from the horizon

(This one’s for you Dad. I’m sure you’ll understand)

Saving the world is pretty hard work, so the idea was put forward for a weekend blow out in Jakarta. Although I wouldn’t have normally gone for the luxurious weekend away in the big city, I was really looking forward to spending some time with Jo out of Aceh, and all the creature comforts of a big city were quite appealing. So a five star hotel was booked, and non-Sharia compliant clothing was packed, and we were all set to go! Read the rest of this entry »

4.27am Small earthquake wakes me up. Doesn’t feel like anything more than excessive bed rocking.

6.15am Alarm fails to go off, this morning I don’t go for a run!

7.20am I finally get up.

7.50am Walk to work, past the polluted canal, and over the pot holed bridge. Beautiful.

8.00am I stop by the food store on the way to work. I get rice and rendang, some of which is a curry, and some of which are these thin slivers of beef that have been glazed in honey and coriander seeds. It’s all wrapped up in a banana leaf, and paper … then put in a plastic bag.
I also get my “Kopi Aceh” – coffee, which is served with sweeten condensed milk in a plastic bag. I always half expect to find a gold fish in it.

8.10am Get to work and check my emails while eating my breakfast

8.20am Work on the logistics database which I am making. This will hopefully create a systems which tracks all logistics information, from vehicle usage, to warehouse inventory, to asset registers, to purchase request tracking. I am beginning to get a little scared of the scope of it! I hope I will finish in time. When I gave my initial time proposal I hadn’t really thought of the training that it would take to implement the system, and I’m getting a bit overwhelmed by it all!
I’ve taught myself Access and Visual Basic which I’m using to design the database.

10.00am Although I am meant to be working solidly on the database, because the head of logistics here had Dengue, and one of the other Logistic Coordinators was in a management meeting, I got sent to the UN Humanitarian Air Service (UNHAS) meeting. I have been to UNHAS meetings before, but this one was special. They used to provide a free air service around Aceh for UN agencies and NGOs.
However through a budgeting mishap on their behalf they ran out of money, and had to implement a paid service in a couple of days. This meeting was to discuss how they were going to do it, starting in 2 days time.
UNHAS manages a 3500 passenger a month service using email and Excel spreadsheets, so I’m not too sure about how easily they’ll be able to track payments too. Don’t get me started on the low tech nature of development.
I raised a few points in the meeting which they hadn’t thought of, and made a request that we got our confirmations earlier than the day before! (They said they would, but have yet to send a manifest before 5pm on the day before – real helpful!)

12:20pm Lunch in the office, which usually consists of rice, some fried things (tempe, tofu or other), Fish, and some vegetable stew.

1:00pm Frantically run round the office trying to get approval from the country director and finance to pay UNHAS a deposit to secure our flights, then to try and work out a system to charge the flights to different grants.

2:00pm Try to do some more work on the database, but I’ve been sufficiently distracted so I don’t achieve much.

4:00pm-ish Finally get the documentation from UNHAS about their new cost recovery, follow it up with the country director and finance to make sure our payment and bookings can go ahead.

6:00pm Go to Jo’s house, where she had promised to help me out with my CV. I’m don’t think I’ll be staying here past April, so I’m reworking my CV to pitch me to the Humanitarian Industry. I thought I had a pretty good CV, but Jo, who is the Information and Communications Manager, and has worked as a journalist, made my CV look excellent.

7:30pm Guiltily ditch Jo, and catch up with Jolene, another friend of mine who I hadn’t seen in a while, for dinner. We go to one of the “Bule” (foreigner) restaurants, Country Steak House, and eat New Zealand steaks. Unfortunately I don’t think that they understand the concept of “medium rare”.
We discuss future job prospects, where we want to go, what we want to do.

9:00pm I go home and have a look at a database which I’m helping a friend of mine from another NGO, with. She wants a database to manage the various grants and budgets, which are currently managed with an assortment of Excel spreadsheets (the humanitarian world runs on Excel spreadsheets)

12:00am Go to bed and turn on the AC to make the temperature bearable to sleep. Read my book (Life of Pi) for a while, before turning off the AC and going to sleep with the knowledge that I’ll probably wake up in the middle of the night to turn in back on.