Just wanted to let y'all know that I FINALLY posted photos from my field visits in Yogya and Bogor. They show Yogya PDS officers testing for avian influenza using the rapid tests, including the discovery of a positive case. (Those guys are pretty darn good and probably my favorite PDS team so far!) In the Bogor photos, you will get to see participatory epidemiology in action, with images of proportional piling, mapping, and the scene a few minutes prior to a community education session.
My next trip to Yogya has been delayed again, and this time we won't be able to go back until after the Idul Fitri portion of Ramadan, when everyone goes home to visit the family. I am disappointed! But I plan to leave Jakarta this weekend to see the beach.
Ciao,
E
Tuesday, September 25, 2007
Thursday, September 20, 2007
apartment living part 1
I've been promising to write about apartment living in Jakarta for a while. In honor of a successful plant shopping adventure today, I will now do so... However, you will only get a portion of this now because my bloody modem lost the signal the better part of an hour before I finished writing this the first time. Then it crashed my laptop so I couldn't save what I had written. Now I am too tired to start over on water, electricity, elevators, and the manual washer. Sorry. Blame the crummy Chinese modem and Indosat broadband system! I will do these topics over another time, I promise.
Many of you know that I now live on the 32nd floor. No, it isn't particularly safe given Indonesia's frequent earthquakes. But we all have to die sometime. And, in the meantime, I have a killer view. One I could never afford somewhere else. I'll try to grab photos of it to post, but it is really best at night. There weren't many 1 bedroom apartments available in this complex, Taman Rasuna, when I was looking. And even rarer is a top floor one with a large terrace, like I have. So I had to grab it. Overall the decor is nice but the place is grungy - hand grime on the door frame, etc. I made them clean up and paint over the large area of mold in the bathroom wall before I would take it. I also think water pools in my bedroom when we get hard rains, but, well, I guess that will be a problem to deal with when it rains again.
I looked around for other complexes, but settled on this one (aka the "bule ghetto") for two real reasons: 1) it was cheaper than many of the other expat apartment complexes and 2) high, high convenience factor. The complex has more than a dozen towers, surrounding an enclosed plaza with a pool, playground, sport courts, outdoor bistro, and several small businesses such as dry cleaners and convenience marts. There is also a small business center, where I had the most amazing exfoliating body scrub ever!, with a food court. Nearby (5-10 min walk) is a very nice, and relatively expensive, tennis club/gym. The gym is my #2 oasis in Jakarta, after my apartment. It isn't crowded, it has a nice pool, I have my own locker, and there is a towel service. I couldn't afford a gym membership like this one in the U.S. either. Just past the gym is a smallish mall - Pasar Festival - with a Pizza Hut, Dunkin Donuts, a used book store with English titles, a really good Indian restaurant, and Bengawan Solo, my favorite coffee. Just beyond the mall is a stop for the air conditioned bus that takes me all the way to Deptan for about $0.40 each way in a dedicated express lane. Super convenient, really. I shouldn't complain. Too much, anyway. (I am a Pretty, Pretty Princess, though, so I have to complain a little to maintain my standing with the P3s!)
[Next was originally a description of my apartment's layout and stuff about the elevator, getting electricity, bottled water, and the automatic washer. I'll make up for it!]
Many of you know that I now live on the 32nd floor. No, it isn't particularly safe given Indonesia's frequent earthquakes. But we all have to die sometime. And, in the meantime, I have a killer view. One I could never afford somewhere else. I'll try to grab photos of it to post, but it is really best at night. There weren't many 1 bedroom apartments available in this complex, Taman Rasuna, when I was looking. And even rarer is a top floor one with a large terrace, like I have. So I had to grab it. Overall the decor is nice but the place is grungy - hand grime on the door frame, etc. I made them clean up and paint over the large area of mold in the bathroom wall before I would take it. I also think water pools in my bedroom when we get hard rains, but, well, I guess that will be a problem to deal with when it rains again.
