Rain Water System

The other big project was to improve my rain water collection system. The water we get from the hills is pretty dirty so being able to use rainwater for bathing and washing clothes/dishes is great! As you can see from the picture, water flows off the roof and fills the big white plastic pipe first. That’s because the initial rainwater coming off the roof is fairly dirty carrying with it all the dust, debris, and animal scat that has collected since the last rain. The dirty stuff settles to the bottom of the big pipe and then the cleaner water flows directly into the big blue water tank. After the rain, I have to drain the dirty water out of the white pipe so it is ready to be used next time it rains. It’s a huge improvement over just using the mountain water, at least as long as it rains. This week I have an Indonesian friend visiting to hopefully set up a simple filtration system for cleaning the mountain water so I can use that too. I’ll let you know if it works…

Karen

Project 2 - How to get cleaner water...

Two friends visited to help me with some projects to finish building my house.  First, I laid down laminate on the cement floors.  There is so much rain here and underground water that the cement has acted as a giant sponge to absorb the water…I’ve had wet floors and sometimes standing water in my house since I moved in – which has severely limited my ability to actually unpack my belongings as they have all been continually suspended by various means off the floor to keep from getting wet.  The laminate won’t solve the problem since it is just covering up the water, but with no more puddles to splash in I can finally unpack and  actually sit down. This picture  shows the need for Project 2 – on my way to cleaner water…

Until next time…

Karen

Hi Everyone,

Holy cow, this year has gotten off to a busy start!  Computer problems on top of my normal internet issues has made it hard to keep up with correspondence but  the good news is my computer is working again and our projects are rolling along as well as they could be at this stage.  We are getting ready to have a big 2-day meeting with the local church here to map out a 3 and 5-yr plan for their medical clinic.  They want it to become the medical center for other health programs which is exciting since we want to use it as the vehicle for our health programs as well.  There is also a new nurse who wants to work in the clinic so I am doing trainings with her, and have started working at a Catholic run medical clinic at the far end of town one day a week.  They have no doctor there, and the nuns have asked me to help capacity train them to better treat the patients that come. My next blog will update you on my  house issues (dry floors for now).

Hope the New Year is finding you all healthy and happy and busy doing whatever it is you respectively do in the world…

More later…

Karen

The work visa is finished but not after a few delays. Had to run to Kuala Lumpur to go to the US Embassy to get more pages added to my passport. I had one left but needed two for the kitas ( Indonesian working permit).

The trip to Siberut was amazing but nice to have some time to recover.

I’m excited but almost a little nervous to see what shape my house will be in…luckily my best friend from Palembang who also used to work on the medical boat is coming for a few weeks and will be staying with me, so she can help me clean up whatever mess might be waiting Sure hope those cement floors will be nice and dry.

More news later…

Karen

Hope everyone enjoyed  the Christmas holidays or whatever respective traditions you and your family might follow this time of

Decorated church at the village Bulak Monga

year.  Here, people  readied for Christmas, and it’s so nice to be living somewhere people actually decorate for and sing Christmas carols!  There are some differences though…most homes don’t have Christmas trees because they can’t afford them.  They make decorations out of colored paper and banana leaves, and most gifts are in the form of specially made cookies or other types of food.  Did you know cookies can be made from combining flour made from ground sweet potatoes, dried bananas and cane sugar?  All the churches did their big Christmas services last week, with songs and choirs singing and skits/dramas, just like in the states, but here most services lasted a staggering 4-6 hours.  Literally, they start at 8pm and can go until 2am…I find that amazing given that it’s the same story being told each year…After the first few hours I’m ready to just go home, and wait until next year to catch the second half…

On the 21^st I’ll be going to Padang by boat, and then catching another boat to Siberut, the most northern island in the Mentawai chain.  Siberut is still very culturally intact and traditional with most people still practicing animists, and still wearing loincloths while living in primitive homes in the jungle, etc.  I’ll spend a little over two weeks jungle trekking to some of the more remote villages, but also enjoying their supposedly beautiful beaches. I’ve never been there because it’s a 20-hour boat trip from Sikakap, but have heard the stories and it sounds impressive.  Siberut is also where the world’s smallest monkey can be found – the only place in the world, as a matter of fact. I’ve seen pictures and its tiny enough to sit in the palm of one’s hand…Two Indonesian friends from another local NGO here invited me to go with them there to spend Christmas and New Years.   One is Buddhist, the other Muslim, so neither were bothered by being far from family, or planning to go back to their respective hometowns for the holidays the way all my friends from CFK are planning to do.  Instead we decided a 3-week holiday is the perfect time to go exploring.

