from the horizon

A lot happened in Banda Aceh which I never got the chance to blog about them at the time. Now I’m in a different place and the scattered memories seem like a dream. So it seems important to make a record of this dream.

West meets East - Surreal Read the rest of this entry �

(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 �

On Saturday night, through no fault of my own, I ended up at a UN party. I was expecting the antics which I’ve seen at the other parties which I have attended in Banda Aceh, but I was sadly disappointed.

Everyone was sitting round talking in very clichésque groups, the music was quiet, there was no dancing or any antics.

Now maybe I should just give some background to my views of the UN:

I really really really want to work for them. Well kind of at least. They are the top of the humanitarian career ladder. They pay more, they have job security, they are the big boys on the ground. They hold the coordination meetings for the other NGOs. They run the Humanitarian Air Service (UNHAS) which flies people round the field sites, they have a shipping service for cargo. You get a special blue UN passport.
I’d get to look down on all those volunteers who just turned up with their backpacks thinking that they could help! I would have made it.

And that was kinda the feeling I was getting at the party. Sure, I’d arrived late in the evening, and I still don’t know that many people in Banda Aceh, but I felt like I was back in high school. Everyone there was too cool.
Someone did point out that the harsher the conditions, the wilder the parties. Maybe Aceh’s got too soft, maybe I’ve got to go somewhere harder for better parties.

There is the other side to the UN, which came out when I was talking to one of the UNians. The UN is a system. And I got the impression that the people inside it were just cogs. The system has so much inertia, you kinda have to just go with it. There are procedures for doing things, and you have to follow them. Everything is issued from Geneva. I just there is some advantage to having standards across the organisation, but it does sound very dis-empowering.
That got me thinking about big organisations. There seems to be a trade off between organisational standards and efficiency, and flexibility on the ground, and people not feeling like they’re stuck in a box. I’m not sure where the balance is, but based on the fact the the world isn’t saved yet, I don’t think the UN has got it quite right. I’m not sure how I would actually find working for them, I’d be worried that I wouldn’t have enough opportunity to use my own initiative and creativity.
Giving up on serious conversation, I continued a debate from earlier in the evening, of which powerful woman guys would sleep with. It seemed to be a competition between Hilary Clinton and Condoleezza Rice. We couldn’t really think of any other powerful woman, although one guy did confess that he would sleep with both a Virgin Mary and Eve. I wasn’t sure what that would do to our gene stock.

It was shortly after this I pondered whether the UN had a Standard Operating Procedure for a Godzilla Attack, and started wondering if I should write one for them. At that point Jolene (works for another NGO, met her on the RedR Course in India) and her colleague Axel suggested it was time to go home.

The highlight of the evening was definitely one the way home, when we got caught up in an Acehness Motorbike Street Racing. Crowds of young men lined the streets, and we had to wait for a gap in the motorbikes which we hooning down the road before we could get past. I tried to persuade the driver to floor it, fortunately I was ignored.

Last week I received an email from someone I work with, which was forwarded from the Commonwealth Human Rights Network, which made me slightly embarrassed to be a New Zealander.

The basic story is that a business woman who owns a company which produces dog food, was offering food aid to Kenya which is currently in the grip of a famine. Check out the BBC’s Story.
Although the food which is being offered has been modified to be fit for human consumption, and is claimed not to be dog food, the whole situation does lead to some debate.

On the practical side I can see that her heart is in the right place. The food which she is offering will provide much needed nutrition in Kenya. She claims to have eaten the food mix herself. In fact if someone offered me some of it, I’d probably eat it, although I’m not exactly renown for being a fussy eater.

However I think there are bigger issues here. If you eat “dog food” to survive, where does that leave you? I think it is important to consider people’s own resilience and coping mechanisms. What happens to your sense of self worth after eating dog food?

Also it’s kinda patronising and arrogant to be giving “dog food” to people in need. Is that the best we can give Kenya while we munch on steaks and hamburgers? But considering the logistics of moving food, maybe this freeze dried mix is the best we can do.
Maybe the whole debate is just a PR slip up. If she hadn’t let people know of the connection to the dog food manufacturing, the food aid may have been gladly appreciated.

I think this story quite nicely shows how the issues in the development/aid world are never clear.

On my way back to Banda Aceh I had to spend a couple of days in Singapore renewing my visa and doing some all important shopping!

Having spent so long in Banda Aceh, Singapore was fascinating. Big, organised and clean. One of the things which stands out in the Mass Rail Transit (MRT) System. It connects all of central Singapore with a network of stations. Trains come ever couple of minutes, making it very easy to get around.

