Notes from a Big Island

Defying Gravity

2008-07-04T17:59:00.000-07:00

The daily task of fetching water consumes much time and energy for people living in the areas of Timor where we work. Typically, women and children spend at least one hour in the morning and one hour in the evening fetching water from sources that are often more than half a mile away from their houses. The prohibitive distance and effort required limit the amount of water that they are able to bring back and use at the household level. This in turn means that their families bathe and wash their hands and clothes less frequently than they normally would, facilitating the spread of common diseases like diarrhea.

One of the main goals of our water and sanitation program is to reduce the distance people have to go to fetch water, thereby reducing the burden on women and children and increasing the amount of water that can be brought back to the household and used. There are many ways to do this – from digging or drilling new wells or boreholes to installing pipe networks that distribute water from a spring above a village to the settlement below.

However, when we first assessed last year the areas where we wanted to work in Timor – some of the most vulnerable in terms of water access in all of Indonesia – we realized that they presented unusual topographic constraints. Most houses here are clustered along the roads, which run along the very crest of the hills, while most water sources are located far below in the depths of the valleys. Gravity-based systems, therefore, are virtually out of the question, and digging for water on the crest of a hill is not a very promising endeavor.

How, we asked ourselves, could we lift the water from the springs in the valleys up to the houses on the hilltops? Several options presented themselves, but each seemed to have its own drawbacks. The simplest solution would be a diesel-powered water pump, but there was clearly no possibility that the community could afford to buy the diesel needed on a daily basis to run the pump. Another option, increasingly popular in many parts of the world, would be a solar-powered system, but the high price of the equipment and the lack of a local market for spare parts and batteries discouraged us.

Finally, we decided to experiment with a “ram pump,” a technology centuries old that ACF had used successfully in Laos. The principle of a ram pump is straightforward yet mind-boggling at the same time. The water produced by a large spring is first directed downwards with gravity to the pump, which uses the energy from the flow of the water to pump a small proportion of that water up to the top of a hill far above the original spring. The pump is entirely mechanical – running just on water and air without using any electricity or fuel.

Last week, I visited a village where we have just installed a ram pump that we built ourselves in Soe for 700 US dollars using designs downloaded from the internet. Two pumps connected to a spring producing 3 liters of water per second pump some of that water to a tank a quarter of a mile away and 200 vertical feet above the spring. The yield at the top is 0.5 liters per second, more than enough to feed a gravity system to supply several water taps in the surrounding settlement.

When I asked my team how the community reacted when they connected the pumps and saw the water come out of the pipe at the top of the hill, one of them said, “They smiled so big that you could see their teeth.” Another added, “They say it’s like they are dreaming. For years they have been trying to get someone to help them get water to their village, but they always thought they would have to use a diesel pump.”

Despite this initial success, we still have a lot to do to develop and test the technology, which is one of our top priorities for the coming year. In addition to improving the design of the pump to increase its efficiency and ensure its longevity, we need to make a number of tests to determine the best specifications for the system and the maximum performance of the pump.

A lot depends on the yield of the spring – in another village not so far away, we have been trying to install a high-quality ram pump we imported from France on a smaller spring with a bigger hill but have so far not been successful. But we are determined that we will ultimately come up with an improved design that we can then share with other NGO’s and the local government, who are excited about the possibility of a low-cost, low maintenance solution to one of the biggest problems faced by communities in this area.

Added Value

2008-06-24T01:01:00.000-07:00

In the remote areas where we work, agriculture is the main source of food and the main source of income for the vast majority of the population. But agriculture here, compared to many other places in Indonesia, is difficult. While the dark volcanic soils of Java yield three or even more harvests a year, the sandy, coral-based soils of Timor are lucky to produce one. While the acres and acres of flat plains in Sumatra have developed into profitable commercial plantations, the rugged terrain of Timor makes cultivation difficult, and what topsoil there is gets swept away regularly by erosion and landslides. And while the abundant rainfall of Bali turns the island into a patchwork of vividly green rice fields, the dry winds from Northern Australia limit the potential crops in Timor to corn, cassava, and the like.

Although we do have a large agriculture program geared towards helping farmers get the most they can out of the dry soil, we have also recognized that agriculture will not be sufficient for making long-term improvements in people’s lives here. As a result, we are putting increasing emphasis on developing alternative sources of income. During our first year of intervention, which is now coming to a close, we helped small groups develop income-generating activities based on their existing knowledge and skills. Activities included fishing, livestock, carpentry, and small trade. Now, as we prepare for our second year, we are investigating a number of more innovative activities that we could potentially introduce.

With this goal in mind, we have brought in a food processing expert named Rick for a six-week assignment. Originally from the Philippines, Rick is an agronomist who worked 20 years in fruit processing and export companies in his home country. For the last two years, he has been working as a volunteer with a local NGO in Java through VSO – a British agency that places skilled professionals in development projects in a variety of countries around the world.

Rick’s task here is to help us figure out ways in which farming families in very remote areas could add value to their produce, thereby enabling them to sell it for a higher price. To do so, he is investigating the specific varieties of different agricultural products that are produced locally, the ways in which these products could be processed, and the potential marketing possibilities for different types of processed food.

One of the first villages Rick visited was Oeleu, which produces a significant amount of pineapple every year but is never able to find a way to sell it before it starts to rot. One year, they even rented a truck, loaded it full of pineapple, and drove six hours to the provincial capital, Kupang. But they only managed to sell half of the truck and had to come back home with the other half, not even making enough money to cover the rental fee. Perhaps we can help them with equipment and training to produce pineapple jam or dried pineapple that can be preserved for months and sold to traders who can export it to neighboring islands.

One of the most promising products Rick has identified so far is banana chips. Nearly every household in our area of intervention grows bananas, and a stalk of 20 is normally sold for less than 35 US cents. Using his experience in the Philippines and Java, Rick is working on a way to produce high-quality banana chips cooked in coconut oil that can be produced directly from the coconuts that grow in everyone’s backyard. Thanks to the low production cost, a package of banana chips (made from 2 or 3 bananas) can turn a good profit even if it is sold for just 10 cents, which is easily within the purchasing power of even a hungry schoolchild. And, more importantly, if packaged well, the chips can be stored for months or even years, opening up the possibility for them to be transported and sold outside of the immediate area of production.

Complex problems demand innovative solutions. By thinking creatively and bringing in external technical knowledge, we hope to lay the foundation for successful small businesses that will generate income and stimulate the local economy for years to come.

Handover

2008-06-12T01:19:00.000-07:00

We like to think of our projects not as doing something for the community, but rather as providing the resources (materials, training, etc.) to enable the community to do something for itself. There is no better example than our water and sanitation program here in Timor. All labor required to build the 49 new water facilities we have built this year (which range from hand-dug wells to pipe networks of several miles) is provided for free by the beneficiary communities, who also provide the local material (sand and gravel) necessary. We contribute the non-local material (cement, pipes, etc.), the technical training and supervision, and the tools and equipment.

At the end of the construction, following our technical inspection and quality control, we “hand over” each facility to the community. During the construction, the community members have learned directly how the facility is built, and we train a committee on its maintenance so that they can solve directly any problem that occurs in the future. For the larger pipe networks, the committee collects 1,000 Rupiah (approximately 10 US cents) each month from each household using the water. This money is saved by the committee to buy spare parts and tools needed to repair the system.

This local maintenance structure is crucial to ensuring the longevity of the facilities we build. Numerous pipe systems built by the government in the area using paid labor from outside are broken down and useless within five years after construction. The expensive metal pipes are then typically dismantled by the community and used for hanging wet laundry.

