Travel Log

Friends Peace Teams, News From Indonesia

By Nadine Hoover on March 02, 2009

February 2009 Nadine Hoover, Coordinator

Aceh is braced for upcoming elections in April, which will seriously test the standing peace accord. Prayers for peace and advocacy for U.S. withdrawal of military aid are requested. The Free Aceh Movement (GAM) that resisted national rule for nearly thirty years has formed several political parties. Many questions hang in the air: Will people feel intimidated by either or both sides—the Acehnese parties and/or the national party, Golkar? Will the Acehnese parties win? If they win, will they be allowed to operate fully or be tethered by the national government? If they win, will they actually bring change or just take their turn at taking advantage of the populace? Will provocateurs take advantage of the tension to reengage armed conflict? Only time will tell.

Still, the tension is real. I obtained a special visa that allowed me to enter Aceh. No one ever said I needed to report to the police, but I was very aware that I was entering an isolated area that seldom sees foreigners who aren’t associated with a major logging or mining concessions and was formerly the central stronghold of the Free Aceh Movement during the war. Although there is a great deal of new construction, stacks of grass roofing sheets and brick factories lining the main road and rice fields and fish farms back in operation, still burnt out houses and businesses are apparent. People introduce them self by name, where they’re from and immediately how many times and how for how long they were captured, beaten and tortured and by whom. Many locations trigger stories of who was killed where, how many people and where their bodies were disposed. I reported to the head of the district police. They were very appreciative and issued a letter allowing me to work in the area. Still, several participants did not attend the basic Alternatives to Violence workshop because they assumed the police would not allow our workshop. The army and the marines are both building large new barracks that can house thousands; they don’t build like that if they don’t plan to use them.

I feel very inadequate in expressing the degree of distress I feel knowing that the U.S. government funded the war here through military aid for decades and I fear may do so again. The stories of atrocities against civilians, especially in areas where the war was most heavily fought are heart breaking. Manti, who runs the Children’s Media Center as an arts and cultural center mostly for teens living on the street, always has fifty to sixty teens around the office practicing dancing, music, painting, drama and so forth and another fifty or sixty small children hanging around. His mother is also a massage therapist. She makes traditional medicine and made a six months supply of herbs for Dad’s diabetes. Whenever I pass through Idi Reuyuk, I stop in and give her some massage. In 2001, two soldiers were killed in front of her coffee shop. The military asked her what she saw. She said she saw nothing. They beat and tortured her from 11:00 am until 5:00 pm. She was bedridden for two years. She is still trying to recover from the beating. The government has given compensation to victims of the war. She sees who gets the benefits depending on whom they know or how well they pretend. People like her hardly ever get any compensation. One exception is my friend Dahlan who lost a tooth when he was beaten by the military with a rifle butt. The military has given him a false tooth. For me, there is absolutely no excuse or reason to fund wars like this one. The issues are straight forward for them and for us. 1) Recognize that the Indonesian and U.S. governments orchestrated a coup in 1965 to wipe out communism in the third largest communist state in the world AND to disable the Islamic political power that had its historic roots on the north shore of Aceh. The Acehnese in this area saw the Indonesian military turn on them and slaughter their fathers, elders and leaders. This happened. It was wrong. It should not have happened. As long as history does not acknowledge this, it means that it is not yet history and victims are still not safe and cannot heal and rebuild trust of others. 2) Acknowledge that the military actively defending the Exxon Mobil plant and that illegal logging (sold to the U.S. and Europe) is rampant.

Preschool Teachers in Jaring Halus complete the equivalent of an Associates Degree.Although they were very hopeful that we would continue to support them through a bachelor’s degree, it was agreed among our Indonesian spiritual companions that their development to date is apparent and has greatly strengthened their teaching. They are serving about sixty children who are enrolled and paying monthly fees of about 50 cents. Their preschool program is now recognized by the National Education Ministry and the elementary school has recognized that these children’s development is demanding that the elementary school teachers provide much more advanced activities for them. I strongly encouraged them to focus on parent and elementary school teacher education evenings and on working with the children to write their own books starting with A, B, C books and working up through “A day in the life of …” to local children’s stories.

Mothers from Barak Induk Refugee Camp go to Jaring Halus to learn about developmentally appropriate activities for young children. Mislan’s wife, Ida, Sabaruddin’s wife, Ati, and three other mothers, Parti, Kartin and Sri went with Amir, Mislan and myself to Jaring Halus, a traditional fishing village in North Sumatra, to observe the preschool. I went over some basics of the value of play, three kinds of play, supporting children without anger or punishment, brain structure and development and so forth. They observed the teachers at Jaring Halus and then they rotated through the centers—messy play, dramatic play, blocks, and readiness for reading—playing themselves with the materials. They came home very excited. Mislan, Amir and myself had to go straight to Aceh, but upon our return the women, their husbands and I all went shopping. It took all day! We got buckets, sieves, funnels, sponges, bushes, clothes pins, mung beans, soy beans, etc… all kinds of ordinary things for children to play with. We got corn starch, flour, salt and oil to make paint, finger paint, playdough and obleck.

A dearly loved grandmother in Mislan’s family passed away. We had come back from Aceh a couple days early and she passed away the day we got back. I had been giving her massages before I left and visiting the family. When I got back I showed them how to help calm her breathing. The whole community gathered. The men pray for three days and then the women. Today is the community kenduri where everyone gathers, eats and prays. The family members from Aceh have all arrived and we will cook all day, so we will wait until tomorrow to gather the children to play. The women and children are all very excited.

Mislan and Amir from Barak Induk accompany Nadine to Aceh to facilitate a basic Alternatives to Violence workshop for 24 new participants. We went to Aceh to conduct the first ever advanced workshop. Many people wanted to join, but had not had a basic workshop, so we added a basic workshop. We had 24 very enthusiastic participants most of them in their twenties and early thirties. We held the workshop at Dahlan’s house on the main Banda-Medan highway in the area of Bagok. It is relatively easy access for people from the city of Langsa as well as people from the mountains. We had eight people from the mountains of Bagok and Alu Merah, several from Idi Rayeuk, the closest large town and several from Langsa, a capital city. Their enthusiasm will greatly strengthen Alternatives to Violence in this area. The advanced workshop was cancelled for a couple reasons: 1) Ferry misunderstood and thought that only facilitators could come, so invitations were not sent out to everyone; 2) the schedule was so tight that not everyone could do all the workshops and those who wanted to chose more training for facilitators over doing an advanced;; and 3) the advanced by chance was scheduled on the last weekend of the month and two of the large international donors scheduled strategic planning workshops and many of the key facilitators and  participants for the advanced had to be present at the strategic planning meetings. Still, this gave us a few free days to do some organizing our selves and to come home early to see gramma before she passed away and be with the family.

Bricks, cement and rebar provided to Al-Husni Preschool in Bagok in time for a community “school raising.” We have been supporting the Al-Husni Preschool since 2006 when we set up the preschool at the pesantren. When Tengku Syarwani left as the director, the preschool had to move. They secured land and rented a very small house for the program, but have struggled with getting the funds to build the school. I have offered to try to help, but it has taken awhile to get a design we were all comfortable with. We ran into what they call the “second tsunami,” the effect of the massive influx of funding. Tengku Syarwani and the people of Bagok had been completely isolated for many years by the war. They could hardly go in and out of their own village. They quit working their fields because it was too dangerous. They planted what they needed close to the house and when they went to the forest for wood or rottan everyone prayed they would return. Opening up an area after extreme isolation is difficult, but add to that seeing international donors driving cars the cost more than they will make in a lifetime with expectations that outstrip their imaginations. The donors often require that trainings occur in hotels in the city where they spend more on one participant in three days than the participant spends on his entire family two months or more. The scales of money just are too far apart. What is “reasonable” has no reference point any longer. Our friend, Nasruddin called it “the season of entertainment” and reminded his friends that “the season of foot walking” would come back very soon. Tengku Syarwani has secured $1,600 from the government to build the preschool. With an additional $400 from us, they are able to add a cement foundation reinforced with rebar and a yard high of bricks. This is called a “semi-permanent” structure that secures the building from flood damage. The value of the materials in the school clearly warrants this protection.

I questioned the size of the school. They only have about 30-40 students right now, but Tengku Syarawni explained that they had had around 80 before the left the pesantren. The current location is not large enough, so they had to limit the students. The teachers are hardly paid, so the teachers could not add class rotations since they also have to go to the fields. If the structure is large enough, they will 80 students or more, he is certain. There is competition for local elementary schools. Typically those with money are the ones who get into the best schools, To their great surprise, four of their children got into what is considered the best elementary school because of the school recognized their developmental level and said it would greatly enhance their classes. Everyone in the area was shocked and the demand for their preschool has skyrocketed even though they are located in one of the poorest areas.

Loans were provided to Dahlan and Fachrurrazi to restart fish farms and to Mislan to purchase a motorcycle. Daahlan and Fachrurazzi both live in Bagok and inherited tambak, or fish farm pools from their fathers. They each have a number of pools amongst a large stretch of pools along the ocean at the outlet of a river. This was a strategic location during the war and was taken over by the Free Aceh Movement. For years they could not go to the pools. Having thousands of soldiers living there also created a great deal of damage to the dikes and the irrigation gates went into disrepair. They feel that if they can get the pools operating again, they would have enough to feed their families that would also allow them time to volunteer for AVP and other humanitarian work. We lent $700 to Dahlan for pesticides, fertilizer, feed and starter fish called bendeng. This is a staple fish with a very stable price, as opposed to most other choices where the price varies quite a lot. This allows him to start up two sets of pools. The process uses a set of three pools. The first pool for fish up to a month old, the second for the fish in their second month and the third for the last two months. The first couple months they just have to be checked occasionally, but in the last couple months someone sleeps and stays at the pool permanently. This guard takes 20% of the catch. Still, each set of pools should produce a couple ton or more of fish every four months. We lent $750 to Fachrurazzi to start up one very large set of pools and to repair an irrigation gate. Fachrur has been living very much hand to mouth, working as a day laborer on a palm oil plantation. This is a huge new lease on life for him. Although he was severely tortured for a month and incurred fairly severe physical and brain damage, his brilliance still shines in his insight, understanding, humor and sensitivity.

Mislan has put in enormous hours helping me build the house in Barak Induk and with every other aspect of life. His family has taken me and made me part of the family. To compensate him for his time would be a lot and they have taken on the commitment to simplicity and volunteerism. Still, the degree to which he has put in his time for our work and also the work of Barak Induk—settling disputes, keeping the electricity running, organizing road crews, etc…–means everyone here including me look for ways to help him and his family out. Since the government does not recognize him as a citizen anywhere, he cannot get an ID card. Without an ID card, he could not buy a motorcycle. So he borrowed someone’s ID card to buy a motorcycle. As a “gift” for paying on time every month, he was offered the opportunity to borrow $1,000. Clearly out of his range, he did not borrow the money. The man whose ID card he used said he would not borrow the money as well. I told Mislan I would give him $350 for two months for full time work to assist me, which is enough to pay off the motorcycle, but when he went to pay it off it turns out that the man had borrowed the money and has actually borrowed money everywhere for gambling and is now fighting with his family and does not go home, so no one can find him. If Mislan continues to pay, he will still not be able to take the motorcycle until the additional loan is paid. He still has $700 on his installments, which is more than enough to buy a motorcycle if you have the capital. So I gave him the $700 need to buy a used motorcycle outright. We have agreed that half is payment and half is a loan that he can pay back in cash or work. His work has always been above and beyond and very consistent, so I hope that he will work it off rather than try to pay for it.

