The Old Lucretius Plan

Sapiens qui prospicit

I used to think that our old school motto - Sapiens qui prospicit (wise is he who looks ahead) - was a truism, until I learned that looking ahead is neither desirable nor strictly necessary. In fact, too much looking ahead can lead to procrastination and paralysis. Reconfigure the quote to 'wise is the rabbit who looks ahead' and you will see what I mean, as you envisage the headlights of the approaching SUV.

This week we have been given our 'disaster and emergency preparedness' training, designed to deal with the plethora of calamaties likely to befall us in Indonesia. Apart from the usual dangers: earthquake, tsunami, landslide, flood, civil commotion and of course the ubiquitous terrorism; can be added the new dread of bird flu. In the event of a city-wide pandemic we have been advised to 'stay at home and await instructions'.

I always feel that too much forward planning really takes the fun out of a crisis, and so when the bird flu virus strikes I plan to be downstairs looting Carrefour with everyone ese. My alma mater would be so proud...

Land of extremes

This is the view of Beth's project in Aceh.  In contrast, this is a picture of my World Bank 'power breakfast':

Those are fresh strawberries.  Couldn't get those in Flores, in fact in Flores this breakfast we would be just the banana, or maybe some ubi tatas (sweet potato). 

What's the bleeding time?

When I first started attending meetings in Indonesia and found myself standing at the front with a microphone introducing myself, I thought the obsession with ‘status’ was an Indonesian wide phenomenon.  By ‘status’ I mean, Single or Married?, Children?,  How many?, No!, Why not?, Are you trying?.  But yesterday I discovered that this may simply be a local,  NTT point of interest.

There was a meeting yesterday about nutrition with representatives from NGOs and various government departments when a new cohort of doctors arrived and took their places in the front row.  Give them a few months and they will be in the back row sending text messages with the rest of the rabble, but for now they are following orders.  They were notable for their youth, I am always astounded at how young newly qualified doctors look these days - probably due my own increasing age more than anything else - and their slightly frightened demeanour.  They will be posted at various health centres throughout Sikka for around 6-12 months and this was their initial orientation period.  The entire group of 7 hailed from Java and seemed to all have been born in Jakarta or Medan.  This was their first time so far east in Indonesia and they were pretty shocked with the new change in their living standards. In fact I got the impression they were shocked to find that this backwater was still in Indonesia.    They were keen to hear whether I had contracted malaria and shrunk lower in their seats when I pointed out triumphantly that not only had I survived Malaria but also Dengue fever.   They seemed to take little comfort from my reassurances that it hadn’t done me any harm.  On hearing that I had been in Maumere for nearly two years, one doctor exclaimed, ‘but how come your skin isn’t completely black?’  The fear of these paler-skinned, Javanese doctors was palpable. Skin colour is a big issue in Indonesia with natural skin tone getting darker the further east you travel. People with lighter skin take great pride in that fact alone and whitening creams are very commonly advertised, lighter is better.   

I am sure that some of them will settle in and hopefully more than a few will grow to love the place and people as we do.  My hope is that either way they learn a little about the disparity of wealth and opportunity that exists in their vast country.  They, by virtue of luck, were born into relatively wealthy Javanese families who paid for them to get the schooling required to attend medical school and qualify as a doctor. I am sure they worked hard and their families’ sacrificed to pay the fees, but there is still an element of luck to have had the opportunity in the first place.  In Flores, on the other hand, the quality of schooling is incredibly poor and it is extremely hard for a bright child to be identified, tutored and encouraged in further learning.  Most families struggle to pay the basic school fees causing a  lot of children to not finish the most basic level of  school, let alone daring to dream of higher education.