I recently attended the handover ceremony for the largest pipe network we have built this year, in the village of Suni. While we were waiting for the ceremony to begin, the wife of the head of village, who is currently seven months pregnant, described how she used to have to walk more than one mile to fetch water for her household. Now, our network brings that water to a tapstand less than 50 feet from her front door.

The ceremony began with an elaborate welcoming. In traditional Timorese style, a group of six men armed with swords danced backwards down a hill as we walked slowly towards them, showing simultaneously their force (through their aggressive dance and weapon display) and their hospitality (through the backward direction of their movement, drawing us into the village). Once inside, each of our team members was presented with a ceremonial scarf, woven locally in the village.

After a series of speeches from all sides, the signing of the handover document began. Six signatures were required: that of ACF, our local NGO partner, the head of village, the head of sub-district, the head of the water committee, and the land owner of the spring, who agrees to give freely and in perpetuity the water of the spring for the community’s use.

After several hours of food and line dancing, we were preparing to leave when we observed the first problem the committee would have to face in their management of the system. The bottom three tapstands were no longer giving water while the tapstands above were still active. A child had likely been playing with one of the valves partway down the line and mistakenly turned it off. The committee was confused at first, but soon understood the source of the problem. It may take them some time to get used to their new responsibilities, but we are confident that they have the knowledge and experience to keep the water flowing for years to come.

Malaria

2008-06-02T02:11:00.000-07:00

After more than 3 years of working in high-risk malaria zones, I finally got the disease for the first time. Aid workers often face a tough choice between taking daily pills for malaria prophylaxis, which often have both short and long term side effects, or waiting to get the disease and be treated. After taking doxycyline (an antibiotic) for more than 2 years to the point where it started to damage the lining of my esophagus in 2006, I have since opted for a different strategy: taking prophylaxis only during the high-risk rainy season, when mosquitoes are at their thickest.

I came to Timor with 50 pills of Malarone – the latest of the anti-malaria drugs, and I took them from mid-February to mid-April, the height of the rainy season. But this time, my timing was not so good – I underestimated the importance of the second rainy season, which starts in mid-May and lasts through June.

I arrived back in Soe from my break in Java on the evening of Tuesday, 20 May. When I woke up on Wednesday morning, I noticed four or five mosquito bites on my right foot. Wednesday night around 1 am, I started experiencing sharp pain in my stomach. It felt like I just had a lot of painful gas, but it lasted all day Thursday, through the night, and into Friday as well. Suspecting I had eaten something bad, I alternated between ibuprofen and anti-flatulent syrup, hoping to just “make it to the weekend.”

Friday afternoon around 2 pm, while working on a report with my Water and Sanitation program manager, I suddenly started to feel very cold. At first, I put on my jacket Then I got up to close the windows. By this time, I had started shivering, and soon my whole body was shaking uncontrollably. I excused myself from my colleague and went into one of the bedrooms behind our office, where I lay down and covered myself in two thick blankets. By the time the shaking stopped some twenty minutes later, my temperature was up to 102 degrees.

Fever is actually thought to be a defense mechanism. Because most bacteria have difficulties metabolizing at higher temperatures, the body resets its base temperature to a higher level to “cook the bugs out of the system.” The body feels cold and starts to shiver because it is at a lower temperature than the newly-reset base temperature.

In the case of malaria, the plasmodium (a more complex organism than a bacteria) hides inside the red blood cells, eating them up from the inside. Then once every two days it bursts out of the red blood cells to attack new ones. The body’s immediate reaction is to increase its base temperature, triggering sudden and violent shaking.

I went straight to the public hospital in Soe, where I was told that my symptoms were “classic malaria.” A test confirmed that I had plasmodium vivax, not the most dangerous kind of malaria (falciparum), but still the kind that can hide inside the liver and resurface months or years later. I was prescribed 5 medications: two antimalarials, one antibiotic, one multivitamin, and one antacid – and released to go home and rest. The total cost to fill the 5 prescriptions was 2 US dollars; the fee for the consultation and test was 1 US dollar.

I spent the next several days in bed, feeling weaker than I have perhaps ever felt. My mind remained alert and active, but my body felt a bit like after giving blood. Indeed, because it had destroyed a large number of my red blood cells, the malaria had effectively given me some temporary anemia.

The following week, my strength started to come back day by day, and I was back in the field, touring our water projects with two of our donors. We attended a community hygiene theater show, organized by our health promotion team to promote key hygiene-related messages. During the play, one character was recommending ways to avoid malaria, and another character asked her, “What’s malaria?” She replied, “Oh, you know, it’s the disease that makes you go like this” and started shaking violently. My colleagues laughed and turned to me. “That’s you,” they said.

Religious Pluralism?

2008-05-22T03:52:00.000-07:00

After three hard months of assessments and proposal writing in Timor, I took my quarterly break last week in central Java. One of the most densely populated places on Earth where half the population of the US lives in an area half the size of the UK, Java is full of history, culture, and people.

At the heart of a country that is officially 88% Muslim and often identified as the largest Muslim country in the world, Central Java is home to its share of loud mosques and women wearing headscarves. But perhaps more striking is the diversity of religious traditions on display and their interlinkages. As a historic crossroads of Buddhism, Hinduism, and Islam, Java has in some ways blended them all and combined them with local practices into a syncretic Javanese tradition. One evening, I watched a reenactment of the great Hindu epic the Ramayana in the shadow of a 9th century temple where the Hindu god Shiva sits on a Buddhist lotus flower. The next day, I visited one of the largest Muslim mosques in the area, which is modeled after the pre-Islamic style of Hindu Javanese temples. And the following day, the eve of the 2552nd anniversary of Buddha, I climbed to the top of the colossal 8th century Buddhist stupa of Borobudur while listening to the competing noise from the chanting of Buddhist monks and the sunset Muslim call to prayer. Earlier in the week, I had climbed a volcano where the last king of the Hindu Majapahit dynasty fled in the 17th century to seek enlightenment – a rather Buddhist goal – rather than face his son, a Muslim convert, in battle.

On Sunday morning, to my surprise, I has an upclose encounter with the latest addition to the Indonesian pantheon when I was jolted awake by the raucous singing from the 7 am service in the new Christian megachurch next to my hotel. Christianity, introduced by the Catholic Portuguese and Protestant Dutch in the animist Eastern islands, has only recently made inroads in religiously-saturated Java.

Despite the openness and religious pluralism of Indonesian society that is apparent on the surface, religion is too often used to define hard boundaries between different communities that are difficult to cross. Each person’s religion is mentioned on their national identification card as part and parcel of their personal identity. Even my non-religious colleagues had to choose a default religion (normally Catholicism – the least demanding) to be part of. One, officially a Christian, is struggling to get through all of the paperwork and legal procedures to enable her to marry her boyfriend, a Muslim. In recent years, violent intercommunal conflict along religious lines has taken its toll in Indonesia, particularly in the province of Maluku, where each of the individual islands now seems to be homogeneous as they have driven out members of other religions.

I wish Indonesia’s policy makers could learn from the syncretic traditions of the Javanese heartland and encourage a more open and flexible form of religious pluralism. So much is so common between the different faiths that it seems a shame to box them up into predefined identity packages. And real peace and security will only come when people can focus on the similarities – rather than the differences – between them.

The Tsunami Generation

2008-05-09T06:34:00.000-07:00

I live and work in Timor, more than 3000 kilometers away from Aceh and northwestern Sumatra where the massive Boxing Day tsunami in 2004 left more than 200,000 people dead. I have never met what aid agencies like mine would call a “tsunami affected household.” But I feel the impact of the tsunami every day, because I work with what I would call the “tsunami generation” – a generation of thousands of highly-skilled, competent, and experienced Indonesian humanitarian relief workers.

