An ode to my new home

Last week while I was homeless I received two signs from the Universe in quick succession. The message was clear: find a home!

The first message was from Grand Days by Frank Moorhouse:

The opera played on and she thought to herself, each of us has a space around us which we could sculpture, and then we could work outwards, each from our gardens, spreading into the world, as in Geneva the League would build a Palais des Nations in the parc l'Ariana, and grandeur and reasoned order would spread outwards. But unless that centre was is good working order, no good order could flow from it.

Here I was, languishing without a centre in good working order. What was I thinking?! (I'm starting to think my rat infested centre might not exactly be in such good working order, but at least it's a starting point right?)

Shortly after reading this passage I moved onto Star Magazine. If I didn't get the message the first time the The StarScope by Jennifer Angel was happy to hit me over the head with it:

Aries
Transforming your house into a home provides comfort and belonging. Let a sweetheart know that his or her opinion is appreciated and respected. Money mix-ups are likely; double check the details.

OK, I know only the first line is relevant but I just have to mention that this star sign was written for the week that the tax office gave me a stack of money and promptly sent me a bill asking for it all back. Money mix-up, I think soooo! Spooky, right? Obviously completely wrong about the sweetheart knowing his/her opinion is appreciated and respected. I mean...come on...I don't care what you have to say.

In conclusion I am very happy to have a home. And will be even happier when it stops smelling of rat wee. Furthermore, star signs are obviously true!

Finally I have a home...and rats

Yay, I have a permanent home! It's actually the guest house I stayed in when I first arrived (yes, the GIANT place). UNIFEM has a new intern, Clara, so with our powers combined we negotiated the hell out of the owner and now only pay a small fortune for the second floor. There are two bedrooms, one bathroom and a living area that we share. And as the title of this blog suggests, we also have rats. There was one in my room the other day. I'll tell you the story of getting rid of it when I've dealt with the trauma.

Here is a photo of Clara and I at a Hari Raya dinner the other day. You might be aware that Indonesia stops for the 10 days after the end of Ramadan, but did you know that the next MONTH is spent entertaining friends and visiting everyone you've ever met and eating bucket loads of goat curry? Well it is! This was my first dinner.














Anyway, back to my new house, or more specifically: the area around my new house and the animals that live there.

This is my street.



















And here is the view of the mountains from the street.














OK, so now that you have a sense of the landscape, let's go in a little closer and meet some of the guys keeping it real at a grassroots level.

#1 Duckies!














#2 Old Mr Goaty. Old Mr Goaty (I think his name is Terrence) has an owner who is also old and thought I was strange for taking a photo of Terrence.
















#3 Cute little baby goaty. Once upon a time Terrence would have looked like this. Poor Terrence, he hasn't aged well.


















#4 PUPPY! Hello little puppy, you're not gross and chock-full-o-rabies yet! Even so, I restrained myself and chose not to pick him up. Being a mature adult is hard work.














Yes, puppy is playing in the rubbish dump. That definitely helped me make the mature adult decision not to pick him up.

The rains are 'ere

Since about two weeks ago it has been raining every day. Not always a huge amount of rain, but enough to signal the beginning of the monsoon. But three days ago, on my way home from dinner it started to rain hard. It bucketed down. By the time I made it home there was a stream flowing through the driveway.

When I woke up the next morning it was still raining. The stream in my driveway had turned into a gushing river and I got soaked through when I dared to leave the cover of the porch to get into the car. It was only one step away!

This is what it looked like in the car on the way to work. I felt very sorry for the motorbike riders.














One of the major obstacles of driving through this rain was that the water on the road concealed the huge potholes we usually go to great lengths to avoid.














And just when I thought I'd seen a lot of water, we got to the guesthouse to pick up the new intern. This house is right next door to the giant house I was living in before.














The awful thing was that it kept raining that hard for another 8 hours, so imagine how much worse the flooding got. Apparently this amount of rain is not usual, but not entirely uncommon.

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Did you know that having a good vocabulary can help you save the world from hunger?

Have a look at the Free Rice website. I got to 500 grains of rice before I felt guilty for wasting time.

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I am medium slate blue

According to the spacefem.com colour quiz I am medium slate blue. To honour this I have changed my post title and link colour to reflect my true personality.

you are mediumslateblue #7B68EE

Your dominant hue is blue, making you a good friend who people love and trust. You're good in social situations and want to fit in. Just be careful not to compromise who you are to make them happy. Your saturation level is medium - You're not the most decisive go-getter, but you can get a job done when it's required of you. You probably don't think the world can change for you and don't want to spend too much effort trying to force it. Your outlook on life is bright. You see good things in situations where others may not be able to, and it frustrates you to see them get down on everything.

the spacefem.com html color quiz

Stuck in traffic?

