14 November 2007 – Wednesday
Because the Walkers in Aceh taking part in the handover of a major project, we got to go with the Kanes to a project handover above Bogor. While handovers can be big things – there is one next week that has 450 invited guests and who knows how many people who will just look on – this one was rather small. But it was huge for the people who were directly affected.
In the latter part of 2006, a fire raged through a section of houses that was home to some 23 families with a total of 132 people. After the fire they had no money to rebuild their homes and so they were all living crammed into tents. One of the members of Bogor’s Rotary Club asked them to take it on as a project and they asked LDSC to contribute some of the money.
Today 14 homes were handed over to these families – more than one live in a number of them. Unfortunately they decided to make some alterations to the houses – which they could do – that used up the alloted funds before they were completely finished. But they have waterproof semi-finished homes to live in while they finish them. They are much nicer than the dirt floored, single story wood homes they had before.
One of the alterations is the balcony you see below. It runs all the way around the second story and ties into other older houses. As you see they do not believe in railings – a truly dangerous situation but there was nothing LDSC or Rotary could do about their choices.
The outsides were supposed to be plastered but they used the money for this balcony and extra windows, etc.
The handover ceremony is very formal in an informal way. There were representatives from the home owners, from the local district, from the government, and of course Rotary and LDSC. Each head of household signed the documents in three places. Elder Kane greeted each one after they signed and then signed for LDSC. Afterwards everyone wanted to shake hands and Mary got in the mix with the Kanes.
This young lady in Red got Mary’s attention and she took many pictures of her. Latter the young lady got bored and fell asleep on her mother’s shoulder. The young man has polished off lunch -there is always lots of food at one of these programs – and is washing it down with a container of water. I liked these young ladies who could not stop giggling at having their pictures taken.
Everywhere we go in Indonesia we find small wonders. We had never seen these plants before – we need to get a book of the fauna of Indonesia to see if we can get names for them. When you ask most Indonesians what is the name of a flower, they say ‘bunga!’Â Which of course means ‘flower.’
While we sitting waiting for the ceremony to start I looked across the yard and saw this great stone wall. This is another interesting thing about Indonesia. Even in small villages up in the puncak – top of the mountains – you find wonderful stone walls. Usually they are not as detailed as this one which stretched for about 100 feet or so. I can not imagine what it would cost to duplicate this in the US. But I would love to have it along the South side of our yard.