Tuesday, September 26, 2006

Dropping the Munster Students down there

Today I arrived from Teluk Dalam. I left Sorake at 10:45 am and I arrived Gunungsitoli at 3 p.m. It took me about 4 hours. I stopped over couple times though. On my way to Gunungsitoli, I met Saskia and Aris. They were from Lahusa Site Project. I went to Teluk Dalam on Saturday along with the Munster University Students; Caroline, Natalie, Saskia and Jana. I drove slowly just to make sure that they enjoyed the travel. Apart of the roads was bad and holes were every where. Only in middle of the way, the road was good and I could drive 60 km/hours. The rest, well, I had to be slow down.

We arrived in our office in Teluk Dalam and it was in the middle of the meeting with the workers, the owner of the houses and LPAM. This meeting is a part of the participatory approach. We need to share lessons-learnt and involve the community to the programs. We have just completed the 16 houses for the 16 households as a part of the humanitarian works. Some issues aroused; the rise of the contract value due to the inflation, the input for improving our mechanism in logistics system, the demand for keep working on the areas and I also introduced them the 4 students from Munster University who are doing the internship. On top of that, I was very pleased to find that the meeting was very useful for both the community and us.

After that, we most of us attended the “thank you” invitation from the one of the owner of the houses, Bapak Budi. He’s very happy just because he’s really wanted to live in the new house before the Ramadan Day in which is regarded as a holy month for Moslem. And it seemed like his dream came true yesterday. Of course we let him to hand the house over to him although there is no any official letter yet issued. But, letter is letter. The value of the “thank-you” meeting was more than the hand-over official letter. He cried at the end as he was so happy for that. Then we went to the guesthouse for staying there one night.

Yesterday, I took Saskia, Jana, Caroline and Natalie to the site projects. They will do brief obserbation for two days and we will meet on Wednesday for discussiong what they find in the field visit.

I thought that we were tired for that day and then I dropped them to the office, they stayed there and I went to Sorake again for staying. I just could not stay there with many people. I just needed to be alone and to be off from all the works for a while.

I arrived here in Gunungsitoli today at 3 pm and chit chat for a while with staffs and then went home. At 9 I got in office again. Well, I think it’s time to go home again. It’s almost 1 am already.

1 comment:

Duman Wau said...

Hey Elizabeth,
Your blog is cool. You link me to huge blogs around the world. I'm thinking of putting your blog to my link if that's okay to you.
Duman