Thank you everyone for sending me "get well soon" emails. I am healthy again and perhaps even feeling at my best since arriving! (Probably just jinxed it. Helloooo typhoid)

I didn't even get to take a day off work! On Monday morning I was back in the UNIFEM car stuck in traffic once again. For a small city the traffic flows unbelievably poorly.















This is a photo of the stationary traffic. It doesn't even look that busy but we sure weren't moving.

Wait...What is that up ahead?...
Soldiers! And they are singing! Do Australian soldiers sing? Do they march up the streets of Canberra?














After struggling for a while we finally get in beside them to overtake. I think my driver Pak Halim was just trying to get a good vantage point for my photography.














Eventually we make it to the office and watch the soldiers as they march past. Off they go, merrily marching...oh no....














I've been spotted!














What is that shining young representative of the government of Indonesia in the middle of the photo doing?














Oh yes, he's giving me the finger(s).



















Debate amongst yourselves if you think he intended to show me a peace sign. And then further debate if it is hypocritical for a soldier to make a pledge for peace, which might lead to further debate on whether a highly militarised government has a greater or lesser chance of achieving peace.

Have fun with that and report back in the comments.

Just in time for the weekend

I think I have my first bout of proper illness. Don't get me wrong, every day in Aceh is a sick day, but I think this might be the kind that sends me to bed to watch DVDs for the weekend.














I'd like to blame illness for my bad hair pale face, but unfortunately that's a daily reality too.

Hold the phones: these reports are inconclusive. I could just have a slight headache.

Watch this space.

Homeless but not destitute

I moved out of the guesthouse last weekend so no more hot showers and cable for Sarah.

But better than that, I don't have to pay the insane rent, and was able to avoid the invasion of the owner's relatives for Idul Fitri.

Now I am staying with another AYAD who has been here a few months already. This is my bedroom:














Well, it's actually just the bed and the window, but I had to cut my mess out of the frame.

My host is very sociable and friendly, so my 3-day long weekend (everyone else had 5 days minimum!) was spent hanging out with lots of friendly people and having a great time.

One afternoon we played touch footy. OK, I didn't actually play. I took photos on someone else's fancy camera. Me playing touch footy, I don't think so.

I don't have any photos of the football (I can hear your sigh of relief from here), but I do have a photo of the low cloud over the mountains outside the stadium!














In other news, I ate fish and prawns by the river last night (all from the sea, the riverside location is incidental). It was tasty, but one disconcerting thing about the fish here is that they don't gut it before they cook it, so you have to be careful about what you're eating. I've just grossed myself out thinking about it too much.

To change the subject, I have been going crazy in the DVD store. I bought a million movies the other day and I only scratched the surface. I also bought....wait for it, you're going to squeal with glee...the first half of the Gilmore Girls season 7! Booyah! However I am still expecting a delivery of the official release for Christmas...Put it on your shopping list folks (but you should probably harmonise those lists because realistically I only need one copy).

Put in your movie/tv series orders now. They've got everything you could imagine. And I'm gonna be watching a.lot.a.tv!

My friend Sushi is cool for two reasons.

1). He photoshopped my bad sunset photo and made look like this. Hello, Ms Artist Sarah. Can I have your autograph?















And his blog post on Japanese Funerals got picked up by Boingboing!

Now, for the best news I've heard all day (it's only 9.24am but still...)

There is a new POWER THIRST commercial! You'll feel like a fighter jet made out of BICEPS!

If you haven't seen the first one....Please....for love of all things good in this world...watch it.

And finally the tropical paradising starts

On Friday I was at work while the rest of Banda Aceh (and Indonesia) had started the Idul Fitri holidays.

This wasn't a bad thing at all, because while I worked other people busily oganised a boat trip to an island for the afternoon!

This is the group of swashbuckling adventurers.

Look at all those wholesome young things. Not all of them are Australian so this technically was a very important cross-cultural experience.

And these kids and their dad sent us off. I felt like we were on the Titanic's maiden voyage!

Here is a nice old boat that I saw as we left the port. I'd like to live in this, but I'd have to figure out a way of putting in a shower with hot water and high pressure. If I did find a way to do that it would be the only hot shower in Aceh so I could charge millions of rupiah for ten minutes.

Here are some poor photos of scenery along the way.

There are lots of islands around Sumatra, and most of the ones we sailed past on Friday seemed uninhabited, which means one thing: creating a sovereign nation called Sarah New Guinea! Applications for citizenship are now open!


And here is our destination island!


We jumped off the side of the boat like so...

...and swam about 30m to shore. It wasn't quite as easy to get back on the boat, but unfortunately I didn't get any photos of people being desperately pulled up the side of a slippery boat by three small Indonesian men. They were shocked to hear that one guy weighed 80kgs!

