The Tsunami Generation

I live and work in Timor, more than 3000 kilometers away from Aceh and northwestern Sumatra where the massive Boxing Day tsunami in 2004 left more than 200,000 people dead. I have never met what aid agencies like mine would call a “tsunami affected household.” But I feel the impact of the tsunami every day, because I work with what I would call the “tsunami generation” – a generation of thousands of highly-skilled, competent, and experienced Indonesian humanitarian relief workers.

In recent weeks, I have been involved in the recruitment for 2 key positions in my office in Soe to replace 2 staff who are leaving us – the Head of Base and the senior logistician. In most countries, recruitment for this type of position is difficult; often it is nearly impossible. Even the best candidates – top university graduates or senior managers in the private sector – have to go through a lot of training on humanitarian operations once hired.

Not so in Indonesia. Recruitment here is a pleasure, especially during this period, when many NGO’s are closing down their tsunami relief operations and laying off hundreds of qualified staff at a time. Many of these people had “ordinary jobs” in the government or private sector before being swept up into the tsunami relief operations. Now, they are well trained, experienced, and eager to continue in a line of work that is well paid (by Indonesian standards) and in which they can help people in need.

A good example is one of the candidates I interviewed for Head of Base. He was working in Java as an Indonesian-Japanese translator for a Japanese news agency when the tsunami hit. They immediately sent him to Aceh with a team of Japanese journalists. Witnessing the early stages of the relief effort in action, he decided that he wanted to work for an NGO. But as he was still under contract, he couldn’t fulfill his ambition until a year later, when a massive earthquake struck near his home city of Yogyakarta. After managing the emergency response for a couple of international NGO’s in Yogyakarta, he found his way back to Aceh to join in the reconstruction effort. Then last year he took a new job in the country office of an international NGO in Jakarta as country administrator.

This week, it is another disaster in Southeast Asia – the cyclone in Myanmar – that is dominating the news. With our emergency team in Paris mired in a visa application process that normally takes 3 months, our overwhelmed team in Myanmar has issued a call for help. Indonesians, it turns out, as citizens of an ASEAN country, can get visas for Myanmar within 3 days. So we are now in the process of calling up some of our best and brightest former staff of the tsunami generation to take their knowledge and commitment to Myanmar to help those who are now so desperately in need.

The Daily Mix

One of the things that I enjoy most about my job is the sheer diversity of the different issues that I have to deal with on a daily basis. Here are a few examples of things that have been keeping me busy in the last two weeks:

- Chartering airplanes. Although we are covered by emergency medical evacuation insurance, experience shows that the insurance company sometimes does not have the capacity to respond quickly in case of a medical emergency in an extremely remote area. To increase our options, I was tasked with finding private air transport companies and getting quotations from them for emergency medical evacuation. The best one found, based in Jakarta, could send a plane from Jakarta at two hours notice to pick up the patient from Kupang, take them to Singapore, and return back to Jakarta. The round-trip price for the 12 hour flight: 36,000 US dollars, payable before departure.

- Analysing food prices. Given the much-publicized increase in the price of basic food items on the world market, ACF asked all bases in all countries where we are working to make an analysis of food prices locally and the potential impact (if any) of rising global prices. Here in Soe, we put together the data from our monthly market surveys over the last year to show that contrary to what one might think, prices of most items have remained steady due to this year's bumper rice harvest and large-scale market interventions by the national government.

- Investigating scandals. Our hygiene promotion team came back from the village of Mela to report that the villagers were angry at ACF because one of the staff of one of our local NGO partners who is based in Mela was rumored to have had an affair with a high school girl and made her pregnant. « You NGO's say you are here to help us, but then you go and make problems like this, » said one of the village leaders. Our subsequent investigations, however, suggest that the rumor may have been a false one spread by the head of a neighboring village, who was jealous that ACF had hired three masons from Mela for its construction work.

- Getting to the bottom of labor law. In Indonesia, as in many countries, there are two types of working contract – fixed-term or determined and permanent or undetermined. Employees typically start with a fixed-term contract and progress through a number of extensions, new contracts, or time periods before graduating to a permanent contract, which involves more financial obligations on the side of the employer, particularly in the case of termination. Since having to pay tens of thousands of dollars in termination benefits to hundreds of employees on permanent contracts when closing the post-tsunami projects in Aceh, ACF has been keen to avoid as much as possible offering permanent contracts to its staff. Now that many of our staff in Timor are reaching the end of their first, one-year contract with ACF, I had to do a staff-by-staff analysis of what action was possible and recommended to take for the renewal of their contracts for year two.

