Kate's Latest

A Whole New World

2010-12-05T22:24:00.000+11:00

So – during my fleeting visit home last month, my cousin gently nagged me that I could make the weekends up in Aileu pass more quickly by reviving my blog! I thought it was worth a try. The weekends do drag somewhat here…I live by myself, in a town with only a couple of other foreigners and no electricity between 6 a.m. and 6 p.m., which limits what you can do. In addition, it rains most afternoons and gets so dark that you can’t even read a book… So I’m going to give this one more renewed effort – the latest in Kate’s “I’m going to be better at blogging” vows (I think they’ve been going for about four years now!)

I’ve actually been in Timor for six months, which totally blows my mind. I have signed up for two years – I’m a quarter of the way through that. I can’t believe it…I still feel like I’m new here. But I’m not any more. I speak a little of the local language – not nearly enough…my staff are great about trying to practice with me, but of course, it’s easier, for work, to talk in English – my senior staff are all fairly competent.

It’s interesting living in a country that is so new, that is still finding its feet and finding its way in the world. I have mixed feelings about it – on the one hand, as I move around, I look at the Timorese moving freely around their own country, and I think of everything this country has gone through to get to this stage, and I feel such joy for them, and such pride for them. On the other hand…it’s amazing how much of a mess has been made in ten years – this was a country born with such hope and such optimism, that encountered so many problems, but had the whole world rooting for its success. And when I look at what it has descended to – the corruption and the mismanagement, and the same old story in every developing country…the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. And it makes me want to cry – because everyone suffered to get to this stage, but so many of them aren’t benefiting from it. They still live in squalor and the child malnutrition rates are at the kind of levels that usually prompt telethons in the West…but because these are chronic, nobody notices. Still – in the end, it’s THEIR mess – no matter what happens to Timor now, it’s in the hands of the Timorese and that is something to be celebrated.

Working here is challenging in many ways – the local capacity is very low and I often comment that I feel like a kindergarten teacher, herding my staff around through the most ridiculously low-level decisions. Much of my day is spent dealing with a high level of absurdity, situations that I cannot imagine even entering the head of people back home. I arrive at the office at 8 a.m., but usually it takes half an hour to an hour to be able to sit down at my desk, because I’m sorting out people to head to the field for the day – cars and motorbikes and supplies and cooperation etc. Yet I also laugh more here than I have in any office since I left Australia. Timorese have a GREAT sense of humour, and they laugh a LOT – most of the men laugh like four year old boys (and have the sense of humour of four-year-old boys as well…one of my colleagues talks about the mental maturation process stopping around age 12). But we laugh a lot together – they crack me up, even as they drive me nuts. And they are a wonderful team…they care about each other and are very protective of me. I think, for all of them, it would be their first time working for a woman, but they really look out for me in a way that makes me feel safe and loved. My 2IC, who is really the least intimidating person you can imagine, tried to give a tough guy speech to the security guards at my house…”we will be watching as well and making sure she is safe…and don’t play your music loud because Mana Kate doesn’t like that”!!! Bless his heart…he’s just not very scary but I was very moved by the effort.

As we’re into the home stretch to Christmas (again – didn’t we just do Christmas about six weeks ago? Seriously?) I will try to write more, particularly about specifics of my life here. But for now…I’m back and I have something to say…

I’ll leave you with a photo of my team (minus three staff) taken at our planning retreat in October.

A New Phase

2010-08-08T22:27:00.002+10:00

Despite all evidence to the contrary on this blog, I have been alive and well for the last eight months – just a little preoccupied. For the last two months, this preoccupation has taken the form of a new life in East Timor, where I started working on 1 June. I’m venturing into some uncharted waters for me – development, instead of relief (theoretically calmer and more compatible with a decent work/life balance!) and I’m moving away from programming, into more operational management. My new job is managing a regional program in a place called Aileu (47km south of Dili – up in the mountains so much cooler), with responsibility for programming across Aileu District, and running an office of 45 Timorese staff. This alone is a little daunting – I’ve never managed a team this large before, but I am loving it so far.

Aileu is a green town after you wind up a torturous mountain for a hundred minutes or so (most people are sick on this trip – the road is atrocious and when there is a road, it’s extremely narrow and a constant maze of switchbacks). It has rice paddies and surrounding farms, and is really one street, plus a few radiating spokes. My team is wonderful. I’m still earning their trust (Timorese take a long time to trust foreigners – they’ve been burned by them so many times), but we are really bonding and they are wonderful people. I’m really looking forward to working with them for the next two years.

So – it’s Sunday night and I’m heading to bed, but I wanted to jumpstart this blog and get it revving a little. Here’s hoping updates will be far more frequent from now on…

Happy New Year!

2010-01-01T18:17:00.002+11:00

Well - it's a new one - 2010. And I'm welcoming it in in Washington D.C., so instead of being one of the first in the world to move on, I'm one of the last - it's a strange feeling. Felt like an anticlimax when it finally happened - and of course you realise just how arbitrary this whole New Year thing is anyway!! Although I do have to say that welcoming the new year in, with snow on the ground, all around, is a great way to go...

So what does this new year hold? Well, for a start it holds a month in America as I travel, see friends, and do some skiing. After that - who knows? I'll have to wait and see what comes my way and where I feel drawn...could be very close to home, or very very far away. But whatever it is, I will make an attempt to pay a little more attention to this poor, sadly neglected blog!

Happy New Year to all out there

Paris in the Springtime

2009-05-29T03:38:00.000+10:00

Well – I’m back in Paris, for the fourth time in two years! Staying this time on the Left Bank, which is an area I’m less familiar with, so it’s fun to explore new turf. Bettina and I have been torturing ourselves for the past couple of weeks, thinking of all the great food I would be eating here, and I’m certainly indulging now. I adored that I received an email from my mother before arriving, detailing all the coffee options in and around our apartment!! It truly is genetic.

Thus far we have just been wandering, enjoying the beauty that is Paris, doing some shopping (bit of damage to the credit card!) some museums etc. The weather is pretty cool and a bit rainy but I love it – a great change from Uganda and no chance of getting burned! I’m going to be catching up with some friends over the next few days and might try to get into the French Open as well.

I was pondering yesterday, whilst in a public bathroom in the Tuileries, that really, living in developing countries just prepares you for the bathrooms in France!! Excellent practice. Much of Paris has changed since I lived here in 1995 (my mind is still reeling from discovering a Starbucks on the Champs Elysees) but much abides – I still find it very easy to get around and it still feels like home here. I guess a city that has been here since 500B.C. won’t have changed much in 14 years.

Next week, we are taking a three-day trip up to the north of France (and Belgium) to see a series of sites where Australian soldiers fought in WWI – should be excellent and very moving. We don’t think we have any ancestors who fought in France (my family seems to specialise in the Middle Eastern countries) but are trying to confirm this. I am really looking forward to this…the history geek in me lives on!

So – until I have more news, I bid you adieu…

You know you've been in Uganda too long when...

2009-04-23T00:07:00.002+10:00

Tee double hee - this is an email doing the rounds of expats in Uganda, that you read and think, yep, yep, oh yes definitely! Very funny.
I will probably need to explain a couple of things:

'Flashing' or 'Beeping' refers to one of the habits I find most frustrating in Uganda - people want to talk to you on the phone, but they don't want to actually pay for this privilege. So they call you, let the phone ring once and then hang up, so you see a missed call. You are then supposed to call them back and pay for the conversation they want to have with you. It is standard practice here, even amongst staff, and drives me nuts, because I think it's so rude. Also pointless - if everyone just paid for their own calls to start with, it would all even out in the wash!
Airtime, is credit on your phone (called Load in the Philippines).
CHOGM - the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting - held bi-annually and the last one was in Uganda, at the end of 2007. There was a frenzy of preparation for it, including building many hotels that specialise in empty rooms, beautifying the city and indulging in some serious Queen love. Kampala was full of ads with the tag line "Uganda is Ready for CHOGM" and it became a catchphrase.
Marabou storks are massive and incredibly ugly birds that live in Kampala and eat rubbish (literally - they eat trash). They are disgusting
Umeme is the power company
boda bodas are the taxis that drive around towns with passengers, generally piloted by kamikaze riders with no regard for anyone else on the road. They have quite a high death rate.

Without further ado...You know you are been in Uganda too long when...

…driving, you find yourself using your turn signals as means of communication....'the road is too thin', 'don't overtake (pass me) there is a BUS coming', 'No I'm NOT going to turn here', 'whoopee, we won the football!'

…you no longer get annoyed when people lie to you and make promises they can't possibly keep

…seeing someone speeding towards you in the wrong lane seems completely normal

…Your phone rings and it is a wrong number and you can keep the Hello? Hello? Hello? Hello's going back and forth like a tennis match until eventually the caller realises you are the wrong number and abruptly hangs up, after spending at least 2 minutes worth of airtime!

…You find yourself pointing with your lips and saying "yes" by raising both eyebrows.

…You can masterfully employ a variety of "Eh!" and "Eh eh!" noises to convey a range of meanings

…You know "Come back tomorrow at 10:00 a.m." means whatever you're trying to get done is NEVER going to happen

…You start using the words "even" and "ever" in places you never would have ("Even me, I'm feeling hungry," or "I have ever done that")

…You start referring to people as "this one" or "that one"

…You know you've what? been in Uganda a long time....when you what? Start each sentence as a question and proceed to what? Answer it yourself!

…You've figured out the Ugandan difference between food and snacks

…someone asks you "How is there?" You reply "It is there...

…You willingly drive into oncoming traffic just to avoid the potholes

…A car isn't full unless it has at least 7 people in it

…you can speak Uganglish so well that - you talk with a Ugandan accent; use words like 'shocked,' 'fearing,' 'extend,' 'balance,' ''somehow,' 'even me,' and 'can you imagine' and 'are you sure?' far too often...

…someone "flashes" your phone you just flash them back and wait for them to flash you back and then you flash them back and then they flash you back and....

…you know the load shedding schedule by heart

…you keep a jerry can full of water around, just in case…

…you feel exposed without bars on your windows

…When you come back from being out of the country and conversations go as:
Them: "you have been lost!!" and your response: "I have been found!"
Them: "how is there?" and you: "there is fine!"
Them: "you have gone fat!!!" and you are lost for words because you are not used to be told so with such frankness!!

…You emphasize how you like something and they say: "Are you sure?"

…you are asked how you are and your response is: "Me I am fine, how are you?"

…someone calls out your name and your reply is: "I am the one!"

…you end the conversation with "ok please!"

…your knees ache from squatting over a long drop 4 times a day as a result of a parasite living in your intestines

…it's 28 degrees outside and there are people wearing parkas ("jumpers"?) and stocking caps

…You ask for someone, and you know the answer "He's within" means everything from "He's within the building" to "He's within the city" or even "He's within the country".

….you refer to others as 'you people' and don't intend to be rude

…you start sentences with 'As for me, I ….'

…you stop using those little 'off' or 'up' bits of verbs. You pick people. And you drop them.

…you get 'Fine' as a reply to your 'hello'.

…'nownow' means sometime soon, possibly in the next day or two, whereas 'now' means anytime in the next month.

….'moving' becomes 'shifting' (but you move with people rather than hang out with them)

…you stand in a line and feel something is very wrong because it is orderly and the person behind you respects your personal space...

…"ok" punctuates, modifies, tags and answers almost every sentence.

…"Bambi", said with that humble look, becomes your standard expression of sympathy.

…you use the term "just there" to mean on the other side of the city

…"first let me come" or "first wait" makes perfect sense to you

…at the end of a meeting, people say, "Ok Please" as opposed to good bye or have a nice one.

…your stories always have an "eh?" to make sure the people are listening

…you say SORRY! when someone hurts themselves through no fault of yours

…you call white people "muzungu" and forget that you yourself are white....

…you go to a restaurant and order something off the menu and the waiter/waitress looks you right in the eye and says "We don't have that one

…walking by a uniformed officer carrying an assault rifle is completely normal

…you are Ready For CHOGM

…Clothes becomes a two-syllable word. Clo - thes.

…You know the man asking for Lose actually refers to Rose. And when
someone says "let's play" you should stay seated.

…you don't get confused even though the person you're talking to keeps mixing up 'he' and 'she' in the same sentence talking about the same person.

…you are reluctant to let go of a new, CLEAN 1000 shilling note.

…your home does not have an address.

…your handshakes last an entire conversation

…next to a public phone at the bottom of the call cost there is a charge for beeping

…marriage proposals become a normal and almost expected thing from strangers.

…you have time to grab lunch while the bank teller cashes your check.

…you stop noticing how ugly marabou storks actually are

…you think the taxi you're about to enter is too full but the conductor will squeeze you in and let you sit where he was sitting but then he will be standing over you with his bad body odor.

…You have 9 x 10,000UGX bills and you wrap the 10th one around it and put it in your wallet.

…being given a "push" has nothing to do with "push and shove", but being escorted to your car after a visit....

…You lie on the phone that you are about to arrive for a meeting…yet you've not yet left you're home, forgetting that someone can do the mathematics and be able to tell that you lied!

…You have constant power supply at your house for a week. It leaves you thinking Umeme is not doing its work right. Supplying darkness instead of light.

…people walk into your house and you say "You are all most welcome!"

…you are making a verbal list and trail off saying "what, what.."

…you start calling inanimate objects "stubborn" when they don't work well

…you always use your big notes despite the fact that you have the exact change.

…you think "eh" in a high pitch tone is the correct way to respond when a boda drivers price suggestion is too high.

…umbrellas are not for rain but for the shunshine

Q: why do boda boda drivers wear helmets?

A: because of the passengers whacking them on the head to slow them down.

And still more pictures...

2009-04-09T01:59:00.006+10:00

This is very easy - I am writing a logframe at the moment (fellow POs, feel free to groan in sympathy with me) and I keep distracting myself with posting photos - makes the time go more quickly, although unfortunately the wretched thing is still waiting for me when I get back... Without further ado, I present more photos (these are really random at this point - I am looking through my pictures and thinking "cool - I'll post that" - I will try to be more thematic in the future...)

This photo is actually just a couple of days ago in Capetown - a bunch of us went out to dinner at this quite fancy restaurant, where we paid the staggering amount of approximately US$15 per head for amazing food and drinks (another thing to add to the 'Reasons-Why-I-Love-Capetown list - incredibly cheap!) Needless to say, we were not actually dressed for the occasion (as Ash said, we were in a very upscale place, dressed for MacDonalds) but we had a hoot regardless, and probably entertained the rest of the restaurant with our discussions of heroics from the training ("remember when those terrorists made you dance the Conga Line?")

L-R Judy (Aussie, based in Cyprus), Ana (Bosnian, based in Georgia), Ash (Kiwi based in Australia - old buddy), me, Angel (Indonesian based in Singapore) and Patrick (Ugandan, based in Nairobi) with our pretty scrumptious food

Okay - I already posted this picture and am trying to re-post in the hopes that it is a little larger and you can actually make out the faces. I think I will fail in this hope though - it is just a darn small picture. It's strange to look at this photo, taken a year ago, and realise how many changes we have had in our team since then. I'll have to get a new team photo soon and we can put them side by side.

L-R; Isaac, Wycliffee, Julius, Ekra, Me, Bob, Godfrey, Simba (behind), Bettina and Wise, with Amos seated and looking like the King that he is!

This is from my birthday in February- I took my camera and took a photo of the table when we arrived, because it looked so beautiful (all formal place settings for 25 with wonderful flowers) then forgot about it until the end of the night, so have no actual pictures of the dinner!! But someone took this at the cake moment and although it's a lousy shot, I think it shows how long my hair is getting...

With Kim, one of my very best friends here, at a Christmas party last December. Kim lived in Russia for six years, so is a vodka afficionado (!) She was also a Godsend when we went to St Petersburg last year - not only did she give extensive lists of which restaurants to go to, she gave us lists of what to order! Everyone has those people with whom they immediately click and become so close to - Kim is one of those for me and I will miss her greatly when we no longer live in the same city.

Just wait until your Father sees you!! (family in-joke!) My car in Karamoja last year. It takes beatings for me again and again and keeps coming up roses (well - until someone else took it to Karamoja a few months ago and blew up the engine - it is currently still in for extensive surgery). This trip was amazing - it poured with rain as we drove in and we passed so many cars stuck in the mud...I was nervous because we only had my Prado, not one of the Landcruisers, fitted with mud tyres and an electric winch, and many prayers were said as we drove through bogs. Returning, we left on the Friday night as Bob's father was very ill and he needed to get back to Nairobi...we drove out through insane pouring rain and even continued on to Kampala that night (I was driving whilst the driver napped in the passenger seat and Bob kept commenting how much tiring it was sitting in the backseat than driving - although he declined my frequent suggestions that we swap places to alleviate his fatigue - I had a hard time exercising a modicum of restraint!) We arrive around midnight (greatly violating security protocols, but I was so glad not to have to sleep in Mbale) and I collapsed into bed exhausted, then got a phone call from our Security Manger the next morning - we had about six cars trying to also get out and just getting perpetually stuck in the mud - they kept driving and finally arrived in Kampala over 24 hours later, on Sunday morning. I was SO grateful that we had left the Friday night - those 12 fewer hours of rain really saved us!

That mud is so thick it totally obscured our logo on the door (for security reasons, all NGO cars have their logos on their doors, as evidenced by the UN car behind us) - it demonstrated the point that Louis had made a week before about larger logos on the doors aptly!!

More Pictures

2009-04-08T22:53:00.008+10:00

Well - pictures don't require much effort and as I am working on a proposal, this is my default right now!! I have just come back from a week of Security Training in Capetown and am in love with Capetown and want to move to South Africa right now - it was like being at home (the shopping! drinking tap water! good roads!!!). The training was intense but incredibly valuable - I will be writing about that at a later point. But for now - on with the pictures...

At a food distribution - true to form, the women do all the heavy lifting
while the men stand around supervising...

Bob putting on a bullet proof vest for the first time ever - whilst IN a moving car in convoy. We didn't know he had never put one on - they are murder to get into and you really need someone to put you into it whilst standing up. Anyway, his efforts provided much hilarity to the rest of us in the car (and took him about ten minutes) - I have a sequence of photos that are increasingly funny (including Walter, next to him, theoretically helping him, but really laughing too much to be anything more than a hindrance) but due to the difficulties of uploading, you only get the final one, with his look of triumph. He then proceeded to take the remaining vests and build a little wall of Babylon all around him as well...

The thriving metropolis of Pader ... seriously folks, this is it. This street.
I'm not leaving anything out. What you see is what you get...

Bettina and I (in traditional dress) with Dez at his traditional wedding, in his wife's village. That day was an amazing saga - I should try to write the story sometime as it was surreal...

Some Photos

2009-03-11T19:28:00.005+11:00

So - I thought I'd have another stab at showing some pictures from every day life here, the work etc. Internet seems to be cooperating a little more (nervous to say that in case it blinks out again!) so I will have a shot...

This is Denba, who used to drive for us - Driver Extraordinaire and pretty much the coolest man on the planet. He's sitting on a traditional little stool which cracks me up as he is about eight feet tall. I still see him, but no longer with work with him. I miss Denba...

This is at Landmine Awareness Day last year in Pader - I am with my landmine team and VERY dear friends, L-R Susan, Me, Monica and Walter (who appears fascinated by the happenings!!)

A day in the life - digging a car out of the mud in the East

Geoffrey (our Water Engineer) and myself distributing relief supplies during the flood response, Soroti, 2007 (no comments about stupid hats, please - it is hot and I burn too easily!)

Drop the Pressure

2009-02-17T02:00:00.001+11:00

Well - I was supposed to be travelling to northern Uganda today for the week, but was held up with issues with the EU and another food aid project, and then suddenly we have four days to write a WFP (World Food Program) Proposal, and I think I will be lucky to go to bed this week, let alone go to the north!! The field teams will just have to survive without me for another week! That's not too bad - it is dry season here now and sooooooooo hot up north...makes it really hard to sleep at night. Although I am really excited - up in Pader, which was nothing but a refugee camp a couple of years ago, they now have RUNNING WATER!! It's still insanely cold, but it's running out of taps (sometimes) and makes hair washing soooo much easier!!

Many friends here are off on adventures soon - Sam, Kenny and Julia are going to climb Kilimanjaro on Saturday (I could have gone, but can't really afford a week away from the office at this point, plus...a week without washing? Not really me?!?!) And Charlie is heading to Antigua for a fortnight (me? jealous? Not in the slightest - what makes you ask that!!) I guess I am (hopefully) going to Sth Africa in six weeks for Level Two Security Training (the one where they practice abducting you and holding you hostage etc...should be oodles of fun) so who am I to be jealous?

As part of my attempt to "do stuff other than work" I have started doing personal training with Remmy (the husband of Bettina, my fellow Program Officer and general saving grace). He has succesfully killed me twice now (amazing revival, hey?!) but it's good. He is such a sweetie and very encouraging as he is dragging me up and down hills. I will keep plugging away at this and see if I can't regain some of my former fitness (running 8km kills me about now, and that used to be my standard morning run).

One fun thing...we are now working longer hours on Monday to Thursday, then supposed to leave the office at 2.00 p.m. on Fridays. I have not yet managed this, of course, but it is a wonderfully tantalising prospect, and am hoping to do it this Friday, as it is my birthday - Bettina and I are going to go for Devonshire Tea at the tearoom run by the British wife of the Doctor here - I cannot WAIT!!

Okay...back to it...

Snap Back to Reality

2009-02-16T00:37:00.002+11:00

Well, it's a hot Sunday in Kampala and I am ploughing through emails, trying to clear up a fraction of the hanging work before heading north again tomorrow. This is my least favourite time of year here - in the middle of the dry season the weather is hot and the air is dusty, in the north they are burning the grass and it is brown. This usually lush and green country is far less attractive, although just one or two rainstorms also makes an amazing difference.

I am well into the year again - Christmas seems like a distant memory. I think I will subtitle my trip home over Christmas the "you have to join facebook" promotional tour, as I was extolled the facebook virtues by just about everyone (John even giving me a demonstration of their excellent facilities, which I think was an excuse for "look at all my holiday pictures from America"!) The only dissenting voice is Mum who read an article about it being co-owned by a senior CIA official and thinks it is being used for information gathering purposes (she is probably right, although I do pity the poor person who has to wade through all of that to try to ascertain any useful intelligence!!) I think the masses have prevailed and it is jut a matter of time (and me being willing to allocate a few hours to this) and then I will really join the noughties (is that what they're called?)

Apart from that, Christmas holiday was awesome, but unremarkable. There was home. It rocked. End of story really!! Lots of Mum-cooking, dog-walking, sleeping, catching up, adoring the wonderful Melbourne roads (and my zoomy little car!) and the ease of life in Melbourne. Spending time with friends reminded me how lucky I am to have so many great ones, and made me feel guilty that work has superceded contact with them so much in the last year...but no more! I will do better...

Travelling back delivered a nice surprise - I was upgraded to First Class (I feel that deserves capital letters) for the Melbourne-Dubai leg, which rocked the house fairly sublimely. My own little bed (that they made up with sheets and pillows and a doona!) and pyjamas, a full wine list, with Moet & Chandon Dom Perignon Champagne (!), a la carte dining, a massaging chair, the list goes on and on. I was totally in love with First Class, and then had to shuttle back to economy (undeserving of capital letters) for the Dubai-Entebbe leg, which just about killed me. Also, I ran out of time at the airport and all my planned Duty Free shopping wound up producing one tall latte with an extra shot :( Not quite what I was looking for (and then we sat at the gate for an hour and a half...I was tempted to ask if I could just duck back into the terminal to finish my shopping, while they sorted out whatever problem they had - after all, they could page me, right?!?!) Anyway...

So - back to work, back to real life. We have a new Department Director (finally - after a year of waiting) so are all waiting to see what life is like under the new regime. Apart from that, I am vaguely attempting to get a life, instead of working 24/7 - I'll keep you posted on the progress...

I have been trying to upload more pictures but the internet here is not so interested in cooperating - I will keep trying. Seems to be unable to even load one picture lately... Guess them's the breaks...

Casualties of War

2009-02-12T20:25:00.000+11:00

This is just killing me right now – I am approving a list of patients for medical treatment – they are all former child soldiers, or else children who were “born in captivity” – this means that their mothers were abducted and gave birth whilst child soldiers themselves. Reading this list of injuries, looking at the ages of the patients and wondering about their lives in order to have survived, but be living with these injuries. The suffering of the people of northern Uganda, and their continued perseverance with life and hope, in the face of a situation that would just cause me to crawl into a corner and give up hope, totally amazes me. I will give a couple of examples:

· An 18 year old boy paralysed in one arm due to gun shot
· A 20 year old boy paralysed from the waist down due to gun shot
· A 16 year old boy with his jaw blown off – artificial jaw
· Two 9 year old girls, born in captivity, one with HIV/AIDS and the other paralysed due to a bomb splinter in the brain
· A girl totally paralysed and wheelchair-bound due to bullet in the spine, has returned with two children born in captivity
· A 15 year old boy, totally blind because of backfire of a gun
· A 17 year old boy with a bullet lodged between his two lungs – inoperable

This is just an extract of this list, which is just a tiny, miniscule fraction of the number of war-wounded in northern Uganda – and these are just the physical wounds. Forget the fact that the entire region is traumatised and psychologically wounded. The mental trauma these kids have gone through is indescribable.

Think of some kids you know – imagine them living like this? For the rest of their lives. It is such evil. And now the LRA (the rebel army fighting the insurgency in northern Uganda) has turned its attention to Sudan and DRC – they are wreaking untold destruction in Congo right now – hundreds of killed and heavens knows how many children abducted.

At least some small piece of hope – we are bringing some of these kids down to Kampala to the main hospital here where, we hope, they will have some of their problems fixed. Such a tiny little drop in the ocean though…

So that’s my morning…how’s yours???

(This is) My December...

2008-12-13T00:45:00.004+11:00

...This is my time of the year.

Well - being a total Christmas nut, I am in heaven right now - Christmas is only a couple of weeks away and I leave for home in a week...home! With family and friends and good coffee and my DOG! Of course, I just have to survive long enough to make it there - the work has certainly not abated since I came back from Europe - if possible, it is even greater. I am desperately longing for home - and holidays.

I am still intending to post about my Europe trip - other holidays this year (skiing in Europe in Feb, Zanzibar at Easter, Safari in Tanzania) have not ever made it onto this blog, but this last trip was amazing and I really want to post about it. Sadly, I have realised that it will probably have to wait until Christmas and holidays in order to be posted - I just do not have the time to do it right now.

I thought, however, that in the meantime I could post some pictures and give a bit more of a glimpse of everyday life here in Kampala for me, and include some of my coworkers - put a face to the names I mention to many people in emails/phone calls etc...

So - without further ado:

Hmm - it's pretty small - hope I can identify everyone!! This is most of our key team at the team retreat about six months ago. Some of these guys have gone and we have some new ones, but it's a start

L-R Isaac (Finance), Wycliffee (Operations), Julius (at back - Security), Ekra (Commodities), Me, Bob (Grants Manager), Godfrey (Monitoring and Evaluation), Simba (at far back - Commodities), Bettina (mostly hidden - Program Officer like me), Wise (Finance) and seated - Amos (Operations Manager)

It has taken a couple of hours to load one picture, so that's all you're getting for now. I'm sick of this and want to go home! Will post more later...

World Spins Madly On

2008-10-28T02:27:00.000+11:00

Yes – there were many, many adventures following Cesky Krumlov, but not much time to write blog entries. Sad, when you are too busy having fun to write about it, hey?! I am determined that this long Europe trip will NOT join all the other adventures that are never recorded here (this year alone: France/Germany skiing in February, Zanzibar at Easter, Tanzania safari in June) – I really want to write about it all, complete with pictures – as much for my own memories as to share the experience (mite selfish, I know!) However, since returning to Uganda a month ago, I have pretty much done nothing but work – unfortunately the work situation seems to be worse than before I left, so time for blog-writing has been severely restricted. However, I will be working on this – although the posts may consist more of pictures than text. Keep watching this space…

In other news – Uganda is pretty much same old. I’ve been in Kampala exclusively since returning, working on our response to the food crisis that has gripped East Africa. We are heading into Karamoja in our new programming, where the situation is absolutely dire – it is a drought stricken area bordering Kenya, traditionally very insecure and dangerous and poverty stricken to the max – the numbers of people dying of starvation are terrifying and the stories that come out are heart-breaking. I am really glad that we are starting programming there as the need is overwhelming – I am sure I will be back with pictures and stories as well…

One wonderful little thing – our team was meeting early this morning to plan how to get through everything that needed to be done this week. And apparently they had decided to call in reinforcements for a week to help with a proposal for the north. And there is a knock on Bob’s office door, it opens….and Admir is standing there!!! A good friend from Melbourne who I haven’t seen in yonks and yonks, just standing in our office – I couldn’t believe it! He is here for a week and I intend to maximise the catching up (and persuade him to shave off his Damir Dokic beard as well – I have a task ahead of me!)

On that note – they are kicking me out of the office, so I must post and run…

Will be back with tales of Europe

Cesky Krumlow

2008-08-25T02:40:00.003+10:00

Well - my tour of Europe continues apace. I only have a few minutes so am copying the majority of this text from an email to my parents!! I cannot remember the last post but after Gothenburg, and going up the Swedish coast, I went to Stockholm, which I just ADORED. Met up with my cousin Clyde and his family, and my friend Nina showed me the sights. Awesome time. Then went to Copenhagen which was also beautiful, but rainy (a constant feature of this trip). Then on to Berlin, which I just loved so so so much - great city. Then to Friedrichsdorf to Brett and Belinda's (great to catch up with them) and then to Vienna to start an Intrepid Tour of Eastern Europe.