In a couple of weeks time Andrew, another AYAD who is heading home will have a going away party here. We will sail out, fill rubber dingies with supplies, drag them to shore and camp for the night! Hello malaria!

And now for the worst photo ever taken (and not immediately deleted)...

I know it's absurdly blurry, but my camera will never take a good photo of a sunset and yet I still wanted to give you an idea of how SPECTACULAR the sunsets are here. If you're a sunset kind of person you might want to visit sometime.

You'll be able to book direct flights to Sarah New Guinea very soon.

And finally she finds the kitchen...

Contrary to the heading of this post I had found the kitchen at the guesthouse but assumed it didn't have any cooking facilities.

Well, obviously, there was a room out the back with cook-tops the whole time!


















And look who came to help me cook...














I was pleased that he stayed still long enough to let me take lots of photos, until it occurred to me that I might have shocked him to death with my flash. Are frog's hearts weak? He was still there when I finished cooking. I'm too scared to check if he is still there tonight.

If people ever ask me if I think the influx of NGOs saved Aceh from ruin, I will point them to this...














Without international staff, Banda Aceh would never have seen San Remo Spaghetti and Barilla Pesto. For that the Acehnese people are truly grateful.

A walk around the office

Welcome to my office...















This is just my office (that I share with one other person, and probably a third when a new intern starts next month). The whole building has about four of five of these smaller offices and lots of other spaces.

This is the bathroom. The basin/bath thing is called a mandi and you scoop water out of it with the red jug and wash your hands/have a shower/flush the toilet if it doesn't have a flush. It's a very versatile room this one and I think you'd be hard pressed to find an Indonesian house without one.














This morning I was greeted by this foul green water.















This is what comes out of the tap from the town supply, so you're much better off having a well in the backyard. Everyone has filtered water to drink and I've been advised to use it for cooking, washing food and brushing my teeth too. Stomach bugs are far too common here.

Did I mention that I get to work in bare feet?!















Every morning my sandals get taken off at the door and I get to wander around for the whole day with no shoes on. Life is so much better without shoes.

Tasty food flavours

Being the fasting month there hasn't been much opportunity to go wandering around grocery stores and testing out new foods. But I have found two products that should make their way to Australian shelves ASAP.

Mmmmm, nori seaweed flavoured chips. They tasted like sushi without the good stuff inside. Please forgive the bad photo. My camera is not my friend.

And aloe vera flavoured yogurt. I had this for breakfast with the sensational muesli I found at the foreigner supermarket. I approached the yogurt with caution only to be pleasantly surprised by a quite sweet flavour, with no hint of the grass flavour I was expecting.

It tasted just like the jelly balls you get in the bottom of one of these drinks:

Only four more days of fasting! After that I should theoretically stop starving. However, the entire city empties out for the week and everything shuts down. So I guess my fight for food will continue another week.

Fireworks, "ground zero" and rugby.

This weekend I didn't take a single photo. So beware of the photo-less post.

On Saturday I discovered the bule (foreigner) supermarket. It has Vegemite AND macaroni cheese. I didn't buy them but knowing that they are there gave me real sense of calm. I also picked up my friend's DVD collection. I've only watched one movie so far (Harold and Maude) but beware, this blog could become a film review site before you know it. I will say though, Harold and Maude was delightful!

On Saturday night I went to the WFP bar (a bar hidden in the depths of the compound away from the police) to watch the rugby. Yep, I watched a world cup. Oh lordy it was boring. But I met another person interning with the UN which was nice. There were a lot of people there, some of whom seemed a bit too keen on themselves. Gee, some people think they're so cool for living and working in a really crappy place.

After the rugby my boss and some others from my office and around the place picked me up for a late night adventure (9.30pm!) to the beach to set off fireworks. But on the way to the beach it started raining so we chickened out and went back to the office to set them off. It was great fun! Fireworks should definitely not be illegal. Yes, they are dangerous and badly made, but they are also cheap! A recipe for a good time! Some of the fireworks were decorated with pictures of Sponge Bob Square Pants. Obviously.

On Sunday, while waiting to be picked up by my boss for another beach outing some little kids were playing in the yard next door. The littlest one, who was the size of a six month old, but was walking around and playing like an 18 month old walked over to the fence and just stared at me. For a long time. I waved and smiled but held back, not wanting to frighten her, and she just kept staring. Well that didn't work because out of the blue she burst into tears. She was hysterical! Her sister tried to calm her down, but her dad had to come out and take her inside away from the thing that was frightening her...me!

After that devastating turn of events we drove to the beach which was beautiful but very nasty looking. Apparently drowning in this beach is the biggest (and only) killer of international workers in Banda Aceh. I don't think I will be going in.

