Here's the thing...

Ok, so seeing as my sister has yet to ban me from posting despite no longer being anywhere exotic I’m taking that as indication that she so deeply enjoys my writing that she wants me to keep posting. Hello from London!…where the bombings continue to dominate the news and the plucky Londoners continue to get on board bues and the tube without batting an eye. It really is something the way they’ve rolled over the incident as though it were common occurrence. However, it is in keeping with their national character that displays no public emotion under stressful circumstances until some seemingly random tragedy sets the country off and then displays public emotion wholly out of all proportion to the actual event - ie. the death of Princess Diana. Last night I went to dinner with friends who live between the Liverpool Street and Altgate East stops and they were completely preoccupied with the latest questions on the investigation and not at all concerned that the trains being picked out...

Apparently, my sister has forgotten to change the password settings which still allows me to post! (Lucky, lucky YOU!) Am no longer in Indonesia - PRAISE THE LORD! - but am in Ukraine and thought I would send an update on the scene here from the U.S.’s new best friend - sorry UK. I was last here in November, immediately prior to the second election of orange revolution fame, and was curious if upon return I would find the country different…well, at all. I have to admit that I was skeptical. The U.S. is notorious for getting behind the revolution du jour and then forgetting about it while the new government slides into the same corrupt pit into which the last one lived. Then, six or so years later, we rise indignant shaking our head and wagging our finger and help a new government ascend the throne. It’s a beautiful system, actually, we feel good about ourselves and isn’t that what’s important? I digress… The question remains how is the orange revolution doing six months on? And, ...

I arrived back in DC late Monday night - having left in a blizzard and returning to summer – which made me feel as though the weather had decided that spring just wasn’t worth the effort. Apart from someone kindly declaring a federal holiday there wasn’t much fanfare for my return. A Chinese woman on the plane next to me puked on my feet when we landed, which robbed me of that thrilling moment of touching down on American soil. It was strange to leave Indonesia just when things in the relief effort were getting started and my three months there seemed both very long and very short. The past months have blurred together in a whirl of helicopter flights, stories, articles, earthquakes, snorkeling, and housing and fishing projects. At the end of it, I find that most of the work I did was on a computer in an office - mundane and removed from people’s lives. It never quite seemed to live up to the romantic moniker, ‘humanitarian aid’ it had b...

1. You see a chicken crossing the road and you spend a good ten minutes seriously considering why the chicken was crossing the road. 2. You’re so tired that you can sleep in any sort of contorted position in any sort of vehicle driving on any condition of road. 3. You’ve reached that special state of zen so that even when your driver decides to play chicken with a TNI army semi it doesn’t phase you. 4. The malaria medication runs out. 5. It drops to the low 90’s and seems cold. 6. You forget what warm water feels like…or why anyone would want warm water for anything. 7. You walk into a western-style toilet and have to stop and think how to use it. 8. Batting mosquitos with an electrified/glorified badminton racquet has become your idea of a ‘well-spent evening’. 9. The thought of eating another kernel of rice makes you physically ill. 10. You can no longer tell if you’re actually in an earthquake or imagining it…and you don’t really care.

Apart from the maddening heat the thing that is the most annoying here is the feeling that something is always, always crawling on you. And then to realize that's because something IS crawling on you. Ants, mosquitoes, flies, spiders - there's always something crawling around/on you. There are these particularly large kind of ants here that can't be killed by stepping on them. After you lift your foot there the ant is looking kind of dazed, perhaps with a broken leg or two, dragging itself off to mount a new attack with all its little friends. So in an attempt to get away from things crawling on me and the constant chatter of living with a gazillion people with whom you spend every waking hour, I headed for the roof. It was there, three stories up, waiting for the next big earthquake melt the place into a pile of rubble, I realized how absolutely absurd this disaster is. No kidding. I just spent most of the day writing a proposal for $700,000 of a $2.5 million grant that we...

So, don't tell him but we're killing them by the bucketload. Our logistician just walked through carrying the latest victim. I think the main problem is that we cleaned the fish pond (never clean ANYTHING is my general rule! Nothing good ever comes of it!) and refilled it with water from the well that was made brackish by the tsunami. Ooops! Oh, and there's also no aeration so the poor little things are up on the surface gulping oxygen like, well, like goldfish. This is all very interesting to me mostly because I have a head injury. This weekend a bunch of us went to Sabang (get a map and look it up) to snorkel and lay around on beautiful beaches. On Saturday we rented a boat to take us to a waterfall up in the dense jungle. It was pristine and beautiful and all the things that waterfalls hidden in the jungle are supposed to be but on the way back down I slipped and - to use the phrase of our Alabaman friend here - 'cacked' my head on a rock. Gash across my chin, co...

Today, I’m standing in the Medan airport checking in for a flight to Banda Aceh. Of course, they don’t have my reservation so I explain in pigeon English to the clerk the reason God invented ticketing. It must have been the concept with which he was struggling because my pigeon English was perfect. The conversation went a little something like this: Me: We pay you money so I fly. Him: No reservation. Me: Understand. We pay you money so I fly. We no pay you money so I sit in airport. No standby. Standby no good. Him: You name no on list. Me: I understand. Why we pay you money? Him: You buy ticket? Me: No, I no buy ticket. Administrator buy ticket. Him: Name no on list. Me: You fix. Him: Wait 30 minutes before flight. Me: We call that standby. Him: Yes. Standby. At which point - and the real point of this story: a guy walks up and tries to get onto our flight with—I’m not making this up—an AK47 and handgun that he sets on the counter when he hands his ticket over...