I am now in Cesky Krumlow (with a lot of accents over letters in that name!!) in the south of the Czech Republic and we leave tomorrow for Prague (yipee!) You should try to look this place up on google - it is out of a fairy tale - all cobblestone streets, buildings going back 600 years, a castle on a hill, river running through - it is too beautiful for words! I really love it here.

So far we have done Vienna, which was beautiful - did the walking tour - the Opera was closed for the summer but I took a photo outside. Went to Schoenbrunn Palace in the afternoon which is just stunning - I really liked that. Then that night we went to a concert of Viennese music which was great (Strauss, Mozart and Beethoven, which I think might be stretching the truth a bit, but who lets the truth get in the way of a good concert!!) There were also Opera Singers which I liked, and ballet dancers, who didn't have enough room to move and I found a bit twee!

Next day we went to Bratislava, capital of Slovakia, which was a very small area of old buildings and cobblestones etc., but reasonably underwhelming and I feel no need for a return visit. Four hours were plenty to see the sights!! Then we came here for two days and it has been beautiful. We had a walking historical tour of the town yesterday which was really, really interesting, and then went up to the castle, which is about 800 years old or something!

Then this morning we went mountain biking through the forest (so beautiful except for the downhill on loose gravel/sand which was wet - a bit slippery!!) and the others went rafting this afternoon, but my elbos is still really sore so I skipped that.

So will try to write again later Will eventually hopefully post photos and more details, but at least you know where I am. Hope all are well...

P.S. Hugs to my fave barista!!

From Russia With Love

2008-08-01T23:14:00.002+10:00

Hmmm - well, I just hit a magic button and this entry posted without any content. Hope that hasn't bothered people who have subscribed to the email entries!

Am currently in Gothenburg, Sweden, for Erik (our former exchange student)'s wedding tomorrow to Elin. This event has been the focus point of a very loooooong trip from my family, in which I have joined for a few weeks. They first came to Africa and I met them in Tanzania. This was oodles of fun - I flew there the night before them and went to Dar Es Salaam to stay with my former boss and his wife and son. I was close to the family in Uganda and have missed them since they moved to Dar, so it was great to see them all again. After dinner we went to have drink on the ocean, and they made me jealous with all the great shopping (I couldn't believe how much stuff was just on the shelves in the supermarket!) and I had to send a message to Bettina to make her jealous too... The next day we all caught the ferry over to Zanzibar and had a great day wandering around Stonetown before they went to their hotel and I went to meet Mum, Dad and Alex. It was great to see them and welcome them to their first visit to East Africa (and Alex' first time in Africa). After four days in Zanzibar, with the highlight of scuba diving and swimming with dolpins, we headed to the mainland and a week of safari that was absolutely awesome. We drove through Lake Manyara and down to the Olduvai plain, seeing where the Leakeys found the oldest skull in the world. Then on to the Serengeti National Park where we saw all the game, including a leopard and cheetah (which I was most excited about) and finally heading back to Uganda. We had a few days in the north (I think they were pretty alarmed at the trip up there as I drove on the Uganda roads surrounded by Ugandan drivers!) and the family were able to see some of my project work and go to a camp to talk to the IPDs. Then we finished with a weekend at Murchison Falls, where the Nile passes through a thin waterfall before continuing on to Sudan. All fabulous and sad to finish when they left.

I then finished up at work (am taking two months off as am totally burned out right now) and flew to Europe to meet them a week ago (they had been with Jan in Italy). We then went to St Petersburg, which is something I have dreamed about since Mrs Fergus first talked about Russian History to me in 1993. Not much opportunity to give details here as the internet cafe is about to run out of time, but I will be back with details and photos. Suffice to say, it was awesome beyond words - we went to The Hermitage, ballet at the Mariinksy, Tsarskoye Selo, the Peter and Paul fortress (where all the Tsars were buried) and I was in heaven. Four days was not nearly enough - will have to go back. We then caught the train to Helsinki and had a day there, before coming on to Sweden.

And now time's up. More details and photos later...

Northern Exposure

2008-07-20T23:34:00.003+10:00

I have been meaning to post an update of the situation in northern Uganda for a while now, for people's information, but am just working so so so hard that I don't get much time for anything else. I'm not sure how much people know, but there was supposed to be a big signing of the Peace Agreement between the Government of Uganda (GoU) and the LRA in April this year in Juba (southern Sudan) that failed - Kony (LRA leader) never showed and it turned out that the LRA negotiator in the mediations had never actually met or spoken with Kony, and was not speaking for him, as he had claimed.

Although there has been no resumption of open conflict in the north following this, small skirmishes have been reported, as have isolated LRA sightings. Additionally, it has had a profound impact upon the IDP (Internally Displaced People - most people in the north fit into this category - IDPs are refugees who have not crossed an international border - they are displaced within their own country - like the Sudanese living in camps in Darfur). People are more fearful - there has been a slow but steady transition of people from the large mother camps to smaller resettlement/return camps which still offer the safety of an army presence, but are closer to original homestead and thus allow some access to their land to farm. These movements are creating a whole new situation on the ground (which is a whole different posting topic!) but people are now reluctant to move from the return camps all the way home, and those that have gone home, or are at the return camps are constantly prepared to flee back to the mother camps. I have noticed slightly more (not much, but a bit) troop movement in the north in the past few months. Another tragic thing is the impact this development has on the psychological recovery of former child soldiers - they are now more fearful with a potential return to conflict - those that have escaped the LRA are at greater danger or reprisal from the rebels.

Anyway - the Secretary General of the UN released a report on Children in Armed Conflict in Uganda - I thought I would post an excerpt here so you can read. Long story short: it aint over yet - all the abducted children are out of reach in Sudan and Congo and they're not being released. We still need your thoughts/hopes/efforts/prayers:

25 June 2008 – Although the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) does not seem to be recruiting children in Uganda, women and children are still present in its ranks, and the rebel group is allegedly enlisting young people from neighbouring countries, according to a United Nations report released today.

The LRA, which has fought a civil war with the Ugandan Government since the mid-1980s, became notorious during the conflict for abducting as many as 25,000 children and using them as fighters and porters. The children were often subject to extreme violence shortly after abduction, with many girls allocated to officers in a form of institutional rape.

“Owing to the apparent absence of LRA from Ugandan territory, there have been no recent cases of recruitment and use of Ugandan children, or other grave violations against children attributable to LRA,” Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon writes in a new report to the Security Council.

“However, children and women are still present in the LRA ranks, and there has been no movement on their release,” he adds.

In addition, he notes there are reports alleging that the group has been recruiting children
from southern Sudan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) and the Central African Republic (CAR).

In one case, three boys from the Sudan and the CAR who escaped from the LRA reported that they had been forced to work for the group as porters. They also reported that girls were present in the ranks, and that they were regularly subjected to gender-based violence, including rape.

On 23 April, authorities in Dungu in eastern DRC reported that 13 people, including four students, were abducted from a primary school following LRA attacks.

“These allegations are being reported while the peace talks between LRA and the Government of Uganda are stalled, notably because of the refusal by the LRA leader, Joseph Kony, to sign the final peace agreement,” Mr. Ban writes.

Last July the Security Council Working Group on Children and Armed Conflict called on the LRA to unconditionally release children used in their ranks, and underlined the absence of any concrete signs in this regard.

The Group also noted the International Criminal Court indictments against five senior members of the LRA – the leader Joseph Kony, and the commanders Vincent Otti, Okot Odhiambo, Dominic Ongwen and Raska Lukwiya – on a number of charges, including the enlistment of children through abduction.

The rebel group has maintained that it had released all children and women abducted or
forcibly conscripted some time ago and that those who remained in the bush were women and children related to LRA members.
Mr. Ban says that this information cannot be independently verified because of the absence of any direct contacts between the UN and the LRA leadership.

The Secretary-General urges the LRA to provide a complete list of names and ages of the women and children remaining in its ranks for verification and to carry out their immediate release.

In addition, he says the UN Task Forces on Monitoring and Reporting in Uganda, the CAR, the DRC and the Sudan, in cooperation with the UN missions in the DRC and Sudan, should develop a strategy to increase monitoring and reporting on cross-border recruitment and use of children by the LRA.

The Hard Road

2008-06-22T01:00:00.002+10:00

I’m just full of the sadness right now…

There’s a BBC News Documentary about the current election violence in Zimbabwe, which just makes me crazy – how can anyone in the world think that this could possibly be okay – how can other African leaders not be screaming and jumping up and down? How can Mugabe look at himself in the mirror? Such evil. And to stop all the NGO work – my NGO was supposed to distribute food to 400,000 people this month – what are those 400,000 people eating right now? Aurgh – shouldn’t dwell on it – I’ll just become more furious.

I went to the burial of a nine-month old girl last week. Shalom was adorable – with chubby, chubby cheeks and curly hair. She would grab my little finger and hang on so tightly – I last saw her a week before she died and had to prise her little fingers off mine – I now wish I had just kept hanging on forever. She was the daughter of a colleague – a wonderful man who was shot by the LRA rebels in 2002 (I met him the first time I came here, just after he was released from hospital) whilst driving for us, and yet still does his work. Richard has a gentle heart, a fabulous work ethic and a wicked sense of humour. He and his wife also have a four year old boy – a rambunctious little fellow called Solomon. Since Shalom was born, every time I would ask after her, Richard’s eyes would light up and he would tell me her latest development – she was smiling, rolling over, sitting up – all those wonderful things babies do as they grow. But then, when I was in Gulu last December (for the burial of another colleague’s 29 year old wife), Richard was at the hospital with Shalom. She was having problems with her liver. For the next six months, Shalom was in and out of doctors and hospitals – she eventually came down to Kampala for treatment, and then we managed to get her to Nairobi to try to help. So many people fought to save this little girl, but eventually, she died in her mothers arms last Tuesday…"waiting for the doctor”. I wonder how many people in Africa die while waiting for the doctor?

I drove to Gulu (the biggest town in northern Uganda – the base of northern operations for most NGOs, as well as the army’s base for its war against the rebels – about six hours drive north of Kampala) for the burial with Peter, another driver who used to be based in Gulu. He has children of similar ages to Richards’, and was telling me that there have been times when he and Richard have both been in hospital with their children near death. I was thinking about this during the burial service and realising what a tremendous accomplishment it is for all the adults in this country – just to have made it to adulthood. It is something we would never even think about at home, but to even just stay alive is a great accomplishment.

Of course, once you hit adulthood, you aren’t necessarily going to have smooth sailing. The ravage of AIDS here, let alone other diseases, is staggering – what we read about as abstract facts in newspapers, is real flesh and blood. I have a friend who has already buried three siblings from AIDS and is caring for their children now (all but one is completely orphaned – one boy still has his mother). He was telling me that he went back his village a few weeks ago for the burial of another brother, only to arrive and find him still breathing. He packed him in the car, brought him to Kampala and got him treatment, back on the anti-retrovirals and the brother is now walking again.

The constant presence of death overshadows life in Africa. Staff are constantly going to burials – most staff would bury a relative (taking into consideration the much larger size of the families here) every month or two, and then when you consider friends and colleagues, much of one’s time is spent at burials. I have only been to two in my time in Uganda (although that is two more than the number of weddings I have made it to) and have been harshly reminded of how less sanitised death is here – the services are conducted under trees in the village (in both cases, next to the burned-out remnants of houses destroyed by the rebels) right next to the coffins. When we buried Joyce, her mother started screaming and throwing herself onto the coffin – she had to be carried away and passed out. And then after the service, everyone gives speeches, and the local dignitaries decided this would be a good opportunity to do some campaigning!! Blew my mind a little.

I apologise for the excessive absence – I have just been working and working – almost all I do nowadays is work and sleep, with the occasional self-indulgent window for eating and personal hygiene. Okay – I exaggerate a little – I did make time to see the Sex and the City Movie twice (I have my priorities in order) which was lots of fun. All this is about to change however – I’m about to embark on a fair bit of travel, in Africa and then in Europe.

Winter Wonderland

2008-03-05T22:53:00.003+11:00

Just have to post that "it's bucketing down snow here" It's sunny, but snowing. So pretty. Sadly, it is now all melting when it hits the ground.

I have much more to write about this holiday (I'm now in Germany) but that won't be in this post - I have to go out and play in the snow...

Oh nuts - it stopped. Here's hoping it starts again...

Six Countries in One Day

2008-02-25T08:31:00.003+11:00

Yes - as I cruised down a beautiful run today at Chamonix, I wondered why on earth I choose to spend my life running around the most miserable spots on earth, rather than doing more of this kind of thing? ;-) Answer?.....to be provided once I figure it out myself!

I'm here with a group of Aussie friends, ostensibly to celebrate my 30th birthday, really just to ski... It is so bizarre to fly out of Uganda and eventually (after a journey that took me Uganda--Kenya--Netherlands--northern Ireland--Switzerland--France in less than 24 hours) land up in the snow, surrounded by mountains (still my favourite landscape in the world!) I had four hours in Amsterdam with Mike, who's heading off to Afghanistan (spare him a thought occasionally!!) and drinking disappointing coffee before baffling the poor people at Belfast airport by only transferring ("but...nobody does that here. Why are you just transiting through Belfast?"...."because it was the cheapest route from Amsterdam to Geneva")

Anyway - I'm pretty exhausted now - first day out - murder on the legs and all of that. Time for shower and bed, but thought I should check in.

Many thanks to all those who sent me birthday wishes last week - you all rock tremendously *big hugs*

There and Back Again

2008-02-09T20:15:00.001+11:00

So much to say, but so little reader-attention-span to not abuse!! I must be succinct (you can all stop rolling your eyes now!) here and see if I can fit it all in.

So – it’s February already, which is truly terrifying – where is the year going? Where is my life going? I turn 30 in a couple of weeks and as far as I’m concerned, that is officially OLD. So I’m bracing myself. My plan was to be skiing on my birthday, but due to our organization being audited, and my presence being required (my project is one of those being audited) I have to stick around and will have my birthday in Kampala. However, a few days later I am heading to Chamonix to ski and then spend another week rocking around Europe so I’m pretty excited about that. I just booked my flights and am making arrangements – can’t wait. Mum and Dad are currently skiing (well – Dad is skiing, Mum is nursing a broken arm) in Aspen with a bunch of friends. They have terrible weather and I think they are only getting to ski half the days, but the thought of them out on the slopes has given me itchy feet and I can’t wait to get back onto skis.

In the meantime though, I have plenty of work to occupy my time! I don’t do New Year’s Resolutions any more, but I did vow to try to work less this year. However – I think we can put that under the heading of ‘pipe dream’ at this stage.

Home leave continued to be brilliant. My parents had a party for my 30th while I was still home which was totally awesome and I got to go to the first day of the Australia Open (love me some tennis) which rocked (thank you Mike!) Other than that, the time was filled with usual things – lots of eating out, seeing friends, trying to stay cool in the heat. I seem to have improved at poker – I won a few games (pity we don’t play for money, hey?) and adored getting quality time with Phoebe, who has to be the naughtiest dog alive (Mum is making noises about boot camp – if only there were such a thing for recalcitrant dogs!) I also got up to Queensland for a week – a few days in Brisbane, running around madly seeing people, then Noosa for a few days, to say a final farewell to the house as my parents are planning to sell it. Sadly, the weather in Brisbane was insanely hot and humid – real Brisbane summer, and then there were storms and rain the whole time at Noosa – I got one quick run on the beach in between the rain and enough of a break for Kara and I to check out Hastings St., but it wasn’t a great goodbye to a house that I have adored for over ten years. There are so many happy memories in that house, so many people have visited, so many great times – it has been a haven many times, for me to escape to when everything was too much. So I am really sad to part with it…

Emirates put on its usual production of debacles (which reminds me that I haven’t written my nasty letter yet – I need to get on to that!) for my return, so it was delayed by a couple of days while they tried to get their act into gear. When I finally did get away, my flight from Melbourne was delayed by three hours (gave me time to buy a watch in duty free, which was a birthday pressie from the paternal family) so by the time we landed in Dubai, my connection to Entebbe had already left. More lack of customer service ensued, and finally, I was rebooked onto a flight leaving Dubai that night at 18.00 and going via Nairobi (there’s only one flight per day to Uganda). Luckily, before I got on the flight, eventually some bright spark at the airport noticed that they had scheduled me to arrive in Nairobi twenty minutes AFTER the connecting flight to Entebbe took off. Not such a good plan after all. So I wound up spending the night in Dubai and flying out to Entebbe the following morning. That was okay – I got to see Gabriele (known to us all as Mama) from the Afghanistan office, who was in Dubai (and meet the new National Director too). I haven’t seen Mama since I left so that was all kinds of awesome and I loved catching up on the news. And then I finally made it back to Kampala – two days late!

So now I’m up in the north again – Kitgum today (up close to the Sudanese border). I have a week or so traveling around monitoring the landmines project (plus a little School Feeding in Pader) before heading to Soroti to check on the flood response. I can’t wait to get to Soroti – my friend Eli has relocated there from Gulu so she has a house I can stay in, and I can’t wait to see her. No more Soroti Hotel and two hours wait for dinner for me!

And on that note – I think it’s lunchtime….

So this is the New Year...

2008-01-06T16:06:00.000+11:00

(just quoting Death Cab for Cutie at you there...because I have to, really!)

Anyway - Happy 2008 to all - hope it is a ripper year.
My New Year's Eve was relatively quiet, due to the insane heat (it was still 41C at 6.30p.m. on NYE - and if still felt pretty darn hot at midnight too) - so just hung with some friends in air conditioning ;)

Being at home is all the awesomeness that I expected, and I am also as tired as I expected - I am cranky that I am sleeping away too much of my vacation, although I am still having enormous trouble getting to sleep at night - wretched insomnia/jet lag (my sister gave me an anti-insomnia CD for Christmas...hee!)After the never ending journey back home (getting to Entebbe airport via ridiculous traffic, Entebbe to Addis Ababa to Dubai to Singapore to Melbourne to mix-up-with-rides-home at 3.00a.m.) I made it back here (and didn't even get slapped into quarantine, as my boss and I were vaguely concerned about with the Ebola outbreaks in Uganda).

Home is just as good as I remembered it, Mum is still an awesome cook, my family still rock and Phoebe is still adorable (and now minus the broken leg from the last time I saw her). Much of the holiday has been taken up with catching up, eating, sleeping and a bit of sales shopping. We have had to contend with killer weather - incredibly hot, but on the plus side, whilst sheltering in people's air conditiong, my poker skills seem to have vastly improved and I have one two games (pity we don't play for money!!)

Not much real news, but just trying to post more this year. I don't do New Year's resoultions any more - I have the (probably quite usual) record of never keeping them, so I just don't bother any more. But I will try to post more regularly...

And so...HAPPY NEW YEAR!

(disclaimer - I tried to post this several days ago, but blogger doesn't seem to like me from home...bummer)

Highway to Hell

2007-12-19T17:24:00.000+11:00

So – I leave tomorrow to fly home for Christmas, and I really don’t think there are words in the English language (certainly not in my vocabulary) to describe how excited I am about this – it has been just about the only thing getting me through the last week or two – the thought that “you’ll be home in two weeks, ten days, one week etc” has gotten me out of bed in the morning, and through the day. I really don’t think I have ever been this tired before in my life – a bone-deep weariness that just dogs you around. I have warned my parents that I may sleep through much of my home leave, although my mother may take drastic action on that matter – it usually involves being woken by Phoebe (see picture below) who licks you into submission. But who I just can't resist...

I left Soroti on Sunday and drove back to Kampala – this is the first time I have actually driven myself across the country – I drive around the cities etc, but for around Uganda, we use the drivers. However, we didn’t have any spare drivers in Soroti, and we also had a spare car (through reasons much too boring and complicated to explain, my Prado wound up there for my last week in town, which was lovely to drive around – more so than the twin cab which had been my mode of transportation for the past 2.5 months). But I was a wee bit nervous about driving across the country – many prayers were sent up through the trip! Ugandans are completely crazy drivers – I have driven in some mad places, and I really think they are the worst – they are very reckless, and also very selfish on the roads – there’s no sense of working together to solve a traffic jam, it’s just “oooh – there’s a three inch spot I can try to squeeze into – ahead of the 15 other cars that precede me” etc. And they also have a predilection for…as my Grandad used to say “they only want half the road – the middle half” – which is wicked scary as they barrel down the center of the road towards you and won’t budge over. I have seen any number of wrecks here – really bad ones – they often involve the boda bodas (motorcyclists who take passengers on the back and weave in and out without ever looking over their shoulder – they have a low life expectancy) and matatus (the vans that serve as buses around and between cities – also mad as hatters on the road and the cause of many accidents).

So I was reasonably nervous getting out on the roads, and had warned Geoffrey (the water engineer) that I would be taking longer than our drivers, as I was not going to do 150km/h like they do! The trip was mostly okay – we drove through quite a long stretch of roadworks, stuck behind a never-ending line of trucks (this highway is the main road from Kenya to Uganda so full of trucks) which meant that dust was kicked up so thick that I literally could not see the road in front of me at all – I couldn’t see a thing. Which was pretty scary – I just had to drive straight and pray… We also passed a dead pedestrian in the road – obviously knocked by a car in one of the villages (again – not a great deal of care exhibited when walking/cycling/crossing the road) and that was pretty awful – he was lying at a strange angle in the road with blood running from his head – I looked away pretty fast! Apart from that, we made it okay – which I felt very triumphant about.

Seeing as I was driving on Sunday, I took it pretty easy at the Christmas party on Saturday night (not ours – a German guy in Soroti had a party at his place). I spoke to Florian on Friday night and he said “the staff are bringing the food for the party. So today, they brought the food – it is tied up outside, eating the grass” I was devastated (seriously – goats are so cute – how can you?) and didn’t go out back to the BBQ area at all (I think it is easier to deal with when it comes in a plastic box etc – but my vegetarianism is re-affirmed!) But it was a fun night – the remaining flood response people all got together for one last night – although I didn’t follow them to the local disco afterwards, as I had to drive the next day (which I think was a good thing, looking at Brett the next morning!) The local disco is pretty hilarious – bad music and a dance floor lined with mirrors – people dance in front of the mirrors, just watching themselves – it definitely provides for a novel night out, although being a small group of non-Ugandans there means you get a fair bit of attention…

Anyway – I am back in Kampala and packing up to go home. Cannot wait – quivering with excitement and all of that. My home list includes many things – often food related! I will also get up to the beach house in Queensland for a few days to say goodbye to the place – my parents intend to sell it and I am devastated – I adore that house.

So – in case I don’t write again beforehand – Merry Christmas to you all…

God Save the Queen

2007-12-10T21:07:00.000+11:00

So – a few events recently have conspired to make me realize that it’s a frightfully long time since I updated…once again. In the interim, Australia elected a new PM – about whom I know extremely little, except that he speaks Mandarin and has a suspiciously full head of hair. But he seems to have started well by signing Kyoto and making moves to close the offshore asylum seeker centers – we’ll see how it continues…

Amusing side note – during the election coverage, the BBC International news referred to Kevin Rudd as both Jim Rudd and Kenneth Rudd – gave me a few chuckles, and made me wonder how long he would have to be in power before they got his name right! Last night at dinner, we were discussing politics, and a Spanish Red Cross chap was noting that Australian elections don’t really get much coverage in the international news. I suppose I never really thought about it, mostly because I’m used to Australia not getting much coverage in international news (only in the Sport news, and then mostly related to cricket!) but I did think for a minute about why this was – as I said to Lorenzo, I think it’s usually because our elections are fairly undramatic affairs – there’s a winner and the loser normally accepts the results pretty equably. Plus, honestly – nobody really cares about politics in Australia – our events don’t usually have great dramatic impact upon world events (despite what Johnny Howard kept trying to convince himself, and us) and I think we like it like that – we are the land of sea, sun and sport and that doesn’t make for great headlines…

During the election, I was online with a Zimbabwean friend, and said “oh, by the way – looks like we have a new PM” (this was about an hour before Howard’s concession). And I realized that he probably hasn’t seen an event like that for most of his life. It’s things like this that make me so passionate about voting – I don’t just think it’s a right, I also think it’s a responsibility – I think I owe it to the millions of people around the world who have no rights to chose their leaders to exercise my democratic rights and march down to the polls. Sadly, I was thwarted in this desire this election. Uganda has no Australian consular presence – the closest in Nairobi (I really should try to not ever do anything whereby I require consular assistance, hey?!) which makes voting a wee challenge. It was also not helped by my current residence out in Soroti, which could politely be termed ‘the middle of nowhere’. So – I arranged with the High Commission in Nairobi for them to courier me my ballot papers, and gave them the street address of the office out here in Soroti, and the address of the office in Kampala, as a back-up (in case DHL don’t deliver to the middle of nowhere!)

And I begin waiting… and waiting…

And my boss orders me back to Kampala for R and R over the weekend of the election (think I was starting to fray around the edges!!) and my ballot papers still hadn’t arrive by the time we left on Friday lunch time. So I had a friend checking in with the office on Friday, and Saturday, to see if my papers arrived. Still nada. Saturday – the election is all over and I haven’t voted, for the first time since I turned 18. Monday morning – I get a call from DHL – “we have a parcel here for you – where can we deliver it?”

I was ready to scream down the phone, but being a well-brought up lady, I didn’t. I just politely gave them the address of the office in Kampala, and took delivery of my ballot papers – two days after the election!! I really think DHL should give the Australian Government a refund on that one… Somebody could have walked from Nairobi and delivered them more quickly than that…

Due to electioneering, the Australian Government also missed a truly significant event in the life of Uganda – one that has been a dominant feature since I arrived…I speak of course of CHOGM. What, wait – you haven’t heard of it? Hmmmm – don’t tell the Ugandan Government – they’ll be crushed!! The whole country went CHOGM mad (not sure how much of that was inspired by the two days of public holiday declared for the event thought?) I have no idea who represented Australia – the third deputy under-secretary of agriculture in DFAT?

For the non-Australian/British/Canadian etc readers out there, CHOGM is the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting – it happens every two years or so, and is basically a talk-fest of all countries that are, or used to be part of the British Commonwealth (although if someone can explain to me the presence of Mozambique, I’d be awfully grateful!) I think the last one was in Australia, and this year, it was held in Uganda. Ever since I arrived, the city has been in the throes of preparations – filling potholes, fixing roads, planting flowers, building dozens of hotels that will never be full again. There were also campaigns of picking up undesirable people from the streets of Kampala and locking them up/shipping them away etc, in addition to massive clean-ups of the streets (very entertaining talking to people who came in to Uganda just during or immediately after CHOGM – they were commenting how clean the streets were. We just sighed and said “give it a week or two for the rubbish to accumulate again”!! – Ugandans don’t ever actually throw any trash in the bin – they just drop it in the street or throw it out of the window of their cars – it’s so sad).

Anyway, as always, CHOGM was presided over by the Queen, and the Ugandans went royalty-mad with a fervour I have never seen – rivaled only by our old next-door-neighbour in Brisbane, who had the most massive collection of royal memorabilia plates, wall hangings and china I have ever seen. As we drove back to Kampala on the Friday, most towns had big signs up saying “[insert town name] welcomes Your Majesty to Uganda” and then in teeny, tiny writing underneath “and the other CHOGM delegates” – it was pretty funny. Sometimes Prince Charles got a mention as well – but never the Duke of Edinborough or Camilla. And as we drove from Jinja (source of the Nile – famous for white water rafting – about two hours drive East of Kampala) to Kampala, people were lining the streets in their hundreds – I think they were expecting either the Queen or Charles to drive along there. Poor darlings…all they got was the Nigerian delegation, thundering along in blacked-out BMWs!!!

And boy do these Ugandans love them some Queen Elizabeth. They just went bananas about her – she was beautiful, she was elegant, she gave a fabulous speech (no point trying to tell them she didn’t actually write the speech herself!), she sat beautifully, she walked beautifully, she dressed beautifully, she spoke beautifully – they all wanted their wife/daughter/mother to be just like her. I saw one woman on BBC news saying she just wanted to give the Queen a great big hug – I couldn’t help thinking how utterly delighted Her Majesty would have been to be on the receiving end of that embrace!! And poor Museveni (Ugandan President) didn’t fare too well in comparison – he was looked down upon for his hat (which is rather absurd, I must confess), his smug air, his bad way of walking. It was quite amusing for about five minutes, but I had my driver raving about the Queen for literally an hour and a half as we drove on Friday!! Eventually I turned to him and said “Daniel – I think I’m going to have to tell your wife that you are in love with the Queen” – which dampened his spirits for a minute or two, but then he continued right on again. It was exhausting, I have to tell you!!!

Anyway – CHOGM is all over now, and the investigations into where all the CHOGM money vanished to have begun, with a sad inevitability. Glorious international conference, followed by corruption investigation. Rinse and repeat…

At least it keeps the Red Pepper tabloid in headlines.

Let the Countdown Begin

2007-11-06T19:48:00.000+11:00

So – I’m starting to get very very excited about going home at Christmas – less than two months to go and I cannot WAIT. I have a mental list of things to check out – I want to look at the program for the Moonlight Cinema while I am there, Anna is checking out concerts during my stay, I will need some new clothes and most of all, I need to see how much my puppy has grown.