In recent weeks, I have been involved in the recruitment for 2 key positions in my office in Soe to replace 2 staff who are leaving us – the Head of Base and the senior logistician. In most countries, recruitment for this type of position is difficult; often it is nearly impossible. Even the best candidates – top university graduates or senior managers in the private sector – have to go through a lot of training on humanitarian operations once hired.

Not so in Indonesia. Recruitment here is a pleasure, especially during this period, when many NGO’s are closing down their tsunami relief operations and laying off hundreds of qualified staff at a time. Many of these people had “ordinary jobs” in the government or private sector before being swept up into the tsunami relief operations. Now, they are well trained, experienced, and eager to continue in a line of work that is well paid (by Indonesian standards) and in which they can help people in need.

A good example is one of the candidates I interviewed for Head of Base. He was working in Java as an Indonesian-Japanese translator for a Japanese news agency when the tsunami hit. They immediately sent him to Aceh with a team of Japanese journalists. Witnessing the early stages of the relief effort in action, he decided that he wanted to work for an NGO. But as he was still under contract, he couldn’t fulfill his ambition until a year later, when a massive earthquake struck near his home city of Yogyakarta. After managing the emergency response for a couple of international NGO’s in Yogyakarta, he found his way back to Aceh to join in the reconstruction effort. Then last year he took a new job in the country office of an international NGO in Jakarta as country administrator.

This week, it is another disaster in Southeast Asia – the cyclone in Myanmar – that is dominating the news. With our emergency team in Paris mired in a visa application process that normally takes 3 months, our overwhelmed team in Myanmar has issued a call for help. Indonesians, it turns out, as citizens of an ASEAN country, can get visas for Myanmar within 3 days. So we are now in the process of calling up some of our best and brightest former staff of the tsunami generation to take their knowledge and commitment to Myanmar to help those who are now so desperately in need.

The Daily Mix

2008-05-02T22:26:00.000-07:00

One of the things that I enjoy most about my job is the sheer diversity of the different issues that I have to deal with on a daily basis. Here are a few examples of things that have been keeping me busy in the last two weeks:

- Chartering airplanes. Although we are covered by emergency medical evacuation insurance, experience shows that the insurance company sometimes does not have the capacity to respond quickly in case of a medical emergency in an extremely remote area. To increase our options, I was tasked with finding private air transport companies and getting quotations from them for emergency medical evacuation. The best one found, based in Jakarta, could send a plane from Jakarta at two hours notice to pick up the patient from Kupang, take them to Singapore, and return back to Jakarta. The round-trip price for the 12 hour flight: 36,000 US dollars, payable before departure.

- Analysing food prices. Given the much-publicized increase in the price of basic food items on the world market, ACF asked all bases in all countries where we are working to make an analysis of food prices locally and the potential impact (if any) of rising global prices. Here in Soe, we put together the data from our monthly market surveys over the last year to show that contrary to what one might think, prices of most items have remained steady due to this year's bumper rice harvest and large-scale market interventions by the national government.

- Investigating scandals. Our hygiene promotion team came back from the village of Mela to report that the villagers were angry at ACF because one of the staff of one of our local NGO partners who is based in Mela was rumored to have had an affair with a high school girl and made her pregnant. « You NGO's say you are here to help us, but then you go and make problems like this, » said one of the village leaders. Our subsequent investigations, however, suggest that the rumor may have been a false one spread by the head of a neighboring village, who was jealous that ACF had hired three masons from Mela for its construction work.

- Getting to the bottom of labor law. In Indonesia, as in many countries, there are two types of working contract – fixed-term or determined and permanent or undetermined. Employees typically start with a fixed-term contract and progress through a number of extensions, new contracts, or time periods before graduating to a permanent contract, which involves more financial obligations on the side of the employer, particularly in the case of termination. Since having to pay tens of thousands of dollars in termination benefits to hundreds of employees on permanent contracts when closing the post-tsunami projects in Aceh, ACF has been keen to avoid as much as possible offering permanent contracts to its staff. Now that many of our staff in Timor are reaching the end of their first, one-year contract with ACF, I had to do a staff-by-staff analysis of what action was possible and recommended to take for the renewal of their contracts for year two.

I often get asked what qualifications are necessary or « what it takes » to do the job I do. The answer? Nothing and yet everything. Above all, what is important is a mix of flexibility, creativity, and critical thinking to deal with a daily mix of wildly unanticipated problems in an efficient and professional way.

Disneyland

2008-04-21T03:49:00.000-07:00

The type of visa that I have for Indonesia is only good for up to six months, so I had to leave the country to get it renewed. The nearest place to do so (with the exception of troubled East Timor) is Singapore, less than two hours by plane from Jakarta.

I had visited Singapore briefly in December 2002 and was struck then by its exaggerated level of development and cleanliness, which seemed somehow artificial. Now, a little more than 5 years later, Singapore has gone even further towards an extreme of hyper-development while promoting its image as an international tourist destination by building new rides, statues, fountains, and (still under construction) casinos around the city. After two days struggling to find an appropriate comparison, I finally realized that the Lion City had most in common with Disneyland. Here’s why:

- It’s a small world. Little India, the Malay Quarter, and Chinatown are among the cultural exhibits on display. Each is a tidily kept corner of tradition (including the appropriate temples or mosques) meant to be a sanitary introduction to the 3 biggest nations of Asia.

- Amusement park attractions. A DHL-sponsored hot-air balloon on a tether takes groups of tourists up a few hundred meters over the city and back down again every twenty minutes or so. A waterfront bungee-jumping rig appeals more to the thrill-seeking Space Mountain types. I opted however for the world’s largest ferris wheel, opened in March, which offers a complete panorama of the city, including the spiky new performance hall shaped like a durian fruit and the floating soccer stadium in the middle of the harbor.

- Shopping, shopping, shopping. Remember what the parents used to do while the kids waited in line for the rides? The malls in Singapore stretch for miles with all the top brands on display and indoor underground connections so you never have to go outside where there’s no air conditioning.

From the top of the ferris wheel, I caught a glimpse of the source of wealth that has powered Singapore’s boom: hundreds and hundreds of container ships clogging the straits of Melaka, that all-important passageway between China and India.

Across the straits, the first islands of Indonesia were visible. If not for a few historical mishaps (including the rivalry between the Dutch and the British), Indonesia and Singapore should be part of the same country, along with Malaysia and Brunei. I certainly found it easy to understand all the signs in Singapore written in Malay, which is virtually identical to Indonesian. But instead, Singapore continues to surge ahead (far ahead of even most “developed” countries) while many parts of Indonesia lag behind.

But ahead towards what end? I had to stop and ask myself whether the goal of societies, so often described with the word “development,” is ultimately to become like Singapore? Like Disneyland?

I leave that as an open question.

Musrenbang

2008-04-11T20:19:00.000-07:00

In March and April, the local government is in the throes of a complicated planning process for the activities it wants to implement in the following year (2009). In Indonesia’s newly-decentralized political system, the idea is that the definition of priorities for government programs should come from the ground up. The focal point of this process is the “musyawarah perencanaan pembangunan” or “musrenbang,” which can be translated into English as “development planning workshop.”

In theory, the process works something like this: A musrenbang is first held among community members at the level of the sub-village, the smallest relevant administrative unit. Then a musrenbang is held at the level of the village, where the heads of the sub-villages present their priorities to the head of village, and they define together the priorities for the village. Then a musrenbang is held at the level of the sub-district, which is attended also by representatives from each of the technical ministries (health, education, public works, etc.) from the district level. Each of these ministries then defines its plan based on the priorities identified in each of the twenty-odd sub-districts. Finally, a musrenbang is held at the level of the district to consolidate all of the different technical programs in all of the sub-districts.

