Late night radio

Last night I ended up researching late night radio stations. The occasion was that our new neighbors were playing mosque “music” loudly again. Perhaps they find it helps them sleep but for me for 20 years it has always been “wake up” music. Wake up and pray at 4:45am or wake up and pray at 3pm. Or when the month of fasting ends and people party all night long then they play that music. So for me it is indelibly “wake up” music.

I was trying to find a way to kind of drown out or cover up the “wake up” music and checked out local radio stations. I was checking out FM stations looking for something mellow and sleep inducing, like instrumental muzak or something. But slowly one by one the most mellow stations went off the air. By midnight I was down to about three choices, none of which was ideal, though any were better than nothing.

Usually it's very quiet around here until the birds wake you up in the morning so I am not used to a radio playing in my ear and most of it was in English so I kept ending up listening to the dumb words. I thought about going downstairs and sleeping on the floor in hopes that it might be quieter but knew I’d be bitten by ants all night. Finally, with some gel ear plugs in and the radio going at the head of the bed by the window, and my head at the foot of the bed (which I had to share with the cat), I FINALLY drifted off to sleep...

Believe it or not, when I woke up this morning and took out the ear plugs, the “wake up" music was still going, though not as loud as it had been. I was happy to learn this morning that these neighbors are only there temporarily, waiting for their house to be finished and should be moving out in April.

As for the results of my research into late night radio stations, all I can say is that there apparently isn't much demand....

Corruption, Collusion, Nepotism

Since the relatively benevolent dictator fell in 1998, the people in the second of my worlds have coined another new acronysm – CCN – which stands for Corruption, Collusion, and Nepotism. It has almost become a national mantra whenever the topic of reforming government comes up. Politicians, government workers, people on the street and farmers on the back side of nowhere all mouth this new acronysm. It has even entered many of the hundreds of local languages around the archipelago.

In this part of the world, nations vie with each other to see who can be in the top 3 most corrupt nations. The second of my worlds (and inded the third of my worlds also) is usually in the top three. The problem isn’t so much the governments but rather that corruption, collusion, and nepotism are part of the very fiber of society. Everybody does it from the least to the greatest. It is done without thinking, a reflex action. You expect to help your relatives get jobs. And your employer doesn’t mind hiring your relatives. You expect perks from your job, after all it doesn’t pay much anyway, how else can you live? You expect to gouge other people, after all you have been gouged in everything you have ever tried to do too. When you buy something for a group you belong to, you naturally ask the shop owner for a receipt for more than what you actually paid. It is expected, accepted, and budgeted. It is part of life. So even though people are currently fond of accusing others of CCN, most are totally oblivious to the fact that they too are guilty.

Case in point, some friends were recently visited by a bureaucrat from the department of education who sponsors their visa. The bureacrat flew in from the capital city to visit them. They put her up for three days, wined and dined her, and took her sight seeing. She talked a lot about how they are cleaning up corruption and that part of her visit was to check on them and make sure they really did what they said they did. But before she left, she went to one of the nicer hotels in town and got them to write her a receipt for three days' worth of room and food in that hotel so that she could get reimbursed - even though her entire stay was paid for by my friends.

But there are signs that there has indeed been progress. Recently the Ministry of Finance has been in the headlines. A new finance minister has been cracking down on CCN in her department.

[B]y raising pay for bureaucrats, and not demonizing those who previously took payoffs to make ends meet, she has raised standards and steeled a reputation as an incorruptible reformer. Her message to her staff is simple and positive: "I only have one goal: I want the people [of this country] to trust us, this department, because this country will go nowhere if the people don't start to trust their own government.

Another encouraging sign was when the State Minister for Administrative Reforms admitted in December that half of the country’s four million civil servants were unqualified. Indeed. The bloated, lackadaisical civil service segment is notorious for inefficiency, corruption and cronysm. Astoundingly, the minister further stated that “We’re not a charitable institution. We can no longer afford to pay people who don’t work properly.” He said that they are planning to eventually reassign the 2 million unqualified workers to other jobs in an effort to stop, as he put it, “bureaucratic inefficiencies that leaked money.” A pilot project involving the Finance Ministry found that more than half of the workers in the Finance Ministry were unqualified. Even more astonishing, the unqualified will not be fired, but rather retrained as agricultural consultants and will then be posted in villages throughout the country.