For those of you unfortunate never to have met her, this is Phoebe – our little schnitzel (schnauzer-shitsu cross) – a non-stop bundle of energy who can wriggle like nothing else and never seems to calm down. And I miss her so much and cannot wait to see her again…

Life out here in Soroti continues on – the Ukrainian helicopter pilots cooked dinner the other night, which gave quite a few of us unpleasant lingering after-effects! We also had a dummy spit when the restaurant at the hotel put the prices up by about 30% - Giovanni, the UN OCHA head of office here went and threatened that we’d all check out, so they caved and returned to the original prices – power to the people!

Anyway – continuing with my theme of being too tired/busy/lazy to really write much, I thought I’d give you some pictures of food being airdropped in Pader – due to the inaccessibility of the area, the food is dropped from planes and we meet it on the ground. Just try not to be underneath it when it lands!

Food, Glorious Food

2007-10-30T02:50:00.000+11:00

So - having posted that lot, I was about to leave and then Joyce, the really lovely office assistant here, came in with tea for me. And she won't let me leave until I drink it!! And it is pitch black in this office and I just want to go back to the hotel, but am waiting for the tea to cool!

So I thought I would show you what I do most nights - basically sit in the bar and have dinner with the 'gang' - which is what we have become now (about 20 guys and four girls - we are going to get T Shirts made that say "Flood Girls - Soroti Hotel Field Unit"). I have mentioned previously the atrociously slow service of the restaurant - one night, Leo got fed up and went into the kitchen to cook, taking Anastasia with him for support. We all got authentic Italian food that night - yummy!!

Anastasia, Leo and random cook, shaking things up in the kitchen

"What - you wanted some too?"

Adama helps Leo dish up...

The troops are hungry...

Thank you for this food...

Take a Picture

2007-10-30T02:11:00.000+11:00

So - I am exhausted and cannot be bothered really writing anything right now - I am still out coordinating the flood response - six weeks and counting - fourteen hours a day, seven days a week, and longing for some time off. So instead - I offer you pics... (okay - they seem to be taking forever to load, so I may not offer you very many pics - perhaps slow and steady may be the key with this picspam...

A hut that collapsed after flooding:

Someone get my message in a bottle?

The only access road left into Soroti

The disaster that is Agu Bridge

This used to be completely dry - now there is at least a metre of water above ground

Child collecting water - really speaks for itself

In the Cold Light of Morning

2007-10-05T19:38:00.000+10:00

So – I’m taking five minutes out of my day to attend to this sadly, sadly neglected little blog. I know it has been a ridiculous amount of time since I was here – my excuses include extended periods of time in the field, no internet access for weeks at a time, malaria, annual leave, travel to Nairobi and now…floods in Eastern Uganda!!

I am currently out in Soroti (you could get an atlas?) in Eastern Uganda, responding to the floods that you may or may not have seen on the news (if you live in America, I think we were bumped for OJ Simpson, if you live in Australia, apparently we were bumped for Shane Warne’s latest debacle, if you live in Germany, I think it was extensively covered, given the number of interviews my German colleague gave!!!) Anyway – point is – there are floods across the East (and a bit the north) of the country and we are doing an emergency response, which I am coordinating from the field.

It’s pretty full-on out here – I am really tired and looking forward so much to this weekend (my boss ordered me to return to Kampala and rest for the weekend, bless his cotton socks!) Plus – Thurza is coming from Australia with a care package from me, including a disc with the first three episodes of Season three of Prison Break (cue happy dance). Now that makes me happy…

I will probably be out for the flood response for a few more weeks – we are trying to bring in some staff on secondment, but until they arrive, I will still be residing in Soroti. There is a pretty massive NGO/UN presence out here now – the main hotel in town must think it’s Christmas (hasn’t made them speed up the restaurant service though – if you get your food in one hour, you are celebrating the amazing velocity of that performance – one and a half to two hours is the general wait for lunch/dinner!!) Most evenings, there is a pretty large contingent in the bar eating and drinking, so that’s pretty fun – they are good bunch (although an incredible number of both Italians and Germans – one Italian guy came with his espresso machine, which he just needs to get working, and he will become my new best friend!)

And amidst all of this, my heart has been broken by the news that Steve Hewitt, the Placebo drummer, has left the band *cry,wail,stamp foot* Steve, fyi, is the chap on the right in the picture below of the leaping lads (yes – those leaping lads are Placebo). The thought that they won’t make any more albums together, and I won’t see them together ever again is devastating. Plus – he’s a kick-ass drummer and…well…I really can’t think of words except that it sucks. And I have listening to Placebo on loop since Monday (when it was announced) L

So – a reasonably incoherent post (gives you a pretty good picture of my headspace right now – just sooo tired!) but will try to return soon with a little more info and a little less rambling…

In the meantime – stay dry…

I've Got a New Apartment, Baby

2007-07-30T22:35:00.000+10:00

This brilliant gif was created for me by the extremely talented Lui, who in addition to being a fabulous friend, is also a brilliant graphic artist. She wanted to do something to celebrate my new apartment and sent me this in my mail one day. Needless to say, I was dumbfounded and sat staring at it for a good five minutes with a huge grin on my face, before making all the rest of my team look at it and pretend to appreciate it as well :p

Bonus points to anyone who knows who the three leaping lads are, and why Lui picked them for me?

And to answer B's question - I am going to rent out the place at the moment - the current owners will live in it until they find a new house and then I will rent it out. I will live in it, when I eventually return home, but for now - it is just helping me pay the mortgage.

Here are some pics of my new pad...

The kitchen:

The dining and living room (accessories, including baby, sold separately!!)

The dining room and kitchen:

I'll post some more later...

Capitalist Land Owning Pig

2007-06-22T03:51:00.000+10:00

The title of this entry comes from the title of an email my great friend Clare sent me a few years ago when she and her husband bought a house! I thought it was great, so am stealing it. Hope she hadn't copyrighted it!!

I forgot the most exciting thing! I am a homeowner!!!

As of Tuesday, I own (pending the processing of about a million forms!), a two bedroom apartment in Richmond, Melbourne! I am sooooooooooo excited about this - I have been looking for so long and missed out at quite a few auctions so it is great to have found something. My brilliant father has negotiated it all for me and apparently it is just superb, with views of the river and the city, and an amazing designer kitchen. I can't wait to see it.

I Love Paris in the Springtime

2007-06-22T03:19:00.000+10:00

Wow - you long onto your blog in France, and the whole darn thing is in French - all the links etc. That's not really a problem because my brain is working better in French than in English right now, but still...

This is going to be very short because the French keyboards are different and driving me nuts! I've been in France for about five or six days now. Those of you who have been lucky enough to have been reading my missives since 1999 may remember Géraldine, the zany party-animal roomate I had in the dorms in Massachusetts? Well - she's getting married!! And I'm here for her wedding! I have just returned to Paris from tzo days out in the West, visiting one of my old host families out there, and am loving being back in Paris. I have been been speaking a mixture of French and English, but nothing but French for three days now, and ,y brain has reverted completement to French - I am thinking in French now, which is how I was when I lived here.

Due to the insanely annoying keyboard, this is going to be a short entry - I am going to London on Sunday and will write more when I get access to a real keyboard again!!

In the meantime - Vive La France!!!

That was then...

2007-05-22T19:27:00.000+10:00

So I’m up in the north again, and I realise that, at some stage, I need to give a potted history of the conflict in the north so people can understand the context of what I am discussing. Sad to say – it won’t be today. I am too hot and tired!! I’ve been up here for over a week and still have a while to go, and have just discovered I have to come up again next week as a donor is visiting. *heaves big sigh*

On this trip, I have come to Pader, as on previous trips, but also to Kitgum and Gulu, for the first time since I moved to Uganda two and a half months ago. Those of you who have been reading my missives since 2002 may remember that I visited Kitgum and Gulu that trip, and it was the impression those towns left upon me that made me want to return to work here. It was certainly interesting to see the changes that five years, and more importantly, a ceasefire, have wrought. First of all – we can drive to the towns, and between them, with no problem. Five years ago we had to fly, due to the danger of ambushes. Indeed, last time we came, one of our drivers had just been shot (we saw his vehicle and met him then – and he still works for us – in my department actually) and we met others in the hospital in Gulu who’s car had been ambushed – they were covered in the most terrible burns. This morning, as we drove along the road from Kitgum to Pader, we had no military escort and wore no flak jackets (which were both mandatory a year ago) and the road was filled with children going to school, men riding bicycles and women carrying water or wood on their heads. People were tilling their fields and going about their everyday life, but a year ago that road would have been completely deserted – the only sights to see the frequent crosses marking sites of ambushes (“this is where the priest and two nuns were killed”, “this is where fifteen people from that camp were killed”). The joy of seeing children freely walking the road without the fear of abduction is pretty huge.
Similarly, in Gulu, we went one evening to visit the wife of a colleague who is seriously ill in the hospital with meningitis. This hospital is a very large complex and set in a big compound. For many years, it housed the ‘night commuters’, who were children, or whole families, who walked in to town every night to sleep in the relative safety of proximity to army barracks. They would walk up to five hours each way and needless to say, this dominated their lives. However, the fear of remaining in their villages, with a fairly high guarantee of eventually being attacked by the rebels, meant that the trip was a no-brainer. If the rebels came to your village, chances were all the children would be abducted and taken to Sudan for service in the rebel army, most women would be raped and then perhaps killed, and most men killed. This is the fear that the inhabitants of northern Uganda have lived with for twenty years, as 20,000 children have vanished into the rebel army. We visited this hospital in 2002 and met several thousand people sleeping there through the night – in the rain or the heat, battling mosquitoes and cockroaches, they made their nightly shelter there. Now, however, although the hospital was certainly filled with a large number of miserable people this visit, there were no frightened children huddled under trees or on verandahs, or even out in the open, trying to sleep.

I also went to the office of the Children Of War. This is a reception/rehabilitation center we run for children who have escaped from the rebels, or been captured by the Ugandan army during battles. These children had been brainwashed into soldiers, some of them living with the rebels for years, and received care and counselling at the center before going home to their families (who often also required counselling to understand the trauma their children had gone through and how to support them). I remember meeting children there and hearing their terrifying stories of gun-battles and lost friends – from a 12 year old! They had scars on their wrists and ankles from being bound and many of the girls had children, as they are given as concubines to army commanders. The center now stands empty – all of the rebels are either holed up in Congo or Sudan, or have gone to the reception center in Sudan, where they are meant to wait out peace negotiations under the care of the Ugandan Army. Candice – I was thinking of you so much as I wandered around there again, wondering where you had sat and worked! I remembered having the child sit on my lap and wee all over me – it was so hot I think I dried off in about 20 minutes!!

Altogether, the north is a much more hopeful place now. I become fiercely protective and hopeful as I see these children moving around freely, attending schools that have stood empty for 20 years, moving back to their villages, but perhaps missing siblings, cousins, friends who vanished one night and have never returned. I pray that not a single other child vanishes in the night, winding up with a gun in their hands and a glazed look in their eyes, returning from Sudan to wreak havoc upon their homeland. I desperately hope that the fear fades from the hearts of these children, and they become like most other children in rural Uganda – desperately poor, malnourished and trying to survive, but at least feeling secure. It will be a start – then we can begin working on the rest…

Lest We Forget

2007-05-12T22:59:00.000+10:00

So, I actually wrote this post on ANZAC Day, which is 25 April, but in the true fashion of my ongoing frustration with the new Google-owned Blogger, have been unable to post the jolly thing until now. I had pictures to accompany it, but am not going to push my luck and just try to post it now....

So today it's ANZAC Day. To try to explain ANZAC Day to non-Aussies is always a challenge – you tell them that it commemorates a battle where our forefathers were slaughtered and in which they were convincingly defeated, and they look at you blankly! I think you really have to be either Australian or New Zealander to get it – I just don’t think it can be explained. But to attempt to my non-ANZ audience, ANZAC Day occurs every 25 April, and commemorates the landing by the Australian New Zealand Army Corps (ANZAC – geddit!) at Gallipoli in Turkey during WWI. They stormed the beach and fought the Turks with the eventual aim of conquering the country. They were famous for their bravery – even as they knew they were going to their deaths, the soldiers continued to go over the beachhead and attack. Of course, they eventually lost but it has become an iconic event (many foreigners will know the Mel Gibson movie, “Gallipoli”).

Anzac Day is a public holiday in Australia and there are Dawn Memorial Services in just about every town across the country, before all veterans of all wars march through the streets in parades, which are televised nationally. Relatives of mine have marched proudly every year – my Grandad marched until he couldn’t walk any more, then he rode in a jeep or car. Since his death, members of my family have marched with his battalion, wearing his medals.

I am a complete sap and Anzac Day always gets me – the sight of all these old men and women, who went out to fight for freedom etc., chokes me right up – I always need to be wearing sunglasses at the Anzac Day parades. And this year, I think it is affecting me more than usual, so close after the death of my Nana. My Aunt wrote to me yesterday, that she had finished going through Nana’s things. I apparently get my rat-pack tendencies from her, as she kept birthday cards, Christmas cards, even all the cards she received at her wedding!! And there were also all the invitations to events at my Primary School – the thought of Nana keeping all those set me off again… I still miss her so much.

So not much news from Uganda today, just reflections from home. Anzac Day is a guaranteed day that Iwill miss home – I remember in the Philippines it was my first day of work in the new office. I tried to find a Dawn Service or some kind of memorial in Kamapala to attend, but there didn’t seem to be anything here (I don’t think there are many Aussies – we don’t even have a consulate here), so couldn’t even do that.

Another tradition of Anzac Day is the footy match between Essendon (my team) and Collingwood (NOT my team!) And of course – Essendon lost…

On that note – Happy Anzac Day!

2007-04-18T01:38:00.000+10:00

Whew - such a relief to be able to post again - I am punching the air here and so incredibly glad that nobody can see me! But, I say again.... phew *wiping brow*

I was beginning to be worried I wouldn't be able to post there and all of my history would be gone etc etc...

Welcome back, me

(now if I could just fix the function that emails the posts to people, I would be on top of the world)

Oh - and I think it is currently a tie between Google and Emirates as to who has the most unhelpful 'help' section. Not sure either of them could spell Customer Service...

Gone Away

2007-04-18T01:35:00.000+10:00

Blogger spat the dummy on me a week ago and wouldn't let me post - I have been trying every day without luck. Seeing if this works...

HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO MY WONDERFUL SISTER, ALEX.
The best sister a girl could hope for…

It’s really strange when someone you love dies. Because there are all the trappings of their life that don’t die with them – all the things surrounding them that made up their existence. But without the person, they are just meaningless objects. The clothes that they wore, the photos from their dresser, their bedsheets. All these things are hollow without a person to wear/look at/sleep in them. And your mind doesn’t just automatically accept that this person is gone. You still wake up in the morning and think “I should go and visit” or “I think this person would like to hear this”. The cycle of life just really sucks sometimes, even when it is inevitable.

My beloved Nana died a couple of weeks ago. Many of you know how much she meant to me and how much I have been dreading this moment. When I left Australia in February, I suspected I was saying goodbye to her for the last time, but I didn’t think she would be gone three weeks later. Despite all the platitudes, “she was ready to go,” “she has lived a good life,” “she is reunited with Poppa,” I still miss her like crazy.

Those of you lucky enough to have met Nana know what a wonderful person she was. I truly don’t think a kinder person ever walked the earth – almost too kind for her own good, at times!! I feel incredibly lucky to have had her patient, gentle countenance as an example for the last 29 years and I can still hear her soft voice in my head.

I went home for the funeral and was glad to be with my family. My good friend Kerin was on my plane from Dubai to Melbourne (she had come from Mozambique) and upon seeing me, commented “well, this can’t be good, three and a half weeks after you left!” But it was great to have her support and someone to play with during the Singapore stopover.

It was also good to be with my family for the funeral, and to give and receive support. It is a little strange that there is now nobody of that generation in my family any more – no grandparents (although having all four until one week before my seventeenth birthday makes me pretty lucky, I know) mean no more of those memories – I think it has re-motivated my Dad and his siblings to work on the family history!!

Anyway – I returned to Kampala on Good Friday and had Easter here in the city. I apologise for the delay in posting, and hope to rectify it now with more regular updates.

Alive and Kicking

2007-03-25T23:51:00.000+10:00

I actually wrote this over a week ago, but have had extremely limited internet access, and this is my first chance to post it. Apologies for the delay - the family will also understand the extenuating circumstances...

No – I haven’t died. Although I have been insanely busy for the past week and have, at times, felt dead on my feet! But I am still alive and kicking and checking in…

Last weekend I finally moved into an apartment – it is fairly nice – has a kitchen and living and dining areas, so I am self sufficient. The complex also has a pool and a gym, which is great for my workout-obsession and makes it easy (except for the strange opening hours. What kind of gym closes at 3.00p.m. on a Sunday?) Also – another Program Officer lives in the complex, which has been fabulous.

Terri is an intern Program Officer from Canada who has been a godsend. During my first week here, she was up north, but the day after she returned, she gave me a call and helped me to find places to go, etc. She also took me to church with her on Sunday, has been showing me how to get from apartment to office and has taken me out to lunch. After the fairly dismal first week, where I received very few pointers about anything, it has been fantastic to have someone take an active interest in welcoming a newcomer and helping me settle in to Kampala. Plus, she’s a real sweetie!

Unfortunately, my weekend was marred somewhat by work. At 4.45p.m on Friday afternoon, I was handed a food security project that was not performing well, and essentially told to ‘fix it’!! I therefore spent half the weekend working and frantically finished the documentation by Tuesday afternoon to send to America (we are asking for an extension to finish the work in). Then Wednesday morning, I left to come up north.

This is my first trip to Pader, an area that was chronically insecure during the insurgency. Peace is holding now and people are beginning to move out of the large mother camps into smaller satellite camps – the first step towards moving home and a very positive one, as it expresses confidence in the future of the peace process and of their area.

I’m thinking at some stage, that I need to provide a full explanation of the situation and history in northern Uganda, but I am incredibly tired now, so this will probably not be the day! Suffice to say that the region is emerging from twenty years of war – battered, bruised and pretty uncertain, but determinedly striding forward. The scars are everywhere – driving north, once you cross the Nile (interesting fact: the Nile has its source in Uganda) you are officially in ‘northern Uganda’ and basically, up until six months ago, in a war zone. There are memorial sites and IDP camps everywhere. (IDP stands for Internally Displaced People, who are basically refugees who have not crossed an international border – pretty much the entire population of northern Uganda are IDPs). Some of the IDP camps are beginning to be dismantled as people move to smaller camps closer to home (but still near army barracks) so there are stretches of land with the remains of huts on them.

Today we went out to a distribution at one of the camps – we do feeding programs up here, and today we were distributing seeds and tools to people. Today’s was reasonably small – I think there were less than 1000 people receiving goods. But apparently our food aid program is massive – there will be distributions covering 40,000 people – this blows my mind and I can’t wait to see how the logistics of such a large distribution are handled. I am not sure how many people we are feeding up here – from conversation I have heard it is at least half a million each month. Pretty huge numbers for a chronic campaign…

I am literally too tired to type anything else right now (too hot to sleep up here – just like Afghanistan!) so will end now. I can’t even post this because the internet isn’t working. So I will save it and post it when I return to Kampala.

A Whole New World

2007-03-09T19:28:00.000+11:00

Yipee – I have just been handed a piece of paper that, fingers crossed, will free me from the hotel and get me into a serviced apartment tomorrow!! I cannot wait to move from the hotel, and to particularly be able to cook for myself again. Now all I need is my stuff that is due to arrive next week, and I am set.

Even though I have been out of Afghanistan for six months now, some things are still an adjustment. Loud noises can still sound like gunshots or explosions and guns still make me incredibly nervous. What is strange, however, is adjusting to a new office where security is not the first thing you learn about (in Afghanistan, the security department was the first port of call for all newcomers – you were shown the security procedures before you were even shown your desk!) Here, nobody checks under our cars with mirrors when we enter the office or home, we don’t have call signs, nobody tracks our movements – it takes some getting used to!

I was sad in Afghanistan that, due to security restrictions, I was hampered in what I could write about. I could never tell you whereabouts in the country I was, or even at times, what I was specifically doing. Afghanistan is a world where you travel early in the morning, to blend in with the local cars, but cannot use a vehicle from your organisation. You must check in constantly with head office, but must use a code to reveal your location. Monitoring of our project work can change from week to week, depending on the security situation, and there would be days when we couldn’t leave the compound. Yet the endless sense of humour of the Afghans helped us to stay positive amidst such restrictions on our work.

I am looking forward to a different situation in Uganda, and to being able to tell you much more about my day to day life here. I am looking forward to sharing my stories and adventures as I begin to take on whole new tasks. I am currently working on a proposal for monthly food distribution to 400,000 people!!! And that is just in one district – I have never been involved in relief distributions on the scale that I will be doing here – the number of beneficiaries, the tonnage of food that we are moving is amazing. I am really excited to be getting into it – I am going to the field next week for some distributions and cannot wait to get back out to field life.

But since arriving back in another national office, I have been thinking a lot about Afghanistan again. I still miss it a lot – I thought I was past that, but obviously not completely. I have been missing my colleagues, in particular – some of those wonderful Afghans who welcomed me into their lives so warmly. I miss the amazing countryside, I miss the daily frustrations that would just make us laugh. So many small memories in my mind that pop up – seemingly from nowhere. They may find their way onto these pages (screens?) through the coming months.

An amusing trait that I picked up is the habit of saying Inshallah. I wrote about this while I was there – it translates as “God’s Will” and is the answer to just about everything in Afghanistan. We would say to someone “have a good day” and they would answer “Inshallah”. Or if we said, “we hope your new marriage is very happy” they would answer “Inshallah”. The expats took to using this expression, slightly ironically, but also as a reflection of how we heard it everywhere. And it is not one of those things that goes away – I almost said Inshallah to someone this morning. And I really don’t think it would go down very well in this fervently Christian country! Must make sure I don’t trot that out too often…

But in the meantime – I really need to get a more comfortable chair to sit in!

What's the Word

2007-03-08T00:40:00.000+11:00

Oh man – I am trying to write an article for a development magazine, and it just won’t come – my muse is dead. Thom Yorke can’t find it, Tool can’t find it and Damien Rice can’t find it (and I have just tried all three) – maybe I should stick to the tried and true methods and find Placebo. Or ask the guy in the next office to increase the volume on the already ridiculously loud African music he is playing!!

I love to write – almost as much as I love to read. You know that feeling where you know exactly what you want to say? When you have it all in your head and you know it is just right and your fingers are working overtime, trying to get it down on paper before is slips from your mind? I love that feeling – it is like a mini-high and I use it in a variety of means, both professional and personal. I love playing with words for different purposes and different audiences and creating something with them. I love coming up with a means of expressing a new idea – of using words to create a project design, or an email to a friend, or even a commentary on the latest Prison Break episode.

Anyway – that feeling? Is completely eluding me right now. And I have a deadline…

A few months ago, I wrote an article about Afghanistan and I showed it to my Mum. She came to talk to me about it after she read it. She made a bunch of obligatory motherly comments that I won’t bore you with, but she also said something that resonated (and I paraphrase) – “the words flowed so well, it was completely different from your blog. On your blog, you write the same way you talk. But this was so well edited etc etc.” Made me cringe for all the poor souls who plough through my blog (I was pleasantly surprised when I was home to hear how many people actually do read it). The thought of a written expression of the verbal me is a wee bit terrifying…

(Double Hee – the ipod has just landed on Big Audio Dynamite II – anyone remember these guys?!?!)

I have had a fair bit of free time on my hands since I got here, since I don’t really know anyone or places to go, yet! So I have read quite a bit and seen a couple of movies (finally starting to catch up there). I am going to recommend a few things – first of all, the book I just finished, which is Exile, by Richard North Patterson. He is one of my favourite authors and this is one of the best expressions of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict I have ever read, in an incredibly entertaining narrative. And so well researched – from both perspectives. As always, I thoroughly agree with just about everything he has to say.

Similarly, I watched both The Last King of Scotland and Blood Diamond over the past few days. Both are excellent and interesting portrayals of different aspects of African culture and history, and both rang very true for me, for different reasons. Obviously, The Last King of Scotland evokes a bloody and terrible time in Uganda’s history – I kept wondering what the Ugandans sitting in the audience with me thought of the movie – I doubt that was forefront in the movie-makers minds when they made the film, but it adds another level of poignancy. Similarly, I don’t think anyone in the crowd with me as we watched Blood Diamond could have looked at the depiction of the child soldiers in that movie, without thinking of the exact same situation occurring right now in northern Uganda – watching these children being indoctrinated and turned into killing machines was chilling, as I knew it was happening not far from me at this very moment.

On a lighter note, the gentle disparagement of humanitarian workers provoked general amusement, and Jennifer Connolly’s assessment of Leonardo DiCaprio’s character (and goodness – wasn’t that an awful Zimbabwean/South African accent!) as “not really the UNICEF type” caused quite a few chuckles. Good when we can laugh at ourselves.

I suspect there will be many posts about child soldiers, so I won’t harp on about it for the moment – just giving a foretaste of things to come.

In the meantime, I shall occupy myself with what to do tomorrow, during the public holiday…

1000 Miles Away

2007-03-05T22:45:00.000+11:00

I’m thinking of trying this new thing whereby I label all of my posts with the title of a song. Not for any profound reason – mostly for my own amusement. So for this one – I offer you the Hoodoo Gurus…

Although actually, as I landed at Entebbe Airport on Thursday, INXS’ ‘Never Tear Us Apart’ was playing on my ipod which may be slightly true as well. Arriving here is an indication to me that dreams really do come true, sometimes.

As some of you know, since visiting Uganda in 2002, I have wanted to come back and work here. Specifically in the north, where a pretty savage rebel group called the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) has waged war against the government for 20 years. Their MO is to kidnap children as soldiers, labourers and sex slaves, to kill indiscriminately and often to cut off tongues, ears and even limbs as they terrorise the north of the country. We spent most of our visit in 2002 up in the north, in Kitgum and Gulu, looking at the work we were doing there, and I was moved and motivated by the people, the staff and the tiny rays of hope that we were imparting through the small good acts we were able to achieve amidst such hopelessness. Since that time, I have wanted to work in northern Uganda and I now have my chance – I have started as a Program Officer in the Emergency Relief team here, working entirely in the north of Uganda.

Since returning, I have rediscovered the love I developed for the country four and a half years ago. Ugandans are warm and friendly, full of optimism and joy. I am based in Kampala and am currently learning my way around and trying to settle in (hampered significantly by lingering jetlag – although I was proud to survive until after midnight last night, as I was invited out to dinner – that beats my previous record by four hours!!) I have yet to meet anyone from my last trip – I suspect I will when I arrive up north (hopefully soon). However, I was taken around the office in Kampala and introduced to about 100 people – I think I can remember the names of maybe three! (although with the blokes, I suspect the strategy might be, ‘if in doubt, try Sam’ – there are so many Sams!!)

After the disappointment of leaving Afghanistan so abruptly, and the continuing heartbreak of watching a country I have come to care for so deeply spiral down into a mire of violence, fear and hopelessness, it is wonderful to be given a chance to come here and hopefully achieve some real change – a shaky peace process is holding in the north and people are cautiously optimistic, if justifiably wary. I am looking forward to getting to work up there and to sharing my stories along the way.

Our dear friend, and virtual surrogate family member Su, wrote to me a couple of days before I came here. As a South African she understood very well the ties that Africa bind you with. I hope she won’t mind me quoting her here as a thought to finish with:

“I am sure part of this is bias but since I have heard it from non-Africans too - once you've lived in Africa a part of you always hankers to go back - and when you've done 'good work' in Africa (for want of a better expression this early in the morning) NOWHERE else is quite as satisfying.”

Lifestyles of the rich and famous

2007-02-02T11:30:00.000+11:00

Is it ironic to be wearing my 'Make Poverty History' wristband in Aspen, or just precious? As we landed at the airport, a little joltingly (is that a word?) I put my arm out to brace myself and noticed the wristband - then looked out the window to see at least thirty private jets lined up along the runway! The juxtaposition cracked me up, at least...

Aside from that great irony, I am, in fact, in one of my favourite places on earth. I haven't been here in over ten years, but used to love skiing Aspen when I was in high school and am still loving it now. It is the prettiest town - having maintained a lot of the original architecture of the old mining town, and with a pretty unsurpassable natural scenery! It also boasts some fairly awesome skiing - four mountains, each roughly the size of an Australian ski resort, make up the full complex. It snowed about a foot yesterday - delicious powder to ski in - I couldn't even see my skis under all that snow!

I am here with the family, and we have friends arriving tonight to join us. It is great to have a family holiday before we all part ways again for the year - and a huge thanks to my Dad for shouting us a trip here!

Sadly, thus far, I have not seen any celebrities (suspect they are all in L.A. for the awards ceremonies) - the closest has been Andy Roddick on my flight over here. I was eating at a cafe at Melbourne airport with my old manager, a truly lovely chap who was flying out ten minutes before me, and who told me that Andy was on my flight. Sure enough, about twenty minutes later, a fairly tall chap in a cap and sunglasses (way to be inconspicuous in an airport - stood out like a sore thumb!) stalked past, still looking incredibly cheesed - I don't think he had recovered from his straight-sets loss to Federer two days before... He then vanished into first class, never to be heard from again (I texted my friend Lui, who came to meet me at LAX, to watch for him exiting, but she didn't even see him get off...)