Organization was strengthened to support routine AVP workshops in three locations:Mislan and Amir coordinating in Barak Induk, North Sumatra; Ferry and Nasruddin coordinating in Langsa, Aceh; and Dahlan and Fachrurrazi coordinating in Bagok, Aceh. Ririn will continue to support communications in North Sumatra outside of Barak Induk and Ferry will continue to coordinate overall documentation and communication in Aceh. None of these people have much money for their daily living so even small amounts of expense on any routine basis become a burden. They would like to have monthly AVP refreshers with facilitation of one session followed by discussion. They will try to do small AVP workshops among their family and friends that do not require funding and six larger workshops per year that require some minimal funding. Workshops that draw from a larger pool may occur when I am visiting and I will take care of those funds, which include transportation for participants from a distance. We also calculated about forty days a year of work among the pairs for coordination, communication and reaching out to areas of conflict to arrange workshops in those areas. This was estimated based on two days pre-workshop and one day post-workshop for six workshops plus one day a month plus one day for each monthly refresher (for ten months). The coordinators will:

• Keep a list of people who have attended workshops and which ones
• Keep a list of facilitators
• Write up the news after workshops including photos with captions and stories
• Check materials and restock for the next workshops
• Print manuals, Transforming Power cards and certificates
• Keep a log of hours worked and tasks
• Write monthly financial reports with receipts
• Keep the files complete and make sure news and reports are sent to Nadine
• Prepare an annual training schedule
• Determine facilitation teams
• Contact everyone eligible or interested 2-3 weeks prior to the workshop
• Clarify registrar, food and lodging preparations and make sure the place is ready
• Recruit teams for the monthly refresher

To support these activities, we budgeted:

$100      Coffee, tea, sugar, light snack, mosquito repellant, etc… $10 x 10 meetings

$720      Food, lodging, transport, facilities, etc… $120 x 6 workshops

$100      Phone and gas

$280      Coordinators’ time $7/day x 40 days

x 3            Three locations: Barak Induk, Langsa and Bagok

$3,600      Total annual for AVP in three locations ($1,200 per location per year)

They also agreed to encourage and support the activities for young children. If possible I would love to provide $300/year for supplies such as paper, paint, playdough and so forth and $300/year for six workshops so they can teach others what they know. They area also interested in learning about the Grameen Bank and supporting a lending program. Remaining activities to fund this trip are:

$1,800      AVP for six months in three locations

$   450      Preschool materials for six months in three locations

$1,050       Fish farm rehabilitation for Dahlan and Fachrurrazi (loan)

$1,000      Fertilizer, seed and pesticides for Darmo and his team of three others (loan)

$   700      Motorcycle for Mislan (half loan to be repaid in work)

$   300      Initial stock for a small general store for Amir (loan)

$   475      Complete degree programs for preschool teachers in Jaring Halus

$   250      Training for facilitators for Alternatives to Violence Project (35 people)

$   200      Mislan and Amir payment for work on the housebuilding

$   150      Trauma workshop in Barak Induk with friends from Aceh

$   200      Set up a preschool in Barak Induk

$   400      Bricks, cement and rebar for the preschool in Bagok

$   250      Developmental Activities for Young Children in Jogjakarta

$   500      Acehnese bags to raise funds for my return ticket (five-fold increase)

$7,725      Total ($2,350 of which are loans to be repaid; $5,375 for activities)

Sabarruddin would like to start a wood working shop and I told him I would talk to dad when I get back. Please thank everyone for the tremendous support and encouragement. If we are to support these loans to people here to restart their livelihoods, I still need an additional $1,725. Please let families and friends know that this is a great opportunity to reach out to some of the poorest of the poor in the world. They live on about $150 a month with rice prices at 55 cents a kilo, most of that is used for food. They can get loans for about 250 – 1,000 percent interest. Their lack of access to capital is the major obstacle to financial independence.

Friends Peace Teams, Indonesia Initiative News

By Nadine Hoover on February 15, 2009

The rocket stoves are all complete now. Amir, Sabaruddin, Marti, Mislan, Mislan’s father and I all have rocket stoves drying now. Pak Ali from Bustanul Fakri, an orphanage in Langsa, is a brick maker, so Jamie let Ali lead the kiln building and firing. We started firing when things began to cool off in the afternoon. As the evening wore on, Jamie and I kept trying to get Ali to pick up the fire. At 11:30, Jamie and I finally jumped in. We drug five huge piles of dry palm branches to the kiln and loaded them on. The fire went from red to blue to white. We piled enough on top to get a solid foot of ash to close the top then we closed the air vents for it to fire for the rest of the night. We probably picked the fire up from 330 degrees centigrade to 600 or 650. Pak Ali was shocked. In the morning I tried to get Pak Ali to help me open it up. Jamie was sound asleep. Pak Ali told the other Indonesians it would be three days before we could open it up. So I went down and began pulling the ash off the top to let the heat out. Slowly we lifted the bricks off the top and set them out. The bricks were great! Light, orange, strong…perfect! Everyone was shocked again. Their firings are basically just drying out the clay, not actually firing as we would think of it. We made 350+ insulated bricks to contain the fire box and heat chambers in six rocket stoves. Then we went from house to house and made enough cob for each house from clay in their yards, sand from the river and dry grass from the fields. We then did drawings, laid up the stoves one by one, set the cob, cut and prepared bamboo chimneys and built metal racks for the fire box, pot skirts for the pots and chimney tops to keep the rain out. We were all filthy for a week and people were shocked to see foreigners working in the mud! Everyone in the families from the toddlers to the great grandparents all helped.

Marti has used his to boil and fry and says it works great. I’m waiting to see what his wife says after using it for a week or two. Mislan is having some trouble with his so we’ll have to tinker with it. The others are still waiting the three to five days for the cob to dry a bit before using it. The men are very pleased and tell great stories about the stoves in the coffee shop. We’ll see what the wives think once they’ve used them a bit. (Men and women cook here, but the women do most of the cooking.)

Jav sent three web addresses for Grameen type banks functioning in Indonesia, one in Bali partners with Kiva, one is part of the ministry of Finance and one partners directly with Grameen. You can take a look yourselves at:

http://www.mbk-ventura.com/  (affiliated with Unitus)

http://www.kiva.org/about/aboutPartner?id=43

http://www.kiva.org/about/aboutPartner?id=82 (affiliated with Opportunity International/ KIVA)

http://mitradhuafafoundation.org/  (affiliated with the Grameen Foundation)

http://www.kiva.org/about/aboutPartner?id=79

The latter, Nasruddin from the Forum for the Poorest of the Poor has written to request information about training. On the website it appears as if they have been functioning for a couple years and have offered training in July and October.

Jamie, Ali and I were able to visit Bagok, Each Aceh for a few days. They said it was an amazing education. Aceh is clearly rebuilding. Small brick factories litter the main highway. Houses are going up. Rice fields are reappearing. Household industries are apparent. People are open, friendly and curious. At the same time, restrictions for my travel to Aceh have increased, two gigantic posts—one for the marines and one for the army—are being built, the Bureau for Reconstruction that has coordinated foreign aid in Aceh is closing in April, and several times military or intelligence workers stopped to talk to me. It was friendly talk, but it’s been a couple years since they’ve made their presence to clear to me. The national elections will be held in April and people can feel the government gearing up for confrontations. There have been some isolated, targeted fatalities of key military personnel, which will provoke harsh responses from the government when the opportunity presents itself. But for now, people are active and pleased with their current peace and freedom.

We stayed at Dahlan’s house with his new wife and mother. His father passed  away a few years ago and left the house and fish farm to Dahlan. During the conflict it was not safe to go to the pools. Now he does not have the capital to restart them. Jamie really wanted to raise the funds to help him, so I fronted $400 for him to seed, fertilize and flood three pools. He was so excited he stayed up most of the night organizing three guys to help him and within 24 hours three pools were underway. The joy and relief is a beautiful site. Dahlan said that he did not want a hand out. He wanted to borrow the funds. When his pools are productive he wants to pay the funds back into an AVP account to use to loan to others who are struggling for peace in the area. I told him it would be an interest free loan for one year—three harvest cycles.

Dahlan is 30 years old and an amazing man. He just got married this year. His father was a highly respected village mayor before. Now, Dahlan helps everyone he can in his county. Since the peace accord in 2005, he has gotten everyone in his county legal land claims. They are shocked that he did not take some land for himself. He said that was okay, he had the farm from his father. Then he got the government to give them 10,0000 seedlings for reforestation. Again the villagers were shocked that he did not take a plot for himself. They said that they have designated an area in honor of him that everyone has agreed will be cared for collaboratively by the villagers and be ready for harvest when Dahlan’s children need to go to school. He is the one that has organized the legal case against Exxon Mobil’s collusion with the Indonesian military. With the current village mayor, he erected signs along the beach that this beach belongs to the village of Bagok and organized local residents to maintain the beach. This will hopefully protect them from any corporation that decides to move in and take over, which is happening frequently. I affirmed that if we as the people do not exercise and invest in our rights they are much easier to lose. In the U.S. we take our right so for granted it’s easy to forget and lose many of them.

The majority of people we met introduced themselves by name and how long / how many times they had been kidnapped, tortured, shot or raped. It’s a strange environment. In the refugee camp, traces of the war were left behind. But the side of Dahlan’s house is still riddled with automatic weapons fire, landmarks provoke “That’s the ditch we jumped into when we got caught in crossfire that day I was late, remember?” Jamie and Ali got to meet these people: male, female, young, old, mother, grandmother, grandchild, friend, lover, spouse… They also got to try to process the fact that the U.S. was the major instigator and organizer of the coup in 1965 that led to this war and the primary funder through military aid of thirty years of terror and autrocity for these people. Clearly today just changing U.S. policy won’t resolve the situation after decades of violence and revenge, but if you could be present with these people, paying U.S. military taxes would break your heart to the point you’d have to do something. I have chosen poverty because it would truly rip my heart from my chest to know even one dollar of mine was used in the way I see our aid used here.

Dahlan right now is spending most days at the Myanmar refugee camp. Nasruddin and Dahlan asked me to go to the camp. There are 198 men 13 – 57 years old. When their ethnic group lost the election, they were severely oppressed. Eventually they were told that they had to convert to Hindduism and leave Islam. They did not want to, so they left on a boat to Singapore for black market work. The Thia police picked them up. They report being tortured for three weeks and hen the Thai police released them on their boat at the boarder of Burma and Myanmar. The boat drifted to Aceh instead over the coarse of nearly one month. Twenty-three men died at sea. When they arrived most of them were hospitalized. After five days only six men were left at the hospital. I told Dahlan he was a refugee expert—having been a refugee himself and then every time I’ve come to see him he has a new group of refugees—tsunami, war, returnees, flood, and now international political asylum seekers. Dahlan is watch dogging the refugee camp, which has been set up behind the county head’s office. The UN and international NGOs are still talking, but not taking any action. The Jesuit Relief Service provided kits with bathroom supplies, underwear and such. The government of Indonesia has finally released rice and some basic supplies, but no one was offering to cover the water. The water tank was sitting outside and they did not have water to cook the rice. Nasruddin gave them his driver’s license and said, “Here, I take responsibility for the water. Drive it in.” When I arrived, they were discussing who would sell their motorcycle to cover the cost of the water to get Nas’ license back. So, I gave them $400 to cover the water until I get back, asking them that if they find a water donor, they return the balance. This will cover their cooking, drinking and bathing water for twenty-two days. There have been problems with supplies going missing out of the county office, so they are working hard to create tighter oversight. They only take enough for one or two days, rather than trying to store things there. Local residents have been incredibly generous with food supplies (fish, vegetables, …), clothing and their time to cook, clean, and so forth. The government says they are sending them back, but the local residents say they can’t be sent back because they will be enslaved or killed. Dahlan, Nasruddin, Feri and others are working to try to get them international political asylum letters.

One man spoke some English. Jamie and he discovered they both liked soccer, so the next day the organized a game of Indonesia vs. Myanmar – Jamie played for Myanmar. Then Indonesian were very proud that they won. I told them Myanmar won. When they went to correct me I interrupted. They have been tortured, starved and hospitalized for the past two months. That they are alive, standing upright, making you run and holding their own makes them the winners. Everyone laughed.