I looked around for other complexes, but settled on this one (aka the "bule ghetto") for two real reasons: 1) it was cheaper than many of the other expat apartment complexes and 2) high, high convenience factor. The complex has more than a dozen towers, surrounding an enclosed plaza with a pool, playground, sport courts, outdoor bistro, and several small businesses such as dry cleaners and convenience marts. There is also a small business center, where I had the most amazing exfoliating body scrub ever!, with a food court. Nearby (5-10 min walk) is a very nice, and relatively expensive, tennis club/gym. The gym is my #2 oasis in Jakarta, after my apartment. It isn't crowded, it has a nice pool, I have my own locker, and there is a towel service. I couldn't afford a gym membership like this one in the U.S. either. Just past the gym is a smallish mall - Pasar Festival - with a Pizza Hut, Dunkin Donuts, a used book store with English titles, a really good Indian restaurant, and Bengawan Solo, my favorite coffee. Just beyond the mall is a stop for the air conditioned bus that takes me all the way to Deptan for about $0.40 each way in a dedicated express lane. Super convenient, really. I shouldn't complain. Too much, anyway. (I am a Pretty, Pretty Princess, though, so I have to complain a little to maintain my standing with the P3s!)
[Next was originally a description of my apartment's layout and stuff about the elevator, getting electricity, bottled water, and the automatic washer. I'll make up for it!]
Sunday, September 16, 2007
equipment failures
Hello, hello
Yes, I have not posted in a while. I really have an excuse, though, and it was not for a lack of desire. My satellite modem died this past Monday while I was in the field, so I am very painfully at a loss for communications with the world outside my head and outside Jakarta. I had a little time at the office on Friday but it wasn't nearly enough. To check email and write this blog, I have sucked it up and come to the "Cheetos" mall. [I have no idea how to really spell the name of the mall, but everyone knows it by Cheetos - as long as it is pronounced properly. I had a dumb taksi driver who couldn't understand my American pronunciation of Cheetos, so I panicked and called Cipu, one of our translators. Apparently this idiot wanted me to make the "chi" sound more harsh so I sounded like an Indonesian. How annoying.] So now that I know how to properly pronounce Cheetos like an Indonesian, I took a taxi out here to get my internet fix. This means I have to sit at the mall and be assaulted by the sounds of the Indonesian "rock" band playing nearby. I'm talking covers of Celine Dion, people, and other songs you haven't heard in 20 or 30 years. Add in speaker feedback and children screeching songs like a nightmare of karaoke in hell. Not to mention the cigarette smoke. I hope you understand how desperate I am to be in touch!
After my last posting, we spent 2 more days in the induction workshop. Funny how the audience got smaller and smaller as the Tamrin bigwigs would put in an hour of "facetime" and take off. The FPFs (field program facilitators - Stacie, Jen, and me, plus Ali until she is promoted) stayed behind one evening to have a glass of wine at the hotel. Ah, good wine. Y'all in California have no idea how spoiled you are! Then we piled into buses and drove out to Bogor, where we checked in to a pretty decent hotel. Friday night was our cultural presentation evening. I was shocked at how Ibu Ade - the head of the avian flu Campaign Management Unit (CMU) - belted out the songs, played the guitar, and danced. Lots of dancing to Indonesian pop songs that never seem to end. Of course I got dragged into the dancing, which seems to have made an impression on people. I caught them off guard with my skills - hahahahaha. We spent the next day doing team-building challenges in the jungle. For the most physical challenges, my team turned out to be all petite women and one short guy. Needless to say, we did not excel at any of the physical feats, but our guy, Ata, sure loved the attention he got in the trust circle!
Then I got one day back in Jakarta to recover by the pool, and then it was off to the field. Because the Bogor area is very close to Jakarta, we took Unang, one of the staff drivers, instead of hiring an outside driver. I get along pretty well with Unang, but they sent us in the sedan, which isn't exactly an ideal field vehicle. Especially when we have a pickup and an SUV driving people around Jakarta, looking cool. Efa was assigned as my translator, and Ibu Mundi from CMU was my government chaperone. All in all, we had a pretty good trip. The PDS/R team in Sukabumi City had never been visited by anyone from FAO, and I liked them a lot. I think they are doing a darn good job, given the circumstances. That first night was my birthday. We went out for dinner to celebrate. One big difference between home and Indonesia: when you go out for your birthday here, you are expected to pay for everyone. I wasn't prepared for that, so when the bill came... Not expensive, of course. But it would just have been nice to have something feel like home on my birthday. Instead, dinner was more like being licked by a cat. It's a nice gesture and is meant to feel good, but it really doesn't. Thanks to everyone, though, who sent e-cards!! We'll just have to celebrate extra next year.