I attended the district musrenbang held in Soe in the first week of April. I was curious to find out more about how the process worked, because I had heard in many villages that villagers had made many proposals to the local government with few results.

While I expected the workshop to be a lively debate about what programs should be prioritized in 2009, I found instead that it mostly consisted of pre-prepared presentations on the amassed summary of all proposed projects of all the ministries for all the sub-districts. Although a numeric cost was not assigned to the total, it was clear that it would take at least five or ten times the district’s annual budget to implement all of them.

Which projects do get implemented? Ultimately, the district sends its projects to a musrenbang at provincial level and from there to a musrenbang at national level. Then, a certain budget is allocated by the national government to the province and from there to the district. At that point, the process becomes highly political, with each technical department and sub-district jostling for position so that some of their projects get funded. The ultimate decisions are less than transparent and while the ultimate projects implemented may be among those listed in the initial musrenbangs, they would not necessarily correspond to the priorities on the ground. Villages then find themselves proposing the same projects year after year without understanding why they don’t get implemented.

As I sat through the presentations at the district musrenbang, I kept asking myself two questions: “How could the system be improved?” and “What should our role be as an international NGO?” Some of our current projects were in fact based on proposals made by villagers for many successive years but not yet implemented by the local government. This is obviously helpful to the people in the field, but ultimately our goal should not necessarily be to replace the government by doing what it should be doing.

On page 29 of 135 of the compiled list of proposed programs for the district in 2009, I found a glimmer of hope. In one of the sub-districts where our agriculture program is working to diversify agricultural production by encouraging the cultivation of alternative, more nutritious crops, the community had proposed that the government take on a similar intervention and expand it to additional villages in the coming year.

We cannot replace the local government or make its decisions for it. But what we can do is to come up with creative, sustainable solutions to the tough, long-term problems that people face, try out these solutions in the field and prove that they work, and then advocate to both communities and local government for their inclusion and replication in future development plans.

Alor

2008-04-02T04:10:00.000-07:00

We took the opportunity of the long Easter weekend to visit the nearby island of Alor. It was intended as a purely touristic visit. We stayed in a bungalow on a small island in the middle of the narrow straits between Alor and Pantar islands, which are renowned for their marine life, as they are a major crossing point between the seas to the north and to the south of the main line of the Indonesian archipelago. Most of the weekend was spent snorkeling around the coral, spying on fish of all different colors, and playing with pink hermit crabs and big blue starfish.

But Alor is equally interesting from a humanitarian point of view – in fact, ACF did assessments here in 2006 and 2007, and we are still considering opening programs here in future. The challenges are similar to those faced in many of Indonesia’s eastern islands, but in Alor, the situation is particularly acute and worthy of attention.

Alor is only home to about 175,000 people, but these are divided into more than 50 tribes with more than 30 languages (a Czech linguist we met who was staying in a neighboring bungalow is in Alor on a long-term project trying to document them all). While the coastal areas are home to a mixed population, many of whom are Muslim immigrants from other parts of Indonesia, the indigenous tribes, either animist or nominally Christian, live mainly in the rugged highlands of the interior. The Dutch established nominal control of the island through a coastal presence in the early 1900’s, and this presence has been continued by the Indonesians since independence. But in the interior highlands, there has been only limited contact with the outside world.

Many of the villages in the interior are only accessible by foot. Those visited by the ACF assessment team were full of people with swollen goiters on their necks, a sign of severe iodine deficiency. Other diseases that have been eradicated in most of the rest of the world – including lymphatic filariasis (which causes elephantitiasis), yaws, and measles – are commonplace in the remote parts of Alor.

But what is perhaps most worrying is how these remote populations can be virtually invisible. Indonesia has gone through an abrupt and massive decentralization process in recent years to bring decision-making power and autonomy to the local level – in this case, to the district of Alor. But in districts like Alor, the local government tends to be based in the district capital in the coastal areas and rarely visit the more remote parts of its jurisdiction. Most development programs it implements will therefore be inevitably focused on the coastal areas. And while reams of data are collected by the government at all levels on the population’s situation, the data itself is often of questionable authenticity or extrapolated from a small unscientific sample.

All this means that a village in the highlands of Alor, speaking its own unique language and accessible only by foot, could literally “fall off the map” without anyone ever knowing. And very few people caring. Except maybe for the Czech linguist. And me.

Needs Assessment

2008-03-19T18:17:00.000-07:00

With our current projects set to end in July, we are currently working on defining our strategy of intervention for our next one-year project cycle. Last week, the senior staff and I embarked on a voyage of discovery around the remoter parts of the district (South Central Timor) where we work. We spent several hours in each of nine villages, discussing with the community to get a sense of their situation and their needs.

The landscape at this time of year is stunning. As we are at the end of the rainy season, the steep hillsides are covered in verdant green vegetation, and it still rains enough each day to clear the air. We spent much of the first few days in the area where the rolling hills of central Timor crash down into the coast. White sand beaches were visible hundreds of feet below us and the Timor Sea, completely flat, peaceful, and wave-less at this time of the year, stretched off to the horizon.

Perhaps equally stunning were the remains of expensive, top-down, and mostly failed development projects and the contrast between them and the situation of the population.

In Saenam village, contractors cut corners on a piped water system with a budget of more than 20,000 dollars meant to supply the whole village; the system worked for only 2 days before it broke and the owner of the spring disconnected it.

In Skinu village, 7 boreholes were drilled by the government and supposed to be equipped with gasoline pumps to supply irrigation water to 35 hectares of agricultural land and drinking water to the community. 3 boreholes are not used because the gasoline pumps were never supplied. The other 4 have high-quality Italian-made pumps, but the community rarely uses them because it cannot afford to buy the gasoline to run them. Instead, they are walking several kilometers to a muddy river, where we saw them digging small holes in the sandy banks to collect their drinking water.

In Faat village, I was in the first vehicle to cross over an enormous concrete bridge just completed by the Japanese government. The bridge, which took Japanese contractors three years to build, connects two potholed, virtually unused dirt roads. The Japanese ambassador and the Indonesian Minister of Public Works had come for the opening of the bridge the day before. Due to the poor condition of the roads, we assumed they must have arrived by helicopter.

The most active village economically we visited was definitely Hoebeti. After leaving the road, driving across a rocky riverbed, and traversing the swollen river twice, we emerged at the coast and found several hundred makeshift palm-frond huts. Five years ago, a Taiwanese businessman came to Hoebeti and discovered that the smooth, pink stones from the beach here could be exported and sold in Taiwan for gardens and aquariums for a big profit. He set up a business in Kupang, which sends a truck to Hoebeti every day to collect the stones. The villagers, whose permanent houses are in the hills far above the sea, now spend 5-6 days a week on the beach, collecting and sorting stones and selling them to the truck. In a day, one person can assemble two 50 kg bags of stones, which are sold at 60 US cents a bag. On Sundays, they climb back up to their villages to attend church, before descending again on Monday morning.

We have not yet finalized all of the different activities we plan for the coming year, but from the assessment this much is clear : we must prioritize ideas and projects that come from the bottom-up – from the community itself. Our focus will be on empowering people on a small scale to solve their own problems rather than trying on a big scale to solve their problems for them.

Land

2008-03-03T03:16:00.000-08:00

In an area like Timor and indeed most of the rest of the world, where the vast majority of rural households depend on agriculture for their food and income, the quality and quantity of one's land determines a lot about the wellbeing of one's family. Unlike most of Indonesia, which benefits from rich, volcanic soils, Timor's soils are a poor mix of coral and sand. To make matters worse, the terrain is rugged and crops are often planted on steep slopes, meaning that what little nutrients there are in the soil get washed away in the first big rain.

