Debt Collecting

The other weekend I had a day being a debt collector! My friend Maison said he had to go somewhere three hours from Banda Aceh to talk to someone. After a few questions he said that the person was the friend of his cousin. After a few more questions I determined that in fact it wasn’t a friend but someone who had borrowed money, hadn’t paid it back and wasn’t answering their phone! The guy had borrowed the money as capital for a road project. Maison’s task was to drive the family car there, get the guy and put him on the phone with the cousin who was in Jakarta.

So Maison told me that he was going to pick me up in the morning for the three hour drive. In Indonesian the morning ends at 10am and then mid-day starts. I’ve learnt about Maison’s punctuality in the morning so when he called me at 11am and said “Good Morning” we both laughed. We headed off up the road.

The ipod gets a good workout on these trips. Maison had brought a friend called Yohan as well and we chatted away. It turned into a 5 hour drive to get there. This was the originally promised three hours, one hour of stops and one hour of extra driving. Finally we ended up in a town called Tangse which is up in the hills south of Sigli.

We stopped and had a cup of coffee while looking out across the beautiful view that sweeps down over the valley. We asked about the company that was building the road and were directed to their office. We went up there and chatted with some folks, they said that their boss was actually in Banda Aceh but without telling what we were after we managed to get his phone number and also they gave us a part off one of the machines that they needed us to take to him in the city. Success, we had the guy now, no escape. With that under our belts we cruised back to town. The high point of the return trip was buying some corn on the cob that had been baked over hot coals. Delicious.

Maison dropped me off and went and spoke to the guy that evening. Apparently it is all sorted out. The guy apologized profusely and promised money by the second week in January. I’ll be sure to ask what happens.

I enjoyed seeing a new part of Aceh and want to go back and explore the mountains and rivers there a little in the future.