Bombshell Hits Home
I have mentioned the donor visit a few times now, it is where some of the top donors (and potential donors) to our projects here come and see what we are doing. These trips are always an immense amount of work, and when it is done right the donor will never realize that we spent months preparing for the trip. Our donors will be here for three days, my NGO will have spent more than three months preparing for it when all is said in done. One of the things that they have done to ensure a smooth trip is send someone from NHQ to come and help me prepare for it.
She is the most adorable blonde hair blue eyed angel you could ever hope to meet. She is staying in the house with me and since she has arrived we have had a dinner party where we both cooked a great past dinner with all the doings, went for two runs, made awesome steaks, shopped countless times, watched tons of movies, took a dance tutorial from a DVD and even managed to communicate only through song for more than a few minutes. Needless to say I think she is awesome.
We are both totally insane and our quirks compliment each other well. I have a need to be on time, she has a need to stick to a schedule, she needs to do dishes I need to make sure I go to bed in a clean house. We both got crazy excited shopping for cleaning supplies, we ran into our maid at the store while we were buying everything and were devastated that she wasn’t as excited as we were (both of us are far better cleaners and we’re thinking about doing the cleaning ourselves). Oh, and don’t worry ladies she is happily married. She is a newlywed (married six weeks ago) and her husband appears to be an incredibly caring and sweet man, she is my dorky sister type friend—I think that is what allows us to work so well together.
Ramadan Draws to a Close
Tuesday was Edul-Fitri, the breaking of the fast. It begins a long celebration that is marked by asking for forgivness and the sharing of wealth and love. In the Muslim faith people us this time to tithe their wealth to the poor and visit friends and family in procession of good will. It is also a time to give thanks to God for allowing them the strength to fast. The week long celebration is their Christmas, Easter, Thanksgiving and New Years all in row, each day is a precious day of celebration and adulation.
The Muslim community in Banda Aceh is very conservative. They are strictly governed by Muslim Law but it is not an oppressive hybrid of Islamic beliefs such as the Taliban practiced. The people here can listen to music and have national television (with horrible soap operas).
Local women must wear jilbabs (the head wraps) and are forbidden to date non-Muslim men, in fact, they basically can never be alone in a room with a man but they only apply these rules to local women, they do not expect expat women to wear the jilbabs. Recently, Sharia Police found a local women had “taken up” with an expat and so she was banished from the community (which was lucky for her, she could have had much worse) and the man was booted out of town. Most NGOs, mine included, have strict rules that prohibit us from dating locals, if we violate this we are subject to termination from our jobs. So of course anyone in a jilbab is like forbidden fruit (and the fruit is juicy here).
The weirdest part of all this is that the local women hate wearing the head wraps (it is so hot you would never want to suffer through added layers). They want to be seen as normal, especially the younger women. I was on the track the other day, just after the breaking of the daily fast, and a group of girls drove by on their scooters (everyone here travels by scooter, you can see a family of four on one scooter) and they all shouted at me in English. They said hello and then proceeded to shout out that they loved me and then giggled like a group of typical girls and sped off. If they had not all been in head scarves I would have thought I was anywhere else in the world (because women always shout that they love me and then speed off).
Young men are the same as the women, they want to go out and party and have fun and would love to land a cutie. They like speaking English and enjoy talking to Americans about America. It’s funny, everywhere you go in the world people are the same, they are just governed by different traditions, laws, beliefs and politicians (that know body trusts). I wonder how much easier Iraq could have been won if we had tried to understand the people we were “freeing” before we started our invasion. Winning hearts and minds should be more than a catch phrase politicians toss around to sound compassionate, it should be a strategy used at home and abroad to reach out to people that need reaching out.
I’m thousands of miles from my home town and yet I had the same conversation about how hard it is to keep a women happy here that I did back home. On Indonesian man even started singing “no women no cry,” by Bob Marley and we all started to sing along, we truly are only separated by lack of understanding.
posted by Banda-aid at 3:31 PM
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