The next day we were off to Cianjur, where the PDS/R teams are mostly male. I told them a refresher training is coming up, and they told me to make it as long as possible. Why? Because they are still single. I guess PDS/R trainings are good places to meet potential mates? Geez, maybe I should be going to more of them! Another day observing PDS/R officers at work, and then we spent the night high up in the hills near Bandung. The hotel was pretty ok but the traffic noise was terrible. My mom would have loved the area, though. There were tons of plant nurseries with some really neat plants. The higher we went (= cooler climate) the more familiar some of the plant species looked. Wednesday was Ciamhi City, where, again, we have a pretty excellent team working hard for us. And a military academy. We returned to Jakarta Wed night and headed back out again for the day on Thursday to neighboring Bekasi, where they are reporting lots of avian influenza.
What made Thursday remarkable is that it was the start of Ramadan. Indonesia is mostly Muslim, so people fast from sunup to sundown through the month of Ramadan. On the first day, no one is used to it, so they get tired quickly and don't want to do much. They must get dehydrated to since they can't even drink water. Unang explained to me that they can't drink because maybe a morsel of food stuck in the person's teeth would get washed down the throat, violating the fast. I suspect that explanation is just a silly Unanag thing. Anyone know for sure? All the lunch places at Deptan close for Ramadan, and non-Muslims have to bring lunch from home or order in. One must eat and drink somewhat discreetly so as not to "offend" those who are fasting. It is a "slow" month in the office and everywhere in Indonesia because people go home early and haven't much motivation to work to the usual standards. That meant we went out to a village in Bekasi on Thursday morning, where the whole village turned out to talk with and learn from the PDS/R teams, and were back in the office just after noon because no one wanted to take me out to see another team. Ah, well, thus is life during Ramadan, I suppose. However, it seems to make Jakarta traffic a bit better, which is surely a blessing.
Nice, the band has taken a break. My ears are pleased. In addition to my dead modem, the last 2 DVDs I have tried to watch - all pirated, of course; they cost <$1 each! - were apparently bad ones. I was maybe 30 min from the end of "Breaking and Entering" (sigh, Jude Law) and 40 min into "Motorcycle Diaries" when they just really couldn't be read anymore, either by my DVD player, which is tuned to handle pirated DVDs, or my laptop. Maybe tonight I will be a bit more lucky. I left early from Deptan on Thurs to recharge my electricity account, and the bloody office had closed at 2:30pm. Mind you, this was a day after my nearly-fruitless search for coffee at a decent hour of the morning. On the island of Java. (But the coffee experience here is a topic for another day.) Ali's housekeeper, Ikrab, seems practically impossible to communicate with. I really needed her to come last Friday after I had been in the field, and she came an hour late, after I had already left for work. Sadly, I am giving up on Ikrab and trying someone new. Maybe nothing here works - modem, DVDs, lunch during Ramadan, the gym during the month of November, the office that dispenses electricity, the postal service - but at least I can keep trying to find a housekeeper who shows up when she is supposed to!
The smokers have moved in behind me, so I may need to migrate soon. I am borrowing Jen's laptop later so I can Skype my family tonight before my parents leave for Peru. I'll also grab a bite to eat here at the mall so I can take a break from chicken and rice. I love rice, but once per day is enough. Although, I have found this really yummy, organic red rice...
More to come this week! Planned topics for future blogs include: apartment living, java on Java, malls/shopping, food & food safety, and fashion. I hope to get to the apartment topic this week, since I will be in Deptan.
