Paradigm Shift

We had our first ‘holiday weekend’ during a mission and it has been a relaxing and idyllic time. We took a 45 minute ferry ride to Sabang from Banda Aceh. We were met at the ferry and driven to Santai Sumur Tiga, aka Freddie’s. It is a beautiful traditional spot directly on the beach. We each have our own beach front cabin, complete with hammock on the front deck. There are about a dozen cabins. It is a photo perfect setting. Sosi has come along with us as well. The claim to fame is also that Freddie is an interesting cook and cooks western- in fact he cooks South African as that is his background.

Sabang is a port that at one time was a larger port than Singapore. The main street has an old colonial feel, with large mossy trees that the Dutch brought over decades ago. It does seem like a resort town also with beachfront shops and fancy street lights.

Once we settled in, we decided to go for a becak drive (a motorcycle with a side car for passengers) around the town. It was fun and precarious at the same time. Some of the roads were quite bad so we couldn’t get to some places…we had intended to visit the ‘Zero Mile’ marker which is the most westerly tip of Indonesia but the road was too damaged. (Apparently there is also a 7-mile marker, which was the original 0-mile marker but a geographical survey proved differently.) We then went to see a waterfall. The road got rocky as it ran next to the river. We got out of the becak and walked on rocks across the river and tried to walk through the rainforest to the waterfall. There were cows in the forest and people doing laundry and bathing in the water. The walk up the waterway to the waterfall turned out to be longer and kind of dicier than we anticipated, so we turned back. This turned out to be the theme of the drive….everywhere we tried to go there was some reason it wouldn’t work out. BUT we had a lot of fun seeing the area. Some hills were so steep we had to get out of the becak and walk. We stopped at one point at a most picturesque place and had a cool drink and just soaked up the place. All in all, the ride had all the noise and fumes and insane driving as we are used to here. Going up hills we made an ungodly racket.

There is a lot of snorkelling going on around here – but to us it looked like you just go out there to get baked! So here we sit and sip wine and beer in the shade.

The locals also use the beach and that makes things quite pleasant – the level of tolerance for bathing suits and such is higher so it has been very relaxing not to be always aware of the amount of skin showing. Instead it is about getting burned that is causing us to cover up.

Food at Freddie’s is quite wonderful. Freddie does the cooking on the weekends and makes every meal as a buffet with Western inspired recipes made with all local food. He makes a special effort to welcome the guests and share his special part of paradise. At dinner we talked with Freddie…he has been here since the tsunami, working on entrepreneurial capacity building. He used to live in the house and now has made it something to share with everyone. He keeps putting the money he makes on it into to developing more of it, but being true to local traditions and ways. He also manages another hotel on Sabang and has just wrapped up the NGO work in March of this year.

Freddie has an interesting perspective to offer. We are finding we learn so much from the people around us. He has told us that 75% of the entrepreneurial projects funded have failed. He feels that the Acehenese are waiting for the conflict to return and are not able to buy into the plan for the better future when all they have known is conflict and a lack of control over their destiny due to the power structure. Freddie feels that what is lacking is a paradigm shift. We continue to learn – it is clearly a very complex situation and we just get glimmers when we talk about the government rules and regulations even for the library. Another example in the library context is the fact that we had to push for the library to start going to some of the locations that had been abandoned due to the conflict. Perhaps they too are thinking – ‘why bother, things will just go back to the way they were once everyone leaves.’ We understand from Indonesians here that the number of NGO’s is expected to drop to 25 from the 250 that were here immediately post tsunami.

On Sunday we lounged about. Katherine and I had a nice walk on the beach and a bit of a swim in the ocean before the heat of the sun became too much. We head back to Banda later this afternoon and then on to Sigli early Monday morning. We are having our taste of summer here at the thatch cottage and it tastes pretty Freddie good. O.k. ya that was a bit much but we did mention that we started drinking and it is 11:30 am.