In Medan

Medan continues to challenge us. We are here for the most part of a day. Every time we visit we have our adventures with the folks at the airport. It is extremely hard to tell who is who and of course we landed with someone who seemed to get what we were saying but then delivered us to yet another sketchy hotel in Medan. For the curious read our earlier posts about the Darma Deli hotel experience from a couple of missions ago.

Anyway we perservered and did end up going to the place that FCM recommends which is really quite fine. The Grand Angkasa Hotel is pleasing to the eye and has a business center that has more than one computer, fast Internet and no sketchy fellows loitering (as we saw earlier this morning at the first hotel where we were dropped).

Anyway we are caught up on emails and just really waiting to get to Banda for some chillaxing (Dawna's official term).

We've had many conversations about the project as we get closer to the library and hear everything that has been happening. They have new computers and will have public access so there is lots of policy work still to be done. We guess it couldn't be helped, instead of book trucks the proverbial shopping cart has been purchased. For whatever reason, even with pictures, we just couldn't get it across that this was important library furniture. Of course they may have been jealous of the Banda Aceh library and their shopping carts, so if it was good enough for Banda why not Sigli. We are just rolling with it. (ha) The library will probably look great but crowded with all the new furniture and stuff. It can be quite hard to get the approvals to get rid of stuff so that could be our challenge for the mission.

The best thing we heard en route was that Sosi will be with us for translation and support. Sadly we will only have a couple of days with Iwan as he is needed in Aceh Jaya for another project. He has been getting all the computer stuff set up and that sounded like no mean feat.