I often get asked what qualifications are necessary or « what it takes » to do the job I do. The answer? Nothing and yet everything. Above all, what is important is a mix of flexibility, creativity, and critical thinking to deal with a daily mix of wildly unanticipated problems in an efficient and professional way.

Disneyland

The type of visa that I have for Indonesia is only good for up to six months, so I had to leave the country to get it renewed. The nearest place to do so (with the exception of troubled East Timor) is Singapore, less than two hours by plane from Jakarta.

I had visited Singapore briefly in December 2002 and was struck then by its exaggerated level of development and cleanliness, which seemed somehow artificial. Now, a little more than 5 years later, Singapore has gone even further towards an extreme of hyper-development while promoting its image as an international tourist destination by building new rides, statues, fountains, and (still under construction) casinos around the city. After two days struggling to find an appropriate comparison, I finally realized that the Lion City had most in common with Disneyland. Here’s why:

- It’s a small world. Little India, the Malay Quarter, and Chinatown are among the cultural exhibits on display. Each is a tidily kept corner of tradition (including the appropriate temples or mosques) meant to be a sanitary introduction to the 3 biggest nations of Asia.

- Amusement park attractions. A DHL-sponsored hot-air balloon on a tether takes groups of tourists up a few hundred meters over the city and back down again every twenty minutes or so. A waterfront bungee-jumping rig appeals more to the thrill-seeking Space Mountain types. I opted however for the world’s largest ferris wheel, opened in March, which offers a complete panorama of the city, including the spiky new performance hall shaped like a durian fruit and the floating soccer stadium in the middle of the harbor.

- Shopping, shopping, shopping. Remember what the parents used to do while the kids waited in line for the rides? The malls in Singapore stretch for miles with all the top brands on display and indoor underground connections so you never have to go outside where there’s no air conditioning.

From the top of the ferris wheel, I caught a glimpse of the source of wealth that has powered Singapore’s boom: hundreds and hundreds of container ships clogging the straits of Melaka, that all-important passageway between China and India.

Across the straits, the first islands of Indonesia were visible. If not for a few historical mishaps (including the rivalry between the Dutch and the British), Indonesia and Singapore should be part of the same country, along with Malaysia and Brunei. I certainly found it easy to understand all the signs in Singapore written in Malay, which is virtually identical to Indonesian. But instead, Singapore continues to surge ahead (far ahead of even most “developed” countries) while many parts of Indonesia lag behind.

But ahead towards what end? I had to stop and ask myself whether the goal of societies, so often described with the word “development,” is ultimately to become like Singapore? Like Disneyland?

I leave that as an open question.

Musrenbang

In March and April, the local government is in the throes of a complicated planning process for the activities it wants to implement in the following year (2009). In Indonesia’s newly-decentralized political system, the idea is that the definition of priorities for government programs should come from the ground up. The focal point of this process is the “musyawarah perencanaan pembangunan” or “musrenbang,” which can be translated into English as “development planning workshop.”

In theory, the process works something like this: A musrenbang is first held among community members at the level of the sub-village, the smallest relevant administrative unit. Then a musrenbang is held at the level of the village, where the heads of the sub-villages present their priorities to the head of village, and they define together the priorities for the village. Then a musrenbang is held at the level of the sub-district, which is attended also by representatives from each of the technical ministries (health, education, public works, etc.) from the district level. Each of these ministries then defines its plan based on the priorities identified in each of the twenty-odd sub-districts. Finally, a musrenbang is held at the level of the district to consolidate all of the different technical programs in all of the sub-districts.

I attended the district musrenbang held in Soe in the first week of April. I was curious to find out more about how the process worked, because I had heard in many villages that villagers had made many proposals to the local government with few results.

While I expected the workshop to be a lively debate about what programs should be prioritized in 2009, I found instead that it mostly consisted of pre-prepared presentations on the amassed summary of all proposed projects of all the ministries for all the sub-districts. Although a numeric cost was not assigned to the total, it was clear that it would take at least five or ten times the district’s annual budget to implement all of them.

Which projects do get implemented? Ultimately, the district sends its projects to a musrenbang at provincial level and from there to a musrenbang at national level. Then, a certain budget is allocated by the national government to the province and from there to the district. At that point, the process becomes highly political, with each technical department and sub-district jostling for position so that some of their projects get funded. The ultimate decisions are less than transparent and while the ultimate projects implemented may be among those listed in the initial musrenbangs, they would not necessarily correspond to the priorities on the ground. Villages then find themselves proposing the same projects year after year without understanding why they don’t get implemented.

