Wednesday

Been too busy to write, plus we're all sharing one internet connection - ugh. Anyway, the house is pretty crowded right about now, with everyone running around doing all kinds of jobs. Two cooks, one houseboy, two drivers, three assistants/translators, me, Chris, three women from Utah who came to volunteer, four or five doctors, a couple more nurses, a few workers that are helping in the warehouse, and a nimrod reporter who's filing reports from our garden.

(Sample report: "Disease is rampant in Banda Aceh, and orphans roam the street."... Please! He only just got here last night and wasn't at the UN coordinating meeting I was at where the World Health Organization stated that no malaria or cholera outbreak was evident. Plus he's not yet hip to the sad fact that there are more childless parents than orphans, because the children were swept away in the tsunami and the parents were strong enough to swim. Moral of the story = don't believe the press.)

We just got a shipment in from Medan, the closest large city, and the guys have been piling it into the garage and into our makeshift warehouses outside. The shipments we're going to start delivering by boat on Sunday to about 500 families per trip contain things like rice, water, cooking utensils, oil, blankets, sanitary napkins, sarongs, dried fish, tarps, etc. A medical team will deliver the packets and do health assessments and treatments in each community where necessary.

We've been working off assessment reports we get nightly to determine where the most refugees are and whether their needs are medical, sanitary or otherwise. These places are mostly inaccessible by road. It's been tough trying to figure out where all the other NGOs with boats are going and what they're bringing (we don't all want to visit the same communities) because there is no central database as of yet. We just have to go to the different coordinating meetings around town and start asking questions and taking notes and piece it together ourselves.

Chris is spending most of his time doing procurement of goods and running the finances and administrative aspects of the office, so I've been going to the meetings. I don't mind it so far, since the Euro-hottie and rugged doctor contingency is pretty high at the various organizations, but today a translation mix-up caused the driver to not pick me up, and I was stranded at the UN for a couple of hours. Felt kind of silly standing around with all the Indonesian drivers staring at me, so I finally hopped in the sidecar of a motorcycle taxi and he got me home by some combination of my pointing, his pedaling and the motorcycle's sputtering.

I've only made one cultural faux-pas so far: the first night when I was assigned the task of locating camps on the maps, I unknowingly spread the maps out on the floor of the prayer room to examine them (oops!). I also lost my Indonesian phrase book on the second day...

So, I'm pretty sweaty and smelly all day, and spend most of the time barefoot, since Indonesians don't wear shoes in the house. I haven't spent any money since I've been here because everything's taken care of. There are a couple of kids in the neighborhood who ride by or walk by sheepishly smiling and we say hi every day. All the staff and workers eat together in the dining room three times a day. Still not loving the bucket showers, but oh well.