So - no celebrities, but plenty of hot apple cider and bad coffee! As frustrated as I become with America as a country in the world arena, (primarily due to its government), I do love Americans as a people - they are super friendly and whether on a chairlift, in the jacuzzi or out at a restaurant, it is great to chat to them. Such an interesting variety of people here as well - they are always fascinating (and so many Aussies - we are like a little colony!)

So - no major news, but just checking in from winter wonderland. Will be sure to be back with more skiing tales again...

Kate (back) in Manila

2007-01-02T12:10:00.000+11:00

Yes – I am still alive, but have been frantically busy with work, and Christmas, and travel, and being sick etc!

A couple of weeks before Christmas, however, I got a wonderful early Christmas present, when I was able to return to Manila for ten days, for work. I am currently spending two months working on the project I was on when I lived in Manila (although now based in Melbourne). A new manager has taken it over and has asked me to assist in the first stages, as I know the project and the staff. It is very exciting to be back on this project, and helping to steer it in a new direction that will see it achieve its full potential.

And it meant that I got to return to Manila. It was soooo exciting to be back there – driving from the airport to the hotel, fortunately I had a very patient taxi driver, as I kept squealing “oooh – I remember that”, or “oh – that’s new” over and over! It was great to be back with the great Pinoys and their wonderful smiles. And to see my colleagues and friends again. I have so many wonderful friends in Manila and have missed them so much since I left – to see them again and to catch up properly – not just over email – was wonderful.

Of course, Manila was in full pre-Christmas swing, which means horrendous traffic (“bery trapic ma’am”), completely over the top decorations, endless carols and the wonderful Christmas Cantata and my church. One of the highlights was definitely returning to UCM – I managed to attend two Sunday services, one Saturday night bible study, one Tuesday night worship service and the Christmas Cantata (sadly, my friend Rainier was not solo-ing this year, but it was still brilliant). I do love that church so much – it is just an amazing place full of the most beautiful people, and I have really missed it. It was really the heart and soul of my time in Manila and introduced me to people I will be friends with for my whole life. To be with them again was like a warm blanket – familiar and comfortable and refreshing, as well. They remind me of the goodness in people and I cannot spend time with them without coming away strengthened and feeling loved. I feel so lucky to have these wonderful people in my life and to spend time with them again was a true gift.

We got the tail end of a typhoon through Manila (it hit further south in force) which meant amazing rain and wind. I just wanted to pack up the rain and send it down to poor, drought-stricken Melbourne. Manila has had two super-typhoons this year (I spent my last couple of days staying with friends who lost power for a whole month after the typhoon in September!) and there are still signs of some poor trees that suffered.

It was interesting being back surrounded by poverty again. I have been back in Australia for several months now, and one tends to forget a little. But being back with children begging at your car window and seeing the street sweepers and people who work so hard just to survive another day gives new strength to my determination with my work – a fresh reminder of my privilege and how I do really feel obliged to share some of my blessings around.

And of course, I went diving! My last Saturday, a group of friends and I went down to Anilao, about 130km south of Manila, for a day of diving. It wasn’t the greatest conditions – a very strong current mean quite hard work and low visibility, but it was so terrific to be back under the water and surrounded by fish. Plus diving with these guys was hilarious – they kept making me laugh and my mask would flood – I would just get myself sorted out and I would look at Jess pulling another face, or turning a somersault during the safety stop, and I would be off again. Getting to dive with my great friend Kim was also wonderful – during my year there we never managed to dive together and I was so pleased we finally did – it was such a fun day and made me really lament my absence from Manila all over. It was really a good summary of my time there – wonderful friends from all around the world out on the water with beautiful scenery, hot weather and bad food! And the vague reminder that I had work to do the next day!! Oh – and a six hour gridlocked trip back to Manila (bery, bery trapic!)

Good to know that some things remain eternal…

We break from our usual programming

2006-12-08T20:42:00.000+11:00

Okay - apropos to absolutely nothing except that it completely cracked me up this morning. I was in the bathroom brushing my teeth, and Hugh Rivington (who I only know because he used to present Channel Nine Late News that was on right before La Femme Nikita, back in the good old days) appears to have moved up to CNN. And there was a story on that economists at ANU (the Australian National University) have done a stody that shows that more attractive candidates are more likely to be win elections, but less attractive candidates have greater longevity holding their seats. And then they ranked the four politicians in Australia who were found to be the most ugly. It felt like an episode of Family Feud.

And the survey said:

#4 - our esteemed Prime Minister, The Hon. John Howard
#3 - our esteemed Attorney General, The Hon. Philip Ruddock
#2 - our esteemed Foreign Minister, The Hon. Alexander Downer
#1 - the somewhat less prominent MP from the state of Tasmania, The Hon. Dick Adams, is voted the ugliest man in Australian Politics.

Sadly, I can't seem to find the story on CNN to link it :(

Thank you for the music

2006-11-14T20:25:00.000+11:00

I sat down to watch The OC last week as I had my dinner. I didn’t really have any idea what was going on as I haven’t seen it for years (and I am sure it used to be funnier?), except for the fact that Marissa appears to have died, which made me exceedingly happy. But I was absolutely thrilled to hear (even before the picture came up on the screen), Placebo’s brilliant cover of the Kate Bush song, ‘Running Up That Hill. Such a brilliant song and played, almost in its entirety, twice during the episode. They played this song when I saw them a couple of months ago and it is haunting live (first time I have heard them perform it). Made me realise again how much I love their music, and just how much I love music in general. I do feel so fortunate to have music in my life (to quote ABBA: “without a dance, or a song, what are we? So I say Thank you for the Music, for giving it to me”!)

Speaking of things musical, I had a major triumph this week. I have been quite desperate to attend the Make Poverty History concert this Friday – a musical gathering, in the vein of the Live 8 concerts last year, to coincide with the G-20 conference in Melbourne next week. Tickets are free, but as hard to come by as tickets to U2 this weekend. I was lamenting this fact to two friends at breakfast (shout out to Clare and Tristan!) and when eight tickets were made available through work this week, they both scrambled to get me one – gorgeous friends! So I am off to see Sarah Blasko, Jet, Eskimo Joe, Evermore, the Hilltop Hoods, Paul Kelly and John Butler Trio on Friday night, and cannot wait. There will also be some excellent speakers and I truly hope that this continues the wave of grassroots efforts around the world to end poverty.

If nothing else – should be a ripper night.

Kate woz here

2006-11-10T00:40:00.000+11:00

Wow - this is so cool...

Countries I have visited:
Really need to turn more of that white into red!

I keep going back to the same places again and again...*sigh*

I have been to 12% of the world's countries. Not very impressive hey!

(that is 29 countries by the way). I'm sure I must be missing some!

If you want to try this for yourself:
http://douweosinga.com/projects/visitedcountries

Practice what we preach

2006-11-10T00:23:00.000+11:00

Interesting article about aid workers and their cars - food for thought:

http://www.mg.co.za/articlePage.aspx?articleid=288591&area=/breaking_news/breaking_news__business/

(still not quite sure about whether I can just post a whole article, so am putting the link instead)???

2006-11-08T15:22:00.000+11:00

Heee - totally cracked me up! Soooo Australian!! I rode a donkey in Egypt -they are surprisingly comfortable and can get up a bit of speed too...
Btw - the link for the article and picture is: http://www.news.com.au/dailytelegraph/story/0,22049,20717272-5001023,00.html

The race that stops the nation

2006-11-08T15:18:00.000+11:00

So yesterday was Melbourne Cup Day.

For Australians, that will be fairly self-explanatory. For the rest of the world, I should explain.

I have the fortune of coming from the most sports-mad country on earth. One article I read recently suggested that it was because it was the only thing we did better than the rest of the world (not sure about that – I think our annual alcohol consumption has to be up there with the Germany’s and Russia’s of the international data…) but whatever the reason, we are mad for pretty much anything sporting, and crown our sports heroes the way Americans worship movie stars and the Czechs chess players.

There are several annual highlights of the sporting calendar – the Australian Tennis Open, the AFL Grand Final, the Boxing Day Test, but none has the glamour and universality of the Melbourne Cup. Australia has the distinction of being the only country on earth that stops for a horse race. Yes – the pinnacle of the Spring Racing Carnival is the $3 million Melbourne Cup and literally the entire country comes a standstill at 3.00p.m. on the first Tuesday of November to watch. It is a public holiday in Melbourne, and those who don’t actually go to the races, go to barbeques and luncheons. For the rest of the country, TVs are wheeled out in banks, offices and restaurants, and anybody strolling the streets madly finds the nearest electronics store so that they can watch the TV in the window.

This year’s cup was a massive win for the bookies. Apparently over $200 million was bet on the race this year, but the favourites are still running so the bookies have completely cleaned up. I remember watching them load up the horses into the starting gates and one of the commentators said “now there’s Delta Blues, who could be interesting – he has been overlooked in the pre-Cup lead-up but I think he has the ability” etc. etc. – and I thought, “that’s who I should have put my $5 bet on! Of course he went on to win, stunning the nation. I had put a bet on the horse that came second – Pop Rock, purely because I liked the name, but resisted my father’s suggestion that I double my $5 bet to allow for a place as well as a win, so lost my money!! (also an annual tradition!)

One thing that traditionally bugs me when watching sporting events is the post-race, post-match interview with the winner, when they are heaving and panting so much that they can barely speak, and all they really want to do is go to the changerooms and hug Mum, but they have to talk to Bruce McAvaney or some other twit about how thrilled they are. And no event bugs me than when they do this for the Melbourne Cup. Some git on a horse goes out with a microphone and chases the winning jockey around the turf, trying to get some sense out of him. And in this case, not only is the jockey exhausted and puffing, but he is trotting up and down on a horse, so you only get about one word in three anyway. So I was absolutely thrilled when they attempted this yesterday with the winning jockey. Problem was – he was (is!) Japanese. So his response to all the silly questions hurled at him was, “Berry Happy…Supa Hoss…Berry Happy…Berry Happy”. I was laughing myself silly – thought it was brilliant. Sadly, I don’t think it will deter them from doing it again next year, although I sincerely hope this chap comes back and repeats the performance!

Anyway – my actual point was a great story that I missed on the news last night. My parents screamed at me to come running to the TV to get the kick story on the news, but by the time I made it to the living room it had finished. And then, in between the prime-time news and the late news, the Senate voted to overturn the ban on stem-cell research, so as you can imagine, there wasn’t too much time for feel-good Afghanistan stories in the late news. But I will give you the story now, and a picture I have taken from The Daily Telegraph website – I hope that by linking and crediting I am not committing any copyright violations? This gave me a good chuckle…

Troops celebrate the Cup

COURAGE won the day as Australian troops in Afghanistan celebrated the Melbourne Cup with a race of their own.

Not to be outdone by the celebrations back home, the diggers yesterday held the inaugural TK – short for Tarin Khowt where they are based – Derby donkey race at the Australian base in southern Afghanistan.
The field was slightly smaller – six donkeys – and the course a little shorter than the two miles run at Flemington – the donkeys did one lap of the ring road inside the Australian base.
Lieutenant Colonel Mick Ryan, commander of the Australian task force, said the race was won by Trooper Tim Brush, from the 2nd Cavalry Regiment in Darwin, who was riding a donkey called Courage.
"We had six riders, all the riders were Australian soldiers ... and that was followed by a big Aussie barbecue," Lt Col Ryan said.
"The race went very well. It was quite a bit slower than a normal horse race, of course, but there were no injuries and all the riders completed the race."
Lt Col Ryan presented the victorious jockey with a polished replica of the Melbourne Cup which was made by soldiers in the workshop.
This morning the troops enjoyed a breakfast before watching the big race live on satellite television.

hmmm - the jolly picture is not uploading at the moment. I will post this and then try to add the picture later

Life, or something like it

2006-11-03T23:29:00.000+11:00

I have been fairly overwhelmed recently with life-in-general and not fulfilling my vow to single-handedly enlighten the readers (all four of you!) about Afghanistan. And it probably won't happen tonight either - I am tired and have a cold, so my head is all blocked up and I am fairly incapable of thinking straight! I have seen The Departed tonight, and my brain really isn't up to much more than trying to decide whether or not Leonardo Di Caprio has had hair plugs (seriously - I think he used to have a much more pronounced widow's peak, didn't he?) I also think he has put on about fifty kilos. At least he no longer looks fifteen! But that was a fun and escapist few hours, so I am not complaining. I needed a Martin Sheen fix now that I have watched the very last episode of West Wing - ever (excuse me while I go rock in a foetal position for a while).

Anyway - Spring has sprung in Melbourne and I am enjoying the truly bizarre weather that traditionally brings - 35 degrees one day and 15 the next. The city is incredibly dry - we are continuing our drought and once again on severe water restrictions. The next level came in last Wednesday. So what did I do right before hand? I washed my car. What did it do on Thursday? It rained on my clean car...*pbft* I was so tempted to not emerge from the house all day, in order to preserve my car's cleanliness, especially as we can now only wash them with a bucket (such a performance).

We are also onto daylight saving's time, which is another reminder to me that we are coming in to summer. I have now had two solid years of summer weather and am fairly fed up with being hot and sticky! Guess I am in for another six months or so of it.

Yes - that's right. I am sticking around Melbourne for a while. I have agreed to work on my Philippines project for a few months over Christmas/New Year (although based in Melbourne, not Manila, as management of the project is transferring here). I will be starting on that as soon as I finish my Afghanistan work and cannot wait to get back to Manila to visit. That will keep me busy until February, when we have a family skiing trip planned for Aspen. So I guess my life is fairly well mapped out right now, hey?

I am still missing Afghanistan a lot, but am more slowly getting back into life here. I constantly worry about Afghanistan and my colleagues there - I am always asking for updates about people and checking that they are okay. It is weird how much it is still present with me - I was thinking this morning about one of the team houses we had in a rural zone - I could see perfectly, in my mind's eye, the screen door that led the the bedroomw - I could see the angle it hung at and how the bolt on the door wouldn't close. I can still remember exactly where the surface of my desk was chipped and how my curtains hung crookedly. I suppose, with time, this vividness will fade, which will be healthy. My room isn't even my room now - it has been packed up and is awaiting shipment back to me (well - my personal effects - they are not sending me the curtains!)

I am also embracing life here more and getting on with normal things. Although not a fan of hot weather, I like summer - I like days that are light until 9.00p.m., I like gelati and walking along the beach and of course there is the tennis - I love the tennis and will be a fairly regular feature at the Australian Open, I imagine. I have been getting madly into Harry Potter lately - finally one too many adults told me how much they loved it, and I have firmly jumped onto the ship, whizzing through them so that I am now half way through the sixth book. I also tried to get into something that was on television (man - is it just me or is most of the stuff on TV rubbish now?) I started watching Grey's Anatomy - mostly because many of my friends were and I could discuss it with them. However, I was absolutely thrilled to have the season two finale last week feature my favourite ever Snow Patrol song - Chasing Cars. I now remember reading posts on amazon by people who said they came to the band after seeing this in America - it didn't mean anything to me at the time as I never watched the show. I think that their increasing popularity might have something to do with this - always a dilemma when a band you have loved for a long time suddenly become mainstream. While you are happy for their success, a mean part of you wants them to remain your little secret and another part of you desperately hopes they don't sell out and start writing like the Backstreet Boys *snerk*

I suppose the sum total of these musings is that life here is becoming depressingly normal. I was speaking with another friend who just returned from a year in Africa and we were dwelling on the fact that life back home is exactly the same. Which can be hard to slip back in to. I also don't feel like I want to become too comfortable here - my goal remains to be working in the field and within six months or so, I truly hope to be back overseas. And I know that the more attached and settled you become, the more difficult it is to make the break from home when you leave again. So I find myself in a sort of limbo, which fortunately, everyone is being very patient with.

I will definitely be back with more Afghanistan posts - when my sinuses clear! In the meantime - here's to home and the brilliant convenience of life in Melbourne!

Hmmmm

2006-10-17T11:38:00.000+10:00

Okay - about two months ago I prepared an entry with a couple of photos and then saved it as a draft without posting it. I have now posted it - but it has positioned itself by date at 19 August! So, if you scroll down the page a bit, you will see a few photos.

I will post some more soon...

The best laid plans...

2006-10-13T18:13:00.000+10:00

My last few weeks in Afghanistan, I was feeling guilty because I kept writing these rambling posts that were far from coherent. And I had made a vow that I was going to write concise posts from now on - with one point and a clear message. There would be no more rambling and guff...

But, like so many good intentions, that was was not fulfilled.

I will not be returning to Afghanistan. I am not sure how much you follow the news, but the security situation there is continuing to deteriorate at a fairly rapid pace and it is simply not safe for us to continue most of our work there. We cannot guarantee the safety of staff in the current situation and it is quite difficult to implement our programs. So most activities are being shut down, and I am not returning.

So I guess I won't be writing those coherent posts about Afghanistan after all...

Or maybe I will. I am filled with so many regrets about not returning - on many levels. I actively miss the place. I miss my colleagues - both the internationals I lived and worked with, and the Afghan staff, who I was forming strong bonds with by now and who I really enjoyed the company of. I miss the people - so resilient and brave, facing endless hardship and strife, but keeping on keeping on. I miss the amazing countryside and am so sad I never got to see it turn white with snow, or green with rain. And I miss the work that we did there - I miss the people who will not be able to benefit from our assistance because it is too dangerous to offer it.

And I am angry. The people of Afghanistan deserve better than a life of constant insecurity, where they feel there is no point planting crops because they consider it unlikely they will be around to harvest them. They deserve a chance to have their children educated for twelve years, not consider it a boon if they can learn to read and write. They shouldn't have to be accustomed to gunfire and bombs, and to attending funerals. I am angry at Afghans for doing this to themselves, and for foreigners for messing up their country. So many external forces, making a total mess of the country.

I want to convey to you more of the Afghanistan I fell in love with - the people, the scenes, the ideas. I want to share with you some of what people there shared with me - their hopes and dreams. Their memories of exile, their memories of the Taliban, their memories of liberation and their fear of the future. I will keep writing about Afghanistan for now, so I hope you will bear with me as I share a little of this amazing country with you...

And maybe we will even get a structured and organised post out of it!

Hiatus

2006-09-04T16:49:00.000+10:00

I am home for a few weeks, so just letting you know that this blog will be on hold for a while...

So you are free from my musings and your brains have time to recuperate....

Toodlepip

Still Ramling...

2006-08-23T23:45:00.000+10:00

Oh dear – so I intended to write something completely different in this post, but it sort of wrote itself. And guess what – just for a change – it still is incoherent and rambling!!! Apologies for that but I am still going to post it as-is – may come back to edit one of these days, but probably not. I sometimes wonder if having a job where I write so much means that by the time I get to blog entries, I have nothing coherent left to say?

So, by now, everyone who wants to in America, and all those with download facilities in Australia, have seen Monday’s premiere of season two of Prison Break. And I am left, in Afghanistan, consoling myself with a few images of the guys running for a train, that I got from web spoilers…

It is a tough, cruel, life and I am severely deprived. But fear not – I think I have found a source to get the DVDs – just as soon as post comes to Afghanistan. So I should have seen this episode by Christmas…

So now that we have dealt with the most important element of my life right now, we can move on to less pressing matters.

I remember, one particular day in the Philippines, posting about how I was having a not-particularly-fantastic day and then several brilliant friends just stepped in (via email, I believe!) to do extraordinary things for me, and I finished the day reflecting how lucky I was. I have had a few similar weeks here. There has been quite a lot of stress right now, with a lot of stuff going on (most of which I can’t tell you about on an open forum, I’m afraid) and me getting fairly tired. In addition to this, the relentless heat just grinds on and on and I am so fed up with being a walking puddle of sweat! And yet, so many days, when I look at my emails, from family and friends all around the world, I am reminded how incredibly fortunate I am. The love and support I feel from everybody, ranging from “we need your address so we can send you something fun to cheer you up” to “I saw the news and am worried about you and wish you would leave there, but just want you to know I am thinking of you” to “just plain emailing you coz I love you” and of course, my new favourite “will put Prison Break on a DVD and send it to you”!! It all cheers me up no end and I want to put out a mushy and humble thank you to you all…

It is something that I think many people in a profession like mine grapple with – the constancy of saying goodbye. The office here is downsizing, primarily on internationals and there have been a fairly steady stream of fare-thee-wells since I arrived. It is always hard to say goodbye to people and I have been privileged to work with some truly wonderful folks here. When you not only work with, but live with people, you really want them to be fairly fun. The dynamics of a team house can be interesting and it has been quite revelatory to see the emergence of cliques and alliances and to have to try to dodge all of that!

Like pretty much all mass environs, there are people I really enjoy the company of, and people I can pass the time of day with. Fortunately, there is nobody in the team house I dislike, which makes life easier! But a few of my favourites have left or are about to leave, which leaves me feeling a little bereft. It also makes the team house seem a bit empty. There is a constant ebb and flow of people as we come and go and move around the country – I am actually out in the field now – my time out here has extended from ten days to six weeks and I have had to keep putting in calls to Heart for shampoo and chocolate and more books!! Most of my time is spent out in the field which makes for an interesting variety in both company and scenery and which I actually like (access to shampoo notwithstanding!!) I prefer the field work and like the smaller offices in the field – easier to get to know people. Makes me infinitely happy I am a programming person, and not finance (who never leave the base, essentially!)

We have a team house in all of the zones. This is nice – it always seems like you are coming “home” when you drag your poor body from a six-hour road trip through river beds and across rocks and rubble. But there will be familiar faces waiting for you and the smiling guards there, willing to put up with your halting attempts to learn Dari. Our staff are really lovely people and I feel an extra kinship with them in the field – they are very protective of us out here and I think that we have a closer and stronger relationship. They are particularly protective of the women – two nights ago, when I was in the office after dark, the office guard walked me halfway across the field to the team house, where the team house guard then came and met me (did make me think a wee bit of prisoner transfer!) to ensure that I got home safely – made me feel very safe and protected.

I have also acquired more ‘family’ here. I seem to do this everywhere – in the Philippines I had an extra Aunt and Uncle, plus a surrogate mother. Here in Afghanistan, I have acquired another father (don’t worry Dad – you are still my favourite!!) One of the men up here declared to me that I was his adopted daughter and he was going to take care of me. He has four daughters himself, so is quite protective of women. He is a terribly gentle and intelligent soul – just seeing him brings a smile to my face. And he even reminds me a little of my own father (tall, thin, a little patrician, although I think all of you who know my dad would share my inability to imagine him in a turban and long beard!!) He is very sweet – brings me fruit and makes sure that I am comfortable etc.

And slowly but surely, I am falling in love with the country. It can be frustrating beyond belief at times, and I agreed with a colleague today that sometimes it feels like beating your head against a brick wall. And I am eternally glad that I am not an Afghan woman. Yet, the smiles from the people here, the great hospitality, the perseverance in the face of just constant suffering and deprivation. It is incredibly hard to be Afghan, yet when one of the staff says to me “I am proud to be Afghan and I love my country” I just feel all warm and gooey inside – good for him. The country needs a few more million like that…

…sadly – many of the talented ones are at the foreign consulates applying for visas out. It is so often the way. But I guess our battle is to make this a country where people want to stay, not leave…

Just to whet the appetite

2006-08-19T22:30:00.000+10:00

I finally have a few photos to share. They are pretty bad quality and the lens seems to be filthy (sorry about all the spots etc) but it will finally give many of you an idea of the land where I was living. I had five or six rolls developed and put on to CD when I was in Melbourne in June, but the location of the CDs is something of a mystery for the minute. Those photos are much better quality, but here are a few snapshots, just to give you a clue (if nothing else - they ably demonstrate just how dry it is there)...

I have more that I will post soon and I will write some stuff as well.

Home and Away...

2006-08-19T22:25:00.000+10:00

As many of you know, I absolutely adore my family. And not only because I am legally required to do so. Also, because they completely crack me up. Witness the following extracts from emails (but first, a little context…)

My parents moved house a couple of weeks ago. I still have a bedroom at their house and it is my base in Melbourne. I absolutely adored the old house and was fairly grumpy when they sold it and bought a new, smaller house – the rudeness of it all – them preparing for their age and infirmity now, at the cost of my nice big bedroom and swimming pool!!

Anyway – about a week ago, I received an email from my Aunt, with this passage in it:

I haven't been to see [the new house] yet but am looking forward to it. I will check out how small your bedroom is. I hope there's plenty of cupboard space - I know how much you'll need because I packed up your stuff from your old bedroom.

And then about three days later, this came from my sister:

I have been to the new house twice now, I have unpacked my room and am halfway through yours. So I am the person to yell at if you don't like your new wardrobe arrangement. I thought that your tactic of having more clothes than me in order to get the better room was very sneaky.

Hee!! – totally cracked me up! Was good to have a chuckle at this (and also good to know that I am nowhere near the boxes as they have to be packed and unpacked. I absolutely loathe moving, probably having done it twenty times in my life (not entirely sure and cannot be bothered counting exactly) and hating it more each time I do it.

The funniest (saddest?) thing? That there is probably only one-third of my wardrobe actually in the house – the rest is in storage along with my books and furniture – and many of my shoes.

I actually think that this could possibly be the one reason that I ultimately give up field life. Whenever I am home, I look longingly at the beautiful clothes I have in my wardrobe that I never get to wear any more (there are things there that I have never worn, having been purchased when I was home on leave and then left in the wardrobe) and I sometimes get sick of being field-frumpy. Wears a girl down, you know – the endless bad-hair days (although nobody notices under the scarf!) and the constant not-so-inner glow from the heat! It’s a good thing I have my priorities in order, hey?

Speaking of priorities – there is a fairly bad situation here right now, that overshadows much of the other work that we are doing. And that is drought. The rains have failed in Western Afghanistan this year and crops are also failing – where people should have one meter of wheat, they maybe have twenty centimeters (if they are lucky). This is a huge problem, in a subsistence farming community, and is already leading to massive hunger and social dislocation.

Communities here have several coping strategies for a situation like this. One is to send the able-bodied young men away to find work and send money back. This generally means Iran (every day the queue at the Iranian consulate in Herat stretches for hundreds of meters and moves at an interminable pace) although it could also be Pakistan, or even just Herat or Kabul. This would normally be the first strategy.

Another coping mechanism, although less likely to be openly spoken about, is to sell their daughters. The traditional dowry in Afghanistan is about US$10,000 (many of the young men in the office are saving up for this, so that they can get married) which must be paid to the bride’s father. During hard times, fathers are likely to be less picky about who marries their daughters, and also maybe to accept a discount. There is also a higher chance that a daughter will be sold, not for marriage, but for some other nefarious purpose.

A final strategy (I have left out a various range of other options like depending upon family for help or selling livestock – only available to those more wealthy families) is to move to the camps in Herat for the winter. This would mean a miserable existence on the outskirts of town in a tented community, through the bitter winter. These camps are run, I believe, by the UNHCR and the government. Naturally, the government is quite keen that this not happen, as it is a great strain on the economy to have to care for people there, and causes the social fabric to fray.

We are obviously trying to respond to this. We are working with the government to seek solutions and a call has been put out for international donors. The problem is, Afghanistan is not the focus of attention right now – there is Lebanon, renewed concern about Darfur (Sudan), floods in Ethiopia, volcanoes in Philippines (Hi Pinoys out there – still miss ya!), typhoons in China – you get my drift. The world just seems to be getting worse and worse that there simply is not enough help out there to go around.

Which leaves me feeling singularly useless when I venture out to the field. I feel so stupid, trying to talk to communities about drip irrigation kits, and all they want to talk about is the fact that they have no food at all and are starving. They keep coming back to it again and again and I feel so mean trying to change the subject and get back to the topic at hand. It is so hard to look at a woman who is pregnant, again, and has six children clutching at her skirts, and hollowed out cheeks, and not be able to give her the help she is asking you for – just to tell her that you are working on the problem. Even if we do manage to get assistance in, we won’t be able to help everyone. Sometimes I feel extremely hopeless.

We just to have faith that donors will come through and we will be able to implement the strategies we have designed to feed some people. I guess, in the end, all you can do is what you can do. But driving through the countryside, looking at one barren village after another, it doesn’t seem like very much…

Planes, trains and automobiles (without the trains)

2006-08-07T16:24:00.000+10:00

I am back up in the zones again – I feel like my life nowadays just consists of packing suitcases and traveling around. This time I flew up, rather than driving, which is a far swifter and more comfortable experience. It takes six hours to drive up here, but less than thirty minutes to fly! A distance of about 150km.

Right now, the country side is almost completely barren – it is a light brown colour and the hills look like sand dunes from afar, although when you get close to them, you realise that it is actually a sort of sad scrub cover. Everything is incredibly dusty – it gets everywhere and you have to wipe off your computer screen several times a day from the dust! Down in the valleys you might see a stretch of green – a few fields, some trees. This is the only relief from the brown dust that covers the entire country.

Driving is a different matter altogether. I often wear a burqa when traveling long distances, for security, and that thing just totally sucks! I will get a picture one day and post it here. I love to drive through the country side – I have always enjoyed doing that, pretty much any country I have been in – I just love to watch people going about their daily lives and seeing the local scenery. In Afghanistan, however, you can go kilometers without seeing anyone, then you will stumble upon a small village, made entirely of mud huts, that could be from biblical times. There will be some small boys herding sheep or goats, maybe a family on a donkey (the number of times I have looked at a man walking besides a woman on a donkey and exclaimed “hey – it’s Mary and Joseph!”) The only sign of modernity (apart from our 4WD, anyway) might be the occasional motorbike leaning against a wall.