As I sat through the presentations at the district musrenbang, I kept asking myself two questions: “How could the system be improved?” and “What should our role be as an international NGO?” Some of our current projects were in fact based on proposals made by villagers for many successive years but not yet implemented by the local government. This is obviously helpful to the people in the field, but ultimately our goal should not necessarily be to replace the government by doing what it should be doing.

On page 29 of 135 of the compiled list of proposed programs for the district in 2009, I found a glimmer of hope. In one of the sub-districts where our agriculture program is working to diversify agricultural production by encouraging the cultivation of alternative, more nutritious crops, the community had proposed that the government take on a similar intervention and expand it to additional villages in the coming year.

We cannot replace the local government or make its decisions for it. But what we can do is to come up with creative, sustainable solutions to the tough, long-term problems that people face, try out these solutions in the field and prove that they work, and then advocate to both communities and local government for their inclusion and replication in future development plans.

Alor

We took the opportunity of the long Easter weekend to visit the nearby island of Alor. It was intended as a purely touristic visit. We stayed in a bungalow on a small island in the middle of the narrow straits between Alor and Pantar islands, which are renowned for their marine life, as they are a major crossing point between the seas to the north and to the south of the main line of the Indonesian archipelago. Most of the weekend was spent snorkeling around the coral, spying on fish of all different colors, and playing with pink hermit crabs and big blue starfish.

But Alor is equally interesting from a humanitarian point of view – in fact, ACF did assessments here in 2006 and 2007, and we are still considering opening programs here in future. The challenges are similar to those faced in many of Indonesia’s eastern islands, but in Alor, the situation is particularly acute and worthy of attention.

Alor is only home to about 175,000 people, but these are divided into more than 50 tribes with more than 30 languages (a Czech linguist we met who was staying in a neighboring bungalow is in Alor on a long-term project trying to document them all). While the coastal areas are home to a mixed population, many of whom are Muslim immigrants from other parts of Indonesia, the indigenous tribes, either animist or nominally Christian, live mainly in the rugged highlands of the interior. The Dutch established nominal control of the island through a coastal presence in the early 1900’s, and this presence has been continued by the Indonesians since independence. But in the interior highlands, there has been only limited contact with the outside world.

Many of the villages in the interior are only accessible by foot. Those visited by the ACF assessment team were full of people with swollen goiters on their necks, a sign of severe iodine deficiency. Other diseases that have been eradicated in most of the rest of the world – including lymphatic filariasis (which causes elephantitiasis), yaws, and measles – are commonplace in the remote parts of Alor.

But what is perhaps most worrying is how these remote populations can be virtually invisible. Indonesia has gone through an abrupt and massive decentralization process in recent years to bring decision-making power and autonomy to the local level – in this case, to the district of Alor. But in districts like Alor, the local government tends to be based in the district capital in the coastal areas and rarely visit the more remote parts of its jurisdiction. Most development programs it implements will therefore be inevitably focused on the coastal areas. And while reams of data are collected by the government at all levels on the population’s situation, the data itself is often of questionable authenticity or extrapolated from a small unscientific sample.

All this means that a village in the highlands of Alor, speaking its own unique language and accessible only by foot, could literally “fall off the map” without anyone ever knowing. And very few people caring. Except maybe for the Czech linguist. And me.

Needs Assessment

With our current projects set to end in July, we are currently working on defining our strategy of intervention for our next one-year project cycle. Last week, the senior staff and I embarked on a voyage of discovery around the remoter parts of the district (South Central Timor) where we work. We spent several hours in each of nine villages, discussing with the community to get a sense of their situation and their needs.

The landscape at this time of year is stunning. As we are at the end of the rainy season, the steep hillsides are covered in verdant green vegetation, and it still rains enough each day to clear the air. We spent much of the first few days in the area where the rolling hills of central Timor crash down into the coast. White sand beaches were visible hundreds of feet below us and the Timor Sea, completely flat, peaceful, and wave-less at this time of the year, stretched off to the horizon.

Perhaps equally stunning were the remains of expensive, top-down, and mostly failed development projects and the contrast between them and the situation of the population.

In Saenam village, contractors cut corners on a piped water system with a budget of more than 20,000 dollars meant to supply the whole village; the system worked for only 2 days before it broke and the owner of the spring disconnected it.

