2nd Nov ramblings :)

I came back from a day trip to Salang last night. Japanese Red Cross organised a big handing over ceremony for their housing and health centre projects, which are now finished there. They invited all the big wigs from JRC, the Federation (or IFRC, which coordinates all of the RC societies), the local construction authority BRR and even the governor of Aceh. The NGOs on Sim were also invited, as well as the locals.

They set up stalls with activities for kids, food to sell, beautiful crafts from Salang to buy and even a stage for local dancing and a singing contest at the end of the afternoon! It was a good day and it went really well. Chigusa, the Japanese delegate who organised all the festivities, has been stressed for the last month, and was looking pretty tired yesterday by the end! But I think she was generally happy with the result.

Unforutnately the govt also organised the official opening of the new Lasikin airport terminal (a very fancy building for such a little island with hardly any visitors!), which meant that all the important people didn't arrive until 4pm (was supposed to start at 2), so a late start meant a late finish.

We are not supposed to travel at night here, becaues the roads are so dodgy, but I just wanted to get home - and I'm glad I did because we have a teleconference with Melbourne office this morning that was organised yesterday! - and by the time we left, which was 6:45 - it had already started to get dark. Luckily we made it back in under 2 hours - which is a record, our driver Misbah went a bit faster than normal!

The head of IFRC is a New Zealand bloke based in Banda Aceh, and he and his daughter (who was visiting on holiday) came to dinner with us Wed night at my boss' place. So it was good to meet them and have some nice Indonesian food and a few bevvies.

We have a week-long Monitoring and Evaluation of our WatSan program next week, which will really help us to know exactly where we're at and how things are going. We have an M&E delegate, Marty, coming here specifically for this purpose. He's a champ too, he's from Adelaide and I did my Red Cross training with him back in 2005. There will be G&T!

In terms of my health and well-being (as you're all very concerned), I'm feeling fine. Not overly tired or anything, just back to normal I think. I've been out and about in the field, active on the weekends, and so far it's all good. Everyone is BA is getting sick though - when I was there this week people were sounding terrble and half of them were working from home (or just trying to sleep it off!). I really hope I haven't picked up something from them, as I've gotta be here next week for this visit to Salang.

Rah! that's all.