The roads are fairly dire. I have driven across some horrendous roads in Africa, but nothing compares to the ones here. The only reason we can get to here from Herat in six hours is that the first half of the journey is on tarmac road (which we do in an hour) – if it weren’t we would be looking at a minimum of ten hours (and remember that this is summer – in winter the time for everything just about doubles as you dig yourself endlessly out of the mud).

The zone where I am is the only one I can fly to – from here, you must drive everywhere else. This means many hours in a bumpy car going through the mountains and valleys. Due to the bumpiness, it is impossible to sleep in the car, so I get plenty of people watching (and empty space watching) done. I love to watch the family dynamics of people as we whiz past – only small girls are out and about – or the occasional woman with her husband. Mostly it is men and boys.

One of the greatest things is to see a Koochi family go past. The Koochis are the nomadic people of Afghanistan – they move around and camp in great big black tents, toting all their possessions with them. Occasionally I have passed a whole family on the move – if they are wealthy, they will have camels, and you will see a convoy of ten camels, laden to the hilt with blankets, equipment and people, plus other livestock, moving along the road (we have to dodge them) – it is like Lawrence of Arabia! I like to watch the camels from a distance, but am not so keen on them close up, having ridden a particularly skittish one in Egypt a few years ago!!!

Sorry this is not a particularly coherent entry – I am writing it bit by bit as I tend to other things and I don’t think it has a theme! But I just wanted to throw a few thoughts down, especially as I am having limited time to post entries (just working manic hours). I anticipate being in the zones for most of August – I like it in the area where I currently am – although it is still stinking hot, it cools down better in the evening and I can sleep (unlike Heart, where I struggle to sleep in the summer).

Hope to be back with some more coherent thoughts soon…
Toodles

Home sweet home...

2006-07-23T01:27:00.000+10:00

I have left it too long without updating, so will post something now, although my back is really sore and I very much want to get up off this sofa! The major reason I haven’t been posting is that I wasn’t here (Afghanistan!) I was HOME! I went back to Melbourne for ten days for R and R and had the most fantabulous time. The timing of the trip was necessitated by the Coldplay tickets I purchased last year, but it was so incredibly good to get home. Normally we have R and R about every eight weeks, so I was a little early, but I tell you what, I needed it! Due to the extreme heat, I hadn’t had a decent night’s sleep for weeks before leaving (we have a variety of remedies we try – sleeping under wet sheets, sarongs or towels, draping wet towels over chairs to cool the air – none are terribly effective…) and the only way to make it through the days was to know that I would be cold soon (Clare brought a big jacket to the airport to collect me!!! ‘Twas delicious!)

Coldplay were indeed fantastic, although I did feel that their set could have been a little longer, and they lost some atmosphere playing in a venue the size of the tennis center. But boy, those boys are just NOT cool! Their black clothes and reflective white sneakers – definitely not destined to make the Gucci catwalk any time soon, methinks. All the other elements of being at home were also great, although it wasn’t long enough and I left with a list of people I hadn’t managed to see, which I was sad about. But I just reveled in the cold weather and the fabulous food that is Melbourne. I also loved seeing all the really well dressed people, especially the men. While I think the men here do look great in their shalwar kameezes, the fact remains that I just don’t do beards, which are pretty much de rigeur here (on an amusing aside, I decided that no man was complete in Pakistan without a Groucho Marx/Saddam Hussein moustache – they are the order of the day in Islamabad). Melbournians are just such stylish people and it made me lament my schlumping around here in the heat and my baggy clothing just a wee bit. Looking over my wardrobe at all the great clothes there that I haven’t worn in several years (and some that I have never worn), did make me a little nostalgic. I was also very sad as it was the last time I would ever see the inside of my house in Melbourne – my parents have sold it about bought another in the next suburb. I actually cried when I left the house, but not when I farewelled my family at the airport (maybe I am becoming immune to that – this is the fourth time I have done so in fifteen months!)

On a positive note, my 92-year old Nana looked pretty good (knock firmly on wood) and it was so much fun to catch up with my eighteen month old cousin Spencer (last referenced in my entries from Hanoi (he and his Mum were also home visiting) and walking like a pro now – he’ll be attacking the Olympics speed walking event soon) and my other young cousins, Oscar and Matilda, who are growing like weeds and just gorgeous. I do have a ripper family and feel very privileged.

Returning to Afghanistan was a little difficult. Not because I didn’t want to come back – I feel pretty settled here – but because I really didn’t want to leave home this time. I really enjoyed being back there and the convenience of life as well, and wondered how much longer I will stay out in the field. I am sure it is just a temporary thing (a few people mentioned that I had not had that long I Afghanistan before returning home) and I am perfectly content being back here now. I get the occasional pang for something (normally a person) and quite often for the Philippines!

On a sadder note, it has been very hard to watch the unfolding crisis in the Middle East, and especially the destruction of Lebanon, having just been there. To watch a city (Beirut) that I wandered around just last month, which was trying so hard to rebuild itself after twenty years of war, being reduced to rubble has made me (and everyone else here) incredibly angry and I find it hard not to sneer at some of the Israeli and American officials on the news as they insist on Israel’s right to defend itself. All good and well to say when there aren’t 300 dead Lebanese and millions displaced. How long will it take to rebuild from this, if indeed they survive? I would normally not be writing about this on a public forum, but am so upset, especially as I now know people there, being bombed day and night, possibly living in shelters or refugees, having lost everything. When I think of the people who sat next to us at restaurants in downtown Beirut – are they still alive? The Lebanese were so determined to rebuild and embraced life so fully – it just breaks my heart.
I could go on about this – there are so many more dimensions, I know. But I won’t. It is just so hard to see a city that I marveled at the beauty of, just a month ago, being systematically destroyed. And people I found to be so wonderful and hospitable, running for their lives…

Okay – I will return soon and talk about my further adventures in rural Afghanistan. I had only one day back in Herat before heading out to the zones (by car this time – plenty-a-jolting going on there) and I really do love my time out in the field. So much more interesting than sitting in the office…

D'oh

2006-06-28T21:59:00.000+10:00

I knew it was going to happen...

Placebo are playing in Melbourne on 15 September.

*Cry*

Maybe I will have to come home for my next R and R as well...

Currently in Pakistan, on my way home for R and R. This trip is timed around the Coldplay tickets I bought ten months ago!!!

Islamabad is interesting - we visited the Faisal Mosque this morning - second biggest in the world. Truly amazing.

Not writing much as my keyboard still has not recovered from the coffee and typing is an effort...

Here's to an Aussie cappucino - and cold weather...

The lighter side of life...

2006-06-28T00:27:00.000+10:00

Every day brings amusing stories here – I thought I would share a couple with you. The first one could really have happened anywhere, come to think of it, but I loved that it happened in Afghanistan.

At work, we have a protocol if something goes wrong with our computer. We have to send an email to a central address for the IT department, which is called AFGO Helpdesk. They then send us a reply and we resolve how to resolve the issue. One day last week, I managed to spill an entire mug of coffee (and it was one of those Starbucks city mugs – if you know what I am referring to, you realise how darn BIG they are and how much coffee they hold!) all over my desk, myself and my computer! After I finished staring in amazement for a few minutes at the sheer volume of liquid dripping on to the floor, I pulled myself together, hurriedly put the laptop onto a nearby desk, rescued the papers and tried to mop up the mess. When that didn’t work, I went down to admin, looking for the cleaner. I was assured he would come eventually and so trudged back upstairs to look at the mess. Sadly, I had also added hazelnut syrup to my coffee, so not only was everything wet, it was sticky as well. I was fairly desperate as I had an incredible amount of work to do and didn’t really have the time to waste with this. My computer had shut itself down and when I tried to turn it on again, I discovered that the keys wouldn’t type – so I couldn’t put in my password to get it going again. Getting really desperate at this stage (and totally covered in coffee, so wet, sticky and with brown stains down my white shalwar!) I picked up the laptop and plodded down to IT. I walked in the door, in my somewhat frazzled state and launched into my tale of woe…”I have spilled coffee all over everything and my computer turned itself off and now when I tried to turn it on the keyboard won’t type – non of the keys work and I have to finish my proposals and I’m covered in coffee…” and the IT guy turned to me and said, in total seriousness, “Have you sent an email to AFGO Helpdesk?”

Another story that cracks me up, but that I was sadly not present for, involves a bunch of my colleagues driving in a marked car through the streets of Heart when another car starts driving alongside them and honking madly. The guys are screaming out of the window at our car and waving some material and the screaming and honking and yelling continues, with words like “emergency” and “you must stop” being thrown around. Our guys ignore them and keep driving (worried that they are about to be robbed or blown up), but the Afghan car doesn’t go away. Our guys are becoming quite nervous in this situation and feeling very vulnerable. Eventually, when the car of Afghans becomes even more insistent, the driver of our car decides to see what they are going on about and pulls over. A man comes over from the Afghan car, frantic with worry and clutching the piece of material he had been waving out of the window, saying, “you have to help me – you have to tie this tie for me – I don’t know how”…

I have more, but will save them to pepper through my postings in order to lighten things up on occasion.

Inshallah

2006-06-21T23:24:00.000+10:00

I have hit writer’s block with the insane amount of work that I have to do, so I thought I would write a quick blog entry. I am really feeling it here now – I have four proposals to write in five days, including one that literally grows by the hour (in the last twenty-four hours they have added eight documents to the list required for submission!) and am wondering how I will get all of this, plus a ton of other stuff done, before I leave for R and R next Monday! Additionally, it is incredibly hot here, and I am having a lot of trouble sleeping. Last night, I tried the suggestion of a colleague and soaked a towel, draped it over a chair and directed the fan onto it. This cooled the room down a bit until the towel dried off about 3.00a.m. and then I was back to suffering!! It is especially bad in the early morning – around five or six. The city power goes off about six o’clock and the generator is not switched on until six thirty so I lie there sweltering for half an hour. Or more usually, I am up running around the tennis court (early morning is the only time that is bearable to do exercise, although even at five thirty it is pretty hot now!) It is only going to get hotter and I suppose I will just continue to suffer and long for the winter!

I am back in Herat after my tour of the zones. I really enjoyed being out in the field and seeing the work that we are doing. There is a problem here as the rains have not come this spring – there has been a drought. So crops are failing and people will not have enough food to survive the winter. Some villages decamp en masse and go to camps around Herat where they are fed for the winter. Others just say that it is Insh’allah that they die! I kid you not – that is what I was told in one village!!

Insh’allah is an interesting concept here. It literally translates as ‘God’s will’ and means that everything that happens to you in life is because God willed it to be so. This removes most personal responsibility in day-to-day actions – if you make it safely to the end of a car journey it is not because you drove well, but because God willed it to be so (and the inverse is also true). This concept is remarkably easy to see displayed on Afghan roads! When a pilot comes on to do his P.A. announcement at the start of a flight, he literally says “…we are cruising at an altitude of 30,000 feet and God willing will arrive in Kabul in one hour…” Just what you want to hear from the guy directing you through the air at 1000km/h in an inescapable metal tube…

However, I can see how, when faced with a history like Afghanistan’s, people would cling to a concept of Inshallah. We see this frequently in the Christian church – people with a miserable life clinging to the hope of the glory of heaven – often it is the only joy in their life. Similarly, people who have been through the tragedy of the Russians and the Taliban need to feel that it is part of some higher purpose – life simply cannot be that cruel. If it is all a part of a bigger plan and we are just pawns, then you can accept your fate at God’s hands and relinquish your worry. Worrying about things here won’t fix them anyway – so why not put them in God’s hands?

And on that cheerful note, I will leave you and get back to trying to play my small part in this bigger plan – writing a proposal for funding, so maybe some of these people will actually survive the winter after all. Makes my concerns seem fairly petty in comparison, hey?

Use by date???

2006-06-16T16:18:00.000+10:00

I just actually looked at my blog, which I don't do that often - I normally just post, refresh and then close. And I noticed how blinking out of date it is - it give the weather in Manila, for crying out loud. And all the links are for Manila blogs - I bet half of these aren't being maintained any more (presumably not the AYAD ones anyway!)

Okay - so I need to spend some quality time doing blog maintenance. But you know what - not going to happen today! Today is Friday and I am going back home to enjoy my day off. Prison Break - here I come!

I commit myself to do that, at some stage though. But given my current workload, I am not putting a timeframe on it.

Plus - do you think the weather pixie even covers Afghanistan?

Englistan vs the Big Hearts

2006-06-16T15:59:00.000+10:00

Last night, a miraculous event occurred in the rural outposts of Afghanistan – I watched my first ever soccer game (and sadly, Australia weren’t even playing. I missed their match against Japan, but am determined to watch the one against Brazil, although I think that may put me off soccer again for the rest of my life!) No – on Thursday night (which is our ‘Friday night’ here – our weekend is Friday, Saturday, although actually, it is just Friday – we work six days here…) I was out in the zones with a couple of the staff who live here and the Zone Manager was determined to watch the England match. And I soon became interested as I heard a little about the Trinidad and Tobago team and BBC showed us some of their supporters (I wanna party with those guys – they were wicked and had these awesome drums they were playing!) Do you know Trinidad and Tobago invented the steel pan? And they still use it as a musical instrument! Kewl hey? All their fans were so excited to just be there, and one of the guys who had traveled to Germany was saying, “We are a small country, but we have a big heart. Smallest country, Biggest heart.” Well, right then and there I started barracking for them!

Getting the World Cup here has been no mean feat. I was out in another zone when it began, with a Brazilian girl who spent two days frantically fighting with the television to try to get coverage. That effort failed and she was limited to news updates until we came to this zone, which is a little bigger. There was still not coverage, but we managed to somehow shift the satellite dish over to get local stations as well (I say ‘we’, like I had anything to do with this, beyond watching from the sidelines and being irritated when it interrupted my French Open final viewing!) So now we watch the World Cup on RTA Kabul, a local Afghan station – complete with coverage in Dari. And I started cracking up a few minutes into the game last night, when I realised from the commentating that the Dari name for England was Englistan!!! I loved it every time they said that – made me giggle. I wondered what the Queen would think if she knew her country was actually a ‘stan’! I don’t think the commentators knew any of the players except David Beckham (who still managed to have half a can of gel in his hair, even though he was playing in the World Cup – glad to know he doesn’t let his standards slip), Dwight Yorke and somebody Crouch, which they pronounced with a guttural sound that came out like “Ghhhhrrrrouchhhh”. We spent the whole game thinking Crouch was useless and should actually be playing basketball as he was so tall, until he came through for Englistan near the very end. As you probably know, the mighty Trinidadians did not prevail in this particular encounter, much to my disappointment. Hopefully they have kept their big hearts though.

I am not sure that I am about to dump Aussie Rules in favour of soccer. A game where you go nine-tenths without a goal seems a wee bit pointless to me (and am now waiting for the protests of ‘but the skill involved’ yada yada). I actually went and ran on the treadmill through half time and half of the second half (managed to be back for both of Englistan’s goals) so I don’t think I could fall into the category of hooked yet. Plus – I just didn’t understand half of what was happening…”wait – what does that flag mean?...what is offside?...well – that’s just silly – why can’t it be a goal – it went into the net?...” You get the picture… Went only slight better than my first (and only!) American gridiron game, where I went with a bunch of the foreign students and we were relying upon the Indian who had been to one game the previous week to tell us what was going on! Geraldine (my French roommate) just gave up and started watching the ‘pom pom girls’! We left at half time, bored to tears. So I guess soccer has made a better start with me – I stayed fairly interested. Maybe because you can actually see the players – they aren’t hidden under helmets…

Anyway – roll on the Socceroos – I may need another team to barrack for, given how Essendon’s season is going this year :-(

Beyrouth

2006-06-06T00:17:00.000+10:00

Okay - I have been atrocious about posting and this post is not going to rectify the long absence. But will reassure you that I am still alive (I have another draft saved - will finish and post eventually!)

Have just returned to Kabul after training in Beirut. We had a bit of an abrupt exit from Kabul - we were meant to stay over night here, but that was the day of the riots and we were having anxious phone calls in Herat as we prepared to leave, and then when we landed in Kabul. We couldn't leave the airport as the roads were totally closed and were facing hours at Kabul airport (not a prospect to be relished). The national director was with us and just said we should catch a different airline out to Dubai that same day, instead of waiting until the next day - so that is what we did and flew out an hour later. That night we were in the air conditioning of Dubai, having Mexican food at Chilli's and feeling a little guilty (still not sure how long the national director waited at the airport before he was able to get home!)

On the security front - I might mention as I am getting concerned emails from people. Yes, there are security problems here in Afghanistan. However, it is a large country and the problems are primarily centered around Kandahar (a total no-go-zone) and Kabul (much safer than Kandahar, and also not a place we spend much time). Herat is much safer and we are fine there. I cannot go into great details on a blog, but please be assured that many precautions are taken with our safety, we have built in procedures, safe guards and emergency protocols, but essentially we are pretty safe in Herat - I wouldn't be here if I felt in danger!! I greatly appreciate your concern and I understand that seeing things on the news can be scary, especially when you don't necessarily know where I am in a country and how far away I am from the problems. Thank you for caring, and I promise I am okay!
(P.S. If anyone prints this out and takes it to Nana, please delete the previous two paragraphs!!!)

So anyway, Beirut (or Beyrouth, as it is spelt in Lebanon - which they actually also call Liban - the French term, I think?) This is nuts by the way - it is pitch dark in this room and all the lights have blown so I can hardly see as I am typing!!! We had four days there and did some fairly intensive training. In between, we managed to get a sense of the city. It is rebiulding itself at a massive pace, although there are still buildings with holes in the side, or in a few cases, totally bombed-out shells. What is gorgeous is that they are rebuilding in the old architectural style - so the buildings are gorgeous.

We went out on Friday afternoon to Byblos. This city is claimed to be the oldest in the world. There were the remnants of a village from 2700 B.C. – that is Early Bronze Age! How cool is that! There were also buildings in this site from Greek and Roman times and a Citadel from the Crusades that the Arabs then took over. Just amazing history. It was wonderful wandering around there – and also having the drive up there.

Lebanese drivers are known as formula one drivers – they are completely insane (coming in from the airport on Tuesday night we were dong 130 km/h!) so you take your life in your hands every time you get out on the road, let alone try to cross it!! I think the city has gone World Cup mad as well – so many cars were trailing Brazilian flags, with a number of German, British and Argentinean ones visible as well. Gave the Germans in the group a thrill to see their flag everywhere.

Coming back that night, we had dinner ‘Downtown’ which has been redone in a beautiful manner. There are some stunning buildings and the center of town is kept only for pedestrians, so you can feel free to admire the architecture without fearing for your life should you take your eyes from the road for a split second! Lebanese are incredibly social people and love to go out to eat and party – things start to get going around nine in the evening. So we arrived at exactly the right time and thought we did quite well securing a table for eleven! It was great fun to sit eating yummy Lebanese food (can’t remember what I ate, do remember it was good!) and watching the stunning and very well dressed (although sometimes a bit too glittery for my taste) Lebanese strut their stuff down the road. What I loved to was the mixture of ages – young and old out, often together, to enjoy their Friday night. The smell of Shisha, that I always associate with the Middle East and Central Asia now was always in the air – that sweet, apple smell that I have no desire to smoke (I tried once in Egypt, purely because I was there and felt I should – did absolutely nothing for me!) but love to smell. Children were running everywhere (or cycling on little tricycles!) and it was just a gorgeous atmosphere.

The next day we went out to Baalbek, which is an old Heliopolis a few hours away from Beirut. It is an amazing structure, several joined temples built from BC times through to 551 A.D. (I think) when an earthquake destroyed the temples and they began to be hidden under the dust. It wasn’t until a Prussian-funded digging expedition in the very early 20th Century that much of the ruins were uncovered and they give the image of an amazing temple complex – and just huge. Apparently the main temple is the largest Roman building in the world! That night I also dropped into an Orthodox church in the center of Beirut that was also very old (and being rebuilt after the war). It was beautiful, but I was also surprised at how moved I was, simply being in a church again. I hadn’t realised how much I missed being in a physical house of God, until I stood at the entrance (I didn’t go any further due to my shorts and sneakers!) and got really quite choked up – I stood there for quite a long time.

Sadly I don’t have pictures to share at the moment (which is why I linked to websites). Getting pictures developed in Afghanistan is a very costly and dicey procedure and I am not sure how I would go getting them saved to disc here. As I am unwilling to trade in my SLR for a digital, this means you have to wait until I go home on R and R and have my photos developed to show you – sorry!

P.S. Someone hacked my hotmail account and deleted all of my addresses (almost 500 of them) and all of my emails stored in folders. Naturally I am fairly devastated at the loss of seven years of saved email history and also am cross that I have lost all of my contacts. If you know my email address, could you please email me so that I can save your address again – I am having to rebuild my contacts list from scratch!!!

Afghanistan

2006-05-18T20:33:00.000+10:00

Very very fast one as I am running out the door...

I have arrived! I am in Kabul. For those of you who don't know, I have taken a job in Afghanistan, in Herat, with WV. It is a fantastic job and I am really excited about it. Anyway - I landed in Kabul today (head to Herat tomorrow) after two days of orientation in Dubai. I will write more about it later - now I have to put my headscarfe on (plus shalwar kameez!) and go see the Bombed Out Kings Palace (H can't remember the name of it - that is what she calls it!!) I asked about the history of Kabul, and apparently this is a great place to go.

Kabul is divided in half by mountains and on top of them is a wall built by Genghis Khan - amazing hey?

Will write more later

Toodles
Kate

In Love with Hanoi

2006-04-11T19:32:00.000+10:00

Well - all good things must come to and end, and as such, my time at Hanoi is about over (although I have been granted a two-hour stay of execution due to a flight delay. Unfortunately I only discovered this after arriving at the airport, so am cooling my heels at Hanoi International!)

I have absolutely loved Hanoi, from the minute I landed. It really doesn't seem like a city in a developing country - it is soooooo developed compared with Manila and I don't know if the poverty is just really well hidden, but it seems to be so much better off as well. Jacqui (my cousin who lives there) described it after she had arrived as resembling an aging screen star whose beauty is still there, but has faded. Before coming, I related this to Nat (who came last year) and she told me that after Manila I would think it was Angelina Jolie - and I must agree with Nat!! It is so much smaller than Manila and the streets are cleaner and more orderly. The sight of all those people whipping around on their scooters and motorbikes ("Woo hoo - Moto Madame?") looking so darn elegant - the women in stilleto heels and pencil skirts with opera gloves and hats to protect them from the sun! And their hair never gets out of place - they hop off looking immaculate and wheel their bikes into a shop or wherever to store it and off they go - just amazing!! Having said that - trying to cross the road with all the motos coming at you is a hair-raising experience. Crossing the road in Manila is hazardous, but at least cars are more predictable - less likely to swerve in front of you at the last second.

White people are also less 'special' - we are not stared at, we are not hassled nearly as much. Having said that - I think Vietnamese are less friendly than Filipinos. This is not really an indictement of Vietnamese at all - they are very friendly and nice. But it is pretty hard to compete with the Filipinos who are the most incredibly friendly and jolly people you will ever come across (and I have come across a few - they are closely rivalled by the Egyptians and the Ugandans, but I think they still win out!) Spencer is the exception - people come rushing up to kiss and hug him, absolutely everyone stares into his stroller to coo at him - waiters and waitresses play with him at restaurants (giving Jacqui and Greg a welcome chance to eat!) - and he is a shameless flirt as well. Heads straight for the prettiest girl and flashes his smile (which is too cheeky and adorable for words!) and he is set! I have had so much fun playing with him for the past week - he is a great baby.

It has also been wonderful catching up with Candice - one of my dearest friends from Brisbane, who I haven't seen in two years (since the last time I made it to Brisvegas). She is as gorgeous as ever and loving life in Hanoi. She is volunteering at a street children's center (well - there are four of them) called the Blue Dragon and is on an eighteen month contract there (for those in the know - she is a VIDA volunteer). We spent some quality time together over my week there (lots of shopping) and I just loved being around her again.

In terms of sightseeing - Hanoi is not the champion city for tourists (although there are plenty of them - as Candice says, it is a great place to base yourself while exploring northern Vietnam). The shopping and eating are the main draws. However, I did get some sights into my time - this morning I went to Ho Chi Minh's mausoleum to check out the preserved Uncle Ho (looks very small and waxy!), his house on stilts and his massive and incredibly ugly museum (full of obscure and hilarious symbolism!!) I went to the Hanoi Hilton to check out where the French held the Vietnamese revolutionaries, heroes, patriots and nationalists, and then where the brave Vietnamese chose not to take their rightful and lawful revenge upon the American war criminals, instead treating them lovingly and kindly in the prison for the duration of 'Nam (they got to proy (apparently not pray though), play sports, have parcels from home and even study and read - free from propoganda and brainwashing!) More about that later. They had the flight suit that John McCain (Vietnam POW, now US Senator and ran for President in 2000) was wearing when he was shot down - before being imprisoned for seven years. I just can't imagine that...

Jacqui and I went one day to the Temple of Literature - an exquisite compound of temples and buildings that housed Vietnam's first University - 1000 years ago! Makes Western civilisation seem very retarded by comparison, hey? That was lovely and tranquil until about 500 school children came in!!!

I know I did other things but can't think what right now and this is getting pretty long. I will continue another time...

Off to Angkor Wat now - I am at the airport.

Food, Glorious Food...

2006-04-08T17:36:00.000+10:00

In case you can't tell from that heading, I am not in Manila right now!! Am living it up in Hanoi, with my cousin Jacqui, her partner Greg and their 15 month old son Spencer. Got here Wednesday night and have been eating up a storm ever since (such. good. food!) and giving the credit card a good workout! Have done plenty of wandering in the Old Quarter and yesterday either bought or ordered a ton of stunning clothes (cannot wait to pick them up - and Jacqui can't wait to see either. Maybe this will encourage her to get into the tailoring!) I have also been buying quite a bit of the lacquered goods - they are just so divine. But I still have more shopping to do...

Today Jacqui and I went to the Temple of Literature and wandered around the grounds - peaceful and tranquil until a group of schoolchildren - all adorable in their matching uniforms of blue shorts, while shirt and red scarfe - trouped in! About 500 of them, all talking at the top of their lungs and calling out "Hello" to all the foreigners there. The Temple is great though - it has been there for 1000 years and the focus on education 1000 years ago, while our forbears were running around illiterate and uneducated really puts the cultural snobbery of 'Western' societies into perspective.

Going around Hanoi with a blonde-haired, blue eyed baby is something else! The Vietnamese rival the Filipinos for their love of babies - in fact I think they take it further (although I have never wandered around Manila with a white baby, so can't compare). Every single person we pass cooes into the pusher and comes up to play with him - they stop and kiss him etc. Going into a restaurant the staff take him off and play with him the whole time. And Spencer laps it up - he is a shameless flirt, especially for the pretty women - waving hello (we think he is a royal in training) and schilling for kisses! He is very handy to have around - makes you an instant hit with the locals! Sadly, he has a bit of a cold right now so is a little down...

Oh - it's his nap time and I am in his room. Will finish later...

I'm not going to cry...

2006-03-31T16:47:00.000+11:00

I am NOT...

It's really real. This is my last day in the office. My despedida (farewell) is in an hour and twenty minutes - and I am NOT going to cry! They have prepared a feast of Filipino vegetarian delicacies (I am assured that is not an oxymoron?) and I suppose I should think of something to say, hey?

Last night was our farewell from Sagric (the volunteer agency) and marked the last time I think I will see Naomi and Mairin from our intake, plus Neil (Emily's partner) - they are all leaving soon and I won't see them again. Nat and I sang our last "Bed of Roses" and Em and I did Toto's Africa (with a bit of help!) for the last time (we all have our signature songs now - although some of the lyrics they put up are just hilarious and bear only vague phonetic resemblance to the actual words to the song).

I just received my first farewell from a friend at the office - I shall NOT cry! This weekend is marked off for a combination of farewells, partying and packing up the apartment - fun and games! Fortunately it has cooled down a little in the past two days - middle of last week the summer hit with a vengeance - it has been so hot and I was thankful that Mum and Dad left before the worst of it hit. But the last two days have been a bit cooler again, with lots of rain (although apparently there are no typhoons coming, which is always a relief!) So that will make packing up more bearable.

I have my flights booked for Vietnam (next Wednesday) and secured my visa today (a process that goes so much more smoothly when you actually remember to take your passport to the Embassy!) I had a good laugh though - there was a calendar hanging up in the consulate section that said "Embassy of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam in The Manila - Philippines"...I have never heard it referred to as The Manila before. I am trying to think and I don't think I have ever been to a communist country before (?) so this will be an interesting experience. Plus, I get to see Jacqui and Greg and this new perambulating Spencer, and get a great big Candice Hug (these are an institution) from my dear friend Candice. So am too excited for words.

I will try to focus on that when I feel tears threatening...

Some Donsol Pics

2006-03-29T13:04:00.000+11:00

Bulking up before tackling the mighty whale sharks:

Nat, Ange, Reggie and Em having merienda

Lyndon, Reggie and Ken keeping their fluids up

Fairly large, aren't they?! Looks like a submarine

Reggie and Nat auditioning for Pinoy Idol

Brokeback Mountain 2: Weekend in Donsol

(the outdoor shower at our 'hotel')

Ken riding the whale shark!

Thanks to Nat and Mia for their pics...

Of cabbages and kings

2006-03-27T15:59:00.000+11:00

I would like to start with a big congratulations to myself. I work on the 15th floor of my office and the lift situation here is ridiculous - the lift capacity is woefully inadequate for the number of staff in this building and it is not abnormal to wait for fifteen minutes for a lift. This morning, when I arrived at the office, the queue was out down the hall, out the door and down the street - in four directions! So after moving a meter in ten minutes, I climbed fifteen floors to my office.