One of the things that we are interested in focusing on in our agriculture program is improving soil fertility by encouraging a number of practices – from terracing to composting – that are virtually unknown in the area. Another area of interest is developing small scale irrigation and water catchment systems to help farmers overcome the highly unpredictable rainfall that makes agriculture more a game of chance than a technique of skill.

Both of these interventions would require long-term investments by farmers in their agricultural land. However, in order for farmers to be motivated to put in the work required and in order for the projects to be a success, their ownership rights for the land they cultivate have to be clear and firm. A couple of other NGO's who have tried similar programs in the past have warned us that the land tenure system in Timor is quite complicated and that controversies over land rights are common. Before launching our activities, therefore, we decided to conduct a more detailed investigation of land ownership, through interviews and group discussions with both ordinary people and traditional leaders in the villages where we work.

The results of the investigation started coming in this week. Although the vast majority of households report owning the land they farm, virtually none have any kind of legal documentation for their land. Instead, ownership is based on tradition and passed down from generation to generation, with parents dividing up their land among all of their children (both sons and daughters).

The traditional leaders in the community are actually the old families who originally lived in the area and were considered to own all of the land. When a new family wants to settle in the area or to expand the land it farms, it brings some money and betel nut to the traditional leader – also called the 'king' – and asks him for a portion of his unused land. The king then grants the land for as long as the family continues to use it; if the family or its descendants were to ever move away or stop farming, the land would automatically revert back to the king.

Our main concern is whether land can be taken away. If ACF, for instance, helped a poor farmer to build an expensive irrigation system on his land, could the king intervene and take back the land because he wanted to use the irrigation system? When we posed the question, the unanimous response was that Timorese culture forbids someone who has given land to ask for it back, saying that a calamity will befall the asker. However, the original owner should be consulted about any kind of investment or construction on the land, although tradition also prevents him from refusing, since the land has been given to the new owner. Conflicts are actually more commonly based on disagreement within a family over the division of inherited land rather than between the family and the original owner of the land.

Overall, this land tenure system seems to have developed indigenously to work in a society without written laws and documents. Thus far it has continued to work quite well. Since it depends on the king's land being plentiful, it will be interesting to see whether problems start to arise in the coming years as population pressure starts to decrease the quantity of available land. In the meantime, though, we plan to move forward with our projects while making sure to inform the local kings before making any major decisions.

Capacity Building

2008-02-21T17:21:00.000-08:00

Unlike in many poorer countries, the Indonesian government has substantial financial resources for development projects. However, these funds are often poorly utilized at the local level, due to bad management, low technical capacity, or corruption. As an international NGO with relatively good technical knowledge, we can often have a bigger impact when we work with the government to improve the utilization of its funds than when we implement our own projects directly.

When we first arrived in this part of Timor and did needs assessments in water/sanitation and food security, one of the most striking things we observed were the ambitious, expensive, poorly designed, and mostly broken gravity flow systems for water delivery in rural areas. A gravity flow system is simple in principle – pipes carry water from a spring above a village down to the village using the force of gravity – but their design is more complicated, and must include a detailed analysis of topography, a careful choice of pipe size, and a provision for the protection and maintenance of the system. Here, we saw complicated systems built by the local government using expensive, heavy metal pipes that were broken within a few months of construction.

On Monday, after several months of preparation, I opened a three-week technical training course on the design, construction, and maintenance of gravity flow systems. The course is being taught by three of our technical experts and brings together a diverse group of fifteen participants, including representatives from the Ministry of Public Works (responsible for building the systems), private consultants (who are typically contracted to design the systems), the Ministry of Health (responsible for water quality), and several international and local NGO’s who are also working on water projects.

In the first few days, the training has been exciting. The participants are mostly young, energetic, and used to working in the field. After a few ice breakers on the first day, they opened up and are now actively participating in the training and exchanging experiences and ideas. Our hope is that this exchange does not stop at the end of the training course but continues as they are working on their own projects for their respective organizations.

One key component of the training will be a field visit to two gravity flow systems – one that broke down and was completely reinstalled by the government a few months ago and is already broken again, and another that we are currently building in a neighboring village. Some of the training participants were involved in the reinstallation of the first system, and it will be interesting to get their perspective on what went wrong and what can be done differently next time they have a similar project.

In a context where the government is well-funded and well-staffed but big needs persist, we are trying to lead by example and best practice, pushing the agencies involved to improve the quality of their projects. Our hope is that we can have an impact that will last long after the lifetime of our own programs here.

A Sumatran Holiday

2008-02-13T00:22:00.000-08:00

In most contexts, ACF expatriate staff are eager to leave the country during their quarterly R and R breaks to escape the difficult situations where they work. Here in Indonesia, however, things are different. First, due to the type of visas that we have, leaving the country is difficult because we have to get a new visa to come back in. Second, and perhaps more importantly, Indonesia is a vast country that stretches for thousands of kilometers from east to west and is home to many enticing holiday destinations.

When deciding where to take my first break, one of the big factors was to escape the long rainy season we are having in Timor and find some sunshine. Fortunately for me, the Equator passes through Indonesia, and when it’s raining on one side of the Equator, it’s likely to be sunny on the other side. So last week I flew from the southernmost part of Indonesia to the northernmost part – Sumatra, the fifth biggest island in the world and home to roughly 35 million people.

Our first stop in Sumatra was a national park where orangutans once kept in captivity are released back into the wild. A day’s trek in the jungle yielded a number of up-close encounters with these semi-wild orangutans. The word orangutan comes from ‘orang hutan’ or ‘man of the jungle’ in Indonesian, and it was astonishing how human-like they appeared and behaved. One of the females we encountered had just lost her baby a few weeks earlier, and she came down from the tree with a sad look on her face and wrapped her strong limbs around one of our group members, in need of a hug to make her feel better.

Our second stop was the cool highland town of Berastagi, where we climbed an active volcano. In the crater at the top, we found geysers spraying steam, bubbling mud, and strong-smelling sulfur deposits. After a slippery hike down, we stopped to relax in some hot springs at the base of the mountain, next to a geothermal plant.

Our final stop was a large island in the middle of Lake Toba – the largest lake in Southeast Asia and one of the largest crater lakes in the world. This « island in the middle of an island » used to be an extremely popular destination for Western tourists, but their numbers have declined substantially since the Bali nightclub bombing in 2002, aside from the aid workers on holiday from nearby tsunami-stricken Aceh. During our stay, however, the area was packed with ethnic Chinese tourists from nearby cities and even abroad who had come to celebrate Chinese New Year. Fireworks sparkled into the night.

Any time one travels in Indonesia, the extraordinary diversity within the country is striking. Although the majority of Indonesians from the Java heartland are ethnically Malay and religiously Muslim, there are hundreds of different tribal groups, languages, and cultures in the outlying islands. At each of our destinations on this trip, we encountered a different cultural group, each with its own traditions, architecture, dress, and style of living. This diversity seems somehow to contribute to holding the country together, because a national identity cannot realistically be defined on exclusive terms but must be based on openness and inclusion.

The Gods Must be Crazy

2008-01-29T03:56:00.001-08:00

Our water and sanitation program here is not just about 'hardware' – the construction of sources of clean water. As our overall goal is to reduce malnutrition by decreasing the prevalence of water-borne disease, equally important is the 'software' – education on hygiene practices. Our hygiene promotion team has developed a number of creative ways to communicate hygiene messages and promote best practices in the communities, including the training of elementary school teachers on how to incorporate hygiene messages into their curriculum and the distribution of calendars with graphic diagrams about diarrhea and worms.

