vignettes

Here's the stuff I didn't have time to write about while I was gone:

• MILK - Land O'Lakes had promised us some milk for our aid shipments, but the milk cartons were being delivered from Jakarta to Banda Aceh by truck convoy by the Intermational Organization of Migration (IOM). What we didn't find out until we called the IOM in Banda Aceh was that Land O'Lakes wanted expected us to take ALL of their milk - four semi trucks full! We had only one garage and two outdoor tents for storage, so that was going to be absolutely impossible. We had to transfer the milk we wanted to take to a smaller truck because the larger trucks were too large to go down our street. The boxes were only slightly larger than cola or beer cases, so it took forever to try to get 1000. Then the smaller truck cracked the driveway of our (rented) house. Plus, the police didn't like us leaving the semis parked on the main highway, and luckily got impatient waiting for their bribe and took off. What a nightmare!
• RICE - One day at the house, after having rice for three meals a day every day, I said to Iza (our helper/translator/admin assistant/cultural attache), "What happened to all those noodle packets I bought?" That night for dinner, the cook made noodles - with rice, of course...
• DRIVER - One of our drivers told us that he was in his house with his family when the tsunami hit. They ran to the second floor, and as the waters rose, they realized they needed to go to the roof. His sister was sick and couldn't move from her bed, and his grandmother was out at the market. All the family who made it to the rooftop survived. The sister and grandmother were swept away.
• LANGUAGE - A very tiny and grizzled old woman kept walking by the house when we were doing the kit assembly, and one day she came into the courtyard pointing at the food and other articles and talking to the workers. Her voice was squeaky and gravelly at the same time, and the sounds coming out of her mouth didn't seem like the Bahasa Indonesian I had gotten used to hearing by this point. She seemed like a little E.T., so alien to me and even to the little street on which she stood. The Indonesians told me she was Acehnese, the indigenous people of the region, and her language was Acehnese. The next day she came by and watched us patiently for a few hours, pointing at the oil or the fish, and then to herself. We tried to explain that the goods were for the people of Lam No, or Loh Kruet, or other villages down the west coast. Finally Chris gave her two blankets and she toddled off. The next day she came with a young girl (a daughter? grand-daughter?) and they helped us break down cardboard boxes for the trash pile. We gave them some rice and soap and they left, smiling.
• FROG - Was very excited to find frogs jumping about outside our house at night, as I have always loved frogs, tomboy that I am. I caught one and was preparing to take him around to scare everyone inside, but apparently the frog's defense mechanism was to pee on its predator, so I got a spray of liquid down the front of my shirt for my troubles. That'll teach me!
• MARRIED - Most Indonesians are not shy about asking your age or whether you have a boyfriend or husband. The men would say to me, "Why you not getting married?" This usually was not an invitation to talk about your personal life, but rather an opening for them to market themselves in case you were in the market for an Indonesian husband.
• CAPTAIN - The captain of our ship, "The Elephant Child", was a fisherman whose boat had survived the tsunami only because he was out at sea at the time. He described how he rode the 50-foot waves Hawaii-Five-Oh style out on the ocean, struggling to keep his vessel afloat. When he finally made it back to land, his house was gone, his family was missing, and most of his friends' boats had been chopped into kindling.
• DINNER - Just to prove how utterly helpless we were in our house without our Indonesian staff, on Sunday most of the staff was gone and someone had forgotten to give the cooks money to buy food. Well, there was nothing to eat in the house, and no restaurants nearby, so me and Kathy and Janine didn't know what to do. We skipped breakfast. For lunch we had the Ritz and peanut butter that Kathy brought. By dinnertime we were starving, and we resorted to calling Iza to ask her where we could go out to eat. She had the driver come get us to look for a restaurant. But the driver didn't speak English, so we had communication problems over the fact that they thought we wanted American food. We drove forever, until finally I called Iza back and said, "We've passed a dozen restaurants - I don't know where they're taking us!" She then told them to take us to any old roadside kiosk, which turned out to be truly disgusting and unsanitary in every way. The driver, while claiming he wasn't hungry at all, cleaned his whole plate. We picked at the rice and chicken, then went home still starving. Certainly made us appreciate our cooks!
• FISH - Our houseboys seemed to find the job of cleaning the house and burning the trash either too much work or too beneath them or it didn't pay enough, because they kept quitting. And no one was taking care of the fishtank. Finally I said to Chris, "We need to have someone take a look at the fishtank, 'cause the water's getting pretty gross." I didn't know how to take care of the water, so I hoped that someone would tell the houseboy how to do it. A couple days later, after another houseboy quit, one of the fish died. I felt so bad! Here we had come to save humans, and we were killing fish! The landlord came over and cleaned the tank and took out the dead fish. I told him how apologetic we were...