When I took Jamie and Ali to Medan to see them off, Pak Jannes came to find me. He is a long-time activist in North Sumatra, but I have never met him before. He said that a corporation has come in and stripped the mangroves off a large area of the north coast of North Sumatra to put in fish farms. Since then, the ocean has been flooding and local people are losing crops, water supplies and suffering greatly. They feel this probably violates Indonesia’s agreements in international carbon credits, but they cannot get information in Indonesia about this. There is a group of four to eight of them hoping that I can help them get to this information. They also work in the forest and were extremely greatful to have an official reference for a map. It was a real eye opener for them as well. One of the men in this group is a leading defense attorney for people’s land and water rights and the maps will be incredibly helpful in defending these cases and probably in forming new cases.

Our core of friends is growing clearer, more stable and tight as a working group, including Ririn receiving a scholarship and coordinating AVP and Mislan and Amir from Barak Induk Refugee Camp from North Sumatra, as well as Nasruddin and Ferry from the Forum for the Poorest of the Poor and Dahlan. They have requested that we sit down in a couple weeks to discuss the clearer administration and division of roles here.

I met Manti again! I have not seen him for a couple years. He has return home to Idi Rayeuk, East Aceh, with his organization the Children’s Media Center. He just got married. His wife works with Tengku Syarwani who opened Al-Husni Pre-school in Bagok. He’s the same old Manti. I went to his office on a Sunday and there must have been forty young children hanging out and fifty or sixty teens practicing the Trash Band, dancing, painting, drama. He gave me some videos of them so I can show them when I get home. I invited him to Jaring Halus with the conflict refugees to learn about developmentally appropriate activities for young children. He said, “YES! I’ll bring twenty people with me!” That’s silly since the transportation and food costs for that would do a workshop and outfit two preschools! So I figured out the schedule and did a three-day workshop with them and the Forum for the Poorest of the Poor. For a day and a half we went shopping for what they considered the oddest collection of things. Then for a day and a half thirty of us made our own paint, finger paint, playdough, ubleck, dolls, doll house and town on a sand table and then played with them and water, sand, unhusked rice, blocks, Legos, beads, sissors, rulers, paper, crayons, and much more. Dahlan’s family offered to cook for the whole group for the week. It was a blast! All the supplies are going to Aneuk Bangsa Pre-school in Idi Rayeuk. This is wonderful since Idi saw some of the worst fighting and the kids could use a LOT of attention. I only spent under $50 for all the supplies. He has one other, somewhat larger pre-school he would like to provide supplies to as well. Teachers from both of these preschools joined us for this training. Now the only issue is looking into how much it will cost to get them each a set of preschool blocks, Legos and wooden beads. My source for blocks passed away again (the second source I’ve been able to develop over the past twenty years!). Wismi says there’s a place in Jakarta that is trying to fill that gap. They are not as good as the old ones but they will do she says. I can use all the Legos people can collect. The beads I once got a company in Indonesia to make beads, but I looked and they have gone to making all the round ones orange, all the square ones blue etc… so they have lost their value. Simplier to make of course. I will have to purchase them from Kaplan in the U.S. and bring them with me. Kaplan also has great dolls etc.. for the blocks and plastic animals for the sand table that have a lot of real detail and come in appropriate families. It would be nice to bring some of them. We also need to figure out how to get books. They would like to make books of their stories. They said they would translate from Acehnese to Indonesian and I could translate to English. If kids in the U.S. wanted to do the same, that would be great!

We have planned one more Activities for Young Children workshop in Jaring Halus, over the ocean, to bring people from Barak Induk Refugee Camp to learn from the teachers we having been sending to college. That will be next week and then I will buy supplies to take up to the camp to use there.

We have planned a basic AVP workshop for people from the Children’s Media Center, Society for Health, Education, Environment and Peace, the People’s Crisis Center, and a group of famers from an area with ethnic tension between Acehnese and Javanese. Then we will do a second level AVP workshop. Both of these will be at Dahlan’s house. Then we will do an AVP training for facilitators at the Bustanul Fakri Orphanage / School. After that we will do a Trauma Healing workshop in Barak Induk Refugee Camp. I will leave directly after that to go to Pati, Central Java to do a Activities for Young Children workshop and an AVP training for facilitators. That will leave me a couple days to go visit Al-Falah School before leaving for LA.

As soon as I solve the distilled water problem, we can begin production of <b>colloidal silver</b>. The hospitals don’t even use distilled water. The only source we could find was battery water, but the bottles are small and the quality control is terrible. So we will have to distill our own water. Keeping it clean in the process will be the challenge. We are planning a box with a sloped glass top of 100 cm x 70 cm encased in black plastic with a PVC pipe with a section cut out to form a gutter on the lower side of the glass that is tilted to run into a water jug that has a lid that can be closed after distillation. We made the water distiller on a very hot day, but as soon as we set it out, the temperature dropped and it began to rain. After it rained, I wondered if we could use the distiller in the open to catch clear rainwater. I brought a water tester, so I’ll try that.

We are so grateful to recent donors and to Farmington-Scipio Regional Meeting for providing additional funds at this critical time. The generosity has been incredible. We were beginning to discuss which activities we would not do, but the Friends Peace Teams administrator reported that she is transferring $7,000. This means we can do all our activities and proceed with setting up a training to explore a Grameen Bank Branch.

Friends Peace Teams, Indonesia Initiative News

By Nadine Hoover on January 14, 2009

Layers and layers of politics determine recognized land rights in Indonesia—traditional, colonial, provincial and national impositions of power reign to varying degrees in various places at various times. Without recognized land claims, the fruits of one’s labor and survival becomes tenuous. Short-term returns replace longer-term strategies. Yet who exactly has the power to decide is not always clear either. I am working closely with the leaders of all the camp’s divisions to write a statement from them. We have looked at the requirements for lodging complaints/requests with the United Nations and for requesting advocacy through Global Response, an international environmental network. With these in mind they are trying to put on paper their voice. Once we have that, I have offered to send it to QUNO Geneva and to Global Response to ask them to review it, send questions or suggestions, and direct us to any steps they could take to secure rights to land. This in complicated since they live on the edge of the international bioreserve, Leuser Ecosystem. We are making headway and they are honored and pleased at our support in framing their voice in writing and translating it.

One of our main partners in the refugee camp is Mislan, who travels through surrounding villages selling Jamu, traditional Javanese medicine. I brought with me all the supplies to make colloidal silver. We have already started to use some and fungal infections some of them have had for years, which have been resistant to the medicines they have access to, are already healing. We will go shopping for bottles to distribute it in and have drafted a label that we can print to put on the bottles.

The water filter team is ready to produce filters, but the quality clay was purchased en masse by a company, so we only have access to low quality clay which requires extensive processing before it can be used. We are waiting on the clay. As soon as it is ready, they will produce 250 filters. I will bring a dozen or so to the refugee camp to set up here and give them time to do a trial. The key leaders of the camp trust us and are anxious to get the filters and begin using them. If they work (and we all don’t get sick!) distribution may be very quick.

Jamie Carestio, a potter from western New York, and his friend Ali will be arriving January 26, 2009. They will go to Jogjakarta for three days to visit the potteries and stove production sites there. Hopefully they can pick up the filters and bring them to us. We will then take a week or more to produce rocket stoves. I have talked to the women and they are excited about having stoves that take the smoke out of the kitchen and keep the kitchen and their pots clean. The men are excited that they can point to the use of filters and rocket stoves as evidence that they can live on the edge of the forest without destroying the forest.

I have received permission to go to Aceh, so tomorrow I will be able to meet the Acehnese and beginning planning. There are already requests to do a follow up to the trauma healing workshop, which we will do a group—Acehnese, North Sumatrans and the Javanese refugees. There are also requests for an AVP Advanced, which as yet has not been translated into Indonesia. I will incorporate our experience from the last trauma workshop into the manual and then translate the AVP Advanced manual. This means that we will not be able to do as many workshops on this trip, but focus more on this new development.

They are able to do basic workshops on their own, but funding for AVP workshops is still an issue. We are talking through how to do workshops that don’t cost them anything in their respective home bases. We all feel this is hard, but worthwhile in the long run. We are specifying also that there are workshops that we want to do in conflict areas that are not our own homes and that these may need funding. At present, since the houses are often just tents or weak structures, there is not room for a group and if a group goes inside the place falls down. Traveling to another place and renting a space is costly. So we are trying to figure out two models—one without funds in home bases and one in places that we want to reach out to but can do on a reasonable cost basis. Many of the costs are necessary, but many of them are expectations created by other international charity programs. For instance, people often receive travel money or “smoking” money, they eat A LOT rather than what they usually eat and they expect medicine to be provided and rather than take one or two tablets they take a whole package to take home, and so forth. Without clear expectations and tight controls, this can double, even quadruple the cost of a workshop. We are discussing how to communicate and create a culture that we all understand and agree on, but this is very hard when we enter new areas, especially where there are still frequent fatalities over conflicts.

In the refugee camp, we are building a house to use for guests, workshops and storage for the filter and stove production. It may also be a place that we can do some activities to support the development of young children and store the necessary supplies for that. It may also serve as a “safe house” where people suffering from traumatic responses can come and get some stabilization. It will cost us $1,000 – $1,500. It is located across the street from Mislan’s house in the center of a sort of family compound where his parents, in-laws and married children also live. This ensures support and services that we can control the quality and cost of and security of the storage. It is very central, but just out of the center enough to be quiet and a bit separated from the main bustle. I have allowed them to feel that it belongs to them to use as they see fit for housing guests and community gatherings as well as for our purposes. This will greatly facilitate workshops in the refugee camp.

The funds are adequate, but I could use another $2,000 – $3,000 quite comfortably right now. In addition, I would like to build another building in a central part of rural East Aceh, in Bagok, like we are doing in the refugee camp. It would cost us a bit more, however, probably about $2,000 – 3,000. If anyone knows a donor that would like to build a pre-school, please let me know immediately. If we don’t raise any more than we have now, I will have to do less with the pre-schools and the young children. But, with what we have now, there is already tremendous improvement in the health, aspirations, security and peace of the people here. They are very grateful and inspired by our call to simplicity, honesty, hard work and community.

Child Voice International

By Nadine Hoover on April 30, 2008

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Two days ago I went to ChildVoice International. It all happened quickly. On Sunday afternoon I met Lowna and Diandria. My first impression of the two of them was positive. Knowing that organizations are their personnel I was curious to find out more about their organization. I called Lowna on Monday and asked what her organization was and if I could visit and have a tour. She called me back and said sorry this is short notice, the only good day would be Tuesday, which is tomorrow. So I rearranged my schedule and went to the ChildVoice International office on Tuesday morning to drive out to the site of their program which is roughly a 40 minute drive outside of Gulu on the edge of the Lukodi Internally Displaced People (IDP) camp. The place is for formerly abducted child mothers. Their program is to provide these mothers, roughly 30, and their children with all their needs. The girls and their children live on this compound of ChildVoice International (CVI) and CVI provides them with housing, food, education, health care, and other rehabilitative services. ‘, ‘The office in Gulu was nice. It is in a building with a local government agency. It is simple; the material objects like staplers and unnecessary material excess were not filling the office. Also when you enter their offices, they have eight desks arranged around the room in a non-hierarchical configuration. The office is open. Looking at the structure of the office I could see simplicity, equality, and openness. Another aspect I appreciated was how they share their office with another group, a local Ugandan government agency, and also their fence is just a chainlink fence with a single barbed wire running around the top.