This leaves me breathless with amazement as I try to imagine tens of thousands of low level financial bureaucrats born and raised in the capital city being retrained as agricultural consultants and uprooted along with their families and sent to rural areas in the far flung reaches of the archipelago! Could it really happen???!

Nevertheless, the fact that the issue is being addressed is immensely encouraging.

Yet another encouraging sign was regarding a recent conflict between a mining company and local residents. Usually these sorts of complaints go on and on with blame being thrown around until the little people give up and move on with their lives. Astonishingly, the governor stood up and said the fault belonged to his department who hadn’t investigated the issue properly when the mining concession was made. Not only that but he will take responsibility! Wow!

Dr. Quack-Quack

Maybe when I retire I should open myself up a little clinic. I can be Dra. Quack-Quack, which in the local language would mean ‘sort of like a quack but not exactly”. It shouldn’t cost much to set up. After all, quack doctors do not need any training. They have no boards, no licensing, and no annoying bureaucratic oversight. Why, I could set up my living room to be the waiting room. I could hire a friend to make snacks for people to buy while they are waiting. Another friend who is a master of detailing every bodily symptom and the minutest sensation – including ones you never thought even HAD any sensation - could sit there and write down a list of peoples’ complaints. Another friend does massage so she could work there too. And, we have a floor tile in our living room that sort of looks like some saint's face. I could hire another friend to sell candles so visitors could burn candles to it while they are waiting.

Yesterday a friend got a frantic text from her mother in the village saying that she needed $40 immediately because the quack doctor had told her she had a huge kidney stone and needed treatment urgently. At first I was breathless – who ever heard of a quack doctor charging that much for anything? In a country where the daily wage in rural areas can be as low as $2/day, that is phenomenally steep for a quack doctor. Usually they are paid only a small donation. As I finally began breathing again and oxygen returned to my brain, I began asking how she knew she had a kidney problem? After all, my friend had just been out there last week for New Years and she was fine then.

Turns out she had numbness down her backside and the back of her thigh. Now, it may have been a long time since I was in nursing school but the human body hasn’t changed and I’m sure that is NOT the symptom of kidney stones. In fact, sounds suspiciously like sciatica –pinched nerve in the back. I told the daughter to bring her mother to town. There is a real doctor, a neurologist even, who does charity work every morning and charges only $1. The mother argued a bit because she was apparently quite convinced by the quack doctor that she needed treatment. She said the quack doctor was going to operate on her and it was urgent! Operate???? Yikes!!!

Really, I could do better than that. For only 5-10 cents (I’d have to pay my workers) I could look at all their complaints, listed by my able friend, and any I couldn't help I could at least send them on their way in the right direction for help, whether to the massage lady, the pharmacy, the charity doctor, the appropriate specialist or the government hospital.

My friend put her mom’s name on the list to be seen by the charity doctor this morning and then met her at the bus terminal. As I suspected, he told her it is not kidney disease as she has no trouble urinating, no blood, no pain. It is a pinched nerve. All my friend had to pay was $4 for her mom’s bus fare, $1 for the doctor and $5 for medicine. Saved her a whopping $30 and everybody’s stress has decreased enormously!

Happy New Year!

We had an astonishingly QUIET New Year’s day in sharp contrast to Christmas. Though we are surrounded by electronic noise generators they were all on vacation for New Year’s! The schools are closed, as is the appliance chain office. Many of my neighbors in the apartment complex are also gone for the holidays so we were actually in a quiet cul-de-sac in the midst of all the other racket going on at midnight. Firecrackers have been banned since 2001 and though people try to make noise in other ways, it is just not the same intensity. There was one lone kid with a paper horn out back and in the distance we could hear a low roar of noise: cars honking, people banging on things, loud music and TVs.

