Anyway, the usual 2 hour 'lunch break' that restricts trading and movement for prayer at the central mosque still occurred. Since then it's been pissing down so I've been at the office just familiarising myself with a few things and stuffing around on the internet.
I spent 4 days in Salang this week. This is the small district about 3 hours drive from Sinabang within in which we undertake our WatSan program. It's amazing driving around the island because it is now surrounded by up to 100m of exposed coral reef. It looks like rock now, because the coral is dead. But it really shows the geological change caused by the earthquake. The island is really beautiful, palm trees fringing the beaches and rainforest inland. The villages are quite small and close together, and the houses line the road. Many of them are a result of NGO construction projects and look quite new. Interestingly many of them are built from timber that is sourced from New Zealand pine plantations. Makes it a lot more expensive, but thankfully saves the rainforests of Indonesia!
I went to Salang with the 2 engineers, 2 hygiene promoters and 4 construction supervisors and spent the week finding out what we do. To me, it doesn't make a lot of sense to construct latrines from brick and cement when wood is more flexible for earthquakes, but bricks are apparently the most easily produced in the villages and therefore we use them. Each household builds their own latrine after an assessment of need, participating in 5 steps of a participatory health/hygiene program and a demonstration of how to construct the latrines. The latrines are a squat plate design and have a mandi (small 'bath' filled with water which is used to flush the latrine) inside. Then a fibreglass septic tank is built behind the latrine with a soakaway pit for the liquid, which is filled with coral and sand and plants are planted in the top to absorb the nutrients. It seems to work well. I was amazed that they use coral for the soakaway pits, it doesn't seem a very environmentally sustainable thing to do - but when the coral is dead, I guess it's not really as vulnerable to damage any more! It's mainly habitat for crabs now.
One problem with the latrines is that there is currently no fully developed method to empty the septic tanks once they are full of sludge. This is something I'd like to solve while I'm here. Apparently some pump designs have been trialed but I'm not sure of the status yet. It's definitely not practical to get a sewage truck in and around the houses to pump out the sludge! A septic tank typically takes 5 years to fill with sludge, so hopefully that's enough time to sort this out...
The component of the WatSan program that needs the most work is the health/hygiene promotion program. We follow a tried and tested participatory method called PHAST, which in itself is an effective method of achieving behaviour change and ownership of infrastructure (and which I used in Liberia), but the problem is the way in which it's executed.
We currently use Indonesian Red Cross "Palang Merah Indonesia" or PMI volunteers to assist in running the sessions, but they are not necessarily highly skilled despite having received some training, and there is currently a shit-fight going on between the volunteers that come from Salang district itself, and those that we carry to the field every second week from Sinabang (here, where we live). This is because they get different per diem rates: 35,000 Rp for Salang volunteers compared to 80,000 for Sinabang - all because they are going outside of their district to do the work. As you can imagine, the Salang volunteers aren't very happy about it! Something I need to sort out.
In addition, I can't really judge too well just how effective the volunteers are at delivering the hygiene sessions, because I don't speak Bahasa Indonesian! So I can only go on speaking style, body language etc. Makes things challenging... I am hoping to really get the PHAST side of things ramped up so its more effective.
I'm spending next week in the office, hopefully this will give me a chance to work out what the hell is going on.
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