Love to all, Edie
Yes, I have not posted in a while. I really have an excuse, though, and it was not for a lack of desire. My satellite modem died this past Monday while I was in the field, so I am very painfully at a loss for communications with the world outside my head and outside Jakarta. I had a little time at the office on Friday but it wasn't nearly enough. To check email and write this blog, I have sucked it up and come to the "Cheetos" mall. [I have no idea how to really spell the name of the mall, but everyone knows it by Cheetos - as long as it is pronounced properly. I had a dumb taksi driver who couldn't understand my American pronunciation of Cheetos, so I panicked and called Cipu, one of our translators. Apparently this idiot wanted me to make the "chi" sound more harsh so I sounded like an Indonesian. How annoying.] So now that I know how to properly pronounce Cheetos like an Indonesian, I took a taxi out here to get my internet fix. This means I have to sit at the mall and be assaulted by the sounds of the Indonesian "rock" band playing nearby. I'm talking covers of Celine Dion, people, and other songs you haven't heard in 20 or 30 years. Add in speaker feedback and children screeching songs like a nightmare of karaoke in hell. Not to mention the cigarette smoke. I hope you understand how desperate I am to be in touch!
After my last posting, we spent 2 more days in the induction workshop. Funny how the audience got smaller and smaller as the Tamrin bigwigs would put in an hour of "facetime" and take off. The FPFs (field program facilitators - Stacie, Jen, and me, plus Ali until she is promoted) stayed behind one evening to have a glass of wine at the hotel. Ah, good wine. Y'all in California have no idea how spoiled you are! Then we piled into buses and drove out to Bogor, where we checked in to a pretty decent hotel. Friday night was our cultural presentation evening. I was shocked at how Ibu Ade - the head of the avian flu Campaign Management Unit (CMU) - belted out the songs, played the guitar, and danced. Lots of dancing to Indonesian pop songs that never seem to end. Of course I got dragged into the dancing, which seems to have made an impression on people. I caught them off guard with my skills - hahahahaha. We spent the next day doing team-building challenges in the jungle. For the most physical challenges, my team turned out to be all petite women and one short guy. Needless to say, we did not excel at any of the physical feats, but our guy, Ata, sure loved the attention he got in the trust circle!
Then I got one day back in Jakarta to recover by the pool, and then it was off to the field. Because the Bogor area is very close to Jakarta, we took Unang, one of the staff drivers, instead of hiring an outside driver. I get along pretty well with Unang, but they sent us in the sedan, which isn't exactly an ideal field vehicle. Especially when we have a pickup and an SUV driving people around Jakarta, looking cool. Efa was assigned as my translator, and Ibu Mundi from CMU was my government chaperone. All in all, we had a pretty good trip. The PDS/R team in Sukabumi City had never been visited by anyone from FAO, and I liked them a lot. I think they are doing a darn good job, given the circumstances. That first night was my birthday. We went out for dinner to celebrate. One big difference between home and Indonesia: when you go out for your birthday here, you are expected to pay for everyone. I wasn't prepared for that, so when the bill came... Not expensive, of course. But it would just have been nice to have something feel like home on my birthday. Instead, dinner was more like being licked by a cat. It's a nice gesture and is meant to feel good, but it really doesn't. Thanks to everyone, though, who sent e-cards!! We'll just have to celebrate extra next year.
The next day we were off to Cianjur, where the PDS/R teams are mostly male. I told them a refresher training is coming up, and they told me to make it as long as possible. Why? Because they are still single. I guess PDS/R trainings are good places to meet potential mates? Geez, maybe I should be going to more of them! Another day observing PDS/R officers at work, and then we spent the night high up in the hills near Bandung. The hotel was pretty ok but the traffic noise was terrible. My mom would have loved the area, though. There were tons of plant nurseries with some really neat plants. The higher we went (= cooler climate) the more familiar some of the plant species looked. Wednesday was Ciamhi City, where, again, we have a pretty excellent team working hard for us. And a military academy. We returned to Jakarta Wed night and headed back out again for the day on Thursday to neighboring Bekasi, where they are reporting lots of avian influenza.
