A Tale of Two Islands

It's different in Flores. That's what lots of other volunteers who've worked in both South Sulawesi and Flores have said, and after a few days here it does seem like a different world. 

I'm in Maumere for a week training local government staff in spatial planning. Staff do actually seem to want to work, and every day when I arrive at the office, everyone there is either working or talking about work. There's still time for the usual chatting/smoking/drinking coffee/eating cake, but that seems to come after at least a couple of hours work has been done.

I do feel like a week's training in the office here has had more impact than my 10 months in Sulawesi - people know what they want to do, and just need some guidance in how spatial data can help them do it. In fact they're so on the ball I suspect they'd probably do fine on their own. 

Whiteboard, projector, pink nylon curtains, picture of the President, self

People here are up to the usual Indonesian standards of friendliness. In one incident I was dragged of the street by a group of teenagers, force fed fried banana (served with chilli sauce, of course) and introduced to the family and dogs. This is a Christian majority area, so dogs are actually kept as pets. And only occasionally as food. Beer is also widely available. Apart from the eating dogs thing, it's all good.  

It's blue - come back in a few years and it might be red

A colleague at work has also offered to lend me his motorbike to tour round the island, which is the sort of thing that just wouldn't happen at home, and today we had a trip to see the incredible coloured crater lakes of Kelimutu.

I had to pay this monkey several thousand Rupiah to get this photo

It's been hard work, fitting what was originally a 5 week training course into 7 days, along with some new stuff. But I've been enjoying it, and I'm looking forward to seeing more of Flores for two weeks "jalan jalan" around the island. If I'd been posted here from the start I might have stayed.

The End of the Road

I've quit. Thrown in the towel. Am packing up and going home.

I can't see how all this planning I'm meant to be helping with is going to benefit the community when only 13% of Jeneponto's budget is available for projects, with the rest being swallowed by civil servant wages. When I see waste on that level, I feel like I'm being taken for a bit of a mug.

What's worse, I think that international NGOs, with the best intentions, are contributing to the problem. There's a dependency culture, with the shortcomings of the government being papered over by NGOs. Where's the incentive to improve government systems, when UK/Canada/Japan/Australia etc will step in when the government wants to implement a project? All the resources required to help Jeneponto are present in Indonesia - so why are we sending volunteers here?

Bantaeng, just up the road, has a forestry office of 40 people. And there is still some forest in Bantaeng. So what are the 100 plus people in forestry in Jeneponto doing exactly? Every time I go into the office and see only 2 people working, and the rest watching TV, chatting or sleeping, I think of why I came half way across the world to help Jeneponto.

I feel sorry for a lot of colleagues, who do want to work and help the community, but are let down by a corrupt and ill-managed goverment system, and are not empowered to change things.

There's personal feelings too - I've never felt at home in Jeneponto, and I think the culture here is just too different from mine. I think I may be particularly British, and Jeneponto might be particularly Indonesian. 

I've been trying to think of things I'll miss. Some colleagues, the guys at local NGO Mitra Turatea, the other VSO volunteers, riding around the coast and mountains on my motorbike. I don't think I'll be too sad to leave Jeneponto itself, as I've no great affection for the place, but I've had some good times in Bali, Bira and Malino.

The saddest thing is that, at the moment, I don't think I believe in development in Indonesia any more. I don't regret doing this - I'd regret not having done it a lot more - but spending another 12 months here would drive me mad.

Rice fields, sunset, Malino

Local news for local people

I came across this article in the Makassar local paper, Fajar, last weekend, and have only just got round to translating it. Some interesting stuff on what's happening in Jeneponto politics right now - and explains a lot about why stuff doesn't work here.

From Fajar, 19 June 2011

Jeneponto Delays Reception of Civil Servants

Amidst the bustle at BKDD [Agency for Civil Service Affairs and Provincial Training], in which various Kabupaten [districts] prepare to select civil servants for the 2011 intake and organise proposals for central government, Jeneponto apparently alone is quiet. This area has, it seems, not yet proposed the civil service positions required for 2011.