There is an incredible number of Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) with offices here in Gulu and for me the fencing of the offices is important. Most NGO offices here are walled around the perimeter. That is the way the majority are. Most of them have one coil of razor wire around the top of the wall. I am making a distinction between razor wire and barbed wire. I do not know how to describe the difference just that razor wire is more high tech. Then some NGO’s have two coils of razor wire around the top of their wall. So compared to other NGO’s ChildVoice International is open. I enjoyed the day, and met good people. I am only left wondering what do I think is the full effect of their presence and efforts here in Gulu. That is a question I have for all the NGO’s and foreigners here including myself.

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This week is the last week of school for UNIFAT before a month long holiday. Last week they had their municipal examinations and this week they are having their UNIFAT examinations. From being at the school and doing the art class I have had time to connect with some of the Primary 3 teachers. There are three classes of P3, blue, green, and white, and together they have six teachers. There are three women and three men, and compared with all the teachers at the school, two of the women are on the older side, and two of the men are on the younger side and they joke that the P3 teachers are grandmothers and their sons. It has been nice to sit and spend time with them. I have helped to grade a few of their examinations and I have helped more with stapling and colating their in school examinations.

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1.This is Betty who lives here at the house. She is sitting in the kitchen in the back of the land.

2.This is a picture of someplace where the UNIFAT students used to walk through, and myself at time that has now been closed off. After being here for a little more than a week I learned how to walk from the house to the school almost all the way on back roads and dirt paths. These dirt paths cut between buildings and property. This is common here, it is not rude as it might be in the states. If the way to walk somewhere is open people will walk that way, cutting through land and homes, places where there are no roads. In this picture you can see the horizontal pieces of wood, before they were not there and anyone could easily pass through the vertical pieces of wood.

The Secondary age young people who live here with Mama have started arriving. In total there will be eight coming, three have arrived. So in total there will be 29 people living here. There is one toddler, 11 primary age children, three young men, four parents (Betty, her husband Ceasar, Mama Abitimo Odongkara, and Joe her son), myself, and one older lady, Serena who has lost her mind, now it will be us plus the eight returning secondary school children who have been away at boarding school. The majority of children here (I think this is the case for all of Northern Uganda, I do not know about all of Uganda) who attend secondary school board at their school.

The midway point

By Nadine Hoover on April 12, 2008

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1. Abe and Myself     2. Auze, Deborah, Me, Lamwaka, Becky

Here are a few pictures of the 12 children I have been spending time with. The first picture is of me and Abe, pronounced Ah-Beh. I like all the kids, but it has been easy to get to know and spend time with Abe. She is one of the older kids at the house, she is a girl, her English is good and she uses it, and we have free time that overlaps. I like her very much. Her and Auma are both in Primary 7. They are both apprehensive about these test results that they will found out maybe on Monday of whether or not they will take their Primary Level Exam (PLE) from their school, Uper Nile Institute for Apropriate Technology (UNIFAT), or from another school. There are 99 Primary 7 age children at UNIFAT and only 90 of them will sit the PLE from UNIFAT, 9 of them can either choose to repeat Primary 7 at UNIFAT or they can take their PLE from another school. Both Abe and Auma are stressed about this. In fact it is important. They both say though that if they are not selected to sit at UNIFAT they will take the test through another school rather than do the whole year over again. In the second picture is Auze, Deborah, myself, Lamwaka (Santa Lamwaka), and Becky (Abitimo Rebecca Odongkara, the exact same name as her grandmother, the woman I am living with). (The thing is, they have the same name, and the same birthday). In this picture you can see Deborah and Becky the two girls I sleep with each night.

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I have included these bricks burning because this is such a common thing, I see different stages of it everywhere.

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1. Auze, Abe, Myself, Auma    2. Ojok and Myself

I included the blurry group picture even though it is blurry because I like the energy of it. In the picture is Auze (Bodo Paustino), Abe (whose name is Aol Lucy), myself, and Auma (Auma Milly).

The second picture is of me and Ojok (Ojok Ojara John). Ojok is wonderful. I have had a full range of encounters with Ojok. We have played silly games, active games, games with rules, we have been serious, talked, sat, done math, done English, and we have cried, been grumpy, been upset, and been scared.

An update on my art class at the UNIFAT school.

The art class is now half way over. I work with about 80 to 100 different sets of children each afternoon from about 4:20 to 5:20 or later. This means that one child at the school starting at Primary 3, or the third grade, will see me for one or two afternoons only. I have just been passing out crayons and paper and having them draw, telling them they can draw anything they want. I have one young man from the house helping me. He is quiet when we are in the classroom. He told me though that when we got to Primary 6 and 7 that we should begin the time with a lesson, not just drawing, his idea was to teach some math or English, just so that the older students felt like they “got something”. At first I was not interested in the idea, but I was interested in working with this young man, Odong, and listening to him. I also value his insight into what the children maybe thinking or telling him. So, for the Primary 6 and 7 streams I begin with a 3 minute lesson on how drawing is good for your education. My lesson goes something like this:

To excel in school and in your academic work each person needs a developmental foundation. This developmental foundation is built through play. One type of play is drawing. How this works is that you have an idea, then your body creates it, then you see how closely the representation of your drawing is to your original idea. This process expands your mind. This activity helps your brain to relate the concrete to the theoretical, or the abstract.

I know that because of my accent and because of their being new to me, most of them are picking up little or none of what I am saying. I still give some version of the lesson I just wrote, either shorter or longer, just to please Odong, and that the students also are pleased. I can tell that the students enjoy hearing me talk, even if they don’t understand me. Primary 6 and Primary 7 are the two year levels that I will only see each student once. Primary 3 through Primary 5 I will see each class, or stream as they call it, twice. When I started with the Primary 6 streams I told them “no pencil, and no pen.” From what I have seen in the drawings this direction has significantly increased their creativity, I do not think that is because of the age difference only. The second time I go through the younger years I will also add that direction to them as well, “no pencil and no pen.”

We did it! Indonesians run AVP basic workshop in East Aceh

By Nadine Hoover on April 08, 2008

The Indonesia Initiative of Friends Peace Teams is overjoyed to announce that Indonesians have done the first Alternatives to Violence basic workshop on their own without any facilitators from the outside!

The team that conducted this latest workshop was comprised of facilitators from both sides of a life-long armed conflict. They conducted the workshop in East Aceh, an Acehnese nationalist strong-hold, where Javanese farmers were born, raised and run out of. The participants were from Peureulak, East Aceh, considered the “heart of the war” that has a very hard, fishermen’s culture in which people are easily suspicious and hateful of outsiders.

This was the first time perpetrators were brought together to participate equally with victims of the war. One of the Acehnese facilitators told a story about experiencing transforming power on a night he was certain he would be killed. It turned out that two perpetrators of the violence that night were in the workshop! He says it was really powerful to sit in the room and share what was going on for each of them that night. The Javanese were able to see that they were not the only ones who felt like they might die that night. The meditation at the end of the workshop was amazing.

Since August 2005, four adult and four young adult Friends from New York Yearly Meeting who are Alternatives to Violence facilitators—Nadine Hoover, Dean Hoover, Deb Wood, Pamela Hawkins, Sarah Mandolang, Molly McLellan Tornow, Karilyn Valesko and Steven Slining Haynes—have been going to Aceh and North Sumatra, Indonesia to conduct three-day Alternatives to Violence basic workshops and three-day training for facilitators.

The first workshop took place in East Aceh Indonesia one week after the Peace Accord was signed between the Free Aceh Movement and the Indonesian government in Helsinki, Finland. In 1965, the U.S. government orchestrated a coup de tat in Indonesia that “wiped out communism” in three days, but also was less known for attacking the Islamic power base in Indonesia—Aceh. Never fully recovering from having its own military turn against them, in 1976 the Acehnese initiated a war of independence from Indonesia, which has been in large part funded by U.S. military aid. After nearly thirty years of war and a massive tsunami, most of the people we work with are young, in their twenties and thirties,  who have suffered major traumas in their lives.

During the war, Javanese farmers who had been brought to Aceh under colonization to work on Dutch plantations were run off the lands they had worked all their lives and are now in camps in the mountains, unrecognized by any government. The fear and resentment between these people and the Acehnese is great.

As we have conducted AVP workshops, we have brought people from both sides of the conflict. At first they thought they could not be in the same workshop with each other. At times participants did not sleep for fear other participants might try to kill them in their sleep. But every time, they have become bosom buddies by the end of the workshop, learning they have mutual relatives and trading cell phone numbers.

This latest workshop that they conducted on their own brought tears to my eyes and touched me on so many levels when I heard this news. They felt so successful, not just as facilitators and as a team, but in bringing together people who may not have otherwise touched each others” hearts for generations if ever again. I am SO grateful that we could be part of this, that we could be part of bringing this about in the world, that we could give back to a people who have suffered so much in the wake of the coup of 1965, that our intolerance contributed so heavily to at that time.

What redemption for us and for them. Thank you to everyone who has so graciously supported our work over the last few years!

In peace,

Nadine Hoover, Coordinator

Friends Peace Teams Indonesia Initiative

To support this work, please: 1) travel with us to meet our friends in Indonesia (see www.friendspeaceteams.org for details), 2) send donations to Friends Peace Teams,1001 Park Ave., St. Louis, MO 63104 designate in the memo line: Indonesia Initiative, and 3) check to see that your monthly meeting makes an undesignated contribution to Friends Peace Teams to cover core administrative costs.

Listening Efectively to Children in Uganda

By Nadine Hoover on April 03, 2008

I have been reading Listening Efectively to Children by Patty Wipfler a publication of the Re-evaluation Counseling Communities.

The thing that struck me was the section on healing Children’s Fears. This is a paragraph from that section: “When a child feels frightened, she has difficulty staying in close contact with her loved ones. She can’t hold your gaze for long, and will either be slow to experiment and to trust people, or will be constantly “on the go,” unable to slow down and enjoy your presence in a relaxed way. Fear also makes children edgy and hard to please: things have to be “just so” or the frightened child flares with impatience or anger. Life does not roll easily from one sunny pastime to the next for the young child who is afraid.”

I have spent hours with these 10 primary age kids at home and I have seen some of what is in that paragraph. I have seen some be “slow to experiment and to trust people” I have seen a lack of ability to relax some times. I have also seen, not children being hard to please, but holding grudges, and holding them over things that make no difference one way or another. Some of the things are not true from the paragraph that I’ve seen. The kids are expert at not showing their feelings. Or some way hiding their feelings. When they do not get what they want they go some where else. The kids here do not beg or even ask the adults around for any attention. They entertain themselves and if an adult is around they do not ask them for their time, but they will play with an adult if that person chooses to play with them. The kids are suspicious, I can ask them some question and they want to know why I am asking.

I have put to practice some of what I have read from the fear section and the playlistening section. Actually one of the 10 kids here does not go to primary school, she is too young. I would guess that she is three years old. She was petrified of me when I first came. She would leave if I came. Or scream if I came to close. Not that I tried to approach her at all, just that in doing my business and her doing hers we would physically become close and that is when she would scream. I do a lot of things in the compound. For a time she watched me while leaning against her mother, betty. She has watched me wash my clothes, wash dishes, eat food, fill water cans, playing and talking with the other children, and other activities. For a while we had this game where she would look at me and laugh or scream and cover her eyes. A kind of hide and seek. Then I would cover my eyes and act surprised to see her and then she would laugh/scream. And then she started to walk towards me one time and I cowered away, which is something the book says to do, to let the child take the larger role, and she would run away to her mother and laugh/scream. And that was the next game, for her to act as if she was going to touch me and I would cower and she would run away and laugh/squell. And after that game not all at one time but for several days over many occasions. Then the next step was the same game but she would actually touch me. And at first she did seem scared, brave enough to touch me but scared still. And then it was the same game as she gradually became feeling safer to touch me but still running away and laughing. That is the point at which we are at now. But this morning she was standing somewhere and I had to walk by her to get to the house and she looked at me and had no response at all. I think that is a good sign that she is moving away from her fear of me. I am glad of this. And it is exactly what I have been reading about in the book from Reevaluation Counseling.