I’m not taking my computer at all since I’ll be in the jungle for most of the time and have no idea if Siberut even has internet access anywhere, but I’ll be thinking of you all and wishing peace, joy, love, and a very Merry Christmas.  I’ll let you know how it all went at this end of the planet when I get back, if you let me know how it went at yours.  Until then, love to you all, and see you next year…

Karen

Hi, everyone, I want to share a story that happened recently as I was on the 12-hr night boat ride to come back to my island from the mainland.  I was trying to sleep in spite of the large waves when someone came for me around 3am to inform me a patient on the boat needed to see me.  I followed the messenger through the crowded room strewn with people sitting or lying on the floor wherever they could find a place to stretch out, and saw a young pregnant woman in obvious pain.  Nine months pregnant, her waters had broken earlier that evening several hours after we had already left from Padang.  This was her first pregnancy and she was travelling alone.  Her husband worked on another island far away, and so close to her due date she wanted to be near family so was returning to Mentawai.  Her contractions had been coming with increasing frequency for the past hour and finally the discomfort and fear prompted her to ask for help.  We took her into the Muslim prayer room on the boat so she could have some privacy, and two hours later I delivered my first “boat baby” – a healthy baby girl!  When we arrived in Sikakap around 6 in the morning, her father was one of the first on the boat.  He found her, saw his new grandchild, and he and his daughter both burst into tears.  He had heard the news that his daughter was coming home, and walked for the past 2 1/2 days from his village so he could be there to meet the boat…

Happy Mom and Healthy Baby

It was an amazingly fast delivery especially considering this was her first pregnancy, and I was, and am still, grateful that it went so smoothly.  Interestingly, the boat captain got to name the baby, and he named her after her father’s name (Rahmawati), her mother’s name (Puspita) and the name of the boat (Ambu-Ambu).  So her name is Rahmawati Ambu-Ambu Puspita Putri.  Putri was his own addition and is Indonesian for “princess”.  She will be giving a special certificate documenting her birth on the boat and for the rest of her life will be able to ride Ambu-Ambu free of charge.   I only hope she has an adventurous spirit and enjoys travelling so can take advantage of her rather unusual, and certainly unique, birthright.

May we all experience the miracle of Christmas this season!

Love, Karen

Traveling can be difficult in the states during the holiday seasons so thought you would like to see what it’s like here…

The roads can be pretty terrible in places, especially after it has rained.  The mud can be almost a foot deep and the bikes just slide around on the road. They have tried to make improvements by laying down wood planks in some places along with small logs, but sometimes that makes it worse because the logs move as the bike is going over them.  Or the planks, which aren’t nailed down well, shift and move so the bike skids off of them. As always, friends are there to help.

Roadway

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Until next time…

Training at a mobile clinic

We are focusing a lot of training on the midwives and prenatal/postnatal health.  We are trying to start monthly well-baby clinics in each of the villages where the babies are brought and weighed, immunized, the mothers are checked out, and information is given on nutrition, health, and normal growth milestones.  The clinics are technically required by the government but are not being done now, and in most places were never done, even before the tsunami hit.

House Building 101 -  Choosing Colors

Having seen family and friends in the states build or remodel homes, I’m aware of the care and time that goes in to selecting paint colors and bathroom tiles, etc.  I have no personal experience with this, mind you, but have also seen the reality shows for remodeling and it looks fairly time intensive.  Fortunately for me, selecting tiles and paint in an underdeveloped country on an even more underdeveloped island, has the benefit of only taking a few minutes as there is a minimal selection to choose from and exactly matching styles or patterns is not really considered all that important or even necessary.  I actually ended up having to go to Padang, the nearest big city on the mainland by a 12-hr boat ride, to pick the colors because almost everything in Sikakap was out of stock anyway.   Looking for bathroom tiles, I went to the biggest store in Padang with supposedly the best tiles selection…and found  they had exactly two floor tile colors to choose from: blue or green, and if I wanted textured tiles so as not to slip and fall, there was only one choice of pattern in each color.  Being partial to blue, I was saddened to discover there were no matching wall tiles in the entire store unless I wanted a completely different geometric pattern than the one choice available for the floor tiles.  So green it was.  There was only one choice for wall tiles that supposedly matched the green floors, but it was hard to tell because the lighting in the store wasn’t good.  Both had different shades of green mixed in and I couldn’t really tell how similar the shades actually were, but the shop clerk assured me they did and there was no more discussion because they wanted to close up and go home.