The government does have a scheme that financially aids a small number of students from NTT to attend medical school,  but by the nature of medical school training this process will take a long time to have any sort of significant impact on the doctor numbers throughout the region.  So we are left with the current system of newly qualified doctors being posted to regions they don’t know and in some cases really do not wish to be in.  Because of this and the short-term nature of the placements, it can make it very hard to involve the doctor in creating positive health changes for the local community.  There is a tendency for the unhappy ones to count off the days, escape to Bali as often as possible, consequently leaving little time to invest their talent in a sustainable way.  This can leave the local community feeling abandoned and let down by their local health centre as the doctor is rarely there.

I am certainly not saying that this applies to all doctors working here. There is a core group of committed doctors working in the community and the local hospital who are from all over Indonesia.  But it is a small group and they lack the sufficient support and funds with which to tackle the diseases and the root causes of disease that are endemic here. 

Getting back to the meeting.   They were all asked to introduce themselves to the audience and one by one they took the microphone and each neglected to inform us of their status. After much heckling they caught on to what the crowd wanted and informed us of husbands, wives, children and how many.  As the female doctors revealed they were single,  the head of the health department called to the guys in the audience to make a note of their name, pointing out with a chuckle that this girl may be potential girlfriend material.  As I was one of the hecklers, it occurred to me that perhaps I have been here too long. Political correctness seems a distant memory, but I guess new doctors do not tend to get introduced to their colleagues in this raucous manner back in the UK?

Fundraising Update

I am sure many of you will be interested to hear about the progress of the fundraising campaign that we started a couple of months ago.  The response to the e-mail, and the letters posted by our energetic UK campaign manager (aka Dom’s Mother), have yielded very pleasing results, and the total raised (through this site, payal, cheques etc.) is now in the region of fifteen thousand dollars (US).  This is a very substantial sum of money in any currency, but looks particularly impressive in Rupiah (140,000,000)!

Donors should have receive an e-mail giving them an update on what we have done with the cash, but as some may have slipped through the net, I thought it best to publish it here on the blog as well. Incidentally, if you have not yet had a chance to donate, please do not assume that we no longer need contributions.  All sums are gratefully received and put to good use.

We now have a small office in a great position opposite Maumere cathedral, and a steady stream of visitors, most of whom are curious about this new organisation, and many of whom are looking for a job.  We have, thanks to your donations, purchased a computer and a water dispenser, and paid a local carpenter to build some basic wooden furniture (we prefer to support local craftsmen rather than import poor quality plywood furniture from Java).  We have a number of cheap plastic chairs that we are planning to replace with some wooden ones, when we can find a carpenter who can fulfill the order.  The office does not have enough electricity to run a computer (we are limited to 300w), so we have run a cable from the larger premises next door.  This is fairly common practice here, as it will take months before the local electricity company turns up to upgrade our meter.  We do not yet have a telephone line (again, this will take many months to install, if at all) so we just use our cell phones.    We have running water for about 30 minutes per day, and some curious goats that loiter in the yard.  All the staff are very happy in their new environment.

So, what is JPA-flores actually going to do, I here you ask. Our objective is to improve the economy of Flores by releasing the inherent potential and ingenuity of the people.  We will be doing this in three ways:

1. Strengthening community groups and co-operatives
2. Empowering individuals and potential entrepreneurs
3. Stimulating new enterprises

Detailed information about the various projects we are starting can be found on the JPA website, but here is a very brief summary of our 'clients':

1. Kelompok STILL - a group of traditional 'Ikat' weavers who need help with marketing, quality control and management
2. Kelompok Maju Bersama - a group of coconut farmers that want to improve their income by setting up a small-scale industry making virgin coconut oil
3. Persatuan Sopir - a number of freelance drivers (that do not own cars) want to set up a kind of taxi service in Maumere, and help to improve the service delivery to tourists and other visitors, while also making their own livelihood more secure
4. Fairtrade Rice Scheme - we are researching the possibility of setting up a fairtrade rice marketing scheme for local consumption.  This may be the start of a 'buy Flores' campaign to stimulate demand for local produce in preference to imported goods.
5. Kringga Farmer's co-operative - this village is situated in a remote area in the hills, where they grow cashew nut, cocoa and vanilla. the co-operative is trying to organise the farmers to market their product more successfully, but they need help understanding how the market beyond their village actually works.