New Year’s day is very quiet. People believe that whatever you do on this day you will do all year so they generally prefer to stay home and eat and sleep, maybe visit with relatives. It is also the local custom to assemble 12 different kinds of round fruits and then proceed to eat one fruit a day on each of the first 12 days of the new year. So fruits such as papayas, pineapples, bananas and mangoes aren’t in big demand. Jicamas (called sinkamas locally) , though a root crop, are considered to be round fruits. All sorts of exotic fruits not normally seen in the market suddenly appeared last week. Watermelons cost 5 times what they normally do. They were even selling unripe rambutans! Apples, oranges, durian, pomelos, grapes, guavas were in big demand. Even imported kiwi fruit! (You can also use lemons but the downside is you have to eat it!) Judging by the lines, other hot selling items at the super market on New Year’s Eve were sliced bread, hams, mayonnaise, macaroni, sweetened condensed milk, and the makings for spaghetti. So I presume everybody today is eating spaghetti, macaroni fruit salad, and ham sandwiches in addition to one round fruit.

As for me I'm enjoying a fruit shake made of all the unwanted fruits - papaya, mango, banana, and pineapple!

Merry Christmas!

Christmas Eve we spent at a friend’s house with several others of various nationalities. We got to discussing English as she’s spoken in various places. One lady is from England so I suppose she can be considered the speaker of real and original English! She is teaching kindergarten at an international school with mostly American kids. She commented on some of her frustration when she first came because the children didn’t seem to understand some simple commands! She would tell them to put things in the rubbish and they would stare blankly. She told them to use their rubbers to rub out mistakes and again got blank stares. She didn’t know that here rubbish is referred to as "trash" or "garbage". She didn’t know that here rubbers are called “erasers” and to rub something out is to kill it!

So we got to talking about local English usage. My all time favorite was taking a voltage regulator back to the shop and telling them it didn’t work. All I got was a blank stare. So I described in excruciating detail how every time I plugged it in and plugged something into it, it blew the fuse. Finally the light dawned and the guy said, “Oh, you mean it doesn’t function?” Ah, yes. Only people "work". Things "function".

A friend once noted that her new house helper always swept the floor but never mopped it. So she was trying to explain that the floor should also be washed with water not only swept. To her dismay the girl began throwing buckets of water on the floor. What my friend didn't know is that "wash" means to clean using lots of water, like washing clothes or dishes. What she should have said is "mop" or "clean the floor with water"!

A fun site to vist is www.engrish.com . Also check out http://signslabels.blogspot.com/

And, I hope you had a merry Christmas!

Christmas noise

Our apartment building is surrounded by electronic noise generators. On one side we have 1) a kindergarten – which seems to double as a bingo parlor by night, complete with a truck air horn blown for each draw. On another side is 2) a private elementary school. On another side is 3) a Bible college and just beyond it 4) an open field which various public groups can use. The schools seem to need to have amplifiers that broadcast their programs across town. All of the children screaming in unison at the top of their lungs could not hope to compete with the person at the mike.

Last night an appliance chain store down the hill from us on the other side had it’s “Christmas” raffle. They had some awful band from somewhere using gigantic amplifiers – it could only be described as a band from hell. It was truly an ordeal for anybody living within a kilometer in any direction. For those of us uphill it was like being in an amphitheater as the noise rebounded and reverberated against our back wall so that we got it from both directions. But God was merciful and it started raining after only 40 minutes. They didn’t want their speakers to get wet so they stopped and packed up.

Tonight it seems that the Bible college is having a Christmas party. Their band is much milder in comparison but still rather shocking for a Bible college. One wonders why they bothered with the word “Christmas” though, as none of it had anything whatsoever to do with Christmas. (Actually, we found out the next day it wasn't the Bible college after all that had the band. They did sing at their party but it was drowned out by the appliance chain store having yet another raffle. At least it wasn't as loud or as hellish as it was the previous night!)

The elementary school hasn’t had their party yet but I am sure it will be soon and I know it will be LOUD.

So feel free to come and visit - but you might want to bring some earplugs!

