World Environment Day at the Pidie Public Library

Thursday June 5 was World Environment day and all kinds of the NGO’s in Pidie collaborated on festivities that included tree planting throughout the town and environmental displays at the town centre park. A painting contest, storytelling and refreshments were on the agenda at the libray. And immediately afterward there was tree planting there as well.

Working over the course of a couple of days we created stick puppet sets for the Great Kapok Tree story and for the Great Big Enormous Turnip. Sosi helped with adapting the various animals to fit the Indonesian context- turnip to a carrot, anteater to a squirrel and senor to tuan (mister). We coached the staff through the delivery and how to work with the children to be participants. The performance of the Great Kapok Tree was truly a lot of fun for everyone. The children were really very good readers and ready hams, if you can say that about Muslims. The boy who was the butterfly was particularly animated and the man who chops the tree was a youth about 17 and he gone into the chopping motions and the whole nine yards.

Just after refreshments things got pretty hectic with the imminent arrival of the second adjutant to the assistant governor and the head of the legislature and various heads of the Dinas (a bunch of bigwig political types). They even have ball-caps with the gold crests of the position and names embroidered on them.

What a scene it was; the fancy SUV’s pulled in and there were about 30 becaks out front each with a tree as a passenger. So the air was a buzz with excitement at the library. The dignitaries proceeded to plant the trees with the library staff providing the muscle to shovel in the dirt. Dawna and I both have trees assigned to us- Rambutan, a kind of red fruit of which there is a picture on an earlier posting if you dig back in time. Can you dig it- Mukhtar has declared that they will treasure these trees dedicated to us. This is said to much mirth.

After that we went for a fancy meal with the officials at the Vice Mayor’s mansion. It was one of those stories where the women stay in one room and the men in the other but for lunch we all ate together. Dawna and I struggled to clump the rice and other food into a kind of ball and put it in our mouths without mishap. Also we were finding it a challenge to sit side ways instead of cross legged. Don’t know how the ladies do it. (So much for our ambition to go home and have a modest tomato and mayonnaise sandwich.) We must admit the food has been a challenge this trip. We’ve been in so many contexts and often the food hasn’t been refrigerated, maybe never- it sits out for hours after being cooked. Let’s just say hygiene is high on the list here.

Mr. Mukhtar reported that he heard back from several of the officials that they want to support the library as they saw with their own eyes how busting at the seams it is. New computers are also possible for the public as there is a project to distribute 100 in the town and the official saw the internet room and the potential there. So he was very, very pleased.

One fun thing from our point of view is that including the library as a destination for the planting and the governor representative’s attendance was just suggested a couple of days after we arrived. Not like trying to book pretty much any politician in Canada. It’s a mixture of very formal letters being delivered all over town on a day to day basis and rampant cell phone calls all the time between parties.

In one way it was a fluke that we focused on World Environment day when we did the planning of this mission a few months ago in Canada. We had our dates planned and basically looked at the calendar to see what festivals might work in Indonesia and there was World Environment Day on the Oxfam calendar. The staff wanted support in doing a community program although the do an annual storytelling competition they couldn’t get the idea of doing something more regularly using different topics, festivals on which to build a program. So it was a great coincidence that the Pidie government was putting a lot of energy into World Environment day here. So what a boost for the library.