I already feel more buff!

Anyway - my time here is rapidly drawing to a close - this is my last week in the office and I will be home in Australia just after Easter - gasp (in time for cheap Creme Eggs - yay!) Of course, this has the effect of imposing a certain melancholy upon me as I really don't want to leave - I just love it here and have had the best time. I can't imagine how I will feel when I actually get on that plane...

However, fear not - this is not going to be a moaning and wailing post (although I suspect there are a few of those in store)...

One of the things that has cracked us up endlessly through this year is the Filipino English. Now - this is not to be confused with Taglish (combination of Tagalog and English) which is what most Manila-ans speak in. This is incredibly useful to non-Tagalog speakers as the random English word thrown into the mix allows us to at least know the topic being discussed, if not what is being said about it. However, I am speaking of the way Filipinos speak English. English is incredibly common here. Functioning as a virtual American colony for about fifty years, plus having had huge American influence since then means that most Filipinos have pretty good English and just about everyone I know in Manila is totally fluent. As there are over 300 languages in the Philippines, Filipinos often use English to communicate with one another (for example, if one's mother tongue is Ilocano and one is speaking to someone whose native language is Cebuano, they may speak in English - or they may use Tagalog). Impressively, most Filipinos are trilingual - they speak their native language, Tagalog and English. Some may speak more than that - for example, if they are from a small village near a large city, they will speak that language, in addition to the language of the large city, plus Tagalog and English. Very impressive - like the Swiss really.

However - you will notice quite a few differences between the way we (Aussies) speak English, and the way Filipinos do.
First thing of course is to use American English (Bill Gates would be so proud) - so you ride an elevator (not a lift) and the car has a trunk (not a boot) etc. But then, there are special ways of using sentences:

Fall in line.
We would say form a queue. By the way - Filipinos are notoriously bad at this - I would rank them as the worst queue jumpers in the history of humanity. We have now gotten to the stage where we will rap the offenders on the shoulder and send them to the back of the line, if we are having a bad day and are somewhat grumpy. They also have what we perceive to be a strange situation when queueing for toilets. Instead of forming one line and the front person goes into the first stall to become available, they form individual lines out side each stall - probably not the most time efficient manner to wait, but who am I to say...

I'll be the one to...
As in - I'll be the one to carry the bag. Said with great emphasis upon I'll so that it almost sounds like you have offended them by suggesting that you would carry the bag (often not the case!) Basically instead of us saying "I'll carry the bag"

I'll go ahead now...
I'm leaving. Sometimes known as I'll be the one to go ahead now. So much easier to just say oo'roo

I am having coughs and colds
I have a cold. Always present tense and you don't have a cold, you have colds - or coughs and colds. Sadly, this is a frequent one for me here.

The ref
The fridge. Confused the life out of me at first as I thought they were keeping their food in a referee!!!

Wait a while
You here this all the bloody time here. "Ma'am - wait a while" - or just "Ma'am - a while." It essentially means "we don't know the answer so you sit there and do nothing for anything from a period of ten seconds to ten hours why we either; try to find the answer, try to find something to tell you that will make you go away and leave us alone or just never reappear and hope you eventually give up, go away and leave us alone.

Slippers
What they call thongs (flip flops) - I loved the look on my parents face when they were told to wear slippers into the caves in Sagada because you would get wet. I think they were imagining running around the streams in their sheepskin slippers from home.

Avail of...
This is the one that gets me the most. You see this everywhere..."Avail of your free offer", "Pay your taxes now to avail of discounts". I had a debate with some American friends yesterday as they think this is accurate, whereas I think you should say "avail yourself of". Barry suggested it was a difference in language - for example he said an Aussie would say you 'help me to do this' whereas an American would say you 'help me do this'. Anybody with superlative grammer out there able to assist with this one?

I may add some more as I think of them. I have gotten used to so many of them that they don't stand out in my mind now - I will go home and ask for the C.R. automatically (CR stands for Comfort Room - the word for the bathroom here!)

Also of note - a Barangay (council) in Manila has a mayor - the Honourable PeeWee Trinidad! I kid you not. There is a movie star Bambang Siligano (think I have the surname wrong), a model named Tweetie and a friend of mine works with a lady named Bo Peep. The names are incredible. Literally anything can be a name here...

Going to be so boring going back a land of Sue's and Bill's hey.

Looking Backwards...

2006-03-24T21:23:00.000+11:00

Okay - I swore I wasn't going to finish this week without writing an entry. I have gotten to the stage where I have so much to write about that it almost seems overwhelming. So I shall try, piece by piece, to fill in the blanks.

Mum and Dad left on Monday evening, with about 50kg of my luggage! They had been here for ten days and we had a glorious time travelling around the Philippines - this is such a stunning country. I have been waiting until I got my pictures back to write about this as I wanted to include photos. I finally did today, after three tries (I have used this particular developer twice and both times I have had huge dramas - never again!) but have run out of time to write about our travels this week, so roll on next week.

I promised to update you on the political situation as the last time I did a proper entry we had just entered into a State of Emergency (SOE). That wound up lasting almost exactly a week (to the hour!) GMA (the President) had uncovered a coup plot against her very early on the Friday morning so arrested a bunch of army and marine leaders and put the armed forces on double red alert (I think that in itself lasted for about five days?) This was all timing with the 20th anniversary of the People Power movement that overthrew Marcos after something like 15 years of military dictatorship (I forget the exact time now - but that was 25 February 1986). Every year there are a lot of rallies about this anniversary and this year they were focused a lot on protesting against GMA. Coup rumours were flying all week and Friday morning (24 Feb) it all came to a head - with enormous rallies scheduled for the day.

It was very interesting watching the international media (we have BBC and CNN on our cable service) and their spin on events - the story was that GMA had uncovered a coup attempt and as such put the country in a SOE to deal with the issue. However, the way it was understood within the Philippines was that the danger was gone - the plot was uncovered and defeated and things were okay. It was seen here more as a way for GMA to defuse opposition to herself. When she imposed the SOE she barred any mass gatherings which effectively made the planned protest marches illegal. It also allowed for arrest and detention without warrant and media censorship. (What was poignant and scary of course were the echoes of the Marcos days that people saw in all of this). But people here really saw the SOE as Gloria wanting to protect her rule and not allow public dissent. So that was interesting - realising again how much we are dependent upon the amount of information given to us and the spin placed on information by whoever is presenting it to us.

It was a surreal day, that Friday. In the office we had the radio on and we all spent the day on news websites tracking the developments as they occurred. It was quite scary for someone who has never been through such a situation, although the poor Pinoys are old hands at this! We got no work done - every few minutes people would gasp at something on the radio and everyone would stand up and start talking and babbling - all in Tagalog of course, so I had to keep asking for translation! People were defying the ban on rallies and marching (we were strictly instructed to steer clear - spoilsports!!) and the police and soldiers were waiting for a Presidential directive to go in and forcefully break up the rallies. In the end there was some violent clearing - people were arrested and there was use of water cannons and possibly tear gas, but nothing too dramatic. Luckily Filipinos are really quite gentle people - that gave a good measure of comfort in a situation like this. A friend was marching at the front of one of the rallies and he said it got pretty real at one stage - two mass groups were coming together to form one and there were police vans and shipping containers across the road and he thought they were going to be rammed - it was scary. He escaped just getting wet from the water cannons.

Most people went home from the office early that day. I loved the beauracracy - they had to wait until Dayan, in Australia, gave permission for them to leave the office!!! If I felt the need, I would have been outta there, just like that! That night the AYADs went out to celebrate Ange's birthday and the SOE in the only way we know how - food and bars! And I was delighted to discover that Emily is as bad at pool as I am - we had a great time sucking together at the pool table - with only the disclaimer that we were not allowed to laugh at each other! We managed two games in seventy minutes - although we didn't technically finish the first one. There was this poor employee standing near the table who obviously had nothing to do so was 'helping' us out. Anyway - I had sunk my last ball and had to sink the eight, and Em had one left, and I think he just couldn't bear to watch this display any more - he just grabbed all the balls and pre-emptively racked them all again!! We were goggling at each other a little, but just shrugged and started the torture again!

The Sunday of that weekend (26 Feb) was the most scary moment. I was at the gym about five in the evening and noticed on the TV that there was a kerfuffle at the marine barracks at Fort Bonifacio (the marines are apparently the biggest troublemakers in the Filipino military). One of their colonels (I think? - we all got a crash course in the personalities of the Pinoy military that week!) had either been removed or asked to be stood down - depends upon whose version you listen to (the truth has not outed to this day). And his troops were mutinying and gathering in a chapel there. Then more troops and some big name military leaders began joining and there were stories that battalions in other cities were mutinying. As the night wore on and we sat glued to our TV sets, more people began gathering at Fort Bonifacio and nuns were praying outside the chapel and the stormtroopers were gathering. It was getting more and more ominous and we were becoming quite fearful. Then Cory Aquino (the former President and widow of Ninoy Aquino, the opposition figure who's assasination began the chain that led to People Power) got on the TV and stirred up trouble (as she is wont to do - we think she should leave well enough alone - she has had her time and her main preoccupation now seems to be keeping the political landscape here unstable) calling on people to go to Fort Bonifacio and support the troops. So things kept building and were were watching TV and partaking in the flurry of text messages going around (including the rumours that Malacanang Palace - the Filipino Presidential Palace - was about to be bombed, which was a scary prospect but it was fairly unlikely that there would be advance warning going around by text message!). Ange and I were looking at each other, wondering if we were watching the start of a coup/revolution - we couldn't quite believe our eyes - that we were watching this in our own city. Anyway - about 11.30p.m. it all defused - I am still not entirely sure what happened, but the standoff was over and people started to go back home. I think there have been repercussions from this, but I have not followed that too closely.

Emily works just across from Malacanang. She didn't have work on the Friday, but went in on Monday (although the schools were closed and most people didn't go to work). She said it was scary - shipping containers and barbed wire across the road, police and soldiers everywhere. She got some pictures on her phone (discretely!) - I will try to get them and post some copies so you can see.

After that, things calmed down a little. One of the newspapers was closed and there were police outside and more incidental incidents (sorry!) but finally a week later GMA lifted the State of Emergency. Of course, this being the Philippines, the legitimacy of her imposing it has been challenged by political rivals and the issues is now before the courts...

Just another day in the life of Pinoy politics.

Swimming with Sharks

2006-03-07T14:08:00.000+11:00

Oh man – I am doing happy dances all over the place right now – Placebo’s new album comes out in six days, and it is Triple J’s feature album this week, so they keep playing tracks from it – I hear that familiar voice (Brian Molko really does have a bit of a whine to his voice that makes him easily identifiable!) come through the speakers (I stream the radio through the internet at my desk at work) and promptly whack the headphones in, turn it up and bop along. I am liking the album a lot right now – it sounds really good. Always a bit nerve-wracking when your favourite band brings out a new album – there is the excitement of a whole new album of their songs, countered with ‘what if it isn’t as good or I don’t like it?’ So far I heartily approve and cannot wait to get my hands on it. It comes out next Monday and Alex is tasked to go buy it for me straight away and put it in the next courier bag to Manila – so I won’t get it for another week L Still – woo hoo. They are playing the song Cops right now on the radio and it is stunning…

Okay – I have so much other stuff to be talking about and I haven’t yet – my last weekend, the political situation in the Philippines, my time in Thailand etc. I think I will work backwards and make this entry about last weekend…

So last weekend we had a bit of a last hurrah for my intake of AYADs, plus a couple from the next intake and went to Donsol, to swim with the whale sharks!! This is one of only two places in the world where you can do this (the other being north-western Australia). Whale sharks are the biggest fish in the world and totally harmless - you go out into the ocean in a boat with 'spotters' standing on a pole looking for the sharks. When they spot one, you put on your fins and snorkeling mask and hop in to swim around with it until it vanishes into the depths. We normally only got a minute or less with the shark before it vanished into the depths and we were left treading water on the surface, grinning at each other like idiots and whooping it up. The third one though, we swam along with for ages before it finally left us – fortunately Bobby, our spotter, grabbed my arm and pulled me in the right direction when I got distracted by all the murkiness stirred up by eight sets of flippers (*shiny*!) and I had prime position, right above its back – I felt like I was part of his pod!!! It was pretty awesome.

The first time in we were a little nervous – to jump into the water with a shark, no matter how harmless…eek! And you get in and madly swim in the direction the spotters are pointing and look around frantically, all the while bumping into each other. And then suddenly you see this massive mouth (with no teeth!) coming towards you and there it is – they are black with while spots and have these huge mouths and broad backs. And you are suddenly trying to reverse your direction to swim along with them and see them as much as possible before they vanish into the depths.

Sadly it was raining the whole weekend (has been raining a lot around there - getting down towards the area of the landslide) and it was cloudy so we couldn't see Mt Mayon, which is a famous active volcano (currently rumbling and belching smoke - we anticipate a potential eruption soon?) which meant staying by the beach wasn't so much fun and also that we got pretty cold out in the boat looking at the sharks (my lips were blue and teeth chattering by the time we came in - I would have given anything for a hot shower, but alas...no hot water out there). It also meant that we didn’t see as many sharks as one normally would on a day out. Because it was so grey and the water was darker, it was harder for the spotters to see the sharks and we only saw four (although I actually only saw three – I missed the last one), whereas people would normally see two to three times as many as that in a morning out.

Still - to swim along with a six meter-long whale shark as it just goes about its day is a pretty fantastic experience - I just felt like part of the pod, swimming along above one!! Maybe I’ll come back as a dolphin (prettier than a whale shark!)

Revolution?

2006-02-24T14:34:00.000+11:00

It’s a pretty tense day here in the Philippines. Tomorrow is the twentieth anniversary of the EDSA revolution that overthrew Ferdinand Marcos and restored democracy, such as it is! This is always a cause for big rallies and protests and this year it is even bigger. As you know, for the entire time I have been here there have been coup rumours and threats and they are in full force today. A lot of the city is blocked off, including the Presidential Palace (so Emily gets the day off work!) and they have revoked the permits of a lot of rallies, closed the schools and, quite hilariously, revoked permits to carry a gun today!! I was going to have a birthday party tonight, but cancelled it as people said they would never be able to get near to my place. We live quite near to the Shrine of Remembrance, which is where the revolutions happen and where most of the rallies still happen around Manila (a continuous cause of bad traffic for me – and they always seem to happen on a Wednesday, when I want to get to Bible Study!) and a lot of the roads will be closed off – it will be impossible to move around.

The military have already arrested three alleged coup plotters and apparently foiled a coup attempt at Fort Bonifacio, in Manila, this morning. People are not getting much work done – everyone is looking at news websites and wondering what is going on.

The President has just announced a press conference and there is speculation she will declare a State of Emergency. It is on the radio now and half the office are listening, but it is in Tagalog so I stopped. Okay – Lorna just came back and said that she declared a State of Emergency. But we don’t know what that means… The radio is on in the middle of the office and occasionally people call out things in response (it sounds like they are airing a press conference) but of course, I don’t understand what they are saying.

I am a little scared – I have never lived through anything like this before. The military is on red alert and a lot of people are trying to get out of Manila – we are all saying we want to go home with my colleague Gemma to Baguio (her home, where she returns each weekend) this weekend – it is about seven hours out of Manila. I was just talking to one of the guys in my cubicle – he is my age and has already lived through two revolutions, so is fairly blasé!!! But it is all somewhat new for me. We have gone through this quite a few times this year, but this one feels more ominous, somehow. And I really don’t want to be sent home with six weeks left in my time here.

Hopefully all will be well – I will keep you posted. Am now wondering how much water we have in the apartment!!!

P.S. – will come back and tell you about my amazing trip to Thailand another time. Needless to say, I’m a little distracted right now.

Okay - another update. Apparently they are now saying they will arrest everyone who is currently marching in Makati, because they don't have a permit. This includes former President Aquino who is out there with the ralliers. The police are saying they will use force. There are already thousands out there (and the rally is not supposed to start for another two and a half hours) - I think it is going to get very ugly. Am still nervous - we are now starting to mumble that we shouldn't be at the office, but should be going home.

Thailand!

2006-02-16T19:54:00.000+11:00

I hate computers - I just wrote a whole post and as I was selecting it all to justify the text, it deleted it for me - now I am fully grumpy.

Anyway - I am running out the door as I am going to Thailand tonight!!! Placebo are playing at a music festival there and I am going! Woo hoo! Cannot wait - it will be so brilliant (I have lost the ability to form coherent sentences in my excitement). However, in true Filipino fashion, the travel agent is late arriving with my ticket, so I hope I don't miss the jolly plane!

I have also had to move offices - in order to cut costs we closed one of our offices (we were spread across two offices on the 15th floor of an office tower) and consolidated into one. So we are very cosy now. And I don't have a phone any more :(

Do you want to know something interesting - no buildings in the Philippines have a thirteenth floor!! They all go from twelve to fourteen. This is something I greatly appreciate when I walk down and up to the canteen on the seventh floor! I think if there were just one more floor, I wouldn't make it - I am already puffing like an out of shape hippo when I get back up here!

So - to finish us off - some advice from the official website for attending the Bangkok 100 Rock Festival:

Thailand is a very HOT country! So you better dress comfortably (piffle - after the Philippines, your measly Thailand summer doesn't faze me - I think?).
Have a bottle of water with you, so you can enjoy the show, not spending time for the water!
In case of personal sickness, you need to prepare your pills to be ready to use for the emergency. (can't really think of a comment for this...)
Don't bring any valuable stuff with you here, this is a music festival, not a gala dinner. (huh - but I bought a new Dolce Gabbana...)
Last thing, but not least. Don't forget the tickets!!!
Enjoy the music, but not to bother other people. (somewhat negated by the next point...)
Practice your fav songs of your fav artists, shout it out loud. (which the person standing next to you in the crowd will appreciate beyond measure!!)
Don't throw anything on to the stage while the artist performing. (presumably okay between acts?!)
Don't bring any stuff that can be used as the weapon to the event, cos it will be captured! (and used against us?)
Pay honor to all artists, even the one which is not your fav one.
Give priority to children, ladies, and senior people (imagine there will be a lot of those).
Go with a big group of friends, enjoy it together.
Dress the best look clothes ever! (designer ruffian? Fairy wings?)
Love the artists? Want them to know it? So make a love plate to show them! (the mind boggles)

Day of tears...

2006-02-06T20:25:00.000+11:00

A fairly awful thing happened here in Manila on Saturday morning- actually, less than a kilometre from my home. During the morning, I heard sirens etc., but that is a pretty common occurence here in Manila and I didn't really think anything of it. But then, on my way back from the Salcedo market (where we buy fruit and vegetables) the taxi driver asked me if I had heard the news that morning? I said no, thinking that the coup that has been rumoured since we arrived has finally happened. Turns out though that GMA is still safe, for the minute.

Instead, at the Ultra Sports Stadium, very close to our condo block, a popular game show, Wowowee, were filming their one-year anniversary show. This show normally screens weekly, but were having a midday screening with double their normal prize money available (from one million to two million pesos - about AUD$25,000 or US$20,000). Of course, for many Filipinos, living in constant and abject poverty (40% of the country live on less than US$2 per day), this was a chance of a lifetime to lift themselves out of poverty and make a new start. So instead of the 19,000 maximum number for the stadium, 30,000 people arrived to try to get in - some had been queuing since Wednesday morning.

There was a mad rush for tickets and in an attempt to control the chaos, the organisers closed the gates. There are also rumours that someone shouted that there was a bomb in the crowd, but this has not been confirmed. Anyway - there was a mass stampede and 74 people died, with hundreds injured. Apparently the injured were still at Ultra last night (Monday), but they have all gone today (Tuesday morning).

This has led to a lot of commentary here - the principal element that has been highlighted is how desperate people are - how they would come to something like this and although they obviously didn't realise it at the time, risk their lives, just to win some cash. For many foreigners here, this smacks of many of the things we identify as needing improving in the Philippines - a lack of organisation and control of authorities, no concept of queueing or waiting your turn for something (Filipinos are the worst pushers-in we have ever encountered!), triumph of a pursuit of material goods (either characterised as greed, or a struggle for survival - depending upon who you ask!) at the risk of decorum, civility and sometimes, humanity. There has been quite a bit of condemnation of the TV station (I think they are emerging as the bad guys, for their lack of organisation), but also of people who would go to such extremes to try to get money. While I can agree with this (and can also easily imagine many impoverished Filipinos pushing at the back of this crowd), I think it is telling that I have yet to hear condemnation from a person who has had to struggle to feed their family (possibly because nobody ever bothers to ask such people their opinions?!) It is easy for a room full of rich Filipinos with their drivers, household help, nannies and overstuffed pantries to sit in judgement of poorer Filipinos.

I don't want you to get the wrong impression - there has been tremendous grief and pain at this situation, from all Filipinos. I have just noticed a tendency on the part of well-to-do locals to say "it is so awful, but..."

Currently things are a bit of a mess. A lot of people came in from the provinces to attend the show and now their are children without parents (the majority of casualties were older people, especially women, and children), husbands without wives etc., and with no local support structures.

It has been really devastating - watching it on the television, with people who feel like my compatriots now, I have been really upset and my heart breaks for these poor families who have come for a fun day, and had it turn to tragedy.

There is a short BBC article about it here

A week in a minute (or ten)...

2006-02-03T20:36:00.000+11:00

Just in case they don't know, I need to tell my parents again just how much I love my Christmas present - my shiny new iPod. And my legendary sister for setting it up for me (my sad IT skills shine through again...*sigh*) I am doing really boring work, checking the results of a bunch of candidates throughout the Asian region (although having fun with the names - the longest one so far has 23 syllables - no kidding!!) and am currently listening to the Les Miserables soundtrack - I haven't listened to this for a few years and have forgotten how brilliant it is - great music and lyrics that just give you goosebumps...

Anyway - I swore to myself that I was not ending this week without posting again - so here goes. This blog is a little woeful lately...

So - Australia Day was good, although I was a wee bit homesick. I did my little Australia Day merienda at work (:::gasp::: - Filipinos love vegemite - I am not kidding, they came back for more...ruins all the fun!) and a friend had gotten me this CD of 'Unnofficial National Anthems' full of bands like Cold Chisel and Jimmy Barnes and Men At Work (Rainier said to me..."hmmmm - I always thought that the Little River Band and Men at Work were British - I just looked at him in horror and said "you thought the band who sang "We Come from the Land Downunder" were British - go and stand in the corner") and the music got me a bit - I never thought I would get nostalgic for Christine Anu's 'My Island Home' or Goanna's 'Solid Rock', but hey - I guess there is a first for everything, right? But everyone at work was so sweet - they all came up to me on Thursday morning and said "Happy Australia Day" and really got into the spirit with me. One of the guys here said to me the next day, "oh it is good - your smile is back today. You looked a bit sad yesterday, but you are all smiling again today", which got me all mushy and thinking 'how can I possibly leave here?'

That night, we had a party at the Ambassador's residence, along with just about every expatriate in Manila, I think. Seriously, it was huge - but Aussie food (and wine and beer!) and cheeses and the world's smallest pavlovas (seriously - the size of a fifty cent coin) and some Aussie jazz band playing, inexplicably, a lot of Irish music (?) - although there was a guy with a digeridoo, which was great. Lynette, our ICM, came, and used the opportunity to tell us that she is leaving and taking a job at CIDA (Canadian International Development Agency - I think?) which put a damper on things - we are going to miss her sooooo much. And, I must remember that if I ever go to anything at the residence of the Australian Ambassador in Manila again, I have to wear flat shoes. Both times I have been there, I have spent the whole night with my heels sinking into his lawn which has really not been fun - and is not so good for the shoes, either.

Saturday I went to a performance done by street kids that my friend Sarah, who is an AVI volunteer, has been working with. It was really good - some of the stuff they were depicting was true-to-life situations for them and it must have been quite challenging to write (the children come up with everything and write it themselves) and portray for them, but probably quite therapeutic, all the same. I am constantly reminded here of just how blessed I am in my life - I can't count the ways. That night, we went to an album launch. It was an interesting set up - it was basically in a car park, with no facilities at all (one little stand selling a few drinks - apple juice anyone?

Sunday we had about fifteen people at our place to watch the Australian Open men's final, which was a good match, although not as good as it could have been. We had a split - most of the Aussies going for Baghdatis (underdog sympathies) and the Europeans going for Federer. I didn't really care, just wanted a good match (would have rather watched Keifer - he's prettier!!!) Reggie was taking bets with all the Frenchies about the outcome (I think, sadly, he is probably a bit poor now) which was quite hilarious as he couldn't pronounce Baghdatis' name - so each time he tried to make a bet, he would say something like "the Baghdad guy". Sadly, at the end of the afternoon, Reggie moved out, and now lives with all the French in Katipunan (in the maid's room! with adjoining bat cave - and resident rat!!). Ange and I miss him a lot - we were like a little family that has been broken up. Some of you know the circumstances of this - I won't post them here as it just makes me angry to think about it again, but anyway...

Sunday also marked the end of the annual two weeks of bliss that is the Australian Open - all that beautiful tennis, in our time zone, and it is all over.

Last night, the French (and there is a token German - I am not kidding, there are four French, one German and now Reggie in this house) had a party at their place, that we all went to (well - Ange, Sally, Nat and myself). That was a lot of fun - I had no idea there were so many French people living in Manila - I am surprised there are any left in Paris (are there any left in Paris or have they all decamped?) - there must have been thirty there (maybe less - it was confusing and I may have had a couple of drinks! shhhh) Sadly, being that they are all students, it was a Thursday night (I miss student days) and us being boring workers, we had to leave by midnight... *Big sigh*...it was a fun party

Tonight I am going to see Walk the Line. I think my grumbling about not getting movies here that are not massive blockbusters, or featuring Jean Claude Van Damme has registered with someone, as there are a plethora (by Manila standards) of non-total-mainstream movies coming out soon. Walk the Line, Munich (so excited - I really want to see that, but never thought it would come out here), Brokeback Mountain (can't believe that will be here - the mind boggles), Proof (have actually already seen that on the plane - possibly the first time I have watched Gwyneth Paltrow in a movie and thought, "hey - she actually is a good actress" - I really enjoyed it), ummm - I know there are others, that I can't think of now. But I am excited. Of course, they will probably only be out for two weeks, so I have to rush to see them, when they come. And if I don't want to see any of them, there is always Underworld:Evolution! Or Cheaper By The Dozen 2....

Hmmm - and in the midst of all of this, I have actually done a ton of work. The review is nearing its end and I am chasing down things for it and waiting to see what the final report comes up with.

Franklin Graham is in Manila this weekend - I am possibly going, but not certain...

Okay - I need to go! I hope that this entry makes sense - I have had Javert and Jean Valjean and Cosette in my head as I write and been distracted by the sadness of songs like "Empty Chairs at Empty Tables" etc - so this might be disjointed (there might be a Do You Hear the People Sing thrown in there somewhere?) I have been singing along softly, which has possibly freaked Necy and Lambert out!!

Oh - and I was wrong about number one of the Hottest 100 - in case you are interested:

(5 out of 10 songs are Aussie - pretty good, I reckon. I think 51 songs of the whole 100 were Australian!)

1 Wish You Well - Bernard Fanning
2 Catch My Disease - Ben Lee
3 Feel Good Inc. - Gorillaz
4 Best Of You - Foo Fighters
5 Dare - Gorillaz
6 Mind's Eye - Wolfmother
7 My Doorbell - The White Stripes
8 O Yeah - End Of Fashion
9 Joker & The Thief - Wolfmother
10 Do You Want To - Franz Ferdinand

I leave you with this great line:
"And remember, the truth that once was spoken: To love another person is to see the face of God"
(from the Finale of Les Miserables)

Happy Australia Day to Me!

2006-01-26T17:07:00.000+11:00

Well – it’s Australia Day here in Manila, which doesn’t mean a whole lot to most of the people here. Today I am just a number amongst the homesick Aussies around the globe who are missing the beach, their barbies, (that’s a Barbeque, not a doll!) and their bathers this Australia Day. I have created my own little celebration here though – I did an Australia Day merienda (that’s a Filipino snack) complete with a whole lot of stuff I brought back from Australia (Tim Tams, Mint Slices, Caramello Koalas, Cherry Ripes, Freckles, Caramel Crowns etc) and I some food I made - pikelets and vegemite soldiers. And I have Triple J’s Hottest 100 playing on the radio – trying to guess what the number one song with be. A problem with having been away for a year – I am a little out of touch (although am pretty stoked to see that many of the songs I have voted for have turned up thus far in the countdown, and we are up to number 16). And they are broadcasting live from the Sydney Big Day Out…*cry*

Hmmmm – my picks for number one – I reckon Ben Lee will have a shot, or maybe Sarah Blasko, Wolfmother, or the White Stripes. I think I am putting my money on Wolfmother (they have already have four in this year). Last year, I guessed either Franz Ferdinand or The Killers, and was right (Franz Ferdinand’s Take Me Out was number one) – I guess this year I am in for a surprise…

Tonight there is a party at the residence of the Australian Ambassador. My friend Rainier has sung at it before (apparently they had all these Filipinos singing songs like “Waltzing Matilda” and “I Still Call Australia Home”, which I think would have really cracked me up!) and said it is huge – the world and its wife comes to this event. So it should be fun. Embassy things crack me up – the invitations come complete with finishing times for the parties, and you really should be out by then. We have learned our lesson from the last party, when all the Youth Ambassadors were left like stray waifs sitting on the curb outside the residence after everyone else left with their drivers. We have organised transport this time around!!!