For the past month, the hygiene promotion team has been traversing our area of intervention to show a 'hygiene movie'. I was curious to see what this was all about, so I joined them last week for one of their showings.

As the sun set, the team set up the equipment, including a generator, projector, lights, and a screen. While waiting for more people to come, they started playing some karaoke videos, many of which were country western songs from the US. Karaoke is a sort of national craze in Indonesia, and the flashy images and music started to draw in a big crowd.

The head of the village soon arrived, and offered me some betel nut – known locally as seri pinang. A few bitter nuts are wrapped in the leaves of the seri bush, which is a natural antiseptic used as an ingredient in toothpaste. A pinch of lyme powder is added, and one chews the concoction without swallowing, spitting out the red juicy saliva that quickly fills the mouth. Seri pinang plays an important role in local Timorese culture, offered by visitors as a sign of good will and often used to seal a deal or resolve a problem. Its use is incredibly widespread in rural Timor, with villagers spending a large proportion of their disposable income to buy the nuts, leaves, and powder, and the characteristic red mouths visible everywhere.

This was my first time to try the complete chew. The head of village urged me on, saying it would make my lips more red and beautiful. I chewed for a while but didn't feel the buzz that apparently keeps people coming back for more.

My attention quickly shifted to the movie screen, where the hygiene team had now put on the DVD of 'The Gods Must be Crazy' (with subtitles in Indonesian) in an effort to attract more viewers to their session. It was an odd choice of movie, and I was curious to see how the crowd would respond. The satire was clearly a bit lost on them, but they got quite a kick out of the half-naked Bushmen and the problems they have when they discover an empty bottle of Coca Cola.

Part way through the movie, the team decided it was time to start the session, and they switched over to their two hygiene videos. The first, a sort of animated cartoon, showed the spread of disease from a child defecating in the bush to a plate of food consumed by another family. The movie was in Indonesian, but the team did a voiceover with a microphone in Dawan – the local language – so that more people would understand.

The second movie was a film made in Aceh after the tsunami by another NGO to promote hand-washing. A series of short and humorous clips involved a number of characters learning the hard way (the runs) that they should wash their hands before eating. Although the movie was made in Indonesia, the culture and lifestyle of the Muslim Asian Acehnese seemed about as close to that of the Christian, Polynesian Timorese as that of the Bushmen of Botswana. Nevertheless, the movie was well done and the message clear.

By the time the two videos were finished and the head of village invited us in for dinner, my head was spinning a bit, either from the diarrhea I myself had had in the afternoon, the seri pinang, or the dizzying cultural trip around the world. But at least, before eating, I remembered to wash my hands.

Food for Thought

2008-01-17T19:35:00.000-08:00

Last week, we distributed 50 tons of rice in the villages where we work as part of a Food for Work program funded by the World Food Program (WFP). When most people hear the name of our organization – Action Against Hunger – they assume that most of what we do is distribute food. But this is actually far from the case – in my fourth year and fifth country working for ACF, this is the first time I have been involved in a food distribution.

The objective of this particular program was two-fold. On the one hand, many of the households in the areas where we work had experienced a failure of their corn crop last year due to a drought triggered by El Niño, and they were starting to run out of food sources while waiting to harvest this year’s crop in March and April. On the other hand, our agriculture team wanted to encourage the practice of terracing in order to reduce erosion and improve soil fertility and yields on the steep hillsides where most farmers plant.

WFP, eager to find a home for the tons of food it receives as donations from countries with agricultural surpluses, readily agreed to finance a Food for Work program. Under this scheme, agricultural households would terrace their own individual plots as they prepared them for cultivation in November and December. In exchange, at the end of the program, each household would receive 35 kilograms (roughly 75 pounds) of rice.

Any time one deals with distributions, and especially when the distributed items are intended as compensation, one has to be particularly careful to avoid creating damaging incentives. In this case, our water and sanitation team was particularly concerned, because we rely on free community participation for the labor needed to build our water systems. Would households who received rice in return for terracing refuse to dig wells and lay pipes for free even if they stood to benefit from the clean water produced ? As part of our sensitization campaign, we tried to explain clearly to the communities the purpose of the rice – to help them through an exceptionally difficult time – and to encourage them to see it as coming from ACF as a whole, rather than just the agriculture team.

On Thursday, I attended the final day of distribution, in Nasi village, two and a half hours from Soe by car. Driving into Nasi through the fields, terraces (which had been virtually non-existent in this area prior to our program) were visible everywhere, although there were clearly big differences in quality from field to field. While some households had evidently tried to do just the minimum to qualify for the rice, others had clearly seen the advantage of terracing and created big shelfs using boulders and sticks.

Arriving at the distribution site, the first thing that struck me was how thin and gaunt the people seemed – far different from the comfortable civil servants and businessmen of Soe town. But apart from their physical state, a haze of mental lethargy seemed to hang over the crowd – either an effect of their current hunger or, as we have started to suspect, a result of chronically impaired mental development due to insufficient iodine intake since childhood.

As the distribution got underway, I examined the labels on the bags of rice and discovered they came from California, my home state. Harvested in 2002, when I might have seen it in the field, the rice had been carefully stored and ultimately sold to the government of Japan to give as part of its contribution to WFP. In the end, it ended up being distributed by a French-based organization to stave off a hunger gap in Eastern Indonesia that has been caused by a drought triggered by a climatic event that, on the other side of the ocean, causes increased rain (and hence a better rice yield) in California. For once, something seemed strangely right in the global balance sheets.

A Deadly Fog

2008-01-07T16:11:00.000-08:00

In January and February, the rainy season turns up a notch in Timor, with high winds, pounding rain, cold temperatures, and a risk of cyclones. A storm blew in to Soe on the afternoon of New Year’s Day, and it was still going on Friday, three days later. Sandals had been replaced by raincoats and tshirts by winter scarves.

On Friday afternoon, our logistics team returned from the warehouse of the World Food Program in Kupang with four trucks carrying 50 tons of rice that we plan to distribute next week as the final part of a two-month « food for work » program. The trucks arrived around 5 pm, and the offloading of the rice began. I went home a little after 6, when the team had finished the first truck. What with the counting of the more than 1,500 bags of rice and the careful stacking in the warehouse, it was shaping up to be a long evening.

By 8 pm, the rain had lightened and a thick, cold fog had descended on Soe, reducing visibility to less than 50 feet. The first two trucks had already left to go back to Kupang. When the third truck was finished unloading, the driver parked it on the edge of the busy road outside our office to wait for the fourth truck, so they could go back in convoy through the fog. Although he tried to pull the truck onto the shoulder as much as possible, about half of its width stuck out into the road.

The driver left his truck there and joined the team in the warehouse for the final push of unloading. In the meantime, an off-duty policeman, riding a motorbike without a helmet, came speeding down the road. He didn’t see the parked truck through the fog until it was too late, and ran straight into the back of the truck. With the truck’s height, his motorbike continued under the truck unscathed, but his body slammed into the back of the truck.

Our team in the warehouse was alerted from the cries for help of the neighbors across the street. They rushed to the scene, loaded the bleeding man, who by this time was starting to choke on his own blood, into one of our cars, and rushed him to the nearby hospital. The hospital staff tried to do what they could, but the man was dead within a few minutes.

By this time, I had been informed of the situation and made it back to the office, where I did what I could to help the traumatized team cope with their emotions and deal with the police. Ultimately, as the hired truck had already finished its delivery to us and was parked outside our compound, we didn’t have to be too involved in the police inquiry about the incident. But we couldn’t help feeling some degree of responsibility for this man’s random and needless death.