Thanks to your contribution, and the support of Oxfam New Zealand, we have been able to get off to a much quicker start than we thought was possible.  It also enables us to take a long term view of the problems here and formulate a response that is hopefully more sustainable than the various other interventions that have taken place in Indonesia.

Your donation will directly help people gain command over their own livelihoods. This will build self-respect, reduce vulnerability to natural disasters and improve the health and education status of the people of Flores. 

Many thanks from all of us at JPA,

Bapak Dominic, Bapak Sirilus, Ibu Epik, Ibu Conita, Nona Ani, Mas Abdullah, Bapak Gero, Bapak Densi, Pater Simeon, Ibu Hilda

Is this news?

Last week I had a brush with fame when an Indonesian Television station was in town to highlight the current crisis of malnourished children in Flores.  They were here to film a couple of mother and baby clinics to show what the government was doing to try and combat the issue and then visit a few families with severely malnourished children to attempt to illustrate the scale of the problem.

After they had finished filming at one clinic, I found myself chatting with the crew about what my activities were and some of my frustrations regarding the somewhat reactive approach of the government.

For example, we currently supply the families of severely malnourished (gizi buruk) children with a supplementary food parcel meant to last one month and those children who are merely undernourished (gizi kurang), one for 15 days.  The food parcel contains eggs, rice, vegetables, sugar, milk, fish, cooking oil and salt,  all weighed to a precise amount deemed optimal for these children.  This approach can and does sometimes achieve the desired effect, namely some severely malnourished children's weight increasing so that they become merely undernourished and some undernourished children moving to  a 'normal' weight.  But what normally happens when the 30 or 15 days comes to an end is that the child slips back into a dangerous weight decline.  We are only ever treating the problem once we have an almost emergency situation, rather than having a more proactive approach to combating the occurrence in the first place that runs parallel so that over time, less and less parcels are needed and that as an intervention they are seen as an exception rather than the norm.

The issue of nutrition certainly isn't one of just health and therefore to overcome the problem of malnutrition requires a multidimensional solution including improved  education,  involvement of the farming, agricultural lobby amongst other departments, availability of nutritious food so people have choice and also  a change in attitude and behaviour of the community about the importance of giving children a healthy diet.

At the end of our chat, the interviewer then asked whether he could interview me about the things I had just mentioned,  but this time on camera!  It was a great opportunity to say my piece and hopefully highlight the need for a more integrated approach to tackling malnutrition, that is of course if anyone could understand my Indonesian.

None of this is easy, nor do I profess to have all the answers to what is a very complicated solution, I am just doing what I can from my position in the health department.  Has there been a positive benefit from my work here? I believe there has been.  Will there be another malnutrition crisis this year in Sikka? Unfortunately,  I don't doubt it for a moment.

Campaign update

The campaign for funds for JPA-flores has got off to a good start, with over $1,500 raised in the first couple of weeks, and a few cheques still somewhere in the system.  We are very toched by the friends and family who have given (especially those we know are currently not very flush with cash at the moment) and also the kind offers from total strangers who have stumbled across our site.  Welcome one and all!

This start is very encouraging, and to those of you whom have already given, our friends and colleagues  extend their heartfelt thanks, and to those who are yet to give we extend a cheery wave.  Just click on the button marked 'donate' on the right hand sidebar...

Wot no sugar lump?

Once again it was time for the national polio immunization campaign, and I was sent to one village to administer the vaccine.  170 kids in two hours.  Bless. 

Dom came along to record the event for posterity, so here is one of the many photos he took.

The state we want to be in?

This was an article that was written for a local NGO newsletter.  It was actually published in October 2005, but we forgot to add it to the blog until now.  This is an issue that cuts to the heart of how Indonesia is supposed to develop over the next few years, i.e., are we building a social democracy with strong state-provided services, or something else?   