Hope, wherever you are, you are having a ripper Australia Day…

Twas the Season

2006-01-19T16:43:00.000+11:00

Okay - do me a favour and pretend that you are reading this a month ago!!! That is when I wrote it (and intended to add more to it then!) but never finished it. So am just going to post it now, as is, for your reading pleasure. Because - I did go to the effort of writing it, didn't I?!

For those not in Melbourne, I have just returned to Manila after three weeks back there (two of vacation and one of work at WVA HQ). I will write more about that later (I hope!)

HAPPY NEW YEAR everyone...

If there were to be a worldwide vote, I would have to nominate the Philippines as the country with the most Christmas spirit. When I lived in the States, I thought they went mad with the Christmas decorations (and I still don’t think there is much man-made stuff more pretty than a New England town decking the halls, with old-fashioned street lamps, town squares with enormous trees and houses with those hanging icicle lights). Every country I have had the fortune to spend the Christmas season has made an impression with its individuality – I remember going real carol by candle-ighting in England, wandering in the snow through our village from house to house, and farm house to farm house, holding torches or candles and being welcomed into each house for cookies or apple cider – I felt like I was in a Jane Austen novel (well – I did when I was older and looked back on the time – I didn’t read much Jane at age nine!). I loved Sweden, with the Lucia’s (I think that is what they are called) – triangular holders of light – in each window of every apartment building and house and office block – too gorgeous for words (especially when the sun sets about 3.00p.m.!!) and even Egypt last year, with its almost total ignorance of Christmas and lack of decorations (perhaps, due to being a predominantly Muslim country, you think?) made an impression (I mean – I was the closest I had ever been to the actual source of the event, and saw a church built at the site where Jesus, Mary and Joseph are supposed to have stayed when in exile in Egypt).

Still – no country gets into Christmas like the Philippines. The radios started playing Christmas messages in July and apparently, once the ‘-ber’ months (September, October etc) begin, it is open season. I heard a Tagalog version of Frosty the Snowman (now – if ever a song didn’t need to be translated to Tagalog, I think it is Frosty the Snowman! Reminded me of having “I’m dreaming of a White Christmas” playing in a restaurant in Malawi (a country in southern Africa, for those of you who don’t know!) when it was about 50 degrees…hee) playing in Megamall in September. Starbucks has a Christmas line of something, with the tag line “it only happens once a year.” Well yes – it does only happen once a year, but here in the Philippines, that is like saying winter only happens once a year. It may do, but it is a three month even with a long build up that requires planning, sustenance and a battle plan to get through.

And the decorations – boy oh boy. Filipinos love kitsch at the best of times – plastic ornaments and fake flowers are beloved of the land. But when it comes the Christmas decorations, they definitely adhere to the more is more rule of design. There are lights of all colours, there are reindeer and Santas, there are trees everywhere you can imagine (and it all goes up at the start of November). The internal sound system in our office building (plays in the hallways and the lifts etc) has been piping Christmas Carols since November. There are plastic lantern-thingies having from every streetlight – enormous Christmas trees that are decorated with the goal of not actually allowing any of the green of the tree to show through. And things I have never seen on a Christmas tree before – flowers, ribbons and bows, bizarre food type things…

There are also an abundance of Christmas parties- I think I have accepted seven or eight of the eleven or twelve invitations I received – I just couldn’t fit everything in and prepare to go home as well. We just had our work one – complete with a sermon (before they fed us – which I think is just MEAN!) and SIX games – they still love their games here. Still, I won a prize for best outfit (had to wear green, red or gold – I had all three in a green skirt, red top, green ribbon and red and gold shoes – sounds hideous when I list it all, doesn’t it – like something Kath or Kim would wear) and an iron in the raffle (I kid you not – I think I will donate it to Nat’s new business at Smokey Mountain, where some ladies are making and selling skirts – currently Nat irons them for the ladies!!)

We also had a Kris Kringle, which was unlike any Kris Kringle I have ever seen, in that it had chart done up for it, with each of our names on it, we wrote what we wanted and then our Secret Santa bought it for us!!! Kinda took the fun out of it a little… It was hard too – only a few people had written things and the rest of us were stuck (there was a P300 or AUD$7.50 price limit) until one person wrote down “Powerbooks Gift Voucher” and so I copied her and wrote down ‘bookshop gift voucher’ and before you knew it – probably two-thirds of the staff have written down ‘gift voucher’!!! Not very exciting to open, but easy to wrap!

We also had a lovely Cocktail party (sans the cocktails – not happy about that one…) for Sagric, with many of the Youth Ambassadors (all the Manila ones, plus a few out-of-towners who were lured, possibly by the promise of the non-materialising cocktails?) that was a lot of fun and a chance to see Lynette, Lalay, Bob and Judi again before Christmas.

All in all, however, I think that despite being a massive Christmas junkie, I might be a bit over it by the time it actually rolls around…

(upon rereading this, in January - it looks a little like a travelogue. I hope you will understand that this was not my intention!)

Tell me why I don't like Mondays

2005-12-07T19:21:00.000+11:00

I haven't written for a week or two - things have been fairly tumultuous around here. I won't go into details, but we have lost quite a bit of our funding and on Monday my boss had to let three members of our team go - Merry Christmas, hey? That was pretty rough - I felt really bad and completely useless, unable to do anything to help. We have a lot of work ahead of us (me primarily) as there is a big review being started of the project - I think the main goal of the leaders is to ensure I don't sleep at all before Christmas! So anyway - I have been fairly consumed with work of late, and not able to update. But hey - I still have a job, right? Albeit a volunteer one with no salary!!! So I am doing okay...

However - last weekend (not the most recent, the one before), a rather large group of Aussies descended upon the Visayas group of islands for some fun, food and partying. It was a long weekend (my last public holiday (apart from the Christmas holidays) before leaving, sadly. So Friday night, Mairin, Sally, Reggie, Ange and I flew down to Cebu, where we met up with Piers and Cho who came over from Tagbilaran (the capital of Bohol).

Maybe this would be a good time to give you a clear break up of the AYADs in the Philippines, as we currently stand:

Manila - Intake 13 (arrived April 2005):
Mairin, Sally, Natalie (sharing one flat)
Me, Ange (sharing another flat with Reggie)
Emily (sharing with her partner, Neil, an honourary AYAD who is working at the Australian embassy)

Manila - Intake 14 (arrived October 2005):
Reggie (sharing with Ange and I)

Los Banos - Intake 13:
Naomi

Ilo Ilo - Intake 13:
Sarah

Tagbilaran (capital of Bohol island) - Intake 13:
Lyndon

Tagbilaran - Intake 14:
Cho
Piers (now dating Sally (see above) and the two of them are too gooey for words)

Bacolod - Intake 14:
Elizabeth

All other places are south of Manila - Los Banos is about 1.5 hours by bus, the others are about that by plane.

(you can all do what my mother does each time I leave Manila and locate these places on a map - I think she must have begun carrying the atlas around Melbourne with her)

Okay - back to the weekend. In Cebu, we met up with Piers (called, inexplicably (Ange and I were trying to work it out last night?) Perez) and Cho. Elizabeth flew in on Saturday morning. Basically, we were there to party, however, I was still kinda sick so wasn't up to the full action. I piked by midnight on Friday night, although did hit the clubs, including a pretty cool dance club that I actually think was a tent, on Saturday night. Saturday, we had brunch at this amazing deli/restaurant, with lots and lots of foreign foods on the shelves (everything from Heinz baked beans to Barilla pasta to Guylian (sp?) chocolate) and an amazing cheese collection and wine cellar (we returned for wine and cheese on Sat night). Then Reggie, Elizabeth and I went to buy Liz a guitar (they are made in Cebu - the music capital of the Philippines) and do some sight seeing. We went to Magellan's Cross (I will write more about that later, when I can copy from my Lonely Planet!), the old Spanish fort and a too-cool-for-words Chinese temple (situated right on the river, which is always the home to a lot of slum dwellings - this blew Elizabeth's mind a little, as she hadn't seen any of these yet).

Sunday morning, we headed by ferry over to Tagbilaran. And then out to Panglao island - just off the coast of Tagbilaran and connected by bridge, to Alona beach. There we met up with Nat and her brother Phil, visiting from Melbourne. So by now, we had almost all of the AYADs together. And Monday, Ange, Nat and I went diving off Alona, mostly at a very cool place called Balicasag Island, which has a brilliant wall going down past 30m. It was during this time that Ange earned her new nickname, Floater. Primarily due to the fact that we would be descending and get to about 10m and I would look around for Ange (you always dive in a buddy system for safety and we are used to being buddies now) and she would be nowhere to be found, as she has surfaced and is currently bobbing above the water, trying desperately to get down!! You wear a weight belt when diving, to counteract the buouancy of the water, and poor Ange started out the day with 4kg on her belt and finished it with 7kg!!! Unfortunately, Ange and I were flying back to Manila the following morning so couldn't do the night dive that Nat did (she and Phil spent a week in Bohol). Due to the build up of nitrogen in your body and the issues with going to depth and resurfacing, there is a limit to the amount of dives you can do in a certain timeframe before flying, and we had reached it...

But the diving was great - I am still totally loving it and particularly love the starfish - they look like felt beanie babies, just flopped there in whatever position they land in. I would love to touch one to see what they feel like, but won't. I got my pictures from the underwater cameras developed (well - they developed on film twice and not the other one...*sigh*) - so, once they are all sorted, I will post some (they are not the best quality - being a long way underwater etc).

Monday night, Lyndon joined us (he had been off with his visiting parents the rest of the weekend) and most of the others got blind drunk as they worked their way through a couple of bottles of gin - generally not even bothering to add mixer! I was boring and responsible and thinking of having to go to work the next day, so was sober enough to enjoy Phil's drunken Riverdance, which was one of the funniest things I have ever seen in my life (better even than Ange's riverdance in Ilo Ilo and Nat doing Johnny Cash's Walk the Line on the same night - both memories Mairin had the foresight to capture on video...hee). But Phil (who I think wound up tripping and falling) really gives Michael Flatley a run for his money with his Irish Dancing, that more closely resembled the Can Can. A classic end to a great weekend.

And then of course, Tuesday morning, the dreaded return to Manila...
*Big Sigh*

Musings of no particular significance...

2005-11-25T14:41:00.000+11:00

This is most of my team at work - we took this picture on Jelson's last day,
and unfortunately a few people were away.

Back row: Joel, me, Lorna and Henry (standing)

Front row: Marites, Gemma, Salve, Jelson and Melanie.

Missing: Dayan, Marion and Aileen.

These guys are a lot of fun - I love working with them, and in many ways, they are some of my best teachers about the Philippines. There are other wonderful people in the office as well -
our IT guy is a good friend of mine, as is the accountant and the receptionist.
In fact, they all rock! I will try to get a piccie of all of us -
I know we took some on Prayer Day (start of the financial year) this year.

I haven’t posted much lately – I have been flat out at work and also home sick (not homesick, as one friend thought I meant in an email, but at home, sick – should have put a comma in there!!) I haven’t even finished putting up my Palawan pictures (not even close, I’m afraid!!) but all of a sudden blogger just decided it wasn’t going to post any more one day, so I spat the dummy and shut it down (power of the user?)

Anyway – I am still alive, although a little the worse for wear. I have been sick a lot since I got here – the number of colds I get has become legendary. I lost count but I think I am in double digits over seven months (and am sadly not exaggerating) – people can no longer tell if I am on the tail end of the previous one, or starting another one. I have yet to have a major upchuck event (which I count as a triumph, seven months in!) but have had a full spectrum of other ailments – my most spectacular was two weeks after arriving. I was pretty ill and went to the clinic in Mega Mall (yes – they have a full medical clinic, a church, a skating rink, a bowling alley (that I have yet to see) – I think they should just open a hotel and a school - then you could never leave. It’s like Singapore airport. Anyway – I went from the clinic down to the chemist to fill my prescription (scribbled by the doctor onto the back of a piece of paper – getting prescription-only drugs here is just a matter of looking persuasively at the ‘chemist’) and proceeded to pass out – twice! It took people a really, really long time to notice a white person (extra white at this stage) passed out on the floor – or maybe they just thought I was a druggie and didn’t want to come help! Anyway – eventually some very nice folks dragged me back down to the clinic while I tried to ring everybody I knew (which wasn’t that many people at that stage) and had this ridiculous moment where I literally couldn’t get anyone to pick up their phones. Eventually, I got Ange and she said she would come and get me. So I lay down in the clinic for a while and then Ange, Sally and Nat all walked in – it was quite a sight. Three tall, blonde Aussies in gym shorts (they had been on their way to play basketball) – apparently they attracted quite a bit of attention as they strode through the mall. It was pretty funny – they said that when they walked into the clinic, they didn’t even have to ask for me – people just started pointing them in the direction, “you want to go there”, “she’s through there”, etc. Guess there weren’t too many half conscious white people in there that night!!

Anyway – I was home sick again a couple of days ago, and Ange just totally cracked me up. I was sprawled out on the sofa working the horizontal position as that reduced most of the symptoms, and I can hear her banging and clanging around in the kitchen and am thinking I should go and help her out, but really couldn’t get up (was still proud of making it out of bed!) And then she emerges from the kitchen with this huge grin on her face and comes over with dinner for me – on a tray! With salt and pepper and a little thing of condiments. And cutlery on a folded napkin and everything!! I felt absolutely mortified – I think all my colour returned in spades in a hurry! But at the same time it was hysterical – I am not sure why it was so funny but we were both killing ourselves laughing and it was just so incredibly sweet – I still can’t believe she brought me dinner on a tray…must have been flashing back to her hospital days.

The next day, I was still at home and having to miss dinner out with everyone. Luckily Nat came over to kill some time between appointments near our house, so I had some company for a while. And then, about 7.15p.m., some of my colleagues from work called me, just to see how I was and to tell me that they missed me. It was so touching – it made me realise how much I have come to love the people I work with and how much I will miss them when I leave. And also that we all work too long hours!!!

In fact, I have come to love the Philippines as well. There are days when it drives me nuts – days when I want to be cold, when I want to walk to work without every guy I pass staring openly at my chest, days when I don’t want to feel guilty all the time about my relative wealth, and not get angry about the incredible corruption everywhere. But it has wormed its way into my heart. Filipinos have the most fantastic smiles you have ever seen – they light up their whole faces and the word ‘beaming’ comes to mind. They are the most warm and friendly people – when you ask for directions, chances are they won’t have a clue but will send you in the wrong direction as they are too embarrassed to admit it, but they will always want to do their very best to help you. So many people here struggle every day just to feed their children, but instead of resenting me, they are just incredibly friendly.

But you can get these platitudes a lot of countries you go to – especially developing countries. I guess you have to live in a country, share its ups and downs and make friends from all walks of life to really immerse yourself in it. I have so many wonderful friends here now – friends I will miss like crazy when I go. I have a life here – I know Manila, I know my favourite places to go. Every time I leave the city, I am struck by how amazingly beautiful this country is – it is so lush and green with the most fantastic scenery – volcanoes, rice paddies, mountains, rivers. Sometimes you think you could be driving through rural England and I have even passed red dirt that reminds me of Australia. I enjoy my life here – I like hanging out with my Aussie friends, my Pinoy friends and my international friends. I like that at devotions at work, they speak in Tagalog with me in the room – I don’t understand 99% of what they say (my Tagalog still sucks) but it means I am just part of the team now. It is hard to articulate what I am feeling, but I get a warm and fuzzy feeling walking to work (if I keep my eyes firmly fixed in the middle distance!) driving through the countryside, or showing other visitors around Manila (as a 'local'!) and I know that no matter what, the Philippines has claimed a part of my heart.

Still - it will be nice to go home at Christmas and not attract any attention at all - just be anonymous...

Sth China Sea at Sunset

2005-11-17T13:22:00.000+11:00

Sunset pics!

2005-11-17T13:13:00.000+11:00

These are the little 'bankas' (pronounced Bung-car)

- the boats that fishermen in the Philippines sail on It's a tough life, but somebody's gotta do it!

I may have gone a little overboard in the piccies,
but don't worry - there are plenty more to come ;-p

Pics from the boat in Coron...

2005-11-17T12:58:00.000+11:00

Isn't it stunning!

An amazing storm we had to sail through - our second day was very wet, both in and out of the water!!!

More mountain photos

2005-11-11T20:13:00.000+11:00

Mt Tapyas Pics

2005-11-10T13:37:00.000+11:00

These shots were all taken from Mt Tapyas (I remembered its name!!) looking down over Coron as we went up and down it...

Palawan continued...

2005-11-10T13:13:00.000+11:00

I want to start posting more piccies, but thought I should finish the narrative of Palawan before I do that, so as not to ruin the flow… And brace yourselves Uncle John and Aunty Rhonda (do you even read this???) – There may not be too much weeding in the pics as Palawan is just that stunning! All the relief you felt when seeing how selective I was with my Egypt pictures last year can just go hurtling back out the window!!

Anyway – we are back in Manila and I have been absolutely swamped since returning, so haven’t had a chance to update. Coming back was very hard to do (ridiculously hard – we had to sit for an hour and a half after our plane was supposed to have left in this dodgy little terminal while absolutely nobody told us what was wrong with our plane. I got into this ridiculous situation trying to find out what the problem was as there was only a security guard in the terminal and he had no idea what was going on, eventually saying that the captain knew and said Captain was on the plane. So the Security Guard said he was going to find out some info and never returned. So I decided to go to the check-in counter and ask there, and saw him there hiding! When he saw me again, he turned and walked out and on it went etc! Pretty funny (and incredibly annoying). Eventually, one and a half hours after scheduled take-off, we boarded and with no apology or explanation for the delay (although they did apologise for the warm cabin temperature!) we took off. As I was saying to Ange, if there is a problem with the plane then tell us – none of us want to get in that steel hotdog and go hurtling through the air if it is broken. But we just want to know why we are still sitting on those ghastly chairs – we will understand, but just tell us, for crying out loud… She suggested that it was once again the Filipino fear of losing face – they wouldn’t admit there was a problem (I eventually found out there was a problem with the autopilot and they had to get approval from the head of the airline in Manila to take off and they couldn’t find him…or something like that).

So we are flying back into Manila and can see the smog on the horizon and I looked down and the bay was just black and fetid – so depressing in comparison to the green hills and mountains and the sparkling ocean we had been at a few hours ago. We briefly contemplated hijacking the plane and making it take us back, or transferring our entire offices to Palawan, but eventually took one for the country, landed and battled the Manila traffic to come home.

Backtracking a little…
Our last day in Coron we climbed the hill that I mentioned (can’t remember its name now – will look that up and get back to you). It is 690m and was just incredibly steep steps – we had sweat absolutely streaming off us in rivers and I was panting like I was in labour or something – it was unbelievable. But the view was stunning so it was worth it. Then we went out in a tricycle to these hot springs about twenty to thirty minutes ride way. That was great – the water was incredibly hot and you couldn’t stay in too long (thank heavens Palawan is cooler than Manila – and it was not April!) and it was perfect after the climb.

The next day we flew to Puerto Princessa, the capital of Palawan. Actually, what I may do it stop the narrative here, and put up my pictures from Coron, then continue on with Puerto in my next entry…
Toodles

PADI Open Water Diver!!!!

2005-11-03T14:12:00.000+11:00

Yes - that's me!! *squeals* I am a qualified Open Water Diver and can now be let loose in the water with a tank on my back and a Darth Vadar mask in my mouth! It is very very exciting and I think Ange and I are now addicted! We are in Coron, a small town/village on the island of Busuanga, in the north of Palawan (a group of islands right to the west of the Philippines - apparently Palawan was once part of Malaysia and broke away in an earthquake, however many years ago (I am thinking hundreds of thousands, but whatever...) (btw - this is an insanely slow computer - I am not sure how long I will last before I get fed up and storm back out into the heat of the day!)

Today is our last day here in Coron and we are being extra cautious about not diving and flying, so are having a quiet day today - I want to do some souvenir shopping and visit a gallery (thinking about Christmas presents), there is a hill that we want to climb and later on we will go to some hot springs about a twenty-minute jeepney ride away.

Anyway - I will tell you a little bit about diving, but probably not everything now as I don't want to make this a super long entry and I could talk about it for days. Ange and I flew down here in a tiny little plane on Friday morning (it was an eighteen seater, with no toilet, steward or even cabin pressurisation! As we were taking off, Ange turned to me and said, "it's like Lost" (the TV show about the people whose plane crash landed on a remote desert island and they have to survive there!), which wasn't particularly comforting!!! Anyway - we finally got to Busuanga and had a one-hour jeepney ride to Coron through this incredibly green and lush countryside - each time we leave Manila the lushness just astounds us. We started our course that afternoon with Maddy, who is the friend of my friend Kim in Manila. Maddy is British and has been a scuba diving instructor here for about five years (I think?) and is just the loveliest person - we had so much fun with her. We did 'academics' on the first day which consisted of watching a few very cheesy videos that PADI (Professional Association of Divers Inc., I think?) have for their course.

The Open Water Diving Course generally takes four days, although you can do it in three. There are five videos you watch, followed by 'academics' sessions, four quizzes, five 'confined water' dives, which is where you go through things in shallow water (often done in a pool, we did ours at a shallow beach) and then four actual deep dives - we started out going to 12 metres and by the last one went to 18 metres. The next day (Saturday), we were joined by another guy, Richard, who was a Filipino from Manila and did the course with us. (just an aside - I have been trying to log in to msn messenger for thirty minutes and am about to do something violent...) So we were off scuba diving around the sites of Coron.

Hmmm - I may leave this here as I don't want to be too long and boring. I will come back with more news soon...

Tomorrow we are flying from Busuanga into Puerta Princessa (the capital of Palawan). We will do something around there tomorrow, go to the Underground River on Saturday and then fly back to Manila on Sunday (*cry*) Really don't want to go back......

Anyway - toodles

Gourmet - Philippines style

2005-10-27T14:31:00.000+10:00

Well - we can add this as number twenty-seven on the list of Philippino (now - I am not sure in this case whether it should be Philippino or Filipino or something else entirely - I will research further and get back to you - or probably not!) delicacies that I intend never to try. I do not care if I am thought incredibly unadventurous. It turns out that a delicacy in Palawan is something called alternatively Bird's Nest Soup or Nido Soup - and it is made from bird vomit.

No - I am not kidding you.

Apparently people climb miles up into mountains and then up to birds' nests to retrieve the product of bird regurgitation and then bring it down. And turn it into soup. It is (as a result of the effort required to obtain the key ingredient) incredibly expensive. And - I am informed, delicious . I don't care - I am still not trying it. The thought alone is enough to put me off my food.

One of the most popular and famous specialties of the Philippines is something called balut. This is a partially formed duck egg - with the foetus clearly definable within - you can make out all of the poor little thing. It is hardboiled (I think?) and then eaten. Seriously - I am feeling a little ill as I type. I could put links to pictures but I really don't want to do that to you (or myself). If you are into the big gross-out, you can go and google balut - I am sure it will come up in all of its graphic glory.

Just reaffirms for me why I have always been vegetarian....

Some corrections!

2005-10-26T16:35:00.001+10:00

Oh man - I put some of the text in this post in blue and now my whole blog has turned blue...*sigh*
Very sick of technology lately. Trying again. I have discovered that the edit feature in blogger doesn't actually edit either, you just waste time changing everything and then it re-posts your original post for you - I guess it doesn't believe in the right to change your mind :-(

So nice to talk to friends back home, but then when you hang up, makes you realise that you miss them even more... (hugs to Clare). Less than two months until I will be home at Christmas and I am really excited about it - I can't wait to see my Nana. Clare was asking last night if it really felt like six months and in a way it feels like I have been here forever - as I was saying, my life in Melbourne seems extremely remote right now - Manila is my home and my stomping ground and it is my life at the moment - Melbourne seems remote and far, far away. However, I am still making a list (and checking it twice!) for Christmas - I added 'go to the Moonlight Cinema' this week! But Manila is definitely home for now and despite the heat and the constant noise and the pollution, I feel very established here.

Okay - so turns out I have boo-booed - and I will quote directly from the source here...

hi kate, i went to your blog site and noticed one small typo error. actually its my fault, i missed to tell you to use single 'p' in the word 'filippinos'. oopps....sorry. correct spelling is 'filipinos'. guess i'm already late =<> joel

(sorry Joel - guess you won't be helping me fix any more of my code, hey?!)
So anyway - from now on they will be referred to (on my better days) as Filipinos - that felt really funny to type!

Also, from Helen:
BTW, just a warning that some might have misunderstood your mention of the "naughty-DVD place" in one of your blogs. I'm assuming it's a place you buy cheap pirated copies of DVDs, not an alternative that doesn't bear mentioning.

*adopting indignant stance for anyone who thought otherwise*
Of course I only meant pirated DVDs - what do you take me for? I mean, I am happy to spend my money on illegally copied DVDs, but draw the line at (I am guessing) perfectly legal but totally objectional smut!! Am horrified you would think anything else of me - I have standards, you know!! (double ones, apparently!!) (I really miss smilies, once again...*cry*)

Anyway - am flat out and have to run, as I am getting everything ready to take ten days in Palawan - cannot wait. I am so excited. Ange and I were perusing the Lonely Planet last night and talking about places to go etc. It is going to be so much fun - this Underground River is UNESCO listed (or something) and apparently just stunning. I am so ready to get out of Manila and have a holiday (my first since I got here).

So - you may not hear from me for a few weeks - I don't think there will be too many net cafe's in Palawan (it is knows as the final frontier of the Philippines) so you will just have to hold your horses for updates etc.

Toodlepip

(apparently (don't remember this but sounds like me!) I wrote a message on the whiteboard in my team when I left WVA and it has toodlepip in it - and it is still there - six months later!!! Good to feel missed! And remembered...as the toodlepip girl!)

Filippinos

2005-10-24T18:04:00.000+10:00

Apparently I have been commiting a huge faux pas for the past six months, because the dear nationals of this great country are actually Filippinos, not Philippinos. Or so Joel informed me :( Oooops - very sorry.

Anyway - check out all the pretty new extras on my blog. Courtesy of Emily who, after being fed and plied with wine last Friday night, was dragged into Ange's bedroom and very kindly showed me how to do some extra stuff (we are still having trouble with some of the fonts etc and eventually gave up after a couple of hours when we could no longer see straight). I predict I will probably get this blog looking somewhat how I would like it to look approximately one week before I board the plane to return home...

Speaking of planes - God Bless GMA. She has announced three public holidays next week - Monday, Tuesday and Friday. So Ange and I (two other friends were supposed to come, but they couldn't get flights - it is even harder a weekend to book for than Christmas as everyone goes home in order to go to the cemeteries and mourn their dead) are getting on one (a plane!) and going to Palawan for ten days. We are first going to Coron, a small island north of the main island to get our scuba diving licences and then are going to travel through the rest of the island before flying back to Manila. Palawan is said to the be most beautiful part of the Philippines and I am particularly looking forward to getting out of Manila and to having a break - I think I need a holiday. Will be able to tell you all about it when I return.

My Work!!!

2005-10-21T19:18:00.000+10:00

Very fast as I have to run home and cook dinner for seven Australians (the things I get myself into...*sigh*)

I get quite a few emails along the lines of "great blog - do you do any work? *ppbbffttt* (Mary - you are lucky those VCDs mean I love you forever!!) The answer is - not if I can help it...

Okay, obviously I actually do do quite a lot of work and my general leaving-the-office time is 7.00p.m. to give you a clue. However, firstly I don't think you would be very interested in reading about what I do here coz it aint that interesting a lot of the time! And also, due to confidentiality and some other issues, I cannot talk about it much.

However - I would like to direct you to something I am quite proud of. Please go to the following website: http://www.humanitarianstandards.org/index.html and have a bit of a look around - this is the website of my project. In particular, I would call your attention to the video on the top right hand corner - I wrote the script, produced and half edited the thing - it took up a heck of a lot of my time and probably shaved four years of my life expectancy. You can see me in the occasional few shots (one of the things about editing - I am in very few of them!) as the only white person in the room. But you had better do it fast - there have been calls from some of the stars for it to be taken down - they don't want themselves on the web. I have asked for a delay so I can blow my own trumpet a bit, but it won't be much of a stay of execution.

Also, if you go and look at the newsletters (there are only two!!) The most recent one, I wrote all but one of the articles (see if you can guess which one) and although they are not the finest example of my writing ability, they are something. I also wrote quite a few of the articles for the first one (maybe all - can't remember now?)

Anyway - happy reading.
Toodles
From the extremely hard working Kate

(stop that sniggering in the back- I can hear you)

Halfway through (eep!)

2005-10-20T17:14:00.000+10:00

Well – I have a rotten cold (again!) and am feeling very sorry for myself. I have lost count but this must be the sixth or seventh cold I have had in about four months. I am so tired of this. I think it is due to a few factors – I am really run down and tired and the heat still tires me, which doesn’t help. In addition, in the rainy season, you get wet so often and then sit in the wet clothes – also doesn’t help. And finally outside is so hot and inside is so cold – our office is just arctic and it is ridiculous – I go from the heat outside to shivering and rugging up like I am in Mongolia inside. I have started to be pro-active about it now – I keep subtly adjusting the thermostat, but even then it is not great. (and I have to keep going back and turning it back up when someone turns it down - we have a little thermostat war - the latest in Kate's campaign to 'fit into her host country!!) So am feeling sorry for myself and freaking everyone one with my hacking cough and constant nose-blowing (I think they are used to it now – it’s more a case of “Again?” rather than “oh no – you are sick”!!

