The Lucretius Plan

Some job descriptions

I will be working for a company called PT Jamasatira Perkasa, a company that has been set up by 8 local NGO’s and is supported by Oxfam GB and by YAPPIKA, a national NGO. The company was established to give farmers access to a fair price for their produce by establishing a parallel trading system and to offer an alternative to the current trading oligopoly, a business dominated by a handful of local traders.

NTT is one of the poorest and most disadvantaged provinces in Indonesia. It is vulnerable to natural disaster; suffers from disproportionately high infant & maternal mortality rates; income levels are low; the economy is predominantly rural & subsistence; there is a high level of natural resource degradation and high levels of food insecurity. Many traditional social constructions remain in place that do little to empower marginalized communities and help to maintain a system of domination and subordination (economically, politically and socially, including gender) with very little political or legal accountability for elite groups.

In this context, many NGO’s saw a challenge in positioning themselves to try to address these complex and inter-related issues in the most appropriate manner. In response to this challenge, with the support of Oxfam GB, a group of local NGO’s established three key networks – FIRD (Flores Integrated Rural Development); TIRD (Timor Integrated Rural Development) and SID (Sumba Integrated Development) – representing the three principle islands that make up the province of NTT and striving to pursue a model of integrated regional development.

FIRD has five main programmes, possibly the most important one being stated as ‘economic regional development’. This is the role given to PT Jamasatira within the network. The vision of Jamasatira is of a community owned company that provides a fair trading system for farmers as a vehicle for regional economic development.

Meanwhile, Beth will be a Capacity Builder working with an organisation called Yayasan Pelita Swadaya - a health NGO concerned with, among other things, Adolescent Reproductive Health. Indonesian adolescents are typical of adolescents in any developed and developing country. Reproductive health issues that have affected adolescents in Indonesia for generations are still relevant today. Accurate and timely reproductive health information is still not available to many youth. Reproductive clinical services in general remain unavailable, distant and underutilized by youth. Rural and urban adolescent populations differ in cultural and behavioral norms resulting in different ARH priorities, but in general, issues that are relevant to urban populations (premarital sex experimentation, unwanted pregnancy and STI/HIV) are increasingly relevant to rural populations.

Oh Brad...

Oh, yes, life's pretty cheap for that sort...

(Originally Posted: Tue - April 13, 2004 at 04:13 PM)

Learning to ride a motorbike is very hard.

Or perhaps it is because I have absolutely no aptitude? All I can see is lorries trying to kill me, pedestrians trying to trick me and cars driving in a generally random manner. All I can hear is the instructor saying:

"Indicator off, we are three miles past the junction now."
"What, no lifesaver?"
"Don't drop the clutch like that, you owe me a new gearbox"
"Check left, no left, that's right, that van was going to come up your inside"
"If this was a test, that mistake would be a fail"
"Where are you, please come back"
"That's it, I'm calling the police."
"So, you really do need to learn to ride a bike then. You can't like walk everywhere or take the bus then?"

Ah well, only three days to go...

Oh yes, I know how to participate

Training can be fun

The last week has found me at Harborne Hall, the VSO training centre in Birmingham, enjoying a very impressive course called 'Skills for Working in Development'. The crux of it is the ability to encourage participation of all stakeholders in the analysis, planning, implementation and evaluation of development projects.

I think VSO should franchise this course to UK-based businesses as it is very good at teaching certain facilitation techniques that I would have found invaluable over the past few years. It even tried to endow me with something called 'listening skills', though that may need a bit more work...

The most empowering element of the course was the fact that we were described as 'Development Workers', encouraging us to think less of our previous professions, or at least make them subordinate to this new description. This was probably easier for me, as an unemployed former entrepreneur (stop giggling at the back), than for a Doctor. It feels a lot more interesting to describe oneself as a Development Worker than a Volunteer for some reason, which probably just proves that I am having difficulty with the status-adjustment that this whole adventure demands.

The course was very inclusive, balanced and gave equal weight to everyone's contribution, but despite that I actually enjoyed it!

One high point was Ellen's story about the Alsation attack dog, but I will cover that in separate blog, if Ellen lets me. Ellen and Joost are a Dutch couple who will also be coming to Indonesia with us, and they are excellent value, so I am sure you will hear their names often in future blogs.

I didn't have a nice day...

Calling various companies to tell them of our change of address was never going to be a fun experience, but dealing with Telewest's notoriously bad service certainly makes it all the more painful.

Interestingly, of all the companies I phoned (Telewest, Powergen, Wessex Water etc.), the most friendly, efficient, customer focussed and generally switched on, was the Bristol City Council taxation department.

We keep hearing about how super-efficient businesses should be allowed to sweep away fusty old civil servants and usher in a new age of customer satisfaction, yet I wonder if this could just be a Thatcherite wet dream predicated on the fetish for profit, rather than the desire to give good customer service. To stretch the analogy somewhat, privatising free-marketeers are probably rather poor lovers, known for selfishness and brevity. Council employees, on the other hand, are the Kama Sutra personified: attentive, sensitive and effective.

The Telewest call centre is therefore like a Great Windmill Street clip joint: Offers something you wouldn't admit to wanting, fails to deliver even that, and leaves you feeling cheap and used after the event...

The Removal Men Cometh...

How to pack up your life into three containers.

Today is the day our stuff gets packed into three large wooded containers and shipped off to a warehouse in sunny Clevedon, pending our return in two or three years time.

The last few days have been particularly stretching, as we have had to consider how to divide up or possessions into:

Things we never want to see again
Things we are attached to, but probably don't need
Things we need, but are not very attached to
Rubbish

This took until midnight last night, and the removal van arrived at 9.00 this morning, whereby the lads managed to play a very large game of Tetris, working out how to fit all the items into the containers in the most optimal way. Very impressive to watch, and quite moving when the last container was full, and the wooden panel nailed into place, locking up our dentist chair, mountain bikes and ancient workbench.

So, now we have downsized from a six bedroom house to a one bedroom flat, and it all feels very strange...

Selling the house

Completion on 12/03/04

(Originally Posted: Thu - February 26, 2004 at 10:14 AM)

Our good chum Paul has come through like a good 'un, and bought our house. Of course he is getting an unbelievable deal, but then we haven't told him about the Poltergeist yet.

Packing Up

e-bay, the charity shop or the skip?

(originally posted: Thu - February 19, 2004 at 10:53 AM)

We are due to exchange on the house this week with a view to moving on the 12th March. Over the past few months, Dominic has been becoming an e-bay super user by selling lots of our possessions. It has proven rather fruitful with regard to recycling certain items for cash and Dominic has become a close friend and confidant of our local postmaster. You never know when being able to recite how much it costs to send a 10 kg parcel to The Orkney Islands will come in handy.

Other items fall into the St Peters Hospice bracket. If you happen to be passing the Clifton branch, take a moment to gaze at the window display and count how many pieces you recognize. I do not know if St Peters have received many Roller Blades, Ski Boots or Ab Crunchers in the past but they will certainly draw in the more active customers. By the way, if you hurry, Dominic's Hugo Boss dinner jacket will be on one of the rails. Great bargain for someone, but funny considering we have a Black Tie do in a few weeks time! He does like to stand out in a crowd as we all know, so now is his chance.

The third great beneficiary of our stuff is the Bristol Dump. Even with objects that were too shoddy to take to the charity shop and not viable for recycling Dominic still found a way re-homing them. In the process of throwing stuff into the dump, Dominic was often interrupted by the cries of the refuse official as he ran towards him shouting "NOoooooo". And thus a new home was found in their portacabin for all sorts of wacky items.