Tipping the begging bowl

Does anyone really like asking friends for money? I have recently (as some of you may know) sent a 'begging letter' to friends and family asking for help for JPA-flores, the new NGO I am helping to set up here. This process has stirred up mixed emotions in my fastidious soul.

I find it hard asking people for donations, partly because I am anxious about being disappointed by the response. Last year we tried to raise some money for a couple of projects, and a very small number of people were very generous indeed, and a very large number of people gave nothing at all. Beth's education fund (which has already sent one girl to university in Jogjakarta to read International Law) raised some cash, but we were surprised by the very small amount yielded for my project. In fact, I was so embarrassed that I felt I could not tell my local colleagues about the amount raised, and I bulked the sum out with a large contribution of my own to save my blushes. If I am honest, this made me feel a little resentful about the folks back home. Here was I, a volunteer earning 100 quid a month, donating to the project, while friends of mine earning more than this an hour demurred.

This, in turn, made me wonder if it is even ethical to ask friends and family for money, and in particular if the very nature of 'charity' means one should never expect people to give, nor admonish them if they choose not to give. Perhaps charity is best kept anonymous; transactions between the keen-as-mustard charity worker with a clipboard who stops strangers on Oxford street and signs them up for five-pound-a-month direct debits that are soon forgotten about, yet continue to be paid through inertia.

I agonised over how the e-mail was written, and felt that perhaps I had not given good enough reasons for people to be charitable, or that the process of giving was too convoluted. However, our good friends Ellen and Joost, a couple of Dutch volunteers, have recently raised nearly 5000 dollars by asking their friends for cash, and this news has inspired me and spurred me on. The Dutch are, according to all my Dutch friends, notoriously careful with money, so surely a well-aimed appeal to the spendthrift British should yield more than a similar appeal to the frugal continentals. At the least, I could appeal to the British sense of fair play and patriotism.

So, in constructing the e-mail, I came up with an idea which I hoped would make the process of giving more pleasurable and frictionless. For a start I have abandoned the idea of collecting contributions via VSO, as this did not work out well last time (it took months for the money to get to us). So I have decided to use this site (see the 'Donate' button on the right hand sidebar), Paypal, and the simple expedient of 'send a cheque', of which the latter will hopefully capture some corporate donations.

To make the very experience of giving more pleasurable and rewarding, we reflected on the fact that before we left the UK many people were telling us how much they envied us for what we are doing, and even admired it. Perhaps in most people there is a volunteer trying to get out, and so we came up with the idea of asking people to volunteer for one hour. The idea is that they should devote one hour of their working day (preferably a lucrative hour) to earning money not for themselves, but for the poor and disadvantaged on a little-known island in South East Asia. This makes it easier for people to decide how much to give (thus avoiding procrastination), and also makes a clear link between effort deployed and output gained.

However, this still left the problem of motivation to give. It is quite hard to ask people for money for something so prosaic as a computer, or even just a stapler, and yet without these things the new NGO cannot function. I expect people would rather give money to pay for the one meal that saves a child's life, or the eye operation that saves an old person's sight. The trouble is that such appeals are disingenuous, as your cash in fact goes to an international NGO, which then selects a local partner NGO, who organise a prolonged process of needs analysis, problem identification, resource allocation, project implementation and finally monitoring and evaluation. One of the outcomes of this project may well be that a child was given a nutritious meal, but your money paid for the process (and the stapler), not the fruit and vegetables.

But how do you get all this into an e-mail without boring everyone rigid? The answer is that you don't. If people want to read about the nuts and bolts of our work out here they can read it on this blog, or on the new site for JPA-flores. If they feel they need to know more then they can post a question here, or send us an e-mail, as we would welcome the chance to discuss these issues. However, not everyone wants (or has the time) to get stuck into the often perplexing arguments that surround international development. We therefore hope that people have enough confidence in our good sense to give the money with a clear conscience.

