Weekly update,

First of all I want to report that Rachel has given the kids their first swimming lesson at the pool. The pool is at a fancy hotel/longterm residence. Basically only foreigners go there and there aren't many. Admission for the pool is about $3 for us and $2 for the kids. We spent a nice few hours there on Sunday morning teaching the kids the basics of swimming. We might have to research the proper approach actually! The only downside to it all was that others stayed in the sun too long and got sunburnt :-(

During the week I spent two days visiting my sites to look at possible variations that the engineers would like to make. This involved quite a few hours walking in the bush. One trip earned me three leeches sucking my blood, yuck!! I was dirty and happy when I got home to Banda Aceh. Photos below show one of the intakes we've built to collect water from a spring, it gravitates about 3km down to the community. Basically there is a dam which blocks the water flowing forward and diverts it through the grill, through a simple "filter" and down to the village.





Final funny story. When biking to work there is one intersection which gets traffic blocked up. Rather than eat their fumes I go on the inside and wait holding onto a pole that supports a sign. It is a steel pole. However in true indonesian fasion today it snapped when I was holding it and basically fell on the ground. No trouble for me and I did laught!

Family Time

I made a whistle stop in New Zealand the other week. Literally I was in the country for 54 hours and probably 7 of that was in the airports! Rachel came too but she had 3 or 4 days more after I left. However it was completely worth it. Why?

Firstly


my cousin Alex got married - wasn't she beautiful and very happy too. This is her and her father my uncle John (looks good enough to be the groom!)



Here is the Buchan family (my grandparents are the more mature Buchan's in the picture) all together.
Secondly




It was a great meeting of the family in laws. The first photo is my cousin Lisa offereing some delicious food to Rachel's grandmonther Florence and my grandmother Joyce. It is interesting to note that Florence has a daughter call Joyce too!

The second picture is Rachel and David relaxing in my aunty and uncles house. It was so wonderful to see everyone together. While it was only a very short trip for me, my parents had a couple of days with David and Florence before Rachel and I arrived. David and Florence saw a good amount of the top of the south island and went on to Rotorua too!

It was quite a contrast for Rachel and maybe especially for me. I had been working out in one of my rural villages for a day. While the houses etc are nice and new now it is still a pretty poor area and conditions are tough. I went straight 2.5hour drive to the airport and flew to luxury, cleanliness and a lot of delicious food in NZ, and then straight back! Looking forward a 9 day trip in June to see all the family with more time available.

Here is one last photo. 4 Buchan generations together (see more photos on the picasa site) www.picasaweb.com.google/mjmcwhirter



Back into a heavy workload here but I can see the light of the tunnell and am really enjoying the work while I am doing it.

Awesome Bike Ride

So with my kayaking limited by lack of friends to surfing with a bunch of surfies around me, I’ve taken up the pastime which has become very popular with the foreigners here, mountain-biking. There are some very keen cyclist here who have been cruising around the backroads, mainroads and tracks of the area around Banda Aceh. I’ve been out with them on a few rides and have ridden with Rachel a few times.

I just got back from an excellent ride I thought was worth recounting. Most Sundays my Palestinian friend Ramadan and I bike out and have pizza at a beach about 12km from Banda Aceh. There is a place that makes the pizzas in a wood fired oven and they are very nice. We started biking out there along the main road, unfortunately this meant we were riding into the traffic of people returning from the beach into town. The pollution and danger of the roads in Indonesia is not great at the best of times and 6pm on a Sunday night might actually be one of the worst times.

Fortunately there are some backways to get to the beach. One I’ve ridden a few times with the rest of the cyclists and I had heard rumours of another way to get out there. But I was advised by one of the main cyclists that it is a better hike than a bike. I did remember one guy telling me though that it was realistic on a bike.

I did a little recky by myself. I biked and then pushed my bike up a couple of steep hills. I met a man who’d just trapped some goats and amidst the blood and the gore he made it sound like I was “only two small hills” away from the beach where the pizza was. Intrigued I convinced Ramadan one evening we should go that way instead of through the plumes of exhaust.

We were told it was a three hour adventure but with pushing it along we made it in an hour and a half. Tonight we went back with an Australian friend Angus and it was, as I said, a night worth blogging.