UNIFAT School in N Uganda

By Nadine Hoover on April 02, 2008

Yesterday I attended the Primary School Athletics Compition. I do not know if it was nation wide or just the district. The stadium was just a large area closed off by the concrete wall surrounding it. The track was just a circle of worn out dirt and grass. There was nodifinitive line between the watchers who circled the track and the track itself. There were dull black lines about two feet wide to show the starting point for each person. I watched relay racing, and there were four places on each corner of the track where the starting places were staggered, that is why they used the black lines. The crowd was around the track watching. Each school had a tent connected to the outer wall, not a tent, but a large piece of plastic connected to the outer wall and then connected to two large sticks or poles stuck into the ground away from the wall. This provided shade and a designated area for different schools. The crowd was detirmened by these tents. The viewing students from each school sat roughly in front of their school tent expanding or contracting depending on the number of students at that school and the neighboring schools. I watched relay racing and javelin throwing. ‘, ‘Relay racing seemed to be more important because it happened by itself, and then javelin throwing and some other thing at the other end of the field happened at the same time. It was difficult for me to realize when things were starting and ending and what was going on, I’m not sure if that was because it was unclear or because I don’t understand the language and therefore did not understand the announcer. Though English was used some of the time. I heard the announcer say, Heads of School take note tomorrow all P1 to P4 classes must go to school, classes will resume. Or something to that effect.

This morning all the younger kids bathed, dressed, and got ready then left for school. At this time I bathed and when I came back out and went out back all the younger kids had changed clothes into their home clothes and had returned, I asked Ojok, No school today? And he said no. I have no idea why.

Mama left yesterday because a baby died during delivery and she is going to the burial. She says she won’t be back until Sunday. I have walked many places in Gulu. The downtown is quite small. I am not sure how large an area the surrounding housing areas are. I know they are large and some not very nice, this is due to the fact that so many people have homes in the small villages around N. Uganda but have come to Gulu or other centers to avoid the violence. Ochen told me that the young girl whose baby died during delivery is younger than 16, that she is very small. I read in my Oxfam book that in order to avoid AIDS older men have taken younger and younger female partners and in so doing have given females 13 to 18 a higher percentage of AIDS than 13 to 18 yr old boys. I saw a billboard in Rwanda that had a picture of an older adult male and it said something like, you would not want him to have sex with your teenage daughter, so don’t have sex with his.

Another thing from the Oxfam book that I have seen is the taking of bananas by the helpers of banana owners. So, when I was on the Postal bus from Kampala to Gulu we stopped in a small area and next to us were people moving banana bunches out of a truck and then down into the market, and I saw the guys taking single bananas off from the clumps and placing them somewhere else. The Oxfam book explained that those men do not get paid but instead get to take those bananas and sell them or eat them or anything, but that the bananas are their compensation for their work instead of pay. Ochen does not like Betty, the woman who lives here, I am not sure why but Mama must trust her to some extent because Betty has a key to Mama’s room, which is locked while she is away.

I have met with a group of abducted women that have children from their abduction and are rejected by society that got together and formed a group that now helps other abducted women.

Yesterday I ate lunch with the builders who are working at the school. One of them, Tony, lives here. The first day I saw him working at the school I waved to him, he saw me but he did not wave back. But then on later occasions when seeing each other we have waved. Then the other day he said, you must not have come to school, you did not come say hello. So the next day I made a point of going to say hello, and I ended up entering a room where they were all having lunch. One and then the others agreed that I was invited to have lunch with them, but since food was being prepared for me at the main part of the school I declined. Then the next day, which was yesterday I went there to eat lunch. I saw 12 people also eating lunch not including myself. This group of people do not work together all the time. Some are masons, and some are carpenters, and all of them found this job on their own. When this job is over they will all separate and look for new jobs. Though they find work individually I suspect that they know each other since they have the same profession and Gulu is relatively small enough that I think that some of them could have overlapped on other jobs, or at least be able to find a mutual aquantance. The lunch was porsho (sp?) and beans. The porsho is white corn ground into flour mixed with water and made into a hunk of white stuff. The beans are boiled and are in juice. I am not sure what else is involved. This is a fairly typical meal. I am taking a one a day pill, but it has almost no iron in it and I think my diet here is lacking in iron. Gulu is starkly different from Kampala. Kampala is huge. It is a real city. I think I could buy any western item I wanted there. Gulu is not like that. Even the nicest places are not that nice, well the public places at least. Maybe some of the private homes and offices are nice. The nicest internet place is not all that nice. It is just some computers in a room with seats. I asked Jamie, who has been here for almost two years, who works for invisible children and is from the USA if there was a nice internet place that I had not yet found and he said no.

When I was using the internet two white people came. I said hello to them. One of them is working in Rwanda and the other came from Washington DC. They have come here to Gulu for only a few days to do some prospecting. Tha is how they described it. I gathered that from them that they are looking at the possibility of starting a program in Gulu, they said depending on how the talks go in Juba. I wonder if and how foreigners have been treated in N. Uganda during the war time.

Because Mama is away Rebecca and Deborah slept in the girls room in the back. Which must have made it crowded, because there are only two small mattresses, and there were 6 girls in there. So I slept in the house alone, and was told by Donka and Auze to lock the door. The door is locked every night. So in the morning I woke up to Ojok right outside my window saying, Sera wake up. I woke up and immediately went to go unlock the door. In came Ojok, Rebecca and Deborah, but then Ojok left, and I know it was Rebecca and Deborah who needed to come inside, but I wonder why they themselves did not wake my up but instead Ojok. I know that those two girls could have done it, they would not have been afraid.

Though I have been here for more than two weeks the little Rebecca is only just becoming used to me she is no longer afraid of me but she is not yet comfortable with me. I wonder if by the end of the two months I will be just another person to her.

Gulu, Uganda

By Nadine Hoover on March 25, 2008

So much has happened. I have come to Uganda. I am living with Abitimo Odongkara and the many relatives and orphans that she supports. The school, Upper Nile Institute for Appropriate Technology (UNIFAT), is not 1,500 orphans as I had thought, but somewhere around 1,300 or 1,400 children, some of whom are orphans or returning child soldiers. The returning child soldiers may or may not also be orphans. Abitimo and I arranged for me to lead an art time during the schools midday break and after school. This has not started yet but hopefully will begin on Tuesday after Easter. The times of the art class will be from 1:30 to 2:15 and 4:00 to 4:45 Monday to Friday.

Living here at the compound with me are 11 primary school age children and one three year old. I have been playing and working with them. This morning I spent and hour and a half shelling peanuts with three of the older ones: two girls, Auma and Abe, and one boy, Auze. There were two kinds of peanuts. The two girls and I were shelling one kind of peanut and the boy another.’, ‘Then they decided to have a competition and made four piles one for each of us to see who would end first. My pile was smaller, I think that was a handicap. Looking at the piles I thought the boy”s was a smidgen larger but no one said anything. We started and the boy finished twice as fast as the rest of us. Then the game was disrupted by an old lady, Serena, and ended. I thought possibly the boy went so much faster because maybe the kind of peanut he was shelling was easier. After we finished shelling all of our kind of peanut we went to finish the other kind, and I found that my guess was not the case. Those peanuts were just as difficult to shell.

I have met many people who are orphans, who have lost close relatives, and who have been abducted. One man that I was talking to, while telling me about his life said that he had been abducted. This surprised me because he was older. I thought the Lord”s Resistance Army (LRA) abducted younger ages like 7 to 15, but he was 26 when he was abducted. I am not sure which year but maybe that was earlier on during the abductions, and maybe the LRA took younger people as the years progressed. Many people I have spoken with are questioning whether it is safe yet to return to their villages. Of course many of the people I meet are here in Gulu, so I won”t meet anyone here in Gulu who has decided to return to the village.

During the rush from Rwanda to Uganda and since coming here I have not posted, not had time or electricity. Now that I am here and settled I hope to post once a week. This week has been hectic. A young relative of Abitimo”s baby died during child birth and so Abitimo has gone to help her during this time, she left of Wednesday. Also this weekend is Easter weekend and people have been returning home for their Easter break.

Also last week during the primary school athletic competition 2 or 3 children died in the stadium and 30 some were injured from a lightening strike. So the competition was postponed and set for this week. So this week there was school on Monday and Tuesday morning. Tuesday afternoon there was a memorial time for those children who died and so no school, and then Wednesday and Thursday were the competition, so no school and Friday was Good Friday and Monday was Easter. So there has not been school basically all week, and so there are many children and things going on at the house and this past week it has been non-routine.

Let me tell you about some of the other things. The food is excellent. The most common meal is what they call Porsho (I do not know how it is  actually spelled) and beans. Porsho is made of ground corn flour and water that congeals into a solid kind of starch. The food here is good. Lots of peanuts are used. I have had peanut sauces many times. I have had pea soup, fish, rice, meat, cassava, and samosas. They also have another staple food like the corn thing except it is made with millet or Sourgum (sp?) flour mixed with cassava flour and water and is like the white corn thing but is brown and of a slightly different consistency.

Ok I told you about the hectic nature of last week and this, I did not post again this weekend because Saturday I waited all day to go to the village thinking we were going, Sunday I went to the village, and Monday there was no electricity. Today is Tuesday. Things are now underway, not just with posting, but with my schooling, daily routine and the art class. I will be posting regularly.

Kigali, Rwanda

By Nadine Hoover on February 23, 2008

Due to limited time, I will upload pictures now and add stories later.

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Left: smoke from coal making, Right:the computer room where I am right now.

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Left:George Fox School, Right: A meal

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Left: houses on a hill driving to Cyangugu Right: John Damascene (I”m not sure on the spelling)

Kigali, Rwanda

By Nadine Hoover on February 17, 2008

I have added pictures to the two older posts in the extended sections.

Here are some new pictures:

<%image(20080217-c2 17 08 Kitchen Tatiana.JPG|100|75|Tatiana)%><%image(20080217-c 2 17 08 Kitchen table.JPG|100|75|Kitchen)%><%image(20080217-d 2 17 08 w Monika.JPG|200|150|Monika)%>

I have been spending time in the kitchen. (sorry the two pictures on the right are too small, I will get better at knowing what size to make them.) Tatiana on the left, the one you can”t see, is roughly my age. Like me not yet married and without children. She is here at the Church where we are staying to help do the work involved with hosting us. She has been teaching me some Kinyarwanda. today she taught me 4 through 10. 1 through 3 I learned yesterday. Monika on the right, is somewhere in the middle age region. Her one child is 14 years old. I have yet to ask what her place is with the church but I think she has a permanent role.

Yesterday I spent half an hour with Theoneste, the coordinator of Healing and Rebuilding Our Communities workshop in Rwanda. ‘, ‘We talked about HROC in Rwanda, his involvement, and his general life story. The parts I found interesting in the HROC workshop that he told me about were first the community celebrations. What happens is, in one area, after a set of workshops have been done there, some basic workshops and some workshops for Healing Companions, they have a celebration for anyone who attended any of the workshops. Then that celebration is opened up to extended family members, local authorities, and the general public. He emphazised how the workshops helped bring people together who previously would not associate, and how the community celebration was a time for the community to see what change had come and for that change to be celebrated. The second part that stood out to me was the Healing Companions, people from the community who have extra training to help the people in their community after the facilitators leave. So, they are not facilitators, they are supporters of the community who took the workshops.

I enjoyed talking with him. He speaks english well.