• SILOLNA - We had heard about a private vessel that was making assessment trips down the west coast to get more detailed information ( i.e., for sailors) than the UN team. We couldn't get much information on this boat, except that it was called the Silolna and that it was normally docked in Bali. Finally at a UN meeting, a sunburned and wild-haired middle-aged American woman stood up and said, "I'm Patty from the Silolna and we've just completed our assessment of the west coast. We've got maps, photos, landing spots, IDP camp locations, etc., all available electronically at the UN office." The whole room broke out into applause! This was such important data, and it was gotten by a woman who happened to own a ship nearby (normally used for luxury charters) and wanted to contribute. Here's her website: http://www.indonesianexplorer.com/index.php
• MARIJUANA - Taxi drivers in Banda Aceh (as in a lot of Asian cities) make it a habit of asking their fares if they're interested in finding some marijuana... I don't imagine a lot of the aid workers said, "Sure, I'm from X organization, I'd like to use some of my per diem to contribute to the illicit drug trade in a region controlled by rebel military factions." God, but what I would have given for a BEER!! (No alcohol in Aceh, since it's very conservative Muslim.)
• BODIES - Most of the corpse removal and the mass burials happened before I arrived, but that doesn't mean they aren't still finding bodies underneath all the rubble while digging out the muck. Occasionally I saw body bags lined along the side of the road by the old downtown, and only once did I have the misfortune to see a crew removing a body from a crumbling building... my eyes caught a brief glimpse of an arm dangling out from underneat a blanket on a stretcher, and I turned away.
• SANDALS - The sentimentalist in me made me pack my leather sandals from my last Asia trip. I bought them for $16 in Bangkok, trekked all over with them and kept them in the back of my closet for years. Perfect, I thought, to bring them back to Indonesia ten years later. After a few days' hearty work in the warehouse/garage, the leather finally reached the end of its durability and broke. I bought a new pair of cheap rubber thong sandals, the kind everyone has in Asia, for 40¢. As I mentioned, you have to leave your shoes at the door when you enter a building, and the next day I discovered my new sandals were missing, probably because someone else had mistaken them for their own. So I bought a new pair of sandals and marked them with a cursive "C" on the instep so no one would take them. Sure enough, two days later, they went missing too. Finally I had to buy ANOTHER pair and draw an elaborate star design all along the inside, plus I hid them in my bag when I wasn't wearing them. These were the shoes I was wearing when I arrived in Newark to see snow on the ground. When I went to buy my ticket to Washington at the train station, the kindly agent said to me, "Please tell me you're going to put on some shoes and socks before you go out into the cold." I smiled and headed to the bathroom to change.
• FLIRTING - Just to prove how busy and tired and absorbed I was, I didn't even notice that a cute Croatian aid dude was flirting with me after one of the UN meetings! I didn't realize until I thought about it a few hours later how overfriendly he was being... D'oh!
• SCHOOL - Schools in Aceh reopened this week, as it was felt by all that returning the children to a normal routine and giving them a chance to be around other children would be best for their psychological recovery. Some schools only had 20% of their student body and 10% of their staff left, however, so many schools were combined. The government declared that school uniforms and shoes would not be mandatory for attendance, as they had in the past.
• SHOWER - I found the secret shower in the house, the one faucet that actually has running water, although the water pressure is abysmal and it only works sometimes. Still much easier to rinse my hair this way. My hair in general was a total pain in the ass to wash, brush, keep untangled, and keep out of my face while I was in Indonesia. No wonder I got cornrows last time!
• MUD - On my last day in Banda Aceh, on my way to the airport, I had to stop by the OXFAM office to pick up something. I stepped out of the car and right into a pile of mud ankle-deep. Very nice. I skidded up to OXFAM's front door only to find the office closed. There were some construction workers doing work in the parking lot and I used one of my dozen Indonesian words on them: "Air?" (pronounced "ay-ir", meaning water) They helped me find a bucket of water and wash my leg off. They were watching me splash the water on my feet and calves like it was Acehnese porn. (I crack myself up.)
• FLASHDRIVE - Those little flash drives (or memory sticks) that go into USB ports turned out to incredibly useful in Banda Aceh. Since a lot of the organizations' resources are too strained to be able to print anything, and internet access is slow if available at all, everyone carried around flash drives on strings around their necks. If I needed something from the UN, I would just pop my flash drive into their computer, they would download the documents, and I could bring them back to PCI and put them on our computer. I would have never guessed how important these are the field!
• UNITY - There were well over a dozen countries working in Banda Aceh on the relief effort. Among them: US, France, Germany, Russia, Hungary, Estonia, Australia, England, Holland, Canada, Japan, S. Korea, Afghanistan, Turkey, Italy, Mexico, Qatar, Norway, Singapore, and others I'm sure I missed. It's great to know there ARE things we can all come together on.