The climb up is just perfect. It is VERY hard but it is just the right mix of steepness, continuity and technical mountain biking to convince me that it is indeed possible to ride it the whole way without stopping. One just has to be super fit and be very focused about controlling the bike. It is the type of climb where it will be very enjoyable for many attempts as one tries to get further each time, further each time with little tricks and keys being learnt each attempt and the leg muscles also growing until they can make it. I had to stop to rest or because I couldn’t control my bike enough climbing over the rocks about 4 times tonight, I am sure I can get that down to one and maybe it might be possible to conquer it one day.

Then the downhill makes it just perfect. It is probably 5 kilometers of continuously falling single track with a variety of characteristics: gravelly path between trees, rocky slabs, clay ruts, smooth but narrow concrete path, small drop offs (3 or 4 inches only) and then it opens up to a perfectly smooth tarmac road for the last 500m. Magic.

Then one is out at the pizza place and can enjoy a very nice wood fired pizza with delicious fruit drinks as the sun goes down and the sound of evening prayers comes from the mosque.

Tonight’s adventure kept on coming too. Ramadan left and started leisurely biking through the back roads that lead out the main thoroughfare. It is dark by that time and with our bike lights providing enough light to see 5m in front on the road we cruise through a couple of villages with dogs and people looking on in amusement. Tonight is started to gentle rain while we were winding down through some rice paddies, we pushed on. The rain built and with the mosques letting out the sound of the last prayer of the day we were biking down now deserted roads with water teaming down from the heavens. We decided to push on going through it all happy that the rain would reduce the night traffic even further.

It was a very wet bike for 20min or so. Cars were driving 25km/hour and everyone on their motorbikes was sodden. I actually came across a group of people who were fishing one guy and his motorbike out of the side ditch. I helped them lift it out. The kid (15 years old say) was ok . He must have just lost control or sight in the rain and blatantly driven into the ditch. People are awful drivers and very risky here.

So then I hounded my way home to a very happy shower and then to get into bed to write this.

A Work Update

Both Rachel and I have been working very hard. I’m normally out the door at 7:30am and at work ten to fifteen minutes later. I am not normally getting home until after 7:00pm as I find the time after others have left work is good time for me to catch up on writing and planning work that I have to do.

I am starting to feel that I understand the projects that I am managing now and also the people. I’ve now met all the people in my team including those who work several hours away. I’ve been to probably half the villages that I have projects in and driven past some of the others. It is a very interesting project. As a recap, many of the other Red Cross National societies built houses and made an agreement with us to provide water and sanitation to them.

Our major partner for my projects is the Canadian Red Cross. The other day I visited 5 or 6 villages in Aceh Jaya about two hours south of Banda Aceh where we live. We have many, as many as 30, contracting firms working for us to build permanent water supplies for these houses. We have previously provided temporary water supplies to tapstands in the villages and now we are building either shallow wells in the back yard of each house or a gravity water supply to bring the water down from the hills and pipe it into their new houses. The next few months are going to be very exciting as the water supplies will be starting to run. My main task before that time is to train the village water and sanitation supply committees and the community in general how to administer, maintain and operate these systems, no short order!

In each house we have also built a septic tank, then if the soil won’t provide a good soak away we’ve built a below ground concrete box which we fill with gravel for the water to flow through. We call these structures subsurface flow wetlands and flowers and reeds are planted above the gravel to suck up the water and help dispose of it. The left over water soaks into the ground or is directed to a drain. We have some areas where the soil conditions are causing us some challenges but there are hundreds and hundreds of these systems working well. Our community outreach team has been educating people about them so they are well maintained. Below is a picture of one of the wetlands that has been planted with beautiful flowers and really makes the house look great.

 

I think the team of people I get to work with here are really great. Our programme manager is a very interesting man called Fred who has 50 odd years of experience with projects in developing countries. He provides great leadership for the program. Our engineers, site supervisors and community outreach people are all very dedicated and good at what they do. While we have a big challenge trying to maintain all these sanitation systems and water supplies I think we have a good chance of doing it.

Rachel’s work has been interesting too. She still has not received a longterm contract mainly due to a lack of organization from the outfit who would hire her. She has been working on some short-term contracts. Some of the time she gets to contribute to and be around the political happenings which is what she really wants to do. However in the short-term she has also had to sort out some finance processes at one of the agencies that is not at all organized and is too much of a possibility for misappropriation of funds or corruption. Organizing and sorting out this situation has taken a lot of energy from her but she is very good at doing it.

