Puzzle Pieces from Aceh

My life has feels like it has become a series of seemingly unconnected puzzle pieces. I know that they must fit together, because I am working well, and because I am happy. But I am learning so many different things, and seeing different things, that it is hard to put together into one mind frame, let alone one blog entry. So, this will probably a bit disconnected.

Today was a work day. Getting to work, I am greeted happily by people from America, Malawi, England, Guatemala, France, and all over Indonesia. I keep a running list of the things I need to do in the office. It is long, and bits get added to it all the time, whenever someone stops by my office and asks me to send out a press release, go to a meeting, meet with guests who stop by the office looking to coordinate with Save. Today I checked my email and found that the head of the shelter sector had emailed me and asked me to go to the shelter coordinating meeting at the UNHCR office, cause he was going to be out of town. So, I jumped in one of our large air-conditioned vans….

….Side Note: All the aid organizations have these large air conditioned vans. They are the only fancy vans on the street. And all of them have their institutional logos on them, signs on the vans saying that they are not carrying weapons. Each van is numbered...UNICEF 5, Care 2, MSF 12, UNDP 22, etc. You can stand on the side of the road and aid organization watch… “Ha! The World Food Program can’t drive”. “Concern just cut off that motorbike”, etc. And those are just the INGOs (International NGOs) that can afford big cars…

So, I got into one of our big vans, and headed to the UNHCR office. Shelter people are engineers, so I walked into a meeting of middle aged engineers. I am always the youngest person at any of these things, but here it was more apparent than normal. No big deal. In the end, the meeting was about 20 people. Probably 15 white men, 4 white women, and one Indonesian man talking about how they were planning on rebuilding the lives hundreds of thousands of Indonesians. Rule of experts indeed. Still, interesting. A coastal engineer was discussing how impossible it is to create a tsunami earl warning system for Aceh—the fault line is simply too close. The best you can get is five minutes warning. And the woman from the environmental agency who was there to make sure that everyone used sustainable timber for rebuilding.

Then, back to the office. We are releasing another mass tracing list tomorrow. There are now 600 children registered, all of whom are looking for family members. This does not mean that they are alone. Almost all of them are being looked after by village members or neighbors. But they are still looking for family members. And so, we need this information to get out into the media, so people can call see if any of these kids are theirs. This means that I have to send out a press release, and deal with all the media inquiries. So, a good part of the day was spent on this.

Throughout the day, people come in and chat in my office. My office is next to the meeting room, and so people sneaking out of painful meetings make funny faces at me. Mary, an education specialist from Malawai (I think) came into my office with a Sirsak and confused expression. I didn’t know what it was either (turns out to be a yummy fruit).

Banda Aceh is a beautiful city, even with the destruction. Much of the coast, once you get past the destruction, is white sand. The water is pure turquoise. On the other side, in some places right near the coast, in others, a few miles in, are mountains. They are strange mountains, probably formed by intense seismic activity in the past. They are tall, and very, very steep. In many places, they seem to be cliffs reaching out of the ground. These are the hills that people ran to when they saw the tsunami coming. Some of the hills are small, but they rise into real mountains in the distance. I am told that it is not safe to go to these mountains because they are a strong hold of GAM, or Gerakan Aceh Merdeka, the Achenese freedom movement. I believe it’s dangerous, but I still want to go.

My walk to work in the morning is beautiful. My house is the girls’ house—as far as I can tell, boys are not even allowed inside. The house is situated in between wet rice fields, sawahs. It is about half sawahs and half houses. In the sawahs, people let their cows graze. The cows wander onto the roads and have to be honked out of the way by the air-conditioned relief vans. There are also ducks that wade through the rice paddies, and goats that munch on the piles of trash. Walking to work, I can see the mountains surrounding the city, and reflected in the sawahs. And the air just feels and smells so much better than Jakarta. The walk to work is about fifteen minutes.

So, back to the office. One of my many tasks is to hold impromptu meetings with people who show up, interested in coordinating with or getting help from, Save. Today I was called in from lunch to meet with two people who had come over from Care…

.. Side Note: These organizations have great names: Care, Concern, Mercy Corps, Save the Children, the list of heart wrenching easy to donate to names just goes on and on…

… So, I go out to the porch and am face to face with a person my mother worked with when I was 11. I recognized him right away, but he had to do a triple take when I told him who I was. So strange. I really hope I was not the average totally impossible and irritating 11-year-old. These people now appear to be my colleagues. Weird. So, we sat down, we discussed what they wanted with Save, and I gave them relevant names and contacts. Cool. (Much less cool was later that day when some dudes from a No-GMO advocacy group came over and tried to trick me into saying that we are giving out GMO-ridden food aid. Well, we aren’t. Ugh.)

Another interesting thing is how there are signs of aid workers everywhere in the city. There are tents everywhere, not just in camps. People have them up in the yards of their homes, etc, etc. And everyone has their logo on their tent or whatever it is. The best so far: “This tent a gift of the Royal Saudi Red Crescent”, “This tractor donated by the Kuwaiti National Army”, “Sampoerna (brand of cigarettes) Emergency School. Sampoerna cares”. And then of course are the International Committee of the Red Cross, the Red Crescent, and other normal things you might expect.

Back to work. At 6pm I had another meeting, this time with the World Bank. The last time I interacted with the World Bank was while I watched someone burn a flag on their front steps. And, dammit, this first serious interaction with them makes me believe more firmly than ever that they totally disserved it. They are setting up a multi-donor trust fund for tsunami relief where something like 25 million dollars buys you a vote to decide how the money is going to be spent. This time, there were 23 white males, 2 white women, 1 American woman of Indian decent, and no Indonesians. None. And the assumptions that they were making about Indonesian culture just hurt.

And so, the real news is that I will be staying here for longer than I originally planned. I will be staying up here at least until the end of my contract. I am so glad—I am so much happier up here, and there is so much more to do. Despite the fact that I have so much more to do here and the hours are absurd. It is so much more interesting.