Kigali Rwanda

By Nadine Hoover on February 15, 2008

I am having a wonderful time. People here do not stare/hassle/try to sell things. It is much different from Indonesia in that regard. I have met wonderful people. This morning we met with at the Friends Peace House here in Kigali, I met Joyce (I don”t know her last name) who does AVP here in Rwanda. I have not yet had a chance to talk with her. I also met the people doing the Healing and Rebuilding Our Communities (HROC) workshop. I did not have time to chat with them either, though I”m not sure how their english is, but I did get their phone numbers and told them I would like to come back to Rwanda to do a HROC workshop. At the House we also met Ceaser who is the  coordinator. He spoke about their programs. They have programs with trauma and helping ethnically different people live with one another, a program with street children, and some others. After we went there we went to the Friends Church where I am staying and met with the Clerk, (who is Antoine, also the head of the George Fox School) and somebody else important, but I”m not sure what is his official position. ‘, ‘Tomorrow we, the Friendly Folk Dancers, are doing one dance, a wedding dance, at a wedding. That will start our tour here.

An interesting thing I noticed today is that, in Kinyarwanda the language here they pronounce some W”s as wg, with a g sound. I think this depends on what other letters it goes with. But in the case of Rwanda when they say it, it often sounds much like Uganda. I think that is neat. Also the name of their language you pronounce i”s like e”s. So when they say Kinyarwanda it can sound like kenyaganda. A combination of Kenya and Uganda.

There is so much to say. Mostly I am enjoying meeting the people. I have learned good morning=Mwaramutse and good afternoon=Mwiriwe and I have used them with people, it really brings smiles and helps people feel comfortable.

Here at the George Fox School they have about 30 computers. They seem to all have internet.

I have only seen the high school here. There is a primary school and I have yet to see it, though I am excited.

There is so much more. I love being here. I am taking pictures but have not been able to download them yet. I will as soon as I can!

For those of you reading this from Rochester NY, Ruth Hyde sends her greetings.

For now, love,

Sarah Mandolang

Kigali, Rwanda

By Nadine Hoover on February 14, 2008

Well I have already posted today, but then the electricity went out. Yesterday I arrived. It is hot and breezy here. At night it is cool. at four am this morning there was an earthquake. It woke me up, then I couldn”t go back to bed. So I woke up and “talked” if you can call it that to the two security guards and the gardener. The gardener knew some English but not much. Yesterday when I arrived I went to the church where I am staying and took a cold shower. Then me and Antoine, the head of the George Fox School went shopping.

Here are some of the pictures from the road.

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Click on Read more to see more pictures.

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This interested me, it is a camafloage helicopter.

For breakfast I had fried eggs with onion and tomato, hot tea that I added sugar to, and a jam sandwich. For dinner last night I had half a chicken that I couldn”t finish, fries, and a mayo salad. Yesterday when we were out shopping the car in front of us hit the car in front of them. Shopping was fine. I bought a phone. 250 03353536. It may be that the 0 in front of the three is not needed, I don”t know. I bought a sim card and minutes. I also bought a mosquito net. I changed 100 dollars for 54,000 Rwandan francs. Somebody look that up and see if I did alright! Hehehe.

<%image(20080217-b 2 17 08.JPG|350|263|Kigali Rwanda)%>

This is a common view to see out over the city.

It is hilly here, the hills have nice rivets. (Is that what I mean to say? They are not smooth hills like in western NY they are bumpy edged hills.) The dirt is red. The roofs are red and blue and some light green. There is a lot of green foliage, at the Nairobi airport it was much more dry so I could see the difference.

I have met people from the church Antoine, David, the Pastor and some of the working people, Monika, Polinari, Viyani, and Tatiana. The ones with the last letter a are female and with the last letter i are male.

Philadelphia PA

By Nadine Hoover on February 10, 2008

Preparation in Philadelphia

Hi everyone! Here is a picture of the family who are generously opening their home to me. Their youngest son, Andrew, is away at Earlham College. I am having a wonderful time. I have spent most of it either learning about re-evaluation counseling (RC) or giving back to the family here by helping them renovate an apartment that they rent. RC is based on the idea of physically discharging on emotions that hold a person back from fully living and from making decisions in the present, on facts and experiences that have created patterns of reacting that are no longer helpful or appropriate in the new situation. RC uses co-counseling. Where one person called the counselor pays full and loving attention to the other person, called the client. The two people decide to split the amount of time between  them each taking the role of counselor and client in turn. I”m on my way!

Congratulations on Sarah”s Nomination for a Pickett Grant by Pamela Haines

By Nadine Hoover on January 13, 2008

I met Sarah Mandolang when she was 11 and her family stayed in our house during their transition from Tallahassee to Philadelphia. We’ve stayed in touch as the family moved on to Alfred, New York and she grew up. Sarah has always been an extraordinarily open and warm person with an innate understanding of the importance of community. She thrived at Olney Friends School, but struggled to find her place in the larger college scene. It has been a pleasure to see her coming into her own in the last year or so as a loving and talented young woman who is committed to leading a life of faith and service. Her family roots in both Indonesia and New York Yearly Meeting, as well as her mastery of Alternatives to Violence Project (AVP) training have put her in a strong position to bridge barriers of nation, race and class. She is a young adult Friend who is already doing good work and has enormous potential to do more. I would dearly love to see her have as many opportunities as possible to grow in her leadership.

The series of projects that Sarah has laid out for herself for the first part of 2008 is an exciting blend of learning new skills and applying old ones in new contexts or in greater depth. The internship stay in Philadelphia will allow her to learn basic peer counseling theory and skills that will be applicable in all her future work. The particular emphasis on families and children will help her prepare for her work with a school in Uganda, where she will also have the opportunity to offer her AVP skills. Being present to this healing project in northern Uganda, under the leadership of a local woman who exemplifies a life of faith and service, will help her grow in the Spirit in other ways that cannot be predicted. Participating in a Healing and Rebuilding Our Communities workshop in Rwanda/Burundi will build on her AVP training, and strengthen the skills of the team that will be introducing trauma healing workshops in Aceh, Indonesia in the summer. With Sarah’s idea to invite an Indonesian to the series of nonviolent activist training workshops offered by Training for Change in June, she will both get that experience herself, make it available to an Indonesian activist through her ability to interpret, and translate written materials that will become available to other Indonesians. All of these projects have a strong Quaker link, and have the potential of becoming even more closely connected. I can’t imagine a better use of Quaker leadership funds.

in Alfred, New York, From Sarah

By Nadine Hoover on January 10, 2008

Hi everyone,

I am getting ready for a big trip. My travels begin in Philadelphia, where I plan on getting ready for my trip to Uganda and Rwanda by educating myself about Uganda, Rwanda, and some of the surrounding continental or world context, as well as figuring out with Friends there what my role will be at the school, the Upper Nile Institute for Appropriate Learning (UNIFAT), where I will be spending most of my time. While in Uganda and Rwanda I will be traveling with three different groups.

The first group is the Friendly Folk dancers, the national Quaker folk dancing group, that have been invited by Quakers in Rwanda to come and do a tour. The Friendly Folk Dancers touring is a dancing ministry toward creating a world community and interconnecting the world”s peoples through international folk dancing.  Every time we dance a dance from another culture we are performing an act of peace. The tour performances include suites or sets of dances from cultures or nations that have been or are at war. Each set is introduced and explained as a prayer for peace. I will tour with the Friendly Folk dancers in Rwanda for 11 days.

The second group is Friends from Philadelphia going to the school Upper Nile Institute for Appropriate Technology, UNIFAT. This group will be led by Chuck Esser who has a long standing supportive relationship with Abitimo the woman who started the school in 1986. It is at Chuck and his partner Pamela’s home where I will be staying in Philadelphia to prepare before I leave for my trip. Originally Abitimo started the school for AIDS and war orphans in 1986, in recent years there have been returning orphaned child soldiers. While there I hope to help with peer counseling or co-counseling development, if possible facilitating Alternatives to Violence workshops, organizing games and art projects with the children, helping with conversational English, meeting people, building relationships, learning a local language, and spending time each day keeping a log of my time there to be able to share my stories with others. I will be at the school for 2 and a half months. I will be with that group in the beginning until they leave on March 12, and I will stay until May 12.

The third group I plan on participating with is the African Great Lakes Initiative, a group that does Alternatives to Violence workshops, the workshop that I do in North Sumatra, Aceh, and Java, in Burundi, Congo, Uganda, Rwanda, and Kenya. From the school UNIFAT sometime during my time there I will make a trip to Rwanda in order to participate with some of the African Great Lakes Initiative work. The African Great Lakes Initiative has a workshop they do, Healing and Rebuilding Our Communites, HROC, that I plan on attending in Rwanda. I hope to gather useful material and experience from that workshop and bring it to the work of developing something with the people in Aceh and North Sumatra in July. The people in Aceh and North Sumatra that we work with have expressed the need for reconciliation and rebuilding work. While there in Rwanda I also will spend a few days meeting the staff, sharing with them stories from Indonesia and the United States, seeing their home and making memories of my own to bring back stories to Indonesia and the United States.

The week after I arrive home from this journey I hope to rest and do some post-trip reflection before attending George Lackey”s Super Training with Training for Change in Philadelphia June 4 – 23, 2008. If all goes well with visa application, the Indonesia Initiative Coordinator Ferrizal, will be joining me for this training and I will translate for him. Then we will return to Indonesia for a bit of a rest before we take on a series of Alternatives to Violence workshops and work together to develop an approach to trauma recovery that suits the situation and culture of northeast Aceh and North Sumatra. AGLI”s Healing and Rebuilding Our Communities workshop takes a community approach that hopefully will help me to better support Indonesians who are working to heal from the traumas of war.

Please come back to this site for more updates. To find out more about some of the organizations or workshops I mention look them up online at the websites listed below.

WEBSITES

My traveling news updates–http://www.consciencestudio.com/travel

Friendly Folk Dancers–http://www.infinitejoy.com/ffd/

Upper Nile Institute for Appropriate Technology–http://www.friendsofunifat.org/

African Great Lakes Initiative–http://www.aglionline.org/

Training for Change–http://trainingforchange.org/

Indonesia Initiative and Alternatives To Violence–http://www.consciencestudio.com/

Rochester, New York

By Nadine Hoover on October 04, 2007

Dear Friends,

I came back from a month in Indonesia and went straight to Farmington-Scipio Regional Meeting (western NY Quakers), did massage for four days and then facilitated the Building a Conscience Movement conference in Rochester.

The news as of June 2007 is:

Al-Falah School teachers are doing incredibly well–they did developmental portfolio”s for the end-of-the-year parent-teacher conferences and were thrilled. One teacher said, “You”ve been telling us to do this for ten years. We finally did it and we can see!!! I can see the kid”s work and development over the year. It”s so exciting and amazing.”‘, ‘

Al-Munawwarah Preschool in North Sumatra is doing well, yet the teachers have no salaries and Open University’s Distance Learning Post was closed. They now have to travel to campus, which costs as much as tuition and books combined. So they began rotating who went to campus and trying to bring the others along, but that”s not working. So we decided to let them borrow next year”s educational funds to begin carp farming pools at their homes–if successful, it will cover their transport through the following two years and give them salaries after they complete their degrees.

Al-Husni Preschool in East Aceh is wavering. International NGOs throw large sums of money and every once in awhile Tengku Syarwani has gotten a chunk. The scales are so far off—the simplicity of their village is oppressive, but the NGO funds are exorbitant. Their image of what we can do tends to fly away. I”m letting them take some time to consider simple ways we can make a difference for the children and teachers.

<%image(20071004-Untitled1.png|321|241|Elementary students in Barak Induk, North Sumatra who receive no state aid but asked for books. Dean Hoover left them puzzles.)%>

A Conscience Workshop was held for one day in North Sumatra with the staff of the Village Enlightenment Foundation. It was very new ways of thinking for them.

A Friends Peace Team office was established in the capitol of East Aceh, Langsa, in conjunction with the Forum for the Poorest of the Poor (Forum Peduli Rakyat Miskin FPRM). A laptop computer was donated to support administration and tracking of AVP workshops. We located an office, but when the landlord heard foreigners were involved he raised the rent. We are still searching for a place. Ferry has been hired part-time to support office work and assist with translating materials for AVP, CCRC, trauma recovery and conscience.

