Anyways, Sara and I moved out of our apartment after one month and went to Jogjakarta for a few days. Jogja is famous for being the cultural capital of Java. We went and saw the famous Buddhist Borobudur Temple (supposedly the most-visited site in Indonesia), the Hindu Prambanan Temples, we saw the Ramayana ballet, and saw a shadow puppet show. All famous sites and performances!
Days after Jogjakarta we flew to West Timor for a week to work on a malnutrition project with the Foundation for Mother and Child Health (one of the organizations I had been volunteering with in Jakarta). West Timor is geographically close to Australia, so it was a long flight. We were picked up in Kupang, the "big" city, and driven to a remote village called Anin 4 hours away in the mountains. As soon as we got there the village held a welcome ceremony for us, and ceremoniously gave us ikat (the local woven cloth that the region is famous for) that we wore around our necks to show our acceptance into their community. At the end of the ceremony we walked around and met the villagers. The traditional way to greet people is to bump noses. Villagers stood in a line to bump noses with me! Another tradition that we were introduced to was the customary betel nut. Most adults spend the majority of their day chewing out betel nut, which is actually the seeds of the betel nut, wrapped in a leaf with chalk. It reacts with saliva and turns bright red... and you're not supposed to swallow the juice so you have to continually spit. This accounts for the red splotchy ground all over the village!
We stayed in a 4 bedroom house with the rest of the team. The house used to be the village king's house, supposedly, which explains the large size and the sturdy concrete walls and floor. Most villagers live in a tiny house made of wood slats with aluminum roofs. Most houses had a thatched hut behind it, which was used for storage of food or crops and oftentimes was where the kitchen was located. The village was spread out and covered a side of a mountain. One day we walked down to the river valley and it was an hour long strenuous hike down a dirt path. I can't imagine being a villager and living down there, and having to walk up anytime I needed to go to Church, market, or a community meeting.
The village's biggest problem is water access. During the rainy season, the river serves as the primary source of water for drinking/cooking/bathing/laundry/etc, but the rainy season lasts only a few months. The rest of the year the community has to purchase water... and water is quite expensive (not to mention how difficult it would be to transport by foot down the mountain). The lack of water also creates a huge problem for agriculture. Many months out of the year farming is impossible, and so they have to depend on purchased food during this time. There is no established industry, no jobs other than farming.... so people don't really have any money. And for the few government-sponsored jobs, like school teacher for example, the salary is only 250,000 Rupiah or about $20 per month. This was such an eye-opening experience!
The team that we were staying with consisted of 8 people: 5 from Jakarta and 3 West Timorese locals. On the team was a doctor that served as project supervisor (he had initiated the Timor Project and was the one who had invited me), a project manager, 2 health educators, an Early Learning Center teacher, and the 3 locals (one who served as the driver). They lived together and worked together and seemed to really enjoy the experience. Anyways, prior to our arrival they had spent a few months going house-to-house compiling information on the health status of children under 5. This baseline survey covered everything from malnutrition and anemia rates to diseases like malaria and diarrhea. The day that we arrived the health educators were presenting the baseline results to the community health workers. The Foundation's role, as I was explicitly told, was not to develop a program for the village... it was merely to guide, facilitate, and motivate the village to identify problems and solutions. The health educators were using a method called Participatory Rural Appraisal (PRA) to do so. Sara and I arrived just in time to see it in action, which was awesome because I finally feel like I am seeing the subject of my university studies. The PRA consisted of day long "seminars" in our house for about a week. The health educators led focus group discussions on common village health behaviors and misconceptions, they did a village mapping to identify resources at hand, they made a timeline to look at the challenges and successes of the health workers in the past, etc. They also did a basic health training, discussing the role of carbs, proteins, vitamins & minerals in our diet. The end result was a project plan that included a more comprehensive training for health workers, health training to village mothers, and monthly meetings to report back to one another on their progress in their own sub-villages. The health educators weren't thrilled with it, saying they thought it was too simple, but at least its something to start with.
The other aspect of the Foundation's work in Timor (health aside) is the Early Learning Center, like a kindergarten. The ELC teacher from Jakarta trained some ELC teachers in the village, and now the village 3-6 year-olds attend "class" with their moms or dads. The idea is to start the learning process at a younger age so the kids can get into and do well in the government schools.
The Foundation is expanding its health and education services to some neighboring villages. In our week there we were taken to 2 different villages to talk about the details. Both were really interesting experiences. One community couldn't even talk in a civil way about the ELC because the community was so torn apart... the women wouldn't stop yelling at each other. Apparently one of the health workers had given away all the food donations (these villages get food donations from international orgs like World Food Program) to her own family members, leaving nothing for her own village. There was so much hostility at our meeting because of the "stolen Biscuit" incident that discussing the logistics of an ELC was futile. It's scary to think that families are dependent on this donated food for survival. It's also really interesting to see the division between eating for survival's sake, and eating for nutrition. It's really frustrating for us to see international orgs distributing only biscuits and instant noodles, when their young bodies need so much more. Furthermore, our own nutrition team (from Jakarta, university-educated) did not have very high standards of nutrition. Sure, they incorporated fruits and vegetables, but every meal we ate was fried... fried rice, fried bananas, fried tofu, fried eggplant, fried noodles. Deep-fried everything, combined with rice 3 times a day, made me feel SO unhealthy! Sara and I made an American meal one night for dinner- spaghetti, green beans, and a potato dish... nothing was fried- and most of them didn't like it. They even took our leftover spaghetti and fried it. Unbelievable! ;-)
Sara and I had expressed interest in visiting a nearby village that is famous for being so traditional. I wasn't so impressed with the village, because honestly my village was about as traditional as this one, but the fun part was that we took motorcycles to get there. The entire team went, and so we hired 10 guys with motorcycles to take us. We drove as a group all the way to the village (about an hour and a half each way)... honking at schoolchildren, racing one another, taking pictures of the scenery. It was a great opportunity to see more of West Timor because we went up and over mountains and saw numerous villages. What fun!
Now we are back in Jakarta, and we moved into a bedroom rented out by a wealthy family. We have plans to go on a day-trip tomorrow to the neighboring city of Bandung to see the town and its volcano. Sara is staying in Jakarta until January, but I am preparing to leave... to meet mom in Bali on December 3, and then fly home on December 15! Yay!
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