Getting what you need - Shopping

Open air markets are the shopping centres for fresh local food, clothes, kitchen utensils & many other goods. Every village of any size hosts a market weekly or bi-weekly; our local market runs twice a week from about 7 to 10 am. Indonesian families may be more likely to own a television than a refrigerator, which seemed quite strange to me at first. But after a trip to the market, things are a little clearer. When you can grow food all year around, long-term food storage is less of a priority. Rice is dried of course, so even in areas where only one crop a year can be grown, it’s easily stored. Fruit comes into season at different times of the year, so while you can’t find mangos now (December & January is harvest time for these), rambutan & durian are available. Papayas are still growing & will be ready to eat in a month or two. Market vegetables (tomatoes, potatoes, beans, water spinach & others) are grown pretty much continuously. 

So, why would you need a fridge? The ice cream guy drives by on his motorbike with a cooler mounted on the rear seat at least once a day. The other strange (to me) thing, ‘though is that fresh dairy products are non-existent in smaller towns & villages. Milk is sold in powdered or canned version. I say “strange” because there seems to be no shortage of cows & goats resident in these areas. I assume they are raised for their meat & the milk is taken to be processed. Processed "cheese" food, regular milk & margarine are available in larger towns, but only one (pricey) store in Makassar that caters mostly to expats stocks yoghurt, cheese & butter. Let me tell you: you quickly realize how heavily a North American diet leans on dairy food when you can’t get any.

The local lawn service providing mowing & fertilizing, but not milk.

Aside from Indonesians who make their living farming or fishing, there are probably millions of independent businesses run by individuals & families here. Most common are small shops (toko) & diners (warung) which can be found in even the tiniest settlements. The shops sell a variety of necessities - soap, candy, batteries, coffee, bread, & all sorts of processed goods (cookies, ramen noodles, etc). 

Indonesians talk about food the same way Canadians talk about the weather, even ‘though it’s not terribly interesting & much less variable than spring in New Brunswick. Warungs may specialize in seafood, chicken or meat (with rice or noodles), but even though they’re all independently owned the menus are predictable and seem to be designed by one big central franchiser. 

Other small businesses seem to be ruled by extreme specialization; roadside stalls will have fish or vegetables or fruit & very rarely more than one type of item. This tendency persists in many shops in larger cities selling manufactured goods. A while back a couple of us went looking for motorbike gloves & quickly learned that a store selling helmets does not sell gloves, or anything else you might need for your bike.

Almost everyone uses cell phones (landlines can only be found in offices), and stalls selling pulsa (time for your phone) are common as well. And cheap - approximately $1.20 Cdn for enough time to give you about 3 weeks of texting & talking.

So, let’s get down to prices - what does it cost to live here? My volunteer allowance is roughly $8.00 Cdn per day, which is well more than adequate to buy food, drinking water, phone time, gas, & some extras. Housing is provided under our agreements, & although some volunteers have to buy electricity, I don’t. In fact, my allowance is luxurious compared to my work partner, who earns slightly more than half of what I do. Rent for a modest house may run between $700 to $800 Cdn a year, but even quite a large house won’t be much more than $1200 Cdn annually. Gas, about $0.25 per litre, water, $1.30 for a large dispenser container. Indonesians are amazed when I tell them what I earned at my last Canadian job - but I’m careful to qualify the amount by also telling them our prices, including the cost of heat in winter.

In Denpasar (& Jakarta, I assume, although I haven’t been there yet) you can find pretty much any consumer good you need from computers to yoghurt. Fewer “western” goods can be found in Makassar, but many large malls are springing up there with department stores, bakeries, electronic shops, hardware & of course, Starbucks, McDonalds, Pizza Hut & KFC. Dunkin’ Donuts has gotten in on the ground floor here, & Indonesians (like most everyone else) love donuts - there’s an opportunity here for Tim Horton’s. 

New job, new house

Didn’t really expect to be wearing socks to bed for warmth while living in Indonesia, but my new home is a bit chilly & it has been raining quite a lot over the last 3 weeks. I invested in a fleece blanket, am glad I packed jeans & several long-sleeved shirts & it’s a nice change not to be continuously sweating while simply sitting on the couch. 

Amir collecting samples

I’m living in the left half of the house (photo on left). Cristine, a graduate student from Italy who is studying macaques; their behaviour, eating preferences, and nutrition; shares the other half with her assistant, Amir, who is multi-talented and indispensable. He climbs 40-metre trees to gather samples, cooks dinners, fixes electrical cords, cleans fish, does motorcycle maintenance etc. etc. Cristine has been here for almost 3 years, so we communicate in bahasa Indonesia - me not having much Italian (that is, none). I’m sure I’m now picking up the accent with my bahasa ‘though, so it’ll be a strange variant that I’m speaking. I went out to the forest with them a couple of weeks ago & saw one large monkey travelling through. There are 3 bands in the local area - 2 resident in UnHas forest and one in Bantimurang National Forest, the boundaries of which abut the Learning Forest. 