After is was confirmed to the interested parties, Jeneponto apparently blocked selection of 2011 civil service positions. In fact, the postponement of recruitment just mentioned will last for the next 2 years. The most important reason is budgetary. The local government is still investigating the financial capacity of the Kabupaten which is not yet stable, after the total budget deviated from the agreed amount.

In addition to budgetary factors, the total number of civil servants in this area has also been assessed as exceeding the limit set, namely 6592 staff. "If local government employs more civil servants, where are the wages to come from?", said chairman of the local assembly Alamzah Mahadi Kulle. But there are still 3511 people yet to become civil servants since their names were added to the database from 2005 onwards. The 2011 budget for Jeneponto is only IDR355 billion [approximately GBP27m], with the result that it is certainly difficult for the local government budget to cover wages for civil servants that now number 6592. "Almost 87% of Jeneponto's budget is spent on paying civil servants", he added.

Head of the BKDD in Jeneponto, Hasnan Arsyad, says the policy of delaying reception of civil servants in 2011 is based on the outcome of a meeting with the local assembly in May. "Delay of civil service recruitment has already been announced in the official report of the meeting between the local assembly and the Jeneponto government", said Hasnan.

While this is happening, BKDD Bantaeng [neighbouring district] have agreed a proposal for 400 new civil servants, although there were votes in the legislative body to delay recruitment because reception of the 2010 intake is not yet complete.

"We have proposed 400, because in 2010 we had 200 people retire, with the same number in 2009", said head of the Agency, Jumaing Rahing.

Secretary of the Bantaeng assembly, Nirdin Halim, has assessed the increase in civil servants for 2011 to be enough. It is certain the government should focus more on increasing budget for community interests. "If civil servant numbers increase, the local budget must surely be exhausted in wages", said Nurdin.

For the intake of civil servants this year, he has asked for honorer [a type of contract worker without the same status as a full civil servant] only. "The reception of the provious intake of honorer has been completed. The new honorer are already working and busy."

Some key facts/observation from my placement put the above into some context:

• Jeneponto district has a population (2009) of 334 175 people. There is 1 civil servant per 50 head of population. The rate in the UK is 1 public sector worker per 10 population.
• Many civil servants have other jobs.
• Many in my office don't work afternoons. Or mornings. There are many civil servants with no officially allocated tasks.
• Money for projects is scarce, so civil servants spend a lot of time writing proposals to central government and international NGOs.
• Government buildings and facilities are run down, ill equipped and ill suited to their requirements.
• If there is money for equipment, there is little for training, maintenance or running costs. For example, there is an environmental monitoring lab full of new equipment which has never been used since purchase in 2008.

So it seems that the number of public sector workers is 5 times smaller than numbers in Europe - but it's still too big for the money available in Jeneponto. The high wages bill is preventing any of these civil servants operating effectively - my guess is that you'd need to halve the head count to maximise productivity. But that's unthinkable here.

Where did the mountain go?

In 2004, half of Bawakaraeng, an extinct volcano in South Sulawesi, fell off. So what does it look like after 200 million cubic metres of rock decide they don't want to be part of a mountain any more? On holiday in Malino, I went to find out.

Landsat image of Bawakaraeng, taken in 2006. The eroded material is still clearly visible as the brown area.






An hour's journey by motorbike, through the mountains and rice fields brought me to the sleepy mountain village of Lengkese, and another couple of hours trek up the valley to a point where I could see the site of the collapse. Most of the rock detached from the Caldera initially came to rest a few kilometres down in the valley, and is now being eroded by the river Jenebareng into a steep sided gorge of unstable rock and earth.


Site of the original collapse. The area is still unstable, with freshly exposed rock visible where recent collapses have occurred.









The river cuts a gorge through the debris, with the steep walls collapsing into the channel.











Up there I met a team of Indonesian surveyors working for a Japanese engineering company. I introduced myself as an engineer from England, which got me an invitation to lunch at one of the team's homes (he was from Lengkese), and a chat about the sedimentation problems caused by the collapse. Bili-bili reservoir, which supplies water to the city of Makassar, is now filling up with sediment from the collapse as it is eroded from the valley. They were surveying the latest collapse from the wall of the valley, which happened the week before.
Survey team at work.