On the way to dinner after the trip to the beach we detoured into one of the neighbourhoods that was worst hit by the tsunami. Around here people call it "zero point" or "ground zero". I learned that one woman in my office had just come back to Banda Aceh from Jakarta where her husband worked to have a baby before the tsunami hit. Her parents' house was in that neighbourhood and both of her parents, her two older children and the new baby were killed. Then she spent months and months in hospital recovering from her injuries. She was very ill because she had swallowed so much water. Another man in my office also lost his entire family. That an entire community has suffered trauma on a scale that can't even be met by years of violent conflict is something I'm slowly grappling with. I will report more on the trauma of Aceh later when I understand it more.

Nightmares.

Last night the local mosque was in full force. At around 5am (post 4am call to prayer) something started that sounded like a Transformer (robots in disguise) reading from the Koran with loud swooshing noises in the background like the theme music from Doctor Who. My trusty iPod drowned out the sound and I was asleep again in no time.

Then I had a dream about an earthquake. The Gilmore Girls and I were in a library and when a huge earthquake shook the foundations of the building I ever so quickly remembered my training and ducked under a desk. When I woke up there was some serious rumbling going on, like perhaps the aftermath of a tremor? No one else felt it though, so I guess I can't claim my first earthquake yet.

THEN, I woke up to this:














It was dying on the floor next to my bed. It was bigger than my bed actually. About 8 ft long.

Sleep should not be this eventful.

Buka Puasa during Ramadan

Last night I went to my first Buka Puasa, which is the breaking of the day's fasting at sunset.

During Ramadan the routine seems to be:
4am: wake up and eat
5am: pray
6am-7am: maybe have a bit more sleep
7am-onwards: go to work for the day
4pm: Go home because you're too hungry to concentrate
6.35pm: tuck in (finally)

At 6.35pm an almighty siren sounds out of every mosque. The first time I heard it I thought it was an air raid siren. Not good for the nerves at all.

Yesterday I went with two of my colleagues to the mosque at the Governor's office to Buka Puasa with other gender-enlightened types and the kids from the local orphanage. I couldn't tell they were orphans by the way, so any images of Annie you might have are sadly (or not) misplaced.

We listened to a couple of different people speak for about an hour and then at about 10 minutes before sunset people started setting out food in front of us. As the siren went we all dove in to the food, especially the water. You can imagine it is pretty nasty going without water for the whole day in this heat. Technically I didn't fast yesterday, but I did skip lunch. I was so hungry!

By the way, I was in the mosque without a headscarf. This was quite acceptable at this time apparently, so while I wouldn't recommend walking in to any mosque without a headscarf it was a nice reminder that in all things, including Islam, there are different strokes for different folks.

Life in a multilateral agency

For fear of getting busted for leaking protected information I won’t mention directly which multilateral agency I’m referring to, but unless my readership has spread into an unknown audience, you all know anyway.

On arrival in Banda Aceh I was given temporary (and expensive) accommodation.

I live in a mansion. It has cable with 75 channels. I have flicked through them all a few times, and it’s true, you can have 75 channels and there is still nothing on. Fortunately my standards are low, so last night I enjoyed “101 top celebrity slimmers”. I stopped watching at about number 64 (from 101 backwards) so we were still in the territory of people who were celebrities many years ago (Tom Arnold), and American people who have never been heard of outside the States (some guy from a TV show called Varsity Blues).

The most impressive part of my mansion is the outside, and the OTT ("over the top" for those of you who don't speak English) furniture.Other than that, it's comfortable, but it’s not the Fresh Prince of Bellair's crib.

Yesterday I spent most of the day ploughing through a basic security test. I learnt how to identify landmines (no there are not landmines in Aceh) and what to do if someone is shooting at me (don’t run for cover, get down on the ground). I also learnt that you should always stay between the second and the seventh floor in a hotel. Staying above the ground and first floors means you are more secure from attacks from people on the street but staying below the seventh floor means you can get down the fire escape without suffering cardiac arrest. But as my boss pointed out to me, the best rooms are usually on the higher floors, so sometimes safety won’t come first. I haven’t done the advanced test yet. Apparently it’s even longer. There goes the weekend.

Today I went to a Banda Aceh-specific security briefing and learnt that I am not allowed to travel outside a “green zone” without security clearance. The “green zone” is essentially the city limits, so either I’ll be breaking a lot of rules (I think I did on the weekend by mistake) or getting a lot of forms filled in. I’m not allowed out of the green zone - even with security clearance - after dark unless I’ve travelled to another city, and I’m never allowed to be in transit after dark. Did you know that 90+ percent of security incidents occur after dark and 90+ percent of those occur while people are in transit. The plus side is I now have an excuse to fly everywhere instead of take crappy minivans for 10 hours. Planes might fall out of the sky but at least they’re not uncomfortable.

Alas, instead of feeling well informed now I just fear for my life.