At work cleaning out a clarifier tank

Aceh Clam Chowdah

(continued)

By Freeman Anthony

For the first couple of weeks, my world consisted of NGO offices in regal houses amongst drainage ponds, dusty palm trees, rice paddies and the occasional burning trash heap. I spent my evenings at the office more immersed in my work than ever before while the mosques droned away outside. At the end of my second week, word came that we would look to expand our treatment plant rehabilitation work on the North coast. Rohan and I would go inspect the regional WTPs along the way to help develop a proposal similar to the ongoing work at Lambaro.

Rohan was a rouge Australian with a convincing grasp of the local dialect and a dozen years in the relief work game. He seemed to like the fact that all we had to go on was a hastily assembled UNICEF brief with suspiciously repetitive wording. IRD had also taken on a Bulgarian-born groundwater specialist the size of a bear who would oversee the work in the North coast area as it had stalled for who-knows-what reason. There were serious water shortages in the region and we didn't have much to say about our water sourcing efforts. High turnaround suggests that NGOs without good stories of progress didn't keep funding for long.

Along the north coast I found a number of small portable treatment plants that had been installed by previous well-meaning but short-termed NGO programmes. As the expats disappeared, local village chiefs were left with the responsibility to run equipment they had never seen before and hardly understood. I could tell I, too, was part of this potentially vicious cycle and noted that this issue needed to be brought up the next time I spoke with the higher-ups that where controlling the money and efforts.

The plants we found over the next four days were blue steel hulks in all manner of location and condition. The Jabal Gapur plant was an hour's ride into the hills above Beruen and had been bypassed six months after it came online, because the operator and his wife had been shot by the Aceh Rebels (GAM) to piss off the local government. A large multi-tank plant further afield was overgrown with vines with an operations building that had been torched to its foundation by GAM. The plants that did manage to operate were either in town or had a healthy crew of Brimob in residence along with their flock of chickens. The Girot Plant plant had a sand bunker built on its reservoir and bullet marks in the tanks. Every nightfall the distribution pumps would be shut off so the rebels wouldn't benefit from the noise coverage for a night attack. The elaborate Brimob insignias painted on the chlorine mixing tanks gave testament to many an idle day standing guard over Beruen's non-potable water supply.

We spent our last day sorting out paperwork and attending a wedding for one of our staff before we hit the road home through rabid monkey country, high mountain plantain farms and ramshackle villages. Dark natural wood stalls with corrugated tin roofs clustered along the crumbling roadway all sold the exact same snack of deep-fried vegetable chips ranging in colour from light yellow to deep red. Rohan signaled to Jemediah to stop at one village and bought a few large bags of the chips. It's tradition to buy presents for your friends when one is off traveling, and they look forward to your return because of it. I had the feeling Rohan was growing weary of this custom.

After ensuring our good names upon our return, we continued on to Banda Aceh, stopping to gawk at an Asiatic Elephant milling about after a day tilling vegetables. Rohan dozed in and out of consciousness as Jemediah carved a suicidal path through scooters, lorries, busses, cars, and water buffalo to get us home before dark. As we sped along I watched our driver shoot quick glances to ensure Rohan was asleep and not paying attention to his passing procedures.

Hard to say if it was the mayhem of the accepted road rules or a foolhardy attempt to blend with the locals, but right about now I started smoking cigarettes. Work had settled into a daily regiment of work and travel intertwined with smoke breaks, lunch breaks, water breaks and prayer breaks. I found myself lighting up with Rohan when we would find another plant in some far off place. After getting all the information we could from the operator and fiddling with whatever valves and pumps we could find, it was time for a smoke as the sun grew lower over the jungle. These were times of reflection on a time and place that to me, was socially remote.