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.

A Week in Cambodia, October 2006.

I am light on long sleeve shirts and so I headed off to the Central Plaza. Great place, teaming with people and merchandise. The stalls are closing up not long after I arrive but I buy a few more bits and bobs. What I did not realize is that they lock the gates and the stall holders sleep in for the night. Looks like I might be spending my first night in there too. Eventually I found a gap where the fence meets the overhang and was able to climb out to the amusement of the locals.

The Longest Meeting…
We had a workshop about arsenic today. The for the first 1:30 I was struggling to keep my eyes open as the Minister for Rural Development was speaking in Khmer only, and about every 10 minutes the overhead would change to be replaced by another overhead in Khmer. Things got better after the break when we showed some educational material. Try the video clip below about don’t drink from the red painted well pumps.

(Opps, When I find the video I will upload it!)

When traveling, you use a map so often it becomes part of the memorabilia, so here is my trusty map of Phnom Penh.


There won’t be many (any?) photos of the people we are helping, it is against policy to take photos in anyway compromises people’s integrity and it turns out easier just to not take photos.

Peace Dance - Dili, East Timor

December 2006
I am over here helping build toilets in internally displaced people (IDP) camps.
Things have not been so peaceful in Timor in 2006. In response, some Timorese had a peace dance in front of parliament buildings in the weekend. Here is a clip of it. The guy with the machete was a very charming showoff.

Nite Moto in Phnom Penh

So here is my ride home from work in Phnom Penh.

The first day I took the hotel's suggested Tuk Tuk driver and it cost 8000 whatzits,

On the way home I negotiated 3000, by the end of the week I would get the same trip home for for 1000-1500 whatzits.

A lesson learned was don't get a ride with any one that looks too excited with life... A crazy smile or a sparkle in the eyes means a hair-raising (or life threatening) ride home.

To work this video, click on the triangle in the bottom right. Depending on your internet connection it may start immediately or take upto a minute to start. If if starts and stops, then let it run through (painfully once) and then replay. It will play smoothly the second time.

This file was a test run, I will add more larger clips later.

Download is 3.1 MB, 13 s.

Cambodia, 9 Oct 2006

Hi, Welcome to my blog.
You are invited to check this out whenever you want to know what I am up to.

Hopefully it will end up with movie clips and sound bites. Anyone wants to educate me on how to set up a decent blog is welcome to email me.

As you may know, I recently started as a WatSan guy with an international development and relief organisation, so now the fun begins...

My first posting is for assisting Cambodia with arsenic removal from groundwater. I felt very (self) inflated and important flying overseas with someone else giving me kit to play with water stuff which I would do for free anyway... so I took the "Al Gore" photo. (Recently I saw the “Inconvenient Truth” film by Al Gore which includes footage of him working on the plane.)


Flying into Phenom Phen, the land for miles around is not really sure if it wants to be the water or land. Reminds me of “Water World”. I have never been to these parts so I don’t know if this is a normal annual thing or have they had some flood. Later I learn this is normal.

That's all folks. Just starting my blog...
Johm riab lia (bye)
Kieran

There should be new postings going on quite regularly for a while now as it is all very new and exciting to me (the blogging that is!)