A series of sabo dams, concrete structures design to hold back sediment from reaching the reservoir, have been built with Japanese funding, with more under construction. The surprisingly good road up to Lengkese was also funded by Japan.


Sabo construction on the Jenebareng river.
















Clearly the Japanese engineers know a lot about how to deal with sedimentation, and the Indonesian surveyors were knowledgable, enthusiastic and hard working. "The sediment traps are working now.", one said. "But in two years time they'll be broken. That's Indonesia."

Qt: why didn't I know about this earlier? (or how bored am I?)

There's not much to do in Jeneponto. A couple of weeks ago my fellow volunteer Alanna and I found ourselves one Saturday night inventing the sport of "Rokok Topi", where two players throw empty cigarette packets into a hat. One point for each packet lodged wholly within the hat. Add use of a fan for tricky cross winds, if that's too easy.

It's too late for inclusion in the 2012 Olympics - maybe Rio 2016, but I can foresee problems with the tobacco sponsorship element. But if McDonalds can be a sponsor, why not a manufacturer of pungent Indonesian cigarettes?

In my other idle moments (of which there are many), I decided to write some software for viewing results from the SFV flood model, using the Qt development suite. 

It's surprisingly easy, as Qt has a wide range of inbuilt graphics and rendering routines. There's also Qt Creator IDE for developing, building and debugging the code, and the help system is actually helpful too. It's also truly cross platform (Linux, mobile, and Windows if you must). Excellent value for money, especially as it's free.

The code for drawing a mesh of triangles, with colour corresponding to depth, looks like this:

    for(e=0;e<mesh.Ne;e++){
        triangle.clear();

        triangle << QPointF (mesh.getnode(e,1).x,-mesh.getnode(e,1).y) <<
                    QPointF (mesh.getnode(e,2).x,-mesh.getnode(e,2).y) <<
                    QPointF (mesh.getnode(e,3).x,-mesh.getnode(e,3).y);

        mainScene->addPolygon(triangle,pen,brush);
    }

And that's it. Add some code for loading data, changing colour scales and loading background raster and you get a fairly functional application. All told this has taken about a week - including trying to get back into C++ and learning new stuff from the Qt libraries.



It's far from perfect, rendering of large background images is unacceptably slow for example. There is also some frustration when it becomes very difficult to do something apparently simple - I haven't managed to work out how to change the colour of one button without changing the colour of all buttons generated afterwards.

But there's also support for databases (MySQL, SQLite, Oracle, ODBC), with a thing called model view, allowing you to link a table directly to a database, without much fuss. I wrote a simple SQLite front end as part of a prototype system for gathering social and poverty data in the field - took a couple of days. 

You can download Qt here - highly recommended. 

Indomie and the art of motorcycle maintenance

"It'll be fine - trust me." Never trust people who say this.

I didn't actually say this when I lead my friend Alanna down a unpaved road, 1 in 3 gradient, on our motorcycle trip to Malakaji. Perhaps I should have - she then could have legitimately turned back. Instead, she dropped the bike twice, the second time breaking the front brake lever off halfway along its length. It's clearly my fault, so I should at least give her a lift back from the workshop a couple of days later after she left her bike there to get it fixed. Little did I know this would turn into a 3 day epic of mechanical incompetence.

View on the way to Malakaji. Worth the trip - not worth the hassle later.