Tales from Dubai

The other day Connie stopped by having recently returned from 4 years working overseas as a maid. She looked healthy, maybe a little bit fatter even. She regaled us with tales from her job as a domestic helper in Dubai for a family with 5 children. She said she had a good family and mostly enjoyed her time there. She said the bad thing was that her actual pay was only half of what the contract she had signed said. That was very disappointing, especially as her own family back home had many needs - her own daughter's schooling plus the higher education of her siblings. She said the lady she worked for wanted her to come back and was willing to increase her salary but Connie's husband wasn't so keen on her going back after hearing some of her tales. So she is now applying to go to Hong Kong as a domestic helper and she hopes the pay will be better.

Connie said the house was huge, nearly a hectare in size and entirely air conditioned. Her jobs were varied but because of her English speaking ability, she was the one who interfaced with the childrens' teachers at the international school they attended. The older girls also had tutors at home but if the tutor was a man, then Connie's job was to chaperon them.

She said that when the family had parties it was exhausting. Men and women met in different parts of the house. The hired help would spend all day cooking and then would serve the men first, then the women. After the party was the long clean up. She said they were supposed to have one day off a week on Fridays but often it didn't happen because the family would entertain and all hands were needed.

Whenever men were around they were supposed to cover not only their hair but also their faces. Early on she found the husband peeking at her through a window when her hair was uncovered from just being washed. She angrily confronted him and told him she was a married woman and if she ever caught him doing that again she would punch him in the face. She also informed the wife that she was a Christian and Christians were only allowed one spouse and that if she was unfaithful to her husband or if her husband was unfaithful to her then they would be breaking the law and would be jailed. That seemd to go a long way in mollifying the wife and in time Connie became her favorite.

Connie said there were several employees in that household from different countries. Her least favorite was the Indian driver who seemed to have only one thing in his mind. (Pornography may be forbidden but talk isn't.) She avoided him as much as possible. In fact she was often the one sent to take him his food because the lady of the house observed that Connie took his food and came back promptly, she didn't hang around and chat while he ate.

Phone calls were also monitered. The Mrs. seemed especially concerned that no sexual hanky panky was going on. Connie said that even when trying to call her mother back home the Mrs would be hovering in the background wanting to know if she was talking to a man.

Connie said many of her fellow employees were one-task only. Like the Indian driver who wouldn't do anything but drive. Connie became the household "electrician" because nobody else could or would do it. Whenever the circuit breaker got overloaded, she is the one that climbed up all the steps to the top of the house in the heat and flipped the switch. She said it was murderously hot most of the year and only in December and January was it really cool.

Connie is just one of hundreds of thousands who work overseas to send back money to their families (and to their government) . They are this country's largest export. But it is not yet known the impact that this is having on their children. Another friend is due back any day now, returning to her husband and two children after working for two years as a maid in Hong Kong.

Update on the Tree

Here's our poor butchered tree now 2 months later. Due to lots of sun and rain, it has a lush covering of leaves again. Someday this stick tree will again be lovely.

The birds are already back, bathing in the cat's drinking water again. (They don't sit still for me to get a good photo because they are in constant motion flipping and fanning their tails in all directions!)

Global Economic Crisis still at upper echelons

Arriving back home it seems that the big topic of international news is the Global Economic Crisis. From what I observe locally, it is still felt mainly at the upper echelons and has not yet had a major impact on the ordinary citizen.

Last July I sat next to a lady on the plane who works for her government’s central bank in the second of my worlds. She was on her way home from a meeting in Europe of global banking and finance leaders. She said it looks like the US is undergoing a severe financial crisis and said that it will strongly affect her country too.

The government had recently decreased its subsidy of fuel thus increasing the price at the pump. Naturally the citizens were upset as all other prices can be expected to increase too. But what the citizens don’t understand is that they have the cheapest gasoline and diesel prices in the region. When I arrived in the river town I saw a line several blocks long of trucks and buses waiting to fill up on diesel. The driver of the car I was in said he had waited half a day to fill the tank with regular gasoline just 2 days ago. He also said that cooking gas was hard to find. This on an island which has its own oil wells! I suspect that savvy merchants have filled up some tankers on the side and are busy selling it to neighboring countries. After all it’s win-win for everybody but the ordinary citizen.