What made Thursday remarkable is that it was the start of Ramadan. Indonesia is mostly Muslim, so people fast from sunup to sundown through the month of Ramadan. On the first day, no one is used to it, so they get tired quickly and don't want to do much. They must get dehydrated to since they can't even drink water. Unang explained to me that they can't drink because maybe a morsel of food stuck in the person's teeth would get washed down the throat, violating the fast. I suspect that explanation is just a silly Unanag thing. Anyone know for sure? All the lunch places at Deptan close for Ramadan, and non-Muslims have to bring lunch from home or order in. One must eat and drink somewhat discreetly so as not to "offend" those who are fasting. It is a "slow" month in the office and everywhere in Indonesia because people go home early and haven't much motivation to work to the usual standards. That meant we went out to a village in Bekasi on Thursday morning, where the whole village turned out to talk with and learn from the PDS/R teams, and were back in the office just after noon because no one wanted to take me out to see another team. Ah, well, thus is life during Ramadan, I suppose. However, it seems to make Jakarta traffic a bit better, which is surely a blessing.
Nice, the band has taken a break. My ears are pleased. In addition to my dead modem, the last 2 DVDs I have tried to watch - all pirated, of course; they cost <$1 each! - were apparently bad ones. I was maybe 30 min from the end of "Breaking and Entering" (sigh, Jude Law) and 40 min into "Motorcycle Diaries" when they just really couldn't be read anymore, either by my DVD player, which is tuned to handle pirated DVDs, or my laptop. Maybe tonight I will be a bit more lucky. I left early from Deptan on Thurs to recharge my electricity account, and the bloody office had closed at 2:30pm. Mind you, this was a day after my nearly-fruitless search for coffee at a decent hour of the morning. On the island of Java. (But the coffee experience here is a topic for another day.) Ali's housekeeper, Ikrab, seems practically impossible to communicate with. I really needed her to come last Friday after I had been in the field, and she came an hour late, after I had already left for work. Sadly, I am giving up on Ikrab and trying someone new. Maybe nothing here works - modem, DVDs, lunch during Ramadan, the gym during the month of November, the office that dispenses electricity, the postal service - but at least I can keep trying to find a housekeeper who shows up when she is supposed to!
The smokers have moved in behind me, so I may need to migrate soon. I am borrowing Jen's laptop later so I can Skype my family tonight before my parents leave for Peru. I'll also grab a bite to eat here at the mall so I can take a break from chicken and rice. I love rice, but once per day is enough. Although, I have found this really yummy, organic red rice...
More to come this week! Planned topics for future blogs include: apartment living, java on Java, malls/shopping, food & food safety, and fashion. I hope to get to the apartment topic this week, since I will be in Deptan.
Love to all, Edie
Thursday, September 6, 2007
laundry racks
Yes, I have been remiss in updating my blog in a timely fashion. Sorry.
All I wanted to do when I came home from my week in Yogya was sleep in, go to the gym, and shop with Dale. I did all those things but had to spend last Sunday at Eric/Dale/Robyn's house learning how to handle chickens and ducks. Fortunately, our learning included vaccinating and drawing blood, but NOT killing. Yea! I don't mind eating chickens but, as a veterinarian, I also don't need to kill any more beings than is absolutely necessary.
Yogya was nice. I like it there. I stayed at a fairly "upscale backpacker" hotel, if such a thing exists, near Jalan Malioboro - the main tourist shopping drag. The folks at the Local Disease Control Center (LDCC, remember this one) were really good to work with. On my first day in the field, we made the rounds meeting people, then had a truly lovely lunch with the PDS officers. Goat sate and an orange squash in a nice outdoor setting, with gamelan music in the background. Cost less than $1.50 per person - amazing! Then we were off to a village that had recently had a die-off in their chickens. Most of the carcasses had been buried and burned (the proper means of disposal) by the time we got there. We tested one surviving bird, which was negative for active virus shedding, and then went to look at the river where some of the villagers had thrown carcasses. While at the river, a woman brought us a dead chicken and a dead chick. Yep - positive for influenza. HPAI up close and personal!! Don't worry - I didn't touch it and I was wearing my N95 respirator mask. Got some great photos; I'll try to post those soon.
The rest of the week wasn't nearly as exciting, but being in the field is certainly better than sitting in front of my computer in a noisy office. I visited more PDS teams, chatted with a woman vet, and I attended the LDCC monthly meeting along with all the local PDS/R officers. I also indulged in some retail therapy, including a trip to a local school of batik art. Or so I was told. Not sure if it was the truth or not. But there was some lovely art that will hopefully grace a few American walls one of these days. I also found that there were 2 new Anita Blake novels (urgh!) so I had to pick them up. Doritos for the brain. Or maybe worse. Pop-tarts?
