Off to Myanmar

Hi, after a year of no blogging, a start of a great life with Sarah, and a month and a half of visa delays, I am off to Myanmar to help with the Cyclone Nagris WASH response.
Probably no posts before September because internet is hard over there but should have something to add when back.

Dona Anna Bridge (Crossing the Zambezie at Mutarara)

The Portuguese built a railway bridge in the 30’s which has been converted to a road bridge since the collapse of the railway. It is a real feature of Mutarara, thought to be 5km long (actually 3.00km as I surveyed it with the GPS). It is being repaired presently so you only get to travel on it for a few limited hours of the day. This was quite a headache as people and trucks would get held up for hours. If you miss your slot, it will be a couple of hours till the next slot.

Video Clip, small, easy down load (2.9MB)


Video Clip, longer (9.1MB)

Towards the end of the deployment, I GPS surveyed the bridge, turns out it is only 3 km long but that is still pretty amazing.

Setting up the Office…

Setting up the office


The Office in Mutarara

The previous use of the building was a dance hall. I could almost understand when they spent half a day covering up the wall pictures of bottles of beer but I was lost on the point when management covered up the hand painted pictures of couples dancing. A bit OTT!


Where do I work…
Mozambique is north of South Africa, east of Zimbabwe and south of Malawi and Tanzinia.

Map of Mozambique


Map of Mutara District
Our base office in Muturara Sede (Muturara Central).

People I Work With

Jean-Claude Mukadi
Zambezi Relief Program Director


Phillippe (from another agency) and Liz Satow - Program Officer
Philippe is a riot to talk to with his own energy and humour overlain with a heavy French accent (he is Belgian), . Everything is alive and intense when he talks about it. One of his best stories was in Somalia, his organisation could not get him any fuel. He had to keep the vehicles running so every night, for the good of humanity, he and a colleague would go out into the streets at siphon petrol from the local residents cars.

Innocencio
In the brief time we worked together we seamed to form a pretty natural friendship. If we had gone to school together I am sure we would have been great mates. Innocencio is starting his own church “Living Development”. He has practical programs as well as spiritual programs. I expect it is a bit of a hell fire and brim stone message but I did not get to hear him formally preach.

George.
George was the waiter at the hotel. From what we learnt he was basically a slave (or had been). He was not paid for his first two years of employment. He slept on a mat generally under the stars. If it rained he came into the porch. He was really humble, smiled a lot and did not appear to complain. He was a ‘happy’ alcoholic if there is such a thing. Based on his private history there was no purpose or means to saving money for the future. So any tips he got went into beer. Again, the most humble man I am aware of.




Joel (Food Program)


Bonifacio - Child Friendly Spaces


Florinda (Finance) and Laura (Office Manager)
Laura held the office together and was a multi-tasker extraordinaire.

Joseph Kumara (National Relief Director) and Jean-Claude

WASH Cluster Meetings…

The size of the 2002 tsunami overwhelmed the agencies. With 1300 non-governmental agencies in the Indonesian response there was a lot of chaos just working out who was who and who was doing what. An outcome was that the UN has set up sector clusters to give better coordination in relief responses. The Water, Sanitation, and Hygiene (WASH) cluster is headed by UNICEF.

First thing off the plane in Maputo I am into a national level WASH coordination meeting. I did not have any information on the situation where we were working nor of any of our progress to date. I took a bit of heat on behalf of my organisation about insufficient situational knowledge and apparent lack of progress. I don’t know that 14 years of process engineering has provided me with too many practical skills for WatSan field work but it has given me a thicker skin and the knowledge that in meetings it is better to say little and have people think you no nothing than to speak out and have people know you no nothing. I was able to repeatedly say “I do not yet have the information but will get back to when I do have the info” which was the right way. After a while the heat cooled of and I had not taken on any promises that I could not deliver and nobody was lead astray. A full on meeting though!

Click here to DOWNLOAD Quelimane audio diary (1.0Mb file - downloads entire file before playing- good for slow internet connections)

Click here to STREAM Quelimane audio diary (not good for slow internet connections)

Arriving in Mozambique

>>> Click here for audio diary

Photo 1: Driving in Maputo (Moz's capital city) from the airport.

A Call from Africa

>>>Click here to download diary entry (1.7MB mp3 file)


Starting December 2006 the Zambezi valley experienced flooding displacing people from low lying lands adjacent to the river. The people have congregated on higher land resulting in new accommodation centres and additional population in existing centres. We have been monitoring the situation and in late February decided that water and sanitation assistance was required in addition to the food, shelter, health, and non-food item distribution we were providing.
Photo: My first ever sighting of Africa

Image Store

Map of Timaru, New Zealand

Vietnam, November 2006.

Mekong Delta from the air
I have always loved the look of farm land and geological formations from planes. In New Zealand you see a rectangular patchwork quilt of paddock. The Mekong by air is an interconnected maze of flooded dykes and drains, all ultimately draining to the sea. For a boy who grew up building dams at Pareora River, the vista is amazing.

Getting to An Giang.
We are helping people in An Giang district. The trip to the office takes about 8 hours from Ho Chi Minh City.








Water World…
Because most everything is under water, one of the best ways of travelling is by water.



Photo by Ms. Kim An Nhiên, 2006.

And if there is not much dry land for growing field crops, then why not support the crop over water. Here are pumpkins on a trellis.

Learning in Cambodia

My purpose in Cambodia

I am in Cambodia as a two way info exchange. I expect some pretty challenging questions at my next stop in Vietnam , so I wanted to drop into their neighbours (Cambodia) and see how they do WatSan here. While here, I am also to get an understanding of the arsenic issues so we can offer assistance including helping with funding proposals.

Claire and Chris.
The main person I am working with is Claire Dixon (Australian Volunteer Ambassador). Claire and her fiancé Chris are out here together. Live like a king on workman’s wages…
In Phnom Pen you can live like a king on workman’s wages, and there is a huge crowd of young ex‑pats doing just that. Saturday night Clair has a party. About 20 young Aussies turn up for a BBQ and a splash in the Para pool. It has the buzz and excitement of the first few weeks of university. Probably because there is a huge crowd of young 20-somethings.

Water Stuff...
Too be effective, the technologies typically need to be increadibly simple and cheap. Have a look at solar disinfection... it does not get much simpler or cheaper than this.

>>>Hint: For the technophobes (that is you Mum and Dad!) the coloured text "solar disinfection" is a "hyperlink". If you click on it with your mouse you will be taken to a new web page.