The picture to the left is my side yard - a wide rice field surrounded by the limestone hills. The higher elevations have pine forests and lower down the slopes are covered with mixed species dipterocarp forest. The karst geology leaves a landscape with steep-sided hills, frequent landslides in the rainy season & river valleys that vary from narrow to wide plains. I saw an article in the news that karst is also subject to sinkholes - one of these swallowed a man in Florida a couple of weeks ago. That’s not one of my major concerns. It’s a beautiful landscape & a relatively quiet location. The road is about 100 metres downhill, so there’s some traffic noise, constant hum of insects and a weird snuffling noise outside my house last week (I didn’t get up to check - sounded like a wild pig, which is possible). I’ve started seeds for a garden - lettuce, tomatoes, beans, zucchini & herbs - and am looking forward to fresh produce in a few months. The local market is convenient (2 days a week), but I’m pretty sure I can grow equivalent or better veggies right outside my front door.

Tree roots on rock

Local scenery

The job? Well, it has some potential. My work partner Nasri & I have several projects that will make the Learning Forest a more valuable and organized resource for research, education and local outreach that are priorities for the university. We’re developing a short after-school environmental programme, need to start work on a waste management plan for the main site, and delineate boundaries of the agroforestry model area as a first step in establishing that as a learning tool. I’m being very generous with our timeline - in six months we may see a few baby step results.

About once a week or so I should be able to get into the city, Makassar (when the cats aren't using my bike) to work at the university office & eventually teach a couple of subjects. Not to mention, get a caffeine fix at Starbucks & pick up some groceries. Next week is already looking busy - a quick trip to Singapore for visa renewal, then a two-day session given by Mangrove Action Project to learn about rehabilitation of degraded coastline habitat. More on this later.

Adapting to change - again

True to form, I’ve changed jobs after only 3 months with the forestry office in Jeneponto. Not my fault, I swear. One of the things I’ve learned about development work, from my placement and through talking to other volunteers, is that the work partner’s perception of appropriate employment for a volunteer often conflicts with CUSO & VSO clear understanding of our role. We’re employed to build capacity & share our skills with the work partner and employees of the organizations in which we’re placed. Unfortunately, many volunteers are frequently expected to just do the work themselves or, as in my case with the forestry office, to simply be present & add “prestige” to the office simply by being the “pet” foreigner. The outcome was that I was assigned no tasks, no people to train & no resources with which to train them. Imagine my confusion when one of the reasons my work partner stated for wanting a volunteer was to train employees to use the GIS system for mapping & I arrive at the office to find that there are no computers. None. Tough to accomplish the goal. The forestry office simply had no practical use for or plan of how to employ a volunteer, but had applied anyway, and been assigned one (me). VSO staff have told us that often organizations in countries that are international aid recipients will simply apply for anything & everything - money, resources or people - and see what they get. And a volunteer is not the grand prize, with the requirement to house us & ease our adaptation to a different culture & language. I’m sure most work partners are thinking “just send cash”, particularly when they realize that we have an expectation of meaningful employment, which means that they should have some kind of long-term strategy for development of their activity areas. We often feel more like the booby prize - especially after our morning bath with a bucket of cold water.

It’s actually rather a grim commentary on awareness & planning by international aid programs, and the overall effectiveness of volunteers.  Work partners that have no plan, recognition of value of the resource, or ability to effectively employ volunteers are frequently failing to take advantage of the valuable knowledge & skills sitting at an empty desk in their offices. Often, the result is that volunteers leave placements early with a sense of having failed to accomplish even the most basic goals in passing on skills that are patently lacking in their work partner’s organizations. And probably go home with a jaded view of international aid itself. 

Luckily (I think) an alternate placement in Indonesia was available, and I’ve moved to the province of Maros (still in South Sulawesi) to a small community called Bengo. It’s in an area of karst ecology, limestone hills & thick forests. I’m living in the Learning Forest owned and operated by the Forestry Faculty of the University Hasanuddin (UnHas), which is in Makassar, 2 hours southwest of here. My job will be to assist the forest manager in creating a long-term plan for use of the forest, and perhaps in a few months teach a couple of courses at UnHas. That makes my inner bahasa-Indonesian-speaking self quail a bit, but it’s certainly motivation to improve my language skills.  

So, will my employment in this placement fit the volunteer role of sharing skills & capacity-building? Maybe. When I say “it’s not just me”, I know - because almost every other volunteer I’ve talked to in this country and in a couple of others have run up against the same brick wall. Another example: An application from an organization states that they need a volunteer to train local staff on how to create video training materials. But they find it’s easier just to have the volunteer videographer film the material themselves, rather than motivate local staff to learn the skill. Then the volunteer leaves after a year, and the organization applies for the next one, failing to realize, or not caring, that the opportunity to have the knowledge in-house & on an ongoing-basis has been lost, again. It’s a problem. It needs to be addressed. How is a question for aid experts to answer, but the first step is recognition. Otherwise, we’re all wasting our time.