Alternatives to Violence Training for Facilitators was held in East Aceh. Most of the senior facilitators couldn”t join us because a “People-to-People” exchange with Cambodia and Sri Lanka had been postponed a month and collided with our schedule. We did meet with the People-to-People group in East Aceh, which was exciting. We also trained six new facilitators from North Sumatra, three from the refugee camp in the bio-reserve, and three from Aceh.

Two AVP Basic Workshops were held in Barak Induk, North Sumatra, a camp of Javanese run out of East Aceh who are living in an international bio-reserve, Loeser, in North Sumatra, unrecognized by any government. Two AVP Basic Workshops also were held in Deli Serdang, North Sumatra, with women day laborers from the palm oil plantations and men, many of whom were alcoholics. Another AVP Basic Workshop was held in Yogyakarta, Central Java with national peace and legal aid activists.

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An initial trauma recovery workshop was planned and discussed. It never occurred because limited energy, but the ideas were shared and one-on-one sessions were conducted with a number of people. We anticipate continuing to develop the FPT office as a safe house for those suffering from traumatic stress.

The repeated threat of environmental disaster, such as the flood at the beginning of this year, is inescapable. Illegal logging strips the rainforest and massive palm oil plantations move in. Palm has encroached on the international bio-reserve up to two to nine kilometers the entire circumference of the bio-reserve. Illegal logging is causing whole sides of mountains to fall off and wash muck over large areas downstream. We have unique contacts from local residents to national officials to United Nations staff. Dealing with this issue becomes sin-qua-non to doing any other work. Therefore, we hope to promote a proposal for resolution to this issue that has support from government, residents and displaced people.

<%image(20071004-Untitled3.png|419|314|Entrance to Leuser International Bio-Reserve in North Sumatra with palm planted as far as the eye can see. Palm is not a forest tree; does not retain water or soil.)%>

The Building a Conscience Movement conference in Rochester was wonderful. Alan Gamble, National Campaign for a Peace Tax Fund, and Derek Brett, Conscience and Peace Tax International, were with us the whole weekend. We are calling conscientious objectors to war to write a statement and to send it to your local newspapers, representatives and senators and the National Campaign for a Peace Tax Fund. This year, while Charlie Rangel is the chair of Ways and Means, is a unique window of opportunity. Please consider writing your own statement of conscience and sending or hand delivering it and if you’re seeking action beyond that, help five others do the same.

What a wonderful world we live in.

Much love, Nadine

Rochester, New York

By Nadine Hoover on January 25, 2007

I left Jakarta on the 25th and arrived Friday the 26th  at nearly 4:00pm and went straight to Karen Reixach”s for a meeting of the Conscience and War Committee for Farmington-Scipio Regional Meeting. The following day, Saturday, we had Winter Gathering of FSRM, who gave us $1,000 to assist the flood victims in Tamiang. Also Ly Keese and Jane Simkin said they would like to go to QUNO with me. We should remember to invite Saiful Mahdi at Cornell University also.

Jakarta

By Nadine Hoover on January 23, 2007

I left early in the morning for Jakarta. I rested for the day. I was exhausted. I felt badly because the next morning when I called Ibu Wismi I found out she was on her way to the airport to fly to Padang, so I was not able to meet with her. I did go over to Al-Falah School the following day and spent the day observing the school and collecting references for Jav. I was finally able to get through to the Natural Materials (Messy) Play Center teacher. I walked through his center after he was all set up and pointed out to him how he had older children in the center. There were plenty of play spaces to choose from, but their social development was higher, so they wanted to work in groups. A couple of the group spaces had activities that were so developmentally low that the children playing in the did not play in groups, but in singles or parallel. Therefore there were only two stations the kids could choose from. All the other spaces were empty and the kids were all huddled around two spaces. He lit up and said he could see what I was saying. We have been telling him this for years, but he finally got it. We will see next time I go if he really understood or not and could integrate it into his behavior.

I met with Pak Andreas Wednesday evening at the airport. He was on his way to Papua. We talked about the SHEEP staff and the office in East Aceh. He gives great attention to the gradual development of each of his staff members. He is very interested in my comments about brain development and what he can realistically expect and what he can’t. It also led him to say how before he was not interested in education, but the longer he works on community development issues, the more he ends up coming back to questions of educational development. He asked a lot of questions about the early childhood development work we are doing.

He has been asked to assist a foundation in Jogjakarta that has 63 schools. His son goes to one of these schools. He said, “But Nadine, they have all gone to the U.S. and to Europe and been educated there. What’s the difference?” I understood immediately. I told him I wondered the same thing when Wismi and I began to establish Al-Falah School. I imagined the problem was that everything was here, there just wasn’t the experience of how to put it together and make it run. Like having all the parts to a car in a pile in the middle of the road and saying, “Tell me what we don’t have! It’s all here.” “Yes, but it’s not really a car if you don’t put it together so it can run down the road!”

After working on Al-Falah just a short time, I realized that there is another problem. Universities teach theory, but there is a tremendous amount of development in the U.S. and Europe that use but is not the same as the universities and theory. There are the teacher associations, publishers, and materials suppliers. These other actors do a great deal of research and development in their own areas. This research is available to teachers through their products, journals, conferences and so forth. This R&D in practice comes around to inform the theory taught in the universities, but they do not stand alone. In Indonesia people do not support their associations, publishers and materials suppliers. Government, especially the Ministry of National Education, is too corrupt to support a real technical assistance capacity. They are not supporting the translation, printing and distribution of books. They are not ensuring the availability of educational materials. After twelve years of trying to develop a supplier of preschool blocks and beads and laces, and successes at times, I still cannot purchase them in Indonesia right now. Indonesia not only has to build better schools, they have to build associations, publishers and materials suppliers and a culture of honesty that wants to and will support them. He was extremely interested.

I spent the next day resting, writing, packing and going to the airport. I did get to meet with Pak Indra. He was replaced as the head of the National Coordinating Office for Disaster Relief by a Two-Star General and his crew, but they forgot to decommission his position, so he still has his position, but without any responsibility. He still goes to the office, but it is very laid back. If he does not have a position in February, he will automatically retire at 56 years old.

Books for Jav

Scaffolding Children’s Learning Berk & Winsler

Developmentally Appropriate Practice in Early Childhood Programs

Florida School Readiness Performance Standards (on the web)

More Than ABCs

Play and Lives of Children Rogers & Sawyers

Your Baby’s First Year week-by-week Glade Curtis MS

Senapal, Langkak, N. Sumatra

By Nadine Hoover on January 22, 2007

Ririn, Sisto and I left early. We took a boat out of Jaring Halus and Pak Pri met us at the dock. We drove up into the mountains of Langkat where the head of the flooding started there. I asked them who was logging so heavily and replacing the forest with palm oil. There was a murmur. “It’s better if you don’t know. … We shouldn’t tell her that. … It won’t be safe for her. “ They were quite concerne3d. It turned out that one of our friends with a friend of his had tried to expose illegal logging activities, but after they got one article in the newspaper his friend was found dead in the river and he went into hiding for over two years. As opposed to Tamiang, the names of Andri Tanoto and Acang did not come up. The names that arose in North Sumatra were from the military command, Pak Anip, who used to be the military commander and now is the Director of PERBAKIN, the Association in Indonesian Snipers, in Medan. He runs PT. Anugrah Langkat Makmur. Also the Batak, Pak Lintong of PT. Rapala and a Chinese man behind PT. Karimun were mentioned in conversations as behind much of the logging in the area. Signs entering most of the palm oil plantation areas confirmed the PT names.

We arrived at the most remote camp. People were all over in tents. Food supplies and water were coming in, but again, only at the camps. If people went back to their villages, it took awhile to walk and if they were not present at the distribution in the camp, they did not get any rations. Also the wells had not been cleaned at the villages, so there was often no water.

We hiked up the mountain to the most remote villages—Aras Napal Kanan and Aras Napal Kiri—and went to the church where a couple hundred villagers had climbed up into the open air rafters and hid from the water. Children, elderly, everyone climbed up twenty or thirty feet and spread boards between the rafters. It looked terrifying. They were up there two days and two nights. These two villages are fiercely independent and don’t want to ask for help, but the men say that want to rebuild homes so they can leave their wives and children safe and can go down to work. It will be several months before they can work their fields again—the sediment will have to harden some. All the fields have three feet of sediment covering them. It has dried out the chocolate plants and killed the fruit trees. If their families are safe, they can go to work to replace the things in their homes. They are scavenging for tin for roofs and have found a lot, but not enough for all the houses. They have lumber—they looked to the river and all around them where the illegal logs were jammed and strewn around. They are cutting lumber, but they need nails. Aras Napal Kanan has 68 households and Aras Napal Kiri has 94 households. Amazingly, no one died in the flood, but there are 162 homes to rebuild. This would take about 20 million rupiah for nails for 150 homes. They also estimated that they need about 30-50 million rupiah for metal roofing, depending on what they can scavenge. They also said that if there were some funds for ten carpenters for forty days (40,000 rph or $4.50 per day) to help them, the job would go so much faster, but that would take about 16 million rupiah.

I left 10 million for the nails and said I would try to collect some more. Farmington-Scipio Regional Meeting offered another $1,000 upon my return and I sent $1,280 immediately upon my return. This will go along way in rebuilding their homes. I wish we had the $ 9,000 to meet these minimal needs that would make their recovery so much swifter, but we use what we have. That’s what they always say to me, “We use what we have.” I smile, “Yes, we use what we have.” They clearly said, though, that the most amazing thing for them was that I came to their village and walked all the way out there. I had been to the church that sheltered them and kept them alive in the rafters. They said their county officials had not even come to their village. No one had, except us. This meat a great deal to them. They said, “Imagine, even our own village head has not been out to the village since the flood. Imagine how we feel. Have we been completely abandoned?” But they were in great spirits when I left them and were hopeful that they could get to work and rebuild their lives.

As we came off the mountain and drove to Medan, we talked about many things including Quakerism. We talked about the work we are doing in the US around the School of the Americas Watch, conscientious objection to military taxation case of Dan Jenkins, the exploration of a group legal action, considering the revoking of the personhood of corporations. They were fascinated by all these things, but mostly wanted to know if we could do a workshop on Quakerism when we returned.

Friends in Aceh had asked for a similar thing, but in the form of a workshop on discerning conscience. We discussed the conscience work and the possibilities of opening a Conscience Studio in East Aceh. They mentioned that the leading military general running for office was just announcing a Conscience Party. I remembered my friend, Mia Shargel in Tallahassee Florida who says words are like dirty tea cups, once used for coffee, the tea is never the same. It’s a shame when words are used contrary to their meaning. We decided it was okay to go ahead using the language since it was what we actually meant.

A schedule might include:

Jaring Halus, North Sumatra

By Nadine Hoover on January 21, 2007

The next morning I left very early for Jaring Halus. Putra escorted me. It was not really necessary, but it was polite and gave us a chance to talk. The group of AVP facilitators felt that if we were to support a person part time to help arrange and organize AVP workshops and keep the records and contact lists, it should be Putra, because he does not have other work. I told him that I would not support that. He did not have his feet on the ground and needed to plant himself somewhere. His family is still in Pidie. He has a new baby. He has no steady employment. He did could not rely on AVP and needed to establish himself somehow. He agreed and said he was looking into becoming a distributor of computer supplies such as inks and USBs. They are small and easily managed. He could work half time and spend the other half time doing humanitarian work. He has a friend from elementary school who is distributing these materials nationally and would supply him for East Aceh if Putra wanted. He just needed ten million rupiah to get started. His father was trying to collect it for him, but he wasn’t sure when the family could put that kind of money together. He understood, though was disappointed that I would not rely on him to organize AVP workshops for the time being.