In this line of work, one often has to grapple with issues of life and death, sometimes in the most bizarre and unexpected circumstances. Above all, this incident has renewed our commitment to keep up our efforts to give and improve as much life as we can.

A German Christmas on the Island of Flores

2007-12-27T22:18:00.003-08:00

We took advantage of the four day Christmas weekend to make a quick trip to the island of Flores, a 45-minute, 30-dollar plane ride away from Timor. While Timor is not a volcanic island, Flores definitely is, and it has the rich black soils and rugged topography to match. Flores also receives more rain than Timor, so the jagged volcanic cones are covered with thick, green forests and terraced rice fields at the lower elevations.

Our first stop on Flores was the surreal crater lakes of Kelimutu. The three lakes atop this active volcano are each a different color and actually change colors over the years. Normally, the best time to see the lakes is at sunrise, when the cloudy summit is most likely to be clear. When we woke up at 4 am, though, it was raining hard, so we waited to go up the mountain until later in the day. It was a good choice, as we had the lakes completely to ourselves. The first lake, which a few years ago was red, and a few years before that was blue, now appeared chocolate brown. The second lake, which a few years ago was blue, had now become a bright turquoise, and yellow chemicals rising from within the lake make it likely that it will become even more yellow as time goes on. The third lake, which a few years ago was black, now appeared dark green. All of the lakes are highly acidic, with a pH of less than 2, so it is dangerous to get too close. Local legend has it that the souls of the dead reside within the lakes – one lake for those who die young, one for those who die old, and one for the wicked.

From Kelimutu, we descended back to the coast and sought refuge from the growing storm in the bungalows of a diving center cum lodge run by a Swiss-German woman and her Indonesian husband. The bungalows were just above the black sand beach on the north coast of Flores near the town of Maumere, which is still recovering from a 1992 earthquake-triggered tsunami that killed thousands. Our first night, we actually felt a small earthquake, and the surf increased noticeably.

Despite the rain, it turned out to be a very convivial Christmas spent together with the lodge owners, their son (who at 8 or so years old already speaks Indonesian, German, and English), and the two other guests at the hotel, both German. There were games of Uno, Christmas songs in German, the opening of the family presents, and a delicious vegetarian menu incorporating all kinds of local fruits and vegetables. There was even a decorated Christmas tree of sorts – made out of a fallen palm frond.

Recreation Day

2007-12-16T03:02:00.000-08:00

Sometimes it is necessary to take a day off. Our teams have been working hard week in and week out building wells, mobilizing communities, and training farmers, so we decided to mark the end of the year with a ‘recreation day’ for all of the staff. On Friday morning, we hired a bus and the 30-odd staff of Soe base – water engineers and agronomists, accountants and drivers – piled aboard and headed for Kupang, the provincial capital that is on the coast two hours away by road.

From Kupang, we clambered on to a large motorboat and set off for Pulau Kera – a small island 30 minutes away across the bay. The island has no permanent inhabitants, an is home only to fishermen who come from Kupang for a few days at a time. There is no source of drinking water, so they have to bring whatever water they need with them.

As we left Kupang, the sky was growing dark with the afternoon rain clouds that are common during this season. But the further the boat took us, the clearer the skies became. As we approached the island, the bottom of the sea was visible through the crystal-clear water. I couldn’t resist, so I jumped off the boat and swam the last 200 meters to shore.

There must be thousands of small islands like this in the Indonesian archipelago – little pockets of paradise. It took less than 45 minutes to walk around the entire island, never once stepping off of a perfect white sand beach littered with all kinds of intriguing shells. A lonely lighthouse and the temporary shelters of fishermen built with palm fronds were the only signs of civilization. An effort to develop tourism on the island had failed due to a controversy over ownership of the land.

Despite being an island people, many Indonesians are afraid of the sea and don’t know how to swim, but everyone seemed to enjoy splashing around in the calm, clear water. As the sun set over the sea, we started a fire and roasted fish and eggplant for dinner.

After dusk, the boat took us back to Kupang as the stars came out. The lights of the boat and the clarity of the water enabled us to see a number of interesting creatures – including a large sea snake – during the trip. Dozens of flying fish leaped and skimmed along the surface of the water. It was a dreamy evening, a perfect end to a lovely day.

Managing Local Partners

2007-12-05T17:27:00.000-08:00

In the 1980’s and the 1990’s, the trend in international relief and development work was for large donors to channel funds through international NGO’s like Action Against Hunger rather than directly giving them to often-corrupt governments. Since 2000, a new trend has emerged, particularly in Asia and Latin America. While large donors continue to fund international NGO’s directly, they often prefer them to implement their projects through local NGO partners. Local NGO’s tend to have excellent local knowledge, and when supported and trained by international NGO’s can improve their capacities and become more autonomous. These days, many well-known international NGO’s, from Oxfam to Care, implement most of their projects through local partners.

For ACF, working with local NGO’s is not something we are used to, and we are currently experimenting with such partnerships in a relatively small number of countries, including Indonesia. Here in Soe, we work with two local NGO partners (one for our food security activities and one for our water and sanitation activities). As this is our first year of partnership, we are managing their activities quite closely and providing as much support as we can to make sure that their work lives up to our high standards.

I have spent much of the past week dealing with a number of difficulties related to our local partner in water and sanitation, which is working on the construction of water sources and pipe networks.

The first problem related to two of the field officers of the local NGO. Because the local NGO is a separate entity, it recruits, manages, and sanctions its own staff, and we have little control over them. However, these two field officers were clearly having a negative impact on the progress of the program. One of them was handicapped with no arms, so he was unable to do the construction tasks he was supposed to, or even to drive his motorcycle to the field sites. The other continuously disregarded the instructions of our technical supervisors, which resulted in at least one accident when the rope lowering a cement ring into the well snapped and the ring fell to the bottom of the well, injuring one member of the community.

The complicated thing about these two field officers is that they were members of the family of the director of the local NGO, so he has been reluctant to get rid of them, despite our continued pressure. Finally, I had to write him a letter threatening to cancel our partnership if he did not replace the two staff. Reluctantly, he did.

The second problem related to the payments of the local NGO. Whereas most international NGO’s have the capital to cover the costs of a project while waiting for a significant amount of the payment upon completion of the work, most local NGO’s do not. In this case, we had specified in our agreement that we would split up the payment into seven installments, based upon the completion of a certain number of the sources.

The complicating factor is that most of the work itself is carried out by the members of the community, who work for free on the site as their contribution to the project. Part of the responsibility of the local NGO is to mobilize the community to work, but this is not always an easy task, particularly during this time of year, when many people are busy planting their crops. As a result, our partner is behind in meeting its construction targets and has run out of money to pay the salaries of its staff for this month.

Ultimately, the success of our project will depend less on our direct management skills and more on our ability to negotiate with our local partner, ensuring a proper mix of support and control, of encouragement and rigor. At the same time, we have to avoid losing sight of our goal of building up the capacity of the local NGO by starting to think of it is a simple contractor. Relations can be strained at times, but we try to keep focused on our common goals and learn how best to work together.

Thanksgiving in Soe

2007-11-27T04:33:00.000-08:00

Thanksgiving this year was a working day for me. I woke up at 6:30 am in our sub-base in Boking, a remote town on the southern coast of Timor island 3 hours drive from Soe. With one of my colleagues, I went for a quick swim in the ocean, despite the warnings we had received from the community that the waters off of Boking are home to sharks. By the time we finished swimming at 7, the sun was already high and hot. As we are at the eastern edge of a time zone, the sun tends to rise early and set early. Government offices, in fact, are open from 7 am to 2 pm each day, with no lunch break.