It is less than two months to the national elections in Indonesia which will be very important for life in Aceh. We want the incumbent president, called SBY, to win as he has been helpful for the peace process while some of the competitors are much more likely to be pressured into derailing it due to connections with the military. Fortunately most polls have SBY doing nicely at the moment. There are local parties running in Aceh which is unprecedented in Indonesia, which normally requires parties to have representatives throughout Indonesia. This was one of the provisions of the peace process. It is interesting to see who the Acehense will vote for. I think a good number of them will vote for a local party rather than a national party but we aren’t sure how many will vote for Partai Aceh which is the party that the people who were in the Free Aceh Movement (GAM) during the conflict have set up. It is going to be a very interesting time and also a time when we are all going to be very careful.

BLACKIE the cat

 

There used to be two cats that hung out at our house a lot. One is called Tompie and one is called Blackie. Blackie is a female cat and she has been pregnant for a while now. The first sign was that she was all of a sudden very hungry and very brave looking for food. She would come into the house upstairs where we eat and would have to be pushed away from the food!

Rachel and I aren’t at the stage where we want to pet Blackie, she undoubtedly has fleas. However Rachel started feeding little old Blackie some milk and occasionally eggs every now and then. Blackie now sleeps most nights right outside our door on our door mat. (See the photos below). We even went as far as getting some real cat food pellets for her the other day. It will be interesting to see what happens when the kittens are born. Maybe we’ll have a meowing pack outside our front door too.

Amazing Delivery

I got a real surprise the other day when I looked around inside our little house and saw that there was a letter there. It was from Kim and Age in California. They had asked me an address to send a Christmas card to but I had told them not to bother as there was no way that it would get there. However I did have my bank book with me that had the address written down so I sent it to them. Lo-and-behold exactly a month after they sent the Christmas card it arrived at my house.

OK, maybe not so amazing but look at the address
JL Pendidikan DSN. Tuempeun
Desa Lamjabat
Meuraxa
BANDA ACEH 23234

You'll note that there is no house number, just a street name.

What is even more amazing is that I've never seen anything that looks remotely like a postman anywhere near our house, or anywhere in Banda Aceh for that matter! Dian, the lady who lives next door to us, said that a non-descript man pulled up on a motorbike and passed the letter to 5yr old Muktadi who was standing out the front of the house. He brought it in and said there was a letter for me. Simple as that...

I don't suggest sending anything valuable via this route but feel free to try with fun things. Also I've had FedEx deliver things to me at my office. Actually I just heard that FedEx is closed for the next month or so. Apparently DHL is open though...

Michael McWhirter
c/o American Red Cross
Jl. Fatahillah No.2A,
Geuceu Kayee Jatho
Banda Aceh, 23239, Indonesia

Anyway getting back to the christmas card from Kim and Age making it here, I obviously had too little faith. Now the card is very pleasantly sitting on the fridge just where it belongs, see the photo above.

A new job

 

It has been a while since I've found the time to write in the blog. This is because I have started a full-time job with the American Red Cross. The photo above is looking down across the site of a reservoir we are about to build to feed down to the Krueng Raya area in the background.

I've been busy sorting out my personal situation here in terms of administration, trying to meet the staff and trying to understand my projects here.

I am the project manager for our water and sanitation work in about 40 villages. There are around 100 houses in each village so we are somewhere in the order of 4,000 houses which have been built by other Red Cross organizations. My team has responsibility for supplying septic tanks and water supplies for these houses. We are also providing health and hygiene training and very importantly we are providing capacity building and training for village communities to operate and maintain the facilities. We also are providing funding to IOM for a lot of houses so in addition to the houses above we oversee IOM's work with our money.

It is going to be fun. We have about 20 contractors working for us right now in villages spread over a drive of about 8 hours. We also have to work with the community, other aid organizations and the local government structures that exist.

My team is about 20 people at the moment and they all seem to be very nice and capable people. I am really looking forward to working with them more. I am also really looking forward to working with the communities and the operators of the systems we are building. Great fun.

It has been a case of long days at the office trying to get my head around all of this but I've been enjoying it. It is quite different from being the consultant. I actually have one of my old major competitors working for me so it is nice to become the client not the consultant.

Of course there are going to be challenges. Mostly issues that took place before the team that exists now had a lot to do with this. Also after the construction we have the even harder task of working to educated/encourage the communities on how to use the new infrastructure. Wouldn't be fun if it was all easy.