Lugging my boxes of hopefully matching tiles, next on my list was the porcelain squat pot Indonesians use instead of western toilets.  I found a store that sold a green one, but there wasn’t one on display to look at (apparently it was only at their warehouse), but with no other options, I bought it sight unseen and to this day (the bathroom hasn’t been done yet) am hoping it matches with at least one of the other shades.  Turns out it won’t be a big deal if it doesn’t.  The foreman of my 3-man construction team took it upon himself to buy my bathroom door (which is made of plastic to protect it from getting wet.  Indonesians don’t shower, by the way, they just fill a cistern with water, stand in the middle of the bathroom, and use a plastic scoop to dump it on themselves, so the walls and door can get wet).  Anyway, without us having discussed it first, he bought a blue door – with a large picture of cartoon goldfish in the middle – so who knows, maybe the as-of-yet-unseen porcelain squat will match with that, if not with any other color in the bathroom.

I’ll let you know…

Karen

Right now the focus is on teaching very basic and rudimentary hygiene and sanitation issues since those concepts are severely lacking here, with the idea that we will gradually build on and add to their knowledge base as their understanding increases.   Eventually we want to especially focus on maternal/child health issues since there is an inordinately high infant mortality rate and rate of women dying in childbirth.  See the story below…

This is a case that happened back in July when we were doing our team training in Java, but illustrates a common problem here on many levels.  A 19-year old woman, 8-months pregnant, began having trouble coping with the discomfort of her pregnancy and panicking at the thought of giving birth.  So she went to a local midwife/medicine woman and asked her to make the baby come immediately.  She took the prescribed herbs and went into labor on Thursday but then didn’t progress any further by Friday.  So the local midwife referred her to a government-trained midwife, who gave her an episiotomy to try to help the baby come out, but didn’t use sterile instruments.  By Saturday night it was determined the fetus was now dead in uterus, and the episotomy site had become infected.  She was given no medicine, and by the time the once-weekly ferry showed up on Wednesday that could take her to the nearest hospital on the mainland, the infection from her episotomy had spread to her entire body and the mother was septic.  She survived the 12-hour ferry ride which arrived in Padang Thursday morning, but then died upon reaching the hospital…Locals shook their heads and said this kind of thing, or variations of it, happen all the time…

God Bless the Children

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Most of my work, btw, is being done in partnership with a local Indonesian NGO whose main focus is community development, but is focusing more on health issues in Mentawai since the need here is so great.  This NGO has an Indonesian nurse and recently graduated midwife who together make up my immediate medical team.   The pictures are from 2 of the mobile clinics we’ve done, plus a basic first-aid training for a group of kaders from one village that included how to treat simple and complex wounds, how to splint a broken or injured body part, how to treat burns, and how to treat heat stroke.  The videos are from simulations we did afterwards with the kaders where we gave them scenarios and had them practice the concepts on each other.  We gave the information in both Indonesian (which most of them understand though rarely use), and the local Mentawai language.  Many of the women are illiterate so we gave them handouts with both written content as well as pictures to demonstrate the concepts.

Basic First Aid Training

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The House Continues…

So, with the building materials ready we hired two construction workers from Sumatra who have experience building homes using the earthquake resistant techniques, and they got to work.  It took them about 3 weeks to get the foundation walls up and the framing for the house started.  Then we took a 2-week break to celebrate the end of Ramadan, the Muslim fasting month.  Most people from Mentawai are Christian, but the construction workers are from Sumatra and Muslim, so they went home to celebrate with their families.

When they came back with an extra guy to help with labor, they began preparing the wood for the roof frame….they began putting up the sheets of corrugatedaluminum for the roof.  Most roofing material is tin and so rusts quickly.  We were lucky enough to score aluminum, but the funny thing was that the only kind they had in stock at that moment was a baby blue color.  So I ended up with a baby blue colored roof.

Ok, until next time…