As for the squeamishness about asking friends for money, I feel sure this will quickly dissapate once I can tell my friends at JPA-flores that they can go out and buy that desk, organise that community meeting and pay for that phone call.

I will keep this blog posted on what happens next...

Island life

The run up to Christmas has been quite hectic and so I only find myself now on Christmas Day with a little time to jot a few memories down.

The beginning of December marked Indonesian National Health day and so as you would expect this was a big event for my office. I was a little surprised however to find that the event was being marked by the Dinas hosting an enormous party for all the office staff and any other health employees who happened to be in Maumere on the day. The party stared at about 11 o clock with the guys drinking arak and singing karaoke and the women doing the cooking. They had a proper PA system in the large meeting room and as usual I was astounded at how everyone seemed to have a fantastic singing voice. Indonesians seem to be born to sing and are at their most comfortable with a microphone in their hand standing in front of people. As a tribute to me they sang a number of songs in English and I made the mistake of singing along from my seat. As soon as they spotted that I knew the words a microphone was quickly dispatched and I was urged to stand at the front and sing. Now as anyone who is acquainted with my singing voice can attest to, it is not something for public performances. So I sat there bright red holding a microphone wishing I had joined the choir at school and actually learned to sing Abba numbers properly. (Incidentally, the lyrics to a famous Abba song were printed out in a church leaflet, but they had got the spelling wrong so the chorus read ‘I believe in angles’, which could be the anthem for architects and feng shui practitioners).

The following week I was picked up at my house at 5 am by a team from the office as a group of us was heading for the island Palu’e. There were various aims to the trip as members from various departments went along. I was there specifically to help with the training of the ‘Kader’ volunteers who are responsible for running the Mother and Baby clinics. Others were there to fix the Health centre radio, the island’s only means of communication. I had heard that Palu’e was some six hours away by boat and as most people here can’t swim and are afraid of long boat journeys they had decided we would drive along the coast road until you are able to get a boat across in two hours. The drive was bone crunching along a truly terrible road for 4 hours until we reached the crossing point but there was a bit of a party atmosphere. We had brought along lots of food and as soon as we stopped some of the guys built a small fire on the beach and cooked a large squid they had bought on route.

The boat trip was one long picnic with food being constantly passed around. This did surprise me a little as I had been told that Palu’e was dependant on food being brought in by boat, only really having corn and green beans growing on the island and so I was under the impression that we needed this food to ensure we wouldn’t be a burden on the locals for the duration of our stay. But what do I know? The trip over was beautiful and Palu’e with its active volcano rising up and dominating the landscape was a much larger island than I had expected. As we approached the jetty I was lost for words at the sheer beauty of the place.

The Paediatrician from Maumere had accompanied us to check all the children with malnutrition and as we walked from the jetty to the health centre, a distance of about 30 metres, we saw literally hundreds of women and children waiting. We were told that as Palu’e has not had a doctor for nearly a year all the women and children had travelled down from their villages and had waited all morning for this precious opportunity to see the doctor. We prioritised the children with malnutrition, then the rest according to symptoms and village location as some women had walked carrying their children for four hours down a very steep mountain and still obviously had the journey home. The health centre and a few simple houses for the staff make up the main port of entry to Palu’e. The mountain begins more or less immediately behind these premises and the climb is steep from the outset. I was entranced by the site of colourful dots snaking their way up and down, some not moving and taking a rest and others carrying children or shopping.

I spent the afternoon asking the mothers with malnourished children about the government scheme of providing supplementary food. This was to determine its effectiveness and learn about specific logistical issues for the island and distribution to the villages. This was the first time in Indonesia that I felt I needed an interpreter to assist me. I was in a small room crowded with about 30 mothers and children all talking and it was so difficult to understand what they were saying, especially the village names. I was feeling a little dejected about my language skills until one of my colleagues found herself asking the same question over and over as she couldn’t make out the reply either. It seems that the accent is so different from the rest of Flores that it was difficult for all of us.