The last two months I was again in the second of my worlds. Everything seemed normal as far as ordinary citizens selling and buying. We heard in the news about a “global economic crisis” but it didn’t seem to affect the month of fasting shopping boom.

The main topic of local concern was the constant power outages. People grumbled at the power company’s (government owned) lack of planning. They complained that they wait until the coal is all gone and then run out and try to buy a little more, just like people running out of toothpaste run out to a neighborhood shop and buy a little more.

But actually, I suspect the problem with the coal is the same as the problem with the gasoline. Sellers make more profit selling shiploads of coal to neighboring countries.

By the end of October the news was more sobering. Copra (dried unprocessed coconut) prices had dropped overnight from $64/ton to $10.75. For the people I was working with copra is their livlihood. Their villages are split between those who own coconut groves and those who harvest, they split the selling price half and half. Since the price of copra has been so good in recent years, people don’t have gardens anymore. In addition, they said that because it has been raining so much the past year that it would be hard to start a garden because they couldn’t burn it off, and clearing the overgrown land by hand would be very difficult. They were quite glum that day. But they were a bit happier when the price came back up to $32 a few days later.

One man who heads a large project sponsored by a development bank found out that they had just cut the funding by 10%. He worried that he will have a big problem to deal with because people will be angry. They will feel tht the jobs and income have already been promised and won’t take kindly to suddenly having it cut by 10%.

I recently arrived back here in the third of my worlds. Here too we hear of the Global Economic Crisis. Prices have been increasing slowly for a long time. The rice crisis seems to be over for now. In fact, amazingly, the price of public transportation actually decreased a little since the price of oil fell!

People here are used to crises. So people do believe it when they are told there will be a crisis. We had the Asian Economic Crisis a few years back, El Ninyo droughts, rice crisis, local currency devaluations, etc. The wealthy may be panicking but for the ordinary citizen there is nothing you can do about it other than try to cut back on spending and ride it out, praying that you don't lose your job. The malls are decorated for Christmas, but things do seem a bit subdued compared to previous years and the mayor is warning that the economic crisis will be severe by January.

Joys of running water

Ah, the joys of running water and 24/7 power! On my recent 2 month trip to the second of my worlds, both were in short supply.

It seems that the immediate problem of power shortages was due to lack of coal. In August rationing severe as the power company saved up coal so that during the month of fasting and for a week afterwards, electricity was normal. But starting again mid-October, severe rationing became the norm again – three hours of power and 7-12 hours off. The time is ever fluctuating so you cannot make plans. Sometimes it is on in the early evening, sometimes not. If there’s a plan to the rotation, it hasn’t been made public.

Even in the villages it was difficult. Over the last decade people have become dependent on electricity so most families have electric water pumps now and the old hand pumps have fallen into disrepair or been removed. (Wells in this area are too deep for buckets and are just pipes driven into the ground.) The same with the old kerosene lamps that people used to have. Plus now kerosene is in short supply. So even in villages it was difficult to get water for washing, bathing and drinking. TV addicts were especially hard hit. :-) I noticed several families in the village now own gasoline powered generators and were using them to get water and watch TV. And, of course, to charge their cell phones!

Friends in the city complained of feeling stressed, like having to get up in the middle of the night to do laundry and fill up water containers because the lights suddenly came on and there was no way to know when they would be on again. It’s especially stressful for people who have to be at work during specific hours as they miss whatever opportunities there might be for collecting water during the day. Needless to say, small 800-2000 watt generators are a hot item right now!

I suspect what is happening is this: the price of coal in this country is very cheap by world standards and so sellers can make more money by selling shiploads to neighboring countries and pocketing the difference. Then city X is just told that their standing order shipment will be delayed. Of course it isn’t legal but a little money can make all things possible....

The weather was also hotter and more humid than usual. It was often partly overcast and the usual wind off the ocean was absent, making it really miserable for city people shut up in buildings. I myself was constantly perspiring heavily with all my running around and started having trouble with dehydration headaches.

So, I am especially happy to be in a slightly cooler environment now with plenty of water and power all day and night (at least, when somebody isn’t blowing up pylons to prove some obscure point!)