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An
overturned tanker floats just offshore
Aceh Clam Chowdah
By Freeman Anthony
Our front-desk girl giggled and gave me a 21st Century smile from under
her headscarf as she handed me my ticket for Air Garuda flight 186.
The flight from Banda Aceh City to Jakarta would take about 3.5 hours,
which would give me five minutes to make my connecting flight to Singapore.
There was no way that I would make it on that plane, but I cheerfully
took the tickets anyway and decided to throw myself at the mercy of
modern air travel. There were no other flights that day, and if I could
make the flight from Singapore to Auckland, I would go non-stop from
Indonesia to the resort town of Queenstown, New Zealand. The trip would
amount to complete modern culture shock with no hub-city purgatory.
Three months earlier I had offered up my resume to a colleague who
was looking for noncommittal engineers to sort out water supply and
sanitation issues along the eastern Indian Ocean coastline in the wake
of the Boxing Day Tsunami. I knew Michael from one of our larger offices
in the South Island, and we had worked on water projects before, and
I liked his all-in approach to engineering. He had made the right contacts
in the Non-Government Organisation (NGO) world to get on a five-month
project with International Relief and Development (IRD) in Aceh, on
the northwest tip of the island of Sumatra. The position was essentially
to help Banda Aceh City rebuild its water and sewer systems with the
planet-sized shot of global relief funding currently being injected
from most nations with a ratable GNP. Banda Aceh City is the hub of
the Aceh Province and amounts to an Islamic frontier town riddled with
corrupt politics, armed rebels and valuable natural resources.
I got the message on a Friday afternoon in Queenstown. Michael's time
was done soon, and he needed someone on site within two weeks to take
over. He needed to return to NZ to finish up a few projects of his own
and figure out why the corporate support of the project had evaporated
in his absence. The original framework had five of us managing different
phases of a water treatment plant rehabilitation project, but in the
end the demands of our New Zealand clients kept everyone else firmly
in the cubicles, stadiums and pubs.
With the help of a few citified architects I managed to get a number
of pints into my boss that evening at the Rattlesnake pub before I came
at him with my big plan. He proposed to "roll it around in his
brain" and consider for a few days my request for an impromptu
six-week leave of absence from the office. A week later I got the nod
and immediately bought tickets to Jakarta along with a Bahasa Indonesia
phrasebook and a $200 inoculation cocktail. A week later after a cold
night in Christchurch I was in a plane en route to my fourth whiskey
on ice and cultures formerly under water.
Singapore is a monument to shopping in Southeast Asia with few redeeming
qualities in my book. The one engaging aspect of my mission in this
ex-colonial incubator of tropical diseases was a loose set of instructions
on how to get a 60-day work visa for Aceh. Call Mr. Asuf, meet him with
150 Singapore dollars in hand and follow his instructions. I met him
at the end of Embassy Row, just past the gargantuan Chinese embassy
that looked like a very serious, politically neutral well-landscaped
suburban death star. The Indonesian embassy, in contrast, was an expansive
single story colonial compound with a large NASCAR-style banner out
front that might as well have been advertising Subway sandwiches.
My contact recognized me immediately, and our business was conducted
on a park bench out front under the broad branches of a leafy rain tree.
I would need to call later to arrange the pickup of my visa after he
sorted out paperwork. Four hours later, I was reading a paper at a sidewalk
café on North Bridge Road when Mr. Asuf hurried by, passed me
a now heavier passport, wished me luck, and hurried off to another important
engagement. I finished my Laksa noodles and wrestled my duffle and the
heat to the airport.
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