I had been warned that water is scarce in Palu’e, they do have a volcanic hot water source, and I mean burning hot, but it is salty and so not great for the skin long term. We were only staying for a week so I wasn’t worried but the locals were so kind that they insisted we used the precious collected rain water to mandi (bathe). Refusal was simply not an option, especially after a 10 year old girl had filled buckets from their rain water reservoir especially for me, how embarrassing. I perfected the art of having a mandi while using the minimum of water. It was a good lesson, the appreciation that with each scoop of water I would be depriving someone else of that scarce resource. I realised how lucky we are in our home in Maumere having a well. To cool down I sometimes pour scoop after scoop over me, much like my love of standing under a hot shower for ages in the UK, but here I found myself thinking about what a luxury that was.

I was awoken at 5 am the next morning, the last to get up of course, and found myself sitting on the beach in my pyjamas watching a most beautiful sunrise feeling a little like I had arrived in paradise. Everyone I met was so incredibly friendly and much more generous than they could possibly afford to be. I am still embarrassed about the fact I wasn’t permitted to fetch water for myself or anyone else, there was always a willing small child to do that.

The day was a planning day for the training sessions that would be held the following day: one at the top and one at the bottom of the mountain. From the moment I had arrived I knew I couldn’t leave without climbing the mountain so I volunteered for that session. So at 6am the following morning I and a few local staff set off hoping to get up before the day became too hot. We took it nice and slow but it was hard going. Having done little exercise since arriving in Indonesia I knew it would hurt but I was also looking forward to getting the heart pumping. Needless to say, before long I was dripping in sweat and kept suggesting that this was a good spot to take a picture so I could recover a little with less shame involved. These guys climb up and down twice a week. After being assured that we had climbed the last part and reached a plateau we turned a corner and I was confronted with a pretty up together village. Some houses made from stone, some even with ceramic flooring. I had carried a small back pack up with some water and that was hard enough. We passed through the village to where the training session was being held in a covered area next to the church, or should I say Cathederal, this church was huge. I couldn’t get over the site of 20kg cans of paint stacked up in the corner, the coloured glass that lay in sheets waiting to be cut and the piles of wood frames. All of this stuff can only be brought up one way and almost exclusively by women. Palu’e is essentially an island of women and children, the men mostly having left for Malaysia to find work sending money home when they can.

Some of the staff had arrived the night before and I was impressed at how smart they looked compared to my still recovering appearance including completely dripping T-shirt. Then I spotted that the guys I had climbed up with had changed into clean clothes and were now looking fresh as a daisy. I realised what a basic error I had made and couldn’t believe that I was going to be on stage all day (yes they even had a stage and a microphone) looking like a complete scruff bag.

I am more comfortable with a microphone now (except while singing), and so I gave long introduction about who I am and who VSO are. I organised a simple team-building game called ‘the corner game’ whereby everyone stands in a circle, holding hands, and have to go to a specific corner without breaking the circle (usually causing chaos as everyone tries to pull the group to a different corner). A physically demanding existence at the top of the mountain has made the Palu’e women tough and strong, and they almost ripped my arms out of their sockets as the pulled me around the room.

Later that day it was a much quicker walk down the mountain, but hazardous in flipflops, causing me to trip and almost wipe out the guy in front of me, but he was clearly used to this and managed to catch me before I tumbled down the slope. Later I went for swim in clear blue sea with the local kids. All my Dinas colleagues looked on as they are afraid of sea (surprisingly few Indonesians can swim), amazed that I can swim on both my front and back, which they mistakenly ascribe to some special quality that only westerners possess.

We decided to take the direct route home to Maumere, but as this is the monsoon the seas are rough and few skippers are prepared to make the longer journey. The only skipper brave enough to do it had the smallest boat. 40 people were huddled under a tarpaulin on board this small craft for six hours: three hours of burning hot sun followed by three hours of torrential rain.

Whilst it is not one of the easiest places to get to, I cannot wait to return with Dom, go trekking up the volcano and introduce him to the amazing people who eke out a living there.