I met the Al-Munawwarah teachers from Jaring Halus in Stabat. Wati is the Director of the preschool and is an elementary school teacher as well. She is doing a great job as the Director of the school and is responsible for the religious education and Readiness Center at the school, although now she has added a teacher, Eli, to assist with the Readiness Center. Wati is going to school in Medan for religious studies in an intensive weekend program. She goes to the city of Medan all day Saturday and Sunday.

They said they were really hoping that Eli could go to school with them as well, but weren’t sure if I could find one more person to assist Eli with the costs of college.

Ririn is a staff member of YSKD and has been the major community organizer from the beginning to support these teachers and their schooling. Ririn is going to school in Medan also for psychology in an intensive weekend program. She lives near the city of Medan and goes to school all day Saturday and Sunday.

Nur Aida was not with us in Stabat because she had just given birth. She runs the Art Center at the school and works on structured construction with the children. She is going to school at the University Budidaya in Binjai, closer than Medan, for language studies. There are no early childhood degrees in Indonesia, so they take what classes they can and get what training opportunities they can, but the degree will be in language studies. This is the case for all the following:

Ratna is responsible for the Dramatic Play Center and understanding social development, Muna is responsible for the Block Center and structured construction play as well as micro play, and Imah is responsible for the Natural Materials Center and sensorimotor development. They work together on understanding the developmental needs of young children and supporting each other in their college studies. They carried themselves much more confidently than I had seen in the past and they spoke much more easily in public.

They had come to the mainland to see if they could get their grades for the past semester to give to me, but they had not been released yet.  The branch office near the mainland for them had just been closed down. The government says there will be no more use of branch offices. So, they have to go to the regional office, which is two hours for them. They clearly saw this as an added burden, but it didn’t seem to hang them up at all. They were clearly very engaged and enthusiastic about their studies. They said they used to get very tired, but they didn’t get so tired any more. I explained that the brain was a muscle and it was like learning to run a marathon, they had to work up to it. They laughed and said that was what if felt like.

Six of the teachers (Nur Aida had just given birth and was not with them, but Eli was with them) and I went to a kitchen/household supply store. They had said they were not using a sand table because they couldn’t keep the cats and animals out of it. But they have a whole beach. I asked if they had sieves. They said no. So we went to look for a sieve. When we got to the store, the only “sieves” they had were tea strainers. But I looked around and saw many plastic basics and other items that could be used as sieve, although not “official sieves.” I began with the Socratic method. Asking them questions about what they might use from the store and how, how many they would need and why, what colors they might choose and why. We spent three or four hours in this very cramped store talking to the teachers about the stages of development of young children and how to support them. The family that owned the store was very interested. And customers lingered and listened in on the lessons. It was great fun and they learned a lot!

We then went out to Jaring Halus. Al-Munawwarah Preschool looks to be in very good shape, well used and not needing a make over to pretend they’re doing things they’re not. That evening the parents and families of the teachers going to college all came to the school to say thank you to us for sending a family member to college. They never imagined that would happen in their families. It was nice to meet their parents. The teachers all wrote letters and sent pictures of themselves. They all said that English was their hardest subject. I suggested that Ririn from the Village Enlightenment Foundation (YSKD) teach them to use email and I could look for correspondents who would write no more than two sentences and they could respond with no more than two sentences. That way it wouldn’t be overwhelming. They were ecstatic.

Langsa, East Aceh

By Nadine Hoover on January 20, 2007

I met Prof. Dr. Syafriruddin, MM in Langsa (0811605087), the former head of public health. He had just resigned because of the corruption. He showed me his school for children who were conflict victims. It is a simple, but beautiful place housing a couple hundred children in middle and high school.

Jufri was taking to Pak Syafri about going to Medan to get an infant incubator for East Aceh Public Health Unit along the northern shoreline. He had heard that they could get one for about $750, but it turned out that it costs more like $1,600. He did have that much money so he was reporting that they did not get one. Pak Syafri confirmed, “Yes, it would cost over $1,500.” I asked about the size of one and wondered whether or not we could find one in the US that I could bring with me when I go sometime. You never know until you try and ask.

He is extremely concerned about the illegal logging of the area. His proposal is that tendering of contracts to large contracts for forest maintenance be halted immediately and villagers be given “rights of use” for national forest land. They would not have “rights of ownership” as the forest would remain nationally owned. They could be given forest tree seedlings, told how to care for them and the size they have to be before they can be harvested. It is easy to patrol and see who has harvested trees that are too small. They would then lose their rights of use for the plot. This could be done on a massive scale through the National Forest Ministry and the Badan Sar Nasional under BAKORNAS and MENKOKESRA. Loeser has tree stock, but no program to distribute them among the people, so Pak Syafri sends people over to get tree stock and to take it out to villagers to plant. I saw them in the morning, even on Sunday morning, arrive at the SHEEP office to coordinate taking tree stock out to villagers to plant. Pak Syafri said that Loeser International is made up of about seven European nations; he thought they included France, Germany, England, and Holland, but could not remember which countries exactly. They patrol the area on elephants. They know what is going on, but do nothing.

I spoke to him about many topics, including ceramics. He has a friend who ran a pottery before the war shut them down. People with skills and kilns still remain and they would certainly like to get up and going again. I told him about Reid Harvey from Alfred University. He had developed a water filter treated with silver nitrate that can clean particles and bacteria out of the water. One filter can be used per household. They were producing the filters in Kenya for about three US dollars. He was very pleased, and kept saying if we could produce it for even ten US dollars that would be great. He has a very strong altruistic streak, but he is still a businessman and increasing the price to “what the market would bear” made sense to him. To me the difference between three and ten dollars for the poorest of the poor is enormous! [I later spoke to Andreas about this in Jogjakarta as well. Andreas and Syafri are acquainted.]

Then I rested. Walking through the muck up in the heat had taken a lot out of me. I took the day to talk with staff at the SHEEP office, buy bags to bring home to offer in exchange for contributions, and to do some laundry. They also took the opportunity to <b>show me an office</b> they would like to rent in Langsa. It is around the corner from the SHEEP office on the main road. It could serve as an office for the Alternatives to Violence workshops and other activities we are doing such as the early childhood development, discussions with the United Nations on illegal logging and arms trading, and the development and expression of conscience. The Forum for the Poorest of the Poor (FPRM) would appreciate sharing and office, but they have no funds. Purtra, Syarwani, Fachlarrazi and other AVP facilitators would like to have an office to gather and work out of as well. They could use if for AVP workshops on a regular basis and other workshops. They have even considered a café in the front, since it is on a main drag. I told them I would have to take this to AVP for the group to consider. It would be ten million rupiah (9,000 to US$1), so that’s just over $1,000 for one year. FPRM says they would take care of all the monthly expense.

Tamiang, Flood Area

By Nadine Hoover on January 19, 2007

The next day Tarmizi, Director of the Aceh People’s Forum (APF), came down from Banda Aceh with his entourage. He is dressed like Sponge Bob, laughs a lot and acts like a child. But he manages large operations and puts lots of former human rights activists to work. I went back to Tamiang with him. We met with Oxfam officials. It seems the Oxfam team changes every time they arrive. They had told the Indonesians that they would only help in the camps, schools and clinics, not in the villages. The Indonesians, including Jufri, Putra and many of our friends were primarily concerned about cleaning the wells in the village. People who went back to clean up and rebuild had no water and the sediment in the wells were hardening up, which would require re-drilling rather than just pumping out the muck. Four of the local NGO staff had been trained along with 28 villagers. They just did not have pumps.

After much misinformation, I found CHF, Community, Habitat and Finance out of New York. They had five pumps in Banda Aceh they could loan. They wrote a contract on the spot and Jufri signed it. We called APF staff in Banda Aceh. They were sending another car down the next day and could bring the pumps. Oxfam, who were funding the local Indonesians to work, protested when they heard. We have five pumps here in that storeroom. I asked why the pumps were not brought out. They would not tell me that they had decided not to work in villages, since there on the ground it was apparent to observers that that was the most needed activity. Their boss said the pumps were electric. So I found them three generators. Once the generators were secured, their second in command said they were not electric. So why were they not released? Well they had a policy not to intrude, so the villagers had to request the pumps and none of them had. In addition, they did not want to spoil the villagers, so they would have to provide their own gasoline. Since they couldn’t do that, the pumps had not been released. I went to the Indonesians, gave them money for the gasoline to run the pumps and told them to request the additional pumps from Oxfam. We therefore got ten pumps running within a couple days.

They told me that Saiful Mahdi of the Aceh Institute, a think tank and research institute in Banda Aceh, had gotten a scholarship to go to graduate school at Cornell University. We talked about wanting to do a memorial writing on a few people who were lost in the tsunami such as Pak Arief and the woman attorney who always came, even in the middle of the night. I was thinking that would be a great job for the Aceh Institute. But there were more immediate matters of the flooding from illegal logging that sees no end in sight. Maybe Saiful would come to QUNO with us.

Tamiang, Flood Area

By Nadine Hoover on January 18, 2007

I woke up to Andi! Andi is a reporter from Pidie. He is a tremendous organizer in support of conflict victims. He has had a hard time adjusting to the large funds flowing through Aceh, but he seems to be doing well.

In Tamiang where the flooding had been the worst, we saw villagers camped in the Chinese cemetery, which was on higher ground. The Chinese community has been very supportive and allowed them to stay there and even sent some aid. We walked to the river to see the sediment that is all over everything and the logs that came down the river. More than the water of the flood, the damage was created by the logs and sediment carried down by the waters overflowing the banks of the river. Past flood had brought water, but never this type of muck. The sediment was at least three feet deep, covering homes, wells, and fields. The chocolate trees had dried up and died. The durian and other fruit trees were dying. The fields would be impossible to work for months. And the logs were enormous. The villagers who had lost homes were already scavenging wood and cutting the logs to rebuild with.

The flood was the result of a number of factors. First the river was full of logs, some villagers estimated twelve kilometers of logs that had not been brought down from Trienggulun (3-8 hours up river). During the rains, the logs caught on bridges and back up, pressing the water over the banks into the palm tree plantations. The pressure for wood to rebuild homes and boats after the tsunami is huge. In the areas where the war was the worst, people had been pressed off the land and social systems had broken down. These became areas where the big loggers could come in and systematically deforest. In place of the forest, they have planted palm for palm oil. As a stood on one bluff, I could see mountain after mountain after mountain and as far as the eye could see it was palm trees, not forest. They water from the flood was pressed into these palm tree plantations. Palm does not hold water or dirt. The water washed the dirt down into towns and roads.

This is true all the way into the Loeser international bio-reserve. They use elephants to patrol the edges of the Loeser reserve to keep villagers out, but not the large business who are the ones deforesting on a massive scale. I got a photograph on one road into Loeser with the sign on the side of the road “Entering Loeser” and as far as one can see down the road into Loeser it is palm trees on the top of the mountain in the middle of the rain forest!

In addition there were two lakes at the top of the mountain, man-made at the time of the Dutch occupation. One of the lakes broke and added all that water to the flood. The other one people are afraid will also break in the future.

There have always been floods, it’s just that the water used to be clean and now it brings with it feet of sediment. The history as they remembered it was:

1926 Water line at 30 cm with clear water

1963 Water line at 20 cm with clear water

1973 Water line at 30 cm with clear water

1995/96 Water line at 100 cm with dirty, itchy water

2005 Water line at 80 cm with dirty, itchy water

2006 Water line at 350-400 cm with dirty, itchy water & sediment taking lives & homes

Bagok, East Aceh

By Nadine Hoover on January 17, 2007

Petrus, Rina and I spent the morning talking while we waited for Jufri. They asked if we were considering opening an office here. It was becoming a challenge. If we came twice a year for four or five weeks and there were a few weeks of preparation and a weeks of closure and follow up that was still about four months of the year that someone had to be attending to our needs and concerns nearly full time and for two or three of those months it was