But their is something unnatural about it. The underground stations are huge, artificial and disorientating. Escalators would carry me down 3 floors, to exactly where I wanted to be to catch the train. Except I didn’t actually have any idea where I was.

I never needed to gain my bearings, just follow the signs to get to the right place. I felt kinda detached from my environment.

But the environment was so unnatural anyway. Sterile, it lacked any natural shapes. Everything that was had been engineered that way. Even the art works were laid out exactly how some artist wanted them. It worried me that I could travel underground from one shopping mall to another without seeing, the randomness of clouds, or trees growing. Just like somewhere out of THX 1138.

And the people all seemed so detached. Isolated in the crowd, in their own little worlds. No chatter. Focused on the destination.

To an extent this sums up Singapore for me. Everything works, but people don’t really participate in it working. So what’s the point in it working?

After Pondicherry I made my why to the utopia of Auroville. Auroville was founded in 1968 by The Mother, who was a follower of Sri Aurobindo. It intended to be an experiment in people living in “progressive harmony”. Based on the idea that humanity is not the last rung on the evolutionary ladder, Auroville plans to be an accelerator for the next step. I should probably point out that Auroville isn’t really set up to accept “tourists”, and I only spent one day there, so my observations are really just first impressions.

The Vistor Centre

The Town Hall

The settlement contains around 1780 people from all over the world, spread over 20km. So I hired a bike and bravely set off to explore this new world. For the most part all I seemed to see were trees growing out of the red ground. One of the settlers later told me that they thought that their greatest achievement was the planting of over 2 million trees. It certainly is more luscious than the rest of India (at least what I’d seen). However I failed to see much more progress than that.

This may have been because the whole settlement was very dispersed. It was designed in the shape of a spiral galaxy; unfortunately no one remembered that galaxies are notoriously difficult to get around. I thought this was a rather large slipup which meant most people had to use petrol consuming motorbikes or cars to get around. So they’re not quite self sufficient!

I did visit the Cynergy, who were a small group that did computer programming outsourcing in the community. It was headed by a guy who was raised on the community. Definitely a different spin on Indian Outsourcing!

The highlight of the community is the Matrimandir, which is a temple/meditation center/ spiritual soul/giant golden golf ball in the middle of Auroville. Current it was undergoing extensive maintenance work, something to do with the gold panels not being attached properly. I managed to have a look around it, and then noticed that the Indian construction workers didn’t really seem to mind if I went inside (which I probably shouldn’t have!). I had heard amazing things about the interior, but it all seemed to be covered with plastic sheeting. I’m not sure if I made it into the main chamber, but it was an eerie feeling being inside. Kinda like I was exploring a lost temple!

Interestingly I met a couple of Dancers from California at Auroville who’d been in India training to be Yoga teachers. They’d had a lot of experience working in cooperative communities, egalitarian structures. They said it was very hard to make decisions, and often what happened was that the loudest person just got their way. They talked about consensus minus one, someone’s always unhappy!

Does cooperation really lead to the best decision being made? Can we have too much cooperation and not enough action?

Overall I was unimpressed with Auroville. I noticed that I always had this negative Hippy/Cult thought in the back of my head, despite my feeling that what they were trying to achieve here was very admirable, and important. I thought their was too much Yoga and Meditation and not enough Renewable Energy. I just got the feeling that there were too many spiritual types and not enough technical types.

Hippies on bike and windmills - kinda sums up my impressions

OK, there was some renewable energy

I thought about how necessary it is to have such a spiritual focus when setting up a community. I’m not sure how well spiritual, social and technical development can work together? I may leave that for another post.

Its worth mentioning about the guru phenomenon in India: Every place seems to have had its guru. Pondicherry has Sri Aurobindo and The Mother. Chennai has Vivekananda and Krishnamurti. All the aforementioned Gurus are dead, but I’m sure there are some live ones around.

The Guru normally has had a mystical experience at some point and now what remains is their hangout (Ashram, Institute, or in Vivekananda’s case, an old Ice House) complete with bookstore featuring the dozens of books they’ve written, and maybe a tomb. Now, I just want to clarify that I think that these were probably remarkable people with a better understanding of the full human experience than I will probably gain. From what of their writing I have read, they have some very profound and valuable insights. However what really worries me is all the Guru Groupies I see. Maybe I don’t get something, but it just seems to be like people blindly following a charismatic leader.

Someone I spoke to talked about the importance of a Guru being able to share their mystical experience with others, which I guess is fair enough, unless they’re dead!

I probably should just cut old Krishnamurti a break. He did disband his gang of followers claiming that enlightenment was something organized religion couldn’t offer. Respect. I even brought a couple of his books!