After breakfast (rice and vegetables), I sat in on a training session on proposal writing for two of our income generation groups and conducted a group discussion session on fish marketing with a group of women. The discussion took a while, because my English had to be first translated by our food security supervisor into Bahasa Indonesian, which then had to be translated into Dawan, the local language, by a staff member of one of our local NGO partners. The answers then had to follow the same chain of translation.

By noon, we had left Boking for the long drive back to Soe. Located at 3000 feet elevation in the central highlands of the island, Soe seems a world apart from Boking. In Soe, the rainy season started several weeks ago, a cold blanket of mist has enveloped the town, and the corn is already pushing up through the rich red soil. In Boking, in contrast, no rain has yet fallen, and farmers are burning the brush on the steep hillsides, the only place they have to cultivate. The heat burns too, and water sources are few and far between, aside from the handful of wells that our water team has already completed.

Arriving from Boking, it was easy to feel thankful that I have more than I am able to scrape from the steep, rocky soil. We invited a group of volunteers from Canada over to our house for a big Thanksgiving meal. Chicken substituted for turkey and eggplant for yams, but we did manage to put together some mashed potatoes and some peanut butter squares for dessert with a few dried cranberries from a care package from Canada sprinkled in.

Fishing for Ideas

2007-11-12T00:10:00.000-08:00

Over the last couple of weeks, I have been working on a new proposal targeting the fishing sector in one of the remote areas where we work on the southern coast of Timor. Although Timor is an island surrounded by seas rich in fish, the people in this area have traditionally relied on agriculture in the central highlands more than fishing from the coastal lowlands for their food and livelihoods. In recent years, however, increasing population pressure and unpredictable climate patterns have made agriculture less and less feasible and reliable. Some farmers living along the coast have started fishing from dugout canoes to supplement their food and income. But equipment, knowledge, and practices remain rudimentary at best.

In addition to providing training and fishing equipment, this new proposal seeks to introduce some new techniques for fish conservation and processing. Currently, what fish is caught must be sold or consumed on the same day before it spoils. Young men with motorcycles wait on the beach, buy the fish from the fishermen at a low price, and ride along the roads selling the fish to houses along the way. We hope to set up a different marketing dynamic by providing icemakers and coolers to preserve the fish overnight, time enough for them to reach the larger inland town markets where it can be sold for a higher price.

At the same time, we hope to introduce a number of new techniques for processing fish through drying, salting, and smoking, which will keep it preserved for months. Currently, the fishing season is restricted to a relatively short six month period when the seas are calm. During the other six months, fish consumption and income from fishing are virtually zero. But if fish are properly preserved, fishermen can benefit from them throughout the year.

In this context of chronic poverty and underdevelopment, a mix of practicality and innovation is necessary to solve persistent problems. For us, this proposal is a pilot project – trying out a new approach on a small scale. If it works, we will see how best to spread the knowledge and ideas up and down the coast.

Corporate Funding

2007-10-31T19:33:00.000-07:00

Action Against Hunger typically gets the lion’s share of its funding from government aid agencies like USAID. Outside of the tsunami affected area, such funding is scarce in Indonesia, despite the persistent underdevelopment and difficult living conditions in the outer islands. At the same time, many large corporations and private companies are engaged in fierce competition for market share in the huge Indonesian market, and they are increasingly turning to ‘social responsibility’ projects to improve their image and give themselves a competitive edge. Thus, while public sources of funding become fewer and farer between, opportunities for private funds are on the increase.

After much reflection, we have embarked on our first experiment with corporate funding – a ‘joint venture’ water and sanitation program cofinanced by Danone, a French multinational conglomerate that owns Aqua, the leading producer of bottled water in Indonesia. In the past few months, Aqua has launched a campaign called “one for ten.” The premise is simple – buy one liter of bottled water and Aqua will provide ten liters of water to needy villages in eastern Indonesia. Zinadine Zidane, Danone’s international good will ambassador and immensely popular in Indonesia, was flown in to launch the campaign.

Aqua is funding us to make the one turn into ten – ten liters of water from the wells, springs, and piped water networks that we are constructing in NTT. The design of our project is no different than it would be if we were receiving funding from our traditional donors, and the terms of our agreement with Aqua ensure our independence and ownership over what we are doing. The only practical difference is that hundreds of millions of Indonesians have heard of our project and are constantly reminded of it through billboards, TV clips, and a message printed on the side of every Aqua bottle.

One of my most important tasks is to make sure that authorities and other stakeholders here understand correctly what we are doing and the difference between ACF and Aqua. Last Friday, I went with our water and sanitation manager to introduce myself to the local head of the ministry of health. When we mentioned that we were funded by Aqua as part of its “one for ten” project, he looked confused. It turned out that he had heard the advertisements and thought the plan was to actually distribute bottled water. Once he understood that we were using the funding to build durable water systems that will last for decades, his attitude changed. “We are lucky,” he said, “to be able to benefit from such a program.”

We will have to carefully evaluate our experience with Danone and its effect on our image before deciding to continue accepting such corporate funds in the future. But the results so far look promising. After Aqua’s media campaign, we were contacted by an Indonesian supplier of PVC pipes, who offered to donate all the pipes needed for the project. This will enable us to extend our program to several additional villages. If such funds enable us to provide more assistance to more people in need without sacrificing our principles, I am all for them.

A Country of Contrasts

2007-10-20T03:16:00.000-07:00

I arrived in Indonesia one week ago to take up my post as program coordinator for ACF for the province of Nusa Tenggara Timur (NTT), which includes the western part of Timor island and an additional 565 smaller islands, 41 of which are inhabited.

Indonesia is a vast country extending roughly 3,000 miles from west to east. It is the fourth
largest country in the world in terms of population, with 220 million inhabitants. And, as I quickly learned, it is a country of contrasts, home to a rich diversity of ethnic groups, languages, religions, and cultures.

Before traveling to my new base, I spent several days in the capital, Jakarta. A city of 9 million people on an island (Java) of 120 million, Jakarta is big, bustling, and busy. As I rode from the airport into town, fireworks exploded from highway overpasses to announce the arrival of Idul Fitri, the celebration marking the end of Ramadan. Normally, the streets are jammed with a cacophony of traffic, but during these days they were relatively empty as a majority of Jakarta's residents returned to their rural homes to celebrate the holidays.

At first glance, Jakarta seems to be a wealthy, cosmopolitan city, with scores of high rise buildings and a Starbuck's, KFC, or Krispy Kreme on every corner. Indonesia as a whole has bounced back from the Asian financial crisis of 1997 and its ensuing political instability, and Jakarta (and Java) are booming again. Green, wet, and gleaming, the city seems to be an integral member of the southeast Asian tiger clan.

Not everything in Indonesia, however, is as shiny as it seems. The glitz of foreign investment, focused on Java, hides increasing inequalities and persistent poverty in the country as a whole. Jakarta's slums (both legal and illegal) are the first hint that the situation in the country is more complex. Here, rural migrants set up precarious existences and struggle to gain access to even the most basic social services, while evading displacement by local government or seasonal flooding.

But the real discrepancies in the country become evident as one leaves the Java heartland and travels to the provinces. My flight form Jakarta to Kupang, the capital of NTT, took three hours. Somewhere in that space of time, we crossed Wallace's line, the fabled divider between the flora of Asia and Oceania. The green humidity of Jakarta was replaced by an arid, brown, hilly landscape of palm trees and dry riverbeds. Christian churches took the place of Muslim mosques. And a dark, Polynesian population took the place of the Asiatic ethnic groups of Java. I was surprised, in fact, not to have to pass through immigration and customs, so different did this new province seem.

In the coming weeks and months, I will be working on developing a deeper understanding of my new island home and the challenges faced by the most vulnerable people in the remoter corners of this rapidly developing country.