I read this on bbcnews.com the other day and my mind just boggled:
DJ Fatboy Slim and Talking Heads singer David Byrne are writing a musical about former Philippine first lady Imelda Marcos, to be shown next March. Here Lies Love will examine Mrs Marcos' passion for music and night clubs.
The whole story is here: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/4346938.stm

Hmmmmm…

Speaking of things musical, we had the welcome party for the new intake of AYADs last Thursday night. There are only four of them this time so I think their orientation was much quicker and smoother – hence getting to go to Smokey Mountain etc. Anyway – as we did, they also had karaoke at their welcome party. I am not sure if I have told you but the Philippinos are absolutely mad for Karaoke – it was apparently actually a Philippino who invented the concept – the Japanese just then took the idea and ran with it. But there are karaoke halls/parlours/stands absolutely everywhere and the Pinoys will take any opportunity to get a microphone into their hands and croon out a ballad. It is the preferred means of celebrating a birthday, promotion or any other event of varying level of significance. I have done it on a few occasions before and not really enjoyed it overly.

So anyway – we had the party at this club/lounge place with our own private room so we could karaoke to our heart’s content. Initially there were the AYADs (maybe ten to twelve of us, including Neil – Emily’s partner and an honourary AYAD), plus a bunch of people from the Embassy and Sagric (our organising agency which actually does a lot of work besides organise the AYAD program – they manage a bunch of AusAID contracts here) and a few others. We started out the evening with a few typical ballads etc (I sang “The Way You Look Tonight” which I always love because it reminds me so much of Grandad) and I made the mistake of not checking that the vegetarian food had no meat in it (you think I would have learned after six months, hey!) Then I took Cho, one of the new AYADs, so my naughty-DVD place which was just next door to stock her up for time in the provinces (and to add 24 seasons two and three to my already-purchased seasons one and four *evil grin*). When we returned (about ten o’clock) it was to find that most of the Philippinos had cleared out and we basically had the room to ourselves – the Aussies, Lynette (our ICM and still possibly my absolutely favourite Philippino – such a perfect mix of being the loveliest person and very cool and extremely professional), Lalay (admin assistant to the AYAD program and a lot of fun) and Lalay’s boyfriend (also works at Sagric). There may have been one or two others there – can’t remember.

So we set about having some fun with that karaoke machine and started programming hilarious anthemic songs in like Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody (which we, quite impressively I think, managed to sing mostly without the words when the video spazzed), Toto’s Africa, Michael Jackson, Bon Jovi, the song from Flashdance etc. We put on “Smells like Teen Spirit” and jumped around head banging and giving ourselves headaches (how did we ever survive high school?) and for a bit of a laugh, an Eminem song (got to the end, having managed about one word in three, and wondered how he manages to take a breath while performing – I don’t think I did while we were attempting. Nat’s suggestion was circular breathing, like digeridoo players?) Occasionally a Philippino would program a song and some ballad would come on, which killed the mood, but on the whole it was absolutely brilliant – we wound up karaoke-ing (?) for five hours and I had a blast and have not laughed so much in ages. The only sad thing (apart from me having no voice the next day) was that, we later discovered, Lalay had a video camera :-( We were watching clips of our performances at a Sagric meeting on Tuesday – alternately hilarious (when someone else was doing something embarrassing) or hide-head-in-hands-worthy (when I was doing something embarrassing!!)

Quickly – Tuesday marked our six-month anniversary here! I cannot believe it. I am now over half way through the year. It has gone by so fast, yet it also feels like I have been here forever. I keep wanting to tell you more about what I am doing here, but am not getting enough time to post (or making enough time to post, depending upon your POV). I have been shamed by reading Brett and Belinda’s blog from Germany (for those of you who know them – go read it, it is excellent. Hang on: http://brushandbel.blogspot.com/ ) They are posting their little hearts out. Hey guys – stop showing me up….

Oh and, we have a new flat mate. Reggie moved into our other room (maybe I should have checked the lease agreement before that?!?!) He is one of the new AYADs who arrived last week. Was actually born in the Philippines (in the Visayas somewhere) and migrated to Brisbane at eleven. So speaks fluent Visayan (local dialect down there) and some Tagalog as well. He is working at an environmental center in Manila. Ange returns from her two weeks back in Melbourne tonight, so she will get to meet him them!!

Toodles

Smokey Mountain (guest post by Nat)

2005-10-13T13:39:00.000+10:00

The new intake of AYADs are here! There are only four of them this time and one of them will be in Manila (and possibly sharing with Ange and I), while two are going to Bohol (where Lyndon is) and one to Bacolod (in the Visayas group of islands). I will write more about them later - it is interesting to reflect upon six months here as we now advise the newbies how to go - strange to think how much I have learned. But this afternoon we are going out with them to Smokey Mountain (sometimes just referred to as Smokey), which is where one of the existing AYADs, Nat, works. So I thought I would post an email she sent about a month ago about Smokey and her work there. I will give you my impressions after we have been:

The Scene

Smokey Mountain - named firstly as a mountain because it has been as high as 35 m and secondly because it smokes almost continuously during the hot summer months. Waste from the City of Manila was first dumped here almost 50 years ago. Before that it was actually a fishing village, the sea is now a kilometre or so away from Smokey. The land has been reclaimed with dumped garbage over the years.

Around 15 years ago if you went to Smokey Mountain youwould have found around 4,000 families living on and around the active dumpsite. The families were mostly poor migrants who came to Manila from the provinces in search of work. Smokey was a good location because it was cheap to live on and [due to] its close proximity to the ports where itinerant work could be found. Contrary to popular belief, not all the families living there were scavengers. Of course, a large number of them did try and scrape together a living from pulling anything of any value out of the numerous trucks that dumped rubbish there every day.

In 1993, Smokey Mountain was closed and the government made a promise to provide housing to the squatters and to rehabilitate the mountain (we’re still waiting forthat last one). Around 3,000 families were housed in temporary accommodation nearby while the new permanent accommodation was constructed. The rest of the families were housed in other areas or accepted cash grants. The temporary housing, which stretched from what was supposed to be 2 years to about 10 years, is a fairly squalid example of accommodation. From what I understand, the two storey structures were open inside and families were to construct their own walls to get privacy. There was only 1 bathroom per floor. I imagine that would have had to be shared by 50 families. The temporary housing is still there and a new bunch of squatters has moved in. Now, with no electricity or running water and no-one responsible for any repairs, it is quite a depressing area.

Last year, the families were moved into their new accommodation, the permanent housing. This is also sometimes referred to as Paradise Heights. Although I notice that tends to be by outsiders, the residents still refer to it as Smokey Mountain. It probably has something to do with the still smoking, still 25 odd metre high mountain of garbage never more than 100 m away from all the housing.

The new housing is 5 stories high, with 24 units on each floor. Someone said to me once the units are about 32 square metres. Each unit has its own bathroom with a toilet and shower head. The sleeping quarters are a mezzanine level about half the size of the bottom level. A lot of the residents have done renovations and extended their mezzanine to cover the whole area. They have electricity and water is available from 6 am - 8 am and 6 pm - 8 pm daily, which means water needs to be stored for toilet flushing, washing and cooking in big containers duringthe ‘off’ hours.

Last week, I met a woman who lived in her unit with her husband, five children, 2 dogs, 4 puppies and a cat! So I think privacy might be a foreign concept in some of the units. Not to mention peace and quiet!

The People

A strong part of the Filipino culture is dependent on having good relationships with the people you are engaging with. In my more cynical moments I would saythis practice tends to perpetuate the cycle of corruption, but it has also given me a great opportunity to meet a lot of wonderful people. As partof my job I have been visiting residents in their homes, just getting to know them and to chat abouttheir environmental concerns. I thought I would share with you a few of the stories.

The gay culture in the Philippines is like much of South East Asia – very definitely present, most often widely accepted and involving a lot of dressing up to look like women. Although, unlike Thailand, most of the gay men in the Philippines can’t afford boob jobs so you see a lot of skinny flat chested men in skimpy clothes and a lot of makeup. The giveaways are the flat chest and the adam’s apple. A few weeks ago I was chatting with some of the Smokey gay population, in their hairdressing salon. One of the ‘ladies’ had a lovely photo of herself up on the wall from when she had entered the Miss Gay Paradise Heights. She didn’t win, although I thought she looked pretty good in her photo, so I wonder what the winner looked like! They were all very happy to talk candidly about themselves.This lady had been taking hormone tablets to grow boobs for about 2 years, but had stopped taking them because she was worried about the side effects on the heart. They cost about $4.50 for 4 months. But it must have worked because she had some great cleavage in her Miss Gay Paradise Heights photo.

Being a strongly catholic country with a growing population, there are a lot of kids at Smokey. Although I am not quite Pied Piper status yet, everytime I am there the kids will be yelling out to me “Hi Maam” “Hi Joe” “What's your name” “Americano” “Whats your favourite colour” or whatever else they learnt in English this week. Normally I just smile, sometimes I have a bit of a chat in which case they go all shy and hide behind their friends and I always correct the American assumption. And of course there is a lot of giggling and commenting in Tagalog. Mostly I have no idea what they are talking about but recently I had a colleague with me and when a little boy of about 3 was tearing around me yelling inTagalog I was able to ask her what he said. When she stopped laughing, she translated that he had been yelling ‘Everybody, look at her, look at her face. It’s different to all the other faces’.

Yesterday I was talking with a woman who was clearly very happy. The story came out that the day before they had been on television and won 5000 pesos (a month's wages here or about $125). [edited for Kate note: that can be a pretty good month's wage - many people make 2000 to 3000 pesos a month - AUD$50 to AUD$75] And how had they won this? Well they came second in some kind of a pet talent contest (I assume) with a pair of dancing rats. I was privileged enough to see the rats in question, and to see one of them dancing against the wall of its cage. What a talent! Paul McDermott you gotta see this!

I have also heard some tragic stories. I was in a house yesterday and noticed there was no TV. I thought that it was unusual, in fact it was the first house I had been in with no TV. It came out that their househad recently been robbed, by their son-in-law, who is addicted to shabu (a cheap local drug). He also beats his wife, their daughter, and has done so for years, and has made death threats against the whole family. They have a small child who wandered in while I was there, no doubt her grandmother's house is a safehaven. They make their living by making and selling a rice sweet. If they sell all they make, they earn around $4 a day. On that they must send their youngest son to school as well as all the other daily expenses. I felt helpless hearing this story, but I am sure there are many more like that. I guess all any of us can do is try and make a difference the best way we know how. Hopefully, my project will create a few more long term sustainable jobs for the community.

Wherever I go, I am almost always offered food and adrink. I have never been asked for money when walking around. Yet I know how much some of these people earn, my colleagues have not been paid for 6 weeks and are scrounging around for things to sell to make some money to be able to come to work. And still everyone is generous with what they have, if its their time, their contacts or what food they have. Some days at Smokey I look around and see a poverty stricken area, I hear stories that make me want to cry and I pass filthy children returning from scavenging jobs who look longingly at the other kids singing songs in the day care centre. But some days I can see why people don’t want to leave when they start earning better money – it’s a very strong community, children can run around with their friends and everyone is looking out for everyone else's kids. People are smiling. A lot of the residents help set up livelihood programs, to help other residents who are probably only marginally worse off than themselves. It’s also a great place for me to introduce a waste segregation program because I don’t need to spend much time talking about the effects of poor waste management, these people know more about it than me and they are probably some of the best segregators in the world.

So that’s a little bit of my world. I’ll be here foranother 6 months or so and hopefully I will be able to meet some more of the incredibly friendly and welcoming Smokey folk. You can check out some photos of my workplace on my website –

www.flickr.com/photos/nataliejiricek

Shalimar!!! (and not much else!)

2005-10-10T19:48:00.000+10:00

I had a fantastic moment on Saturday afternoon. I had a wonderfully decadent Sat morning just lounging around the flat – I needed to go to mega mall to do some shopping (and indulge in my latest obsession – forking out about $5 to get my finger and toe nails done!!) but it was pouring with rain as it only can in Manila – the rain is so heavy that you literally cannot see a couple of metres away. I tried to take some pictures of it to capture just how hard it was, but of course my fancy pants camera blocks out stuff that blurs a picture and focuses on a solid object somewhere, so I am not sure how well they will come out (I still have not embraced the digital age and rely on my trusty SLR – which is why my photos are sometimes sporadic – I have to wait to finish a film and have it developed before I can post it!). Anyway – none of that is really the point at all.

I did a whole series of things that I can’t talk about because someone in Oz will be getting a surprise soon. But then, I was walking back to megamall and thought “I’ll just pop into Starbucks and get a coffee to drink as I walk.” So I walk over to Starbucks (maybe this is the time to confess to my mother that yes, I do drink Starbucks here *ducking for cover*! They are the only place here that uses fresh milk instead of UHT to make coffee, and if you have it double or triple strength, it tastes a lot better!! Sorry – please still meet my plane in December!) and there is a woman sitting outside and I am thinking “that looks a lot like Shalimar.” Then “don’t be silly Kate, Shalimar is in Indonesia” then, “that really looks like Shalimar,” and on and on in my head, until, having convinced myself that Shalimar is still in Jakarta, due back here in two days and it is my imagination when she gets up to walk towards me and of course it is Shalimar.

I should backtrack a bit here as many people won’t know what I am talking about. Shalimar is one of the most lovely and fun people you could ever hope to meet. She worked with me at World Vision Australia for a year or two (somewhere in between I think?) and then returned to her native Philippines with her husband as he was very involved in the political process here and needed to be here for the election last year (possibly was running for office?) I missed her like crazy after she left, so of course she was one of the first people notified when I got the job here, and just after I arrived as well. I was staying at the Linden Suites at the time and she said she wouldn’t acknowledge me until I got out of the Linden Suites, that was where deposed Presidents hid out until everything blows over (although the plaque in their lobby actually claims that it is where the latest people power revolution was organised from – go figure?) and that once I got out of there and into the ‘real Philippines’ then we could be friends again!!! Anyway – I haven’t seen her for a few months – she told me about two months ago that she was frantically busy working on the World Trade campaign (she works for CARE, I think, or is it Oxfam – I can never remember…bad Kate) and wasn’t going to be able to get together until October.

So – first week of October I sent her a message and got a reply that she was in Jakarta and had only just left Bali before the bombs (which I was immensely happy to hear!) and would be back in Manila on Monday and we would talk then. She also said that she had been in hospital for two days with stress, which was awful to hear but not unsurprising as Shalimar has always worked herself ragged. So of course I was fairly worried about her in general and anxious to see her at the first possible opportunity, but never expected it would be two days before her scheduled return date! She had to come back early to meet with some guys, which was exactly what she was doing right there at Starbucks (she lives in Quezon City and rarely ventures to Ortigas) having come straight from the airport (that trip of about 10 to 15kms having taken 2.5 hours!) and had only just arrived there. It was such a total fluke and I couldn’t believe it – I was so thrilled to see her I grinned like an idiot for the next few hours.

She was filling me in on all of her news and one of the things that she was telling me is that her husband is one of the lawyers working on the impeachment of GMA. I haven’t done a political post for a while (mostly because things have died down a lot) but thought I should give you an update now, inspired by Shalimar’s husband. I can’t remember where I got up to in explaining all the political dramas here etc., but here is the current situation (to the best of my knowledge – I have stopped following things so closely). Oh, hang on – we are being booted out now as they are fixing the air conditioning. I will post this and then give you the political update tomorrow.

Sorry to the 99% of readers who have never heard of Shalimar! There was going to be a little more to this post, but anyway – I was really really happy so you should be really happy to read about my joy!!!

Toodlepip

Kate

Supersonic traffic speed...

2005-10-07T20:34:00.000+10:00

I was thinking last night in the taxi on the way home how living in Manila has affected my idea of speed. Because traffic moves so incredibly slowly here (it is depressing to realise that the place that takes you three hours to get to...ON THE FREEWAY...is 60km away ) I feel like we are going super fast if we get up to 60 km/h now. And any faster, I feel like we are totally out of control...Will spin me out when I go home at Christmas - I may be a tad dangerous when I hit the roads the first day or two (anyone volunteering to sit in the passenger seat!!)

Went to the opening of the Australian film festival last night (with the Ambassador and some other big wigs). We watched Swimming Upstream - with Geoffrey Rush, Judi Davis and Jesse Spencer (some kid I have never seen before, but I thought he was a great actor). I loved it - thought it was excellent. Mum and Dad - I think you would really like this movie. You should rent it.

The film festival lasts a week and has some good movies in it - Thunderstruck, The Sum of Us and My Mother Frank. It also has Ned Kelly!! Oh well - you can't win them all (maybe I should go see that, but it got such dismal reviews...) There are a few others including one I have never heard of - Siam Sunset. It runs for a week. So looking forward to a few free Aussie movies (you should have heard us squealing at the Aussie accents emerging from the screen last night - very bizarre).

Ange has gone home for two weeks to be a bridesmaid at her brother's wedding. I am a little jealous - was wondering what I would do first if it were me (take a deep breath of clean air would be top of the list, then enjoy doing 100k/h on the freeway, have a cappucino from the High Street Cafe, go for a run outside on the grass, have a cheesymite scroll, breathe some more clean air, just because I can!!) And Sally has asked to be a model!!! She is going to be modelling in the ad campaign for Bench, which is a clothing company here in the vein of Gap or Esprit. We hope she gets to keep the clothes! Mairin and Lyndon have gone to Hong Kong for the weekend, Nat is in Malaysia with her boyfriend, getting her diving license. And I am here!!! Oh well - there is a flag day thing at church on Sunday and I am carrying the Australian flag - we have had a rehearsal and everything. I have to do it at both services...

And Coldplay are coming to Oz in July!! Yipeeeee. I have not been able to get tickets each other time they come, but will be online to ticketek first thing Monday morning to make sure I don't miss out this time... Cannot wait (have been inspired by all your pics and debriefs from the Chicago concert MR people!!)

Have a great weekend all...
Toodlepip

Fancy Pants Party

2005-10-05T20:17:00.000+10:00

Well – I’m a fancy pants expat now. I went to a gathering at the official residence of the Australian Ambassador last night! Of the Australian Community here. I tell you what – if the entire Australian community were there last night, we are a severely under-represented presence here in Manila – there just aint that many of us (maybe 50 people there!) I don’t think that was all of us though.

A couple of weeks ago we went to two different places to watch the Australian Rules Football Grand Final. Like last night, it was a bit of a head spin to be surrounded by all those Australian accents. We watched the second half at Sid’s Sports Bar which was filled with Aussie blokes – such a great combination; the Australian male, add beer, a little footy and stir… We were reflecting upon how little, at times, we miss the men at home! They were somewhat obnoxious, especially when the captain of the winning team (no idea who it was – someone help me here…Sydney Captain?) thanked ‘the girls’ of the club…..

Anyway – last night was a lot of fun. We were dressed up a little bit and met some really interesting people. The residence is, naturally, enormous and fancy, with some really interesting art (Dad – you would be in heaven). I don’t think everyone there quite got the concept of Youth Ambassadors though – I think they thought we were junior members of the diplomatic corps! I was asked what my portfolio was (Em suggested I should have replied that my portfolio was Emergency Relief through the Asia Pacific Region. Mairin said I should have replied that my portfolio was shoes in the Metro Manila area!!!) Sadly I am boring and just explained what a Youth Ambassador was – oh well…

Anyway – gotta run. Bible study tonight
Hope you are all great

Toodleepip

Kate

P.S. got my first ever professional manicure on the weekend as well - French polish. It is a little wobbly and already starting to chip (Wednesday night!) but what can you expect for a couple of dollars!!

Some more piccies - weekend of debauchery!

2005-09-23T19:14:00.000+10:00

L-R: Me, Ange (my flatmate - AYAD at an orphanage here), Nat (AYAD who works at Smokey Mountain - a massive rubbish dump where thousands of people live), Lynette (our ICM) and Sally (AYAD who works on curriculum for education of indigenous people) at Cafe Saguijo

Possibly the worst picture ever taken of me, but gives you an idea how tiny Lynette (our volunteer In Country Manager) is, so I am putting it up! She is a total sweetheart and wicked cool - we all love Lynette so much.
L-R: Jarrah (AYAD who went home on Monday, after a year here), Mairin (AYAD working aonFamily Planning in the Philippines - a desperate need!) and Lyndon (AYAD archeologist from Bohol) at Embassy Nightclub
L-R: Lisa (friend of Mairin visiting for a week), Ange and Lyndon in a taxi

L-R: Lyndon, Ange, and Lisa out at Saguijo

All these photos are courtesy of Mairin

With a little help from my friends

2005-09-23T19:05:00.000+10:00

After writing, I have returned to the top to add this warning: This whole post has pretty much been devoted to my cyber life – just warning you!

I think I need to dedicate this entry to all the lovely people who have made my day today so much nicer. I came in to work this morning pretty tired (insomnia strikes again!) and somewhat grumpy (caffeine hadn’t hit the system yet) and really not looking forward to the morning. Then so many wonderful people have just chimed in through the day (all electronically!) to make it so much better.

The first was when my friend Tristan had written an absolutely massive email chock full of information to help my sister, who he has never met, with one of her university assignments (sorry Alex – should have warned you that he is famous for ridiculously long emails!) I was sitting there thinking how nice that was and how lucky I am to have such nice friends. Then I get an email from Lui in America, who writes (and I am paraphrasing as I can’t be bothered going to get the original) “I am burning S2 as I type”. That’s right – Season Two and Season Three of La Femme Nikita DVDs (did you guys think I had gotten over that obsession – nowhere near, I’m afraid, but after buying Season One on sale at Amazon, I haven’t been able to afford the others) will be in my hot little hands very very soon. Lui has a friend who is coming back to Manila bearing goods next Tuesday…*cue very happy dance*. Of course, should any law enforcement officials be reading this (Jacqui – do you count?!?!), I do fully intend, at some stage, to buy the proper DVDs complete with little booklets and extra piccies of Michael! But for now, I cannot wait to watch the gag reels and outtakes that I have been hearing so much about since the DVDs came out and, (it feels like) everyone but me has seen them!! Lui is also going to be sending me episodes from Season Five of 24 as soon as they air in America – so I can start watching from late January next year – cannot wait. This is my hardest break so far – probably because I loved Season Four so much and am desperately worried that they are going to do terrible things to my fave characters next season.

Speaking of 24 – I bought Season Four from the charming pirates near my workplace (I still get the occasional twinges of guilt about buying pirated DVDs, but literally everybody here does it, including my Christian co-workers. I know that is absolutely no excuse – one of my colleagues in whom I confided my moral dilemma suggested I have a ceremonial bonfire before I leave and burn all the DVDs – still pondering that one) and the best way to watch that show is definitely with all episodes in your hand, so you can watch on demand. Poor Ange had to endure the sounds of shooting and Jack Bauer’s angst for a few solid weeks before I got through it all (there was about a week’s break at the three-quarter point when I became annoyed with the inevitable silliness) and I have loved not having to wait a week, or sometimes even a minute, to see how the cliffhanger’s are resolved (would sometimes finish and episode and watch the first five minute of the next one, just to see how they would resolve it before going to bed – I know, I’m completely tragic). Anyway – in my opinion, probably the best thing about watching 24 (and Lost as well) is the recaps about them at Television Without Pity. I need to figure out how to put a link in there to show you all the brilliance. Basically, it is a website that does snarky recaps of TV shows and is absolutely hilarious. So today at lunchtime, I sat at my desk and read through the final episode recap for 24 (cue usual hilarity) and then noticed that the screamingly funny guy who writes them has a blog! And that was it for me – I was lost (hee – geddit – Lost…oh nevermind. I crack myself up at least!). Have bookmarked it for future reference, but that was another delight. Just for laughs, this is how he describes the point:

I'm here because while there's no shortage of people hurling their least significant thoughts and feelings up on the Internet, none of those people are me. I'm here because I've got nothing to say, and by God I'm going to say it.

Then, I get an email from Diane with anther ten chapters of her story to beta read! So; fun reading over the weekend. And something else nice happened as well, but can’t remember what. I also got a few really lovely emails from the four corners of the globe that just made me reflect again on what lovely friends I have and how lucky I am.

Enough with the gushing!

Tomorrow is the Australian Rules Football Grand Final and due to Essendon’s season-to-forget, I, (again!) have no personal investment in it, although the West Coast Eagles are in it, so I think I will be barracking for them. We are going, for some reason, to a bar called The Danish Connection to watch it (think the venue where some of the AYAD’s watched a semi-final last week, “The Swagman Hotel” was probably more appropriate!) which will be fun. It is Sally’s (one of the AYADs) birthday so we will, after the game (for her birthday, she will be going to watch her very first game of Aussie Rules, being a rabid Rugby girl) be going out to celebrate that. I must confess, I am very tired (had another bad cold this week) and would probably like to be staying in tonight and tomorrow night, and basically all weekend, but that is unlikely to happen! Anyway – I am looking forward to the footy…shall be fun.

Okay – will try not to ramble on too much – more next week

P.S. - did you notice that I have learned how to link in this post, so there's a bit of an abundance! If only I could figure out how to get smilies into it!

Grrrr - Spam

2005-09-14T16:39:00.000+10:00

I just got a few comments on my blog that were spam, so came to it to try to figure out what to do about it. I don't think I can delete them, sadly, but I have put in a word verification step now so that people need to type the word they are seeing before they post - this means that it actually has to be a person entering the comment and cannot be just a machine, which normally generates spam.

I couldn't believe it - I guess you are truly not free from junk anywhere, are you?

14 September 2005

2005-09-14T15:51:00.000+10:00

I spent an hour last week typing an entry and then, in true Philippino fashion, we had a power failure and I lost the whole thing. Was incredibly frustrated and couldn’t bring myself to retype it straight away. I know I have been woeful in my blog keeping – will try to be better in the future.

I am still here and still hot – my never ending complaint! I will go backwards in time and talk about this past weekend, and then the previous one etc.

This weekend was mostly about the parties! Lyndon, one of the Youth Ambassadors (AYADs) from Bohol was up in Manila for a week. Bohol is an island in the Visayas group of islands, way down south, near Mindanao. It is famous for its beautiful beaches and scenery and we are all hoping to get down there some time. Anyway – we had a meeting with all-but-one of the AYADs (well actually, two, as Natalie was home sick!) on Friday afternoon and it was fun to catch up with what everyone is doing. I really do like this bunch of people – we are incredibly diverse but we get on very well and it is a wonderful support network.

Then we went to dinner at Fort Bonifacio. I hadn’t been there before, but it is an area (just known as Fort) with a lot of restaurants, bars and clubs. Frequented by expatriates and rich Philippinos. It was really nice – there was flat land around and it gave the illusion of open space – always just an illusion in Manila!! It actually reminded me a lot of Port Melbourne. We had a wonderful dinner and then went to a couple of bars.

Most exciting was the discovery of a Cold Rock ice creamery. For those not in the know (and I do pity you!) Cold Rock is a fantastic concept, whereby you pick your ice cream flavour, and then the stuff that you want mixed into it and they crush it up and stir it in. You have a choice from things like fruit, cookie dough (my favourite), biscuits, chocolate bars, lollies etc. It is incredibly good. You can also have sauce/syrup stirred in. What was so exciting though was that they had lots of little Australian goodies – we kept squealing, “They’ve got Jaffas, they’ve got Maltesers, they’ve got Tim Tams, they’ve got Cherry Ripes, they’ve got Caramelo Koalas” etc. You get the drift. We were looking at each other, saying “We’ve been away from home too long!!!” The staff were cracking up at us as well… I got a cherry ripe (they are all fun size) for Ange, who was home sick. It is still in the fridge! Hmmm – maybe I should have gotten a caramelo koala instead?

The next morning, I dragged myself out of bed to go down to Makati to the fresh food market down there. My friend Jenni (who Ange and I met at Coral Cove in our second month here) lives in Makati right near a park where they have a fresh produce market every Saturday morning. It is wonderful – sooooo many people come. There are lots of people cooking food from all around the world, so we have breakfast there (Jenni works night shift at a call center so it is dinner for her!) and get really good, fresh, fruits and veggies. The stuff that you buy in the supermarket is normally not very good – I think a lot of it is actually shipped in from Australia (I recognise the packaging from Coles!!) and it is very grim. It generally only stays good for a day or two as well. Whereas this produce is much better and has a longer shelf life.

You can also buy plants and flowers – two dozen red roses for AUD$3.00. I am not kidding! They are stunning – they don’t last that long – only about three or four days. It is too hot. But sooooo cheap! I have gotten into the orchids – I can get two orchid plants, in a pot, for AUD$8.00. And they last a few months, so it is better than buying fresh flowers. I have put quite a few plants into the apartment, but have, for the first time in my life, lost one. I had a peace lily die last month which I was devastated at. And now another one is on its last legs. I don’t know what I am doing to them – they are getting enough water, but not too much, I don’t think. They are in the shade. Maybe I should emulate Prince Charles and talk to them? I do tell them not to die – they don’t seem to listen to that though? I am so upset – I have never had a plant die on me before and I feel like a failure. Maybe I am not meant to be a mother? Another girl was trying to console me about it on Sunday and telling me how she killed five goldfish in five days – that didn’t help. It just made me feel bad for the goldfish!!!

I will leave this now (getting too long) and return for the rest of the weekend.
Toodlepip
Kate