In Skinu village, 7 boreholes were drilled by the government and supposed to be equipped with gasoline pumps to supply irrigation water to 35 hectares of agricultural land and drinking water to the community. 3 boreholes are not used because the gasoline pumps were never supplied. The other 4 have high-quality Italian-made pumps, but the community rarely uses them because it cannot afford to buy the gasoline to run them. Instead, they are walking several kilometers to a muddy river, where we saw them digging small holes in the sandy banks to collect their drinking water.

In Faat village, I was in the first vehicle to cross over an enormous concrete bridge just completed by the Japanese government. The bridge, which took Japanese contractors three years to build, connects two potholed, virtually unused dirt roads. The Japanese ambassador and the Indonesian Minister of Public Works had come for the opening of the bridge the day before. Due to the poor condition of the roads, we assumed they must have arrived by helicopter.

The most active village economically we visited was definitely Hoebeti. After leaving the road, driving across a rocky riverbed, and traversing the swollen river twice, we emerged at the coast and found several hundred makeshift palm-frond huts. Five years ago, a Taiwanese businessman came to Hoebeti and discovered that the smooth, pink stones from the beach here could be exported and sold in Taiwan for gardens and aquariums for a big profit. He set up a business in Kupang, which sends a truck to Hoebeti every day to collect the stones. The villagers, whose permanent houses are in the hills far above the sea, now spend 5-6 days a week on the beach, collecting and sorting stones and selling them to the truck. In a day, one person can assemble two 50 kg bags of stones, which are sold at 60 US cents a bag. On Sundays, they climb back up to their villages to attend church, before descending again on Monday morning.

We have not yet finalized all of the different activities we plan for the coming year, but from the assessment this much is clear : we must prioritize ideas and projects that come from the bottom-up – from the community itself. Our focus will be on empowering people on a small scale to solve their own problems rather than trying on a big scale to solve their problems for them.

Land

In an area like Timor and indeed most of the rest of the world, where the vast majority of rural households depend on agriculture for their food and income, the quality and quantity of one's land determines a lot about the wellbeing of one's family. Unlike most of Indonesia, which benefits from rich, volcanic soils, Timor's soils are a poor mix of coral and sand. To make matters worse, the terrain is rugged and crops are often planted on steep slopes, meaning that what little nutrients there are in the soil get washed away in the first big rain.

One of the things that we are interested in focusing on in our agriculture program is improving soil fertility by encouraging a number of practices – from terracing to composting – that are virtually unknown in the area. Another area of interest is developing small scale irrigation and water catchment systems to help farmers overcome the highly unpredictable rainfall that makes agriculture more a game of chance than a technique of skill.

Both of these interventions would require long-term investments by farmers in their agricultural land. However, in order for farmers to be motivated to put in the work required and in order for the projects to be a success, their ownership rights for the land they cultivate have to be clear and firm. A couple of other NGO's who have tried similar programs in the past have warned us that the land tenure system in Timor is quite complicated and that controversies over land rights are common. Before launching our activities, therefore, we decided to conduct a more detailed investigation of land ownership, through interviews and group discussions with both ordinary people and traditional leaders in the villages where we work.

The results of the investigation started coming in this week. Although the vast majority of households report owning the land they farm, virtually none have any kind of legal documentation for their land. Instead, ownership is based on tradition and passed down from generation to generation, with parents dividing up their land among all of their children (both sons and daughters).

The traditional leaders in the community are actually the old families who originally lived in the area and were considered to own all of the land. When a new family wants to settle in the area or to expand the land it farms, it brings some money and betel nut to the traditional leader – also called the 'king' – and asks him for a portion of his unused land. The king then grants the land for as long as the family continues to use it; if the family or its descendants were to ever move away or stop farming, the land would automatically revert back to the king.

Our main concern is whether land can be taken away. If ACF, for instance, helped a poor farmer to build an expensive irrigation system on his land, could the king intervene and take back the land because he wanted to use the irrigation system? When we posed the question, the unanimous response was that Timorese culture forbids someone who has given land to ask for it back, saying that a calamity will befall the asker. However, the original owner should be consulted about any kind of investment or construction on the land, although tradition also prevents him from refusing, since the land has been given to the new owner. Conflicts are actually more commonly based on disagreement within a family over the division of inherited land rather than between the family and the original owner of the land.

Overall, this land tenure system seems to have developed indigenously to work in a society without written laws and documents. Thus far it has continued to work quite well. Since it depends on the king's land being plentiful, it will be interesting to see whether problems start to arise in the coming years as population pressure starts to decrease the quantity of available land. In the meantime, though, we plan to move forward with our projects while making sure to inform the local kings before making any major decisions.