This week I've been back at Deptan preparing for the Induction Workshop we are now having at a really nice hotel called the Grand Kemang. It is supposed to be an overview of the entire project for everyone involved. Too bad so many of the higher-ups chose not to attend. We have a good crew of Indonesians involved, though. In the next few months our training team hopes to conduct a total of 93 initial and refresher trainings for PDS/R officers. Quite an undertaking. I apparently now have government clearance and, thus, official permission to work in Indonesia and travel for work. Next week I am supposed to go to visit a few of the districts under direction of the Bogor LDCC. Bogor is really near Jakarta, and the site of our "team building" workshop starting tomorrow evening, but I will travel a bit farther afield in West Java. If all actually goes according to plans...
So, that's all for now. I had to send out laundry plus do a big load of my own, so I have drying clothes all over the place. The housekeeper Ali, Jen, Stacie, and I are sharing is not quite consistent or easy to communicate with. If it weren't for the huge annoyance factor of the manual washing machine (to be explained later), I wouldn't even bother having someone come in!
E
All I wanted to do when I came home from my week in Yogya was sleep in, go to the gym, and shop with Dale. I did all those things but had to spend last Sunday at Eric/Dale/Robyn's house learning how to handle chickens and ducks. Fortunately, our learning included vaccinating and drawing blood, but NOT killing. Yea! I don't mind eating chickens but, as a veterinarian, I also don't need to kill any more beings than is absolutely necessary.
Yogya was nice. I like it there. I stayed at a fairly "upscale backpacker" hotel, if such a thing exists, near Jalan Malioboro - the main tourist shopping drag. The folks at the Local Disease Control Center (LDCC, remember this one) were really good to work with. On my first day in the field, we made the rounds meeting people, then had a truly lovely lunch with the PDS officers. Goat sate and an orange squash in a nice outdoor setting, with gamelan music in the background. Cost less than $1.50 per person - amazing! Then we were off to a village that had recently had a die-off in their chickens. Most of the carcasses had been buried and burned (the proper means of disposal) by the time we got there. We tested one surviving bird, which was negative for active virus shedding, and then went to look at the river where some of the villagers had thrown carcasses. While at the river, a woman brought us a dead chicken and a dead chick. Yep - positive for influenza. HPAI up close and personal!! Don't worry - I didn't touch it and I was wearing my N95 respirator mask. Got some great photos; I'll try to post those soon.
The rest of the week wasn't nearly as exciting, but being in the field is certainly better than sitting in front of my computer in a noisy office. I visited more PDS teams, chatted with a woman vet, and I attended the LDCC monthly meeting along with all the local PDS/R officers. I also indulged in some retail therapy, including a trip to a local school of batik art. Or so I was told. Not sure if it was the truth or not. But there was some lovely art that will hopefully grace a few American walls one of these days. I also found that there were 2 new Anita Blake novels (urgh!) so I had to pick them up. Doritos for the brain. Or maybe worse. Pop-tarts?
This week I've been back at Deptan preparing for the Induction Workshop we are now having at a really nice hotel called the Grand Kemang. It is supposed to be an overview of the entire project for everyone involved. Too bad so many of the higher-ups chose not to attend. We have a good crew of Indonesians involved, though. In the next few months our training team hopes to conduct a total of 93 initial and refresher trainings for PDS/R officers. Quite an undertaking. I apparently now have government clearance and, thus, official permission to work in Indonesia and travel for work. Next week I am supposed to go to visit a few of the districts under direction of the Bogor LDCC. Bogor is really near Jakarta, and the site of our "team building" workshop starting tomorrow evening, but I will travel a bit farther afield in West Java. If all actually goes according to plans...
So, that's all for now. I had to send out laundry plus do a big load of my own, so I have drying clothes all over the place. The housekeeper Ali, Jen, Stacie, and I are sharing is not quite consistent or easy to communicate with. If it weren't for the huge annoyance factor of the manual washing machine (to be explained later), I wouldn't even bother having someone come in!
E
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