Good morning boys and girls. I’m writing in to say that I’ve already lived the day you’re just beginning and it’s not a good one so take my advice, and go back to bed. Woke up this morning under my mosquito net with only the prospect of a dirty well shower. There was nothing edible for breakfast. USAID has pulled PACTEC’s funding which means we’re losing high-speed internet in Meulaboh (WAY TO GO US GOVT!!). Wrote a touching piece about a woman having a baby on a rooftop in the midst of the tsunami. Had some water buffalo for lunch. Had a brief walk between the house and office where I got yelled at by every passing vehicle “HEY MISTA!! WHAT YOUR NAME?” It’s worse than Italy here. Found out a crucial flight out of here tomorrow was canceled and spent the better half of the afternoon at the Red Cross, Samaritan’s Purse, misc. airline offices, trying to chase down/schmooze my way on to a flight. Chartered a plane in the end. Canceled the charter. Will spend all of tomorrow at the airpo...

Felt like I reached a turning point in my trip here today when I poured a bowl of cereal this morning that was crawling with ants. I thought to myself, do I throw it out and eat hard white bread and jam, or do I ignore the ants, pour the milk on and get on with my day. I went for the latter. My sister kindly pointed out that I had failed in my last posting to talk about our most recent quake. So, here it is. We had a brutal earthquake! It was like nothing I'd been in before and we actually had to run for the doors. I have become the resident seismologist because I called it closest at a 7.8 while everyone else was insistent that it was around a 6.4. The title means that I get to speak with authority and overrule everyone else who's spouting off about upcoming quakes or seismic activity. Apart from that I'm now in Meulaboh sitting outside the UN tech tent listening to the mullah's wailing the prayer call. Kind of relaxing, actually. Flew in today with the South Afric...

Took a UN helicopter to Meulaboh. Here’s what waiting for 3 hours in the blistering sun looks like.

"Ferries are finished." The phrase kept coming to mind as I bobbed along for three hours on a fishing trawler somewhere in the 'Sea of Bastard Currents' between Sabang and Banda Aceh. ("Remember," Arief, our logistician had laughed the day before when dropping us off, "If the boat sinks then just try to float and you will wash up in Thailand or India eventually. Don't swim. The currents are bad.") The Indonesians use the phrase 'finished' to describe whatever you want that they aren't going to provide. "Chicken tonight?" "No. Chicken is finished." In our case the ferry back from the island where we'd gone snorkeling was 'finished.' Well, not finished exactly, just not coming back. It had decided - ferries have a mind of their own here apparently - not to come back for the rest of the day and to go to Meulaboh instead. Pequito problemo...our boss and the VP of the NGO was flying in from Jakarta to me...

Mmmmm...lunch!

Some houses destroyed by the tsunami.

Humidity. Mosquitoes. Earthquakes. Yep, that pretty much sums up my week. Oh, and one massive - albeit beautiful - report. I just returned from the PACTEC office (where there's high-speed internet) and I sent off this thing of beauty to the powers that be. I'm sure that it will bring me, and my teammates, all the fame and fortune, acclaim and accolades that we so richly deserve. Barring that, I'm hoping for a simple acknowledgement from HQ. Anyway, on to the fun stuff. Earthquakes. This week we've had some dooseys - all from 4-6.1 on the Richter scale. Having grown up in California I consider myself something of an earthquake veteran - meaning that I have a very well developed plan of action when an earthquake rolls in. Mostly it goes a little something like this: 1) Wake up. 2) Think to myself, 'hmmm, earthquake.' 3) Wait for it to stop. 4) Go back to sleep. See how well that works? None of this running and screaming for me, thank you very much. You might won...

Sundays are the worst. There's no church and so we spend the entire day trying not to work. However, since it's a Muslim country, everyone else is out and about their business and nothing is closed. So, today we (me and the two other expats here - two Brits and a Canadian) decided to get out - just drive and see what we could find. Since I'm the only one with an international driving license the driving fell to me. We headed out in our blue Kijang and found a restaurant in the part of town still standing. It wasn't a particularly good restaurant, according to the locals, it just happened to be one of the only ones still standing. Another good example of location being everything. Indonesian food is quite good; a lot of seafood and fried noodles and rice. After lunch we found a couple of MSF and UN vehicles across the street at the other restaurant in town so we're hoping that there's a place better than where we ate. Next, we decided to try to find the 'tank...

Indonesia is humid. I know that comes as no surprise to those of you who own a map but the reality of it is quite a different thing than the knowledge of it. And the strange thing is that there’s no other season. It’s hot and humid year round. No need for a change in wardrobe with the season the weather just stays the same and, at times, it rains more. In Medan now.

So, if you were going to choose any airport in the world in which to spend a quantity of time (read: 9 hours) then Singapore Changi is definitely the one! Free internet access, free movie theater, gardens, fish ponds, helpful staff who hang around at two in the morning to offer advice and direction, plenty of places to sit and sleep. As long as one doesn’t spit chewing gum on the carpet you’re sure to have a wonderful time.

It is a bad idea to try to go to Indonesia without an Indonesian visa. Correction: More accurately, it is a bad idea to trust that the Northwest Airline flight agents will know anything about Indonesian visas and let you board your flight without one…despite the fact that you have to be IN INDONESIA to get one and they do know that. I won’t classify this as an international incident but it was close. Still in DC. It’s snowing here and I’m dressed for 85 degree weather.

This is not Kristin and I am not writing from Idaho. (Praise the Lord!) However, I am Kristin’s sister and am writing from Washington, DC where I am about to leave for Banda Aceh, Indonesia. I’ll be three months there doing tsunami relief with an undisclosed organization - lest I get fired for my postings. For your reading pleasure, I will be posting from time to time about the wild and wacky time I’m having in refugee camps, or with the government, or with the GAM guerillas. Stay tuned…