Day 1:

0900 Leave bike at workshop
1200 Return to collect bike. Bike not there - mechanic has taken it for "testing". Via the mosque for Friday prayers. We go for lunch while we wait.
1300 Mechanic returns - he has replaced broken lever with an adjustable one. That can only be used at one of the settings, so not really adjustable. And wobbles, looking like it might fall off. We want a normal one. Normal levers are unobtainable in Jeneponto, says workshop owner man. Assistant turns up 30 seconds later with normal lever from another shop.
1400 Normal lever fitted, all well. Brakes start binding after 2km, so bike won't move at all until it's been allowed to cool.
1500 Back to workshop - mechanic starts to file off part of the brake lever to stop it operating the brakes when not required. He's using the smallest file I've seen outside a manicurist's toolkit. This could take a while.
1530 Newly filed lever fitted - brakes still binding. Front brake caliper stripped, cleaned, rebuilt. Wheel turns freely.
1600 Braking power now vastly reduced - feels a bit like driving my old camper van. Apply in writing for permission to stop at least 5 working days in advance. But not good in Jeneponto traffic. Feels like there's oil on the brakepads - possibly contamination from the vast gouts of lubricant the mechanic was sloshing everywhere around the caliper?
1630 We take the bike to another workshop, the "official" Honda one. Genuine parts, they promise. They check the bike and say it's fine. It's clearly not. We decide to give up for the day - it's already too late for Alanna to get to Makassar tonight. Poor show all round I think.

Day 2:

1000 I return and take bike back to Honda dealer - they check the brakes, still saying it's fine. But just to humour me, they strip and clean the brake pads.
1030 Still not good. They seem now to think the brake lever is the problem - but don't have the correct one in stock. I'll have to go to Takalar or Bantaeng for one - or they can get one for me. It'll take two weeks. Hmmmm.
1100 They find a correct brake lever - but from an old bike, and it's twisted. Fitted - seems to make the brakes a little better.
1800 Final testing of bike. Brakes still don't work. Retire to regroup over fried chicken and beer.

Day 3:

1100 Honda dealer closed, so we go to another workshop. Manage to convince them the brakes aren't good - they agree! Progress. Slosh petrol around (whilst smoking, natch) to get the oil off. Still not good.
1130 I tell them to change the brake pads. They agree. Old ones are glazed - probably from overheating on day 1 when the brakes were binding.
1230 Brakes work! Only 50 hours since starting out.

For sheer this-should-only-take-15-minutes-but-ends-up-taking-three-days annoyance,
this ranks higher than my record 5 visits to the shop to get a working gas cylinder for my cooker. I'm a wholly incompetent amateur mechanic (I once had to araldite a rocker cover in place after shearing the bolts...), and even I know more about bikes than any mechanic in Jeneponto.

How can people be so incompetent? They must practise.

Bira

I've always really hated beach holidays (without ever actually having done one, of course). It's just sand, sea and overweight German men in very small trunks.

Needing to escape from Jeneponto after a slightly stressful time organising training courses, I headed down to Bira for the weekend, and actually quite enjoyed it. Bira is the type of place recommended in Lonely Planet, so popular with backpackers. It also seems to be popular with drunk Russians, retired Dutch and VSO volunteers.

Actually most of the tourists there are local - Good Friday is a public holiday here, but with no family or religious obligations for the overwhelmingly Muslim population, so a good opportunity for a weekend away.

Bira is so nice, that even the "Karaoke Bars" (i.e. knocking shops) are hidden discretely off the main road in the forest. Which leaves the main (and only) street free for shacks selling fish, cold beer and snorkels.

Bira is a bit of a long way to go for most people (6-8 hours from Makassar), but for me the motorcyle ride there was one of the highlights, threading along the coast for 100km on increasingly broken roads, an opportunity to notice the contrasts between different areas. Things look much nicer as you move east - Bantaeng is a tidy little town, Bulakumba is really quite shiny in parts, and the peninsular down to Bira reminds me a bit of Cornwall. But hotter, and with more goats.

Why is everything in Jeneponto so broken? In Bantaeng, you get proper roadworks - diggers, cones, diversion signs, the lot. In Jeneponto, a hole big enough for a motorbike to fall through appeared in a bridge, about 3 weeks ago. The hole is still there - and all the warning drivers get is a couple of branches hacked off a nearby tree and laid in the road. Something's wrong here.

Metres of golden beaches. That isn't rubbish - just plastic bottles used as floats for fishing nets.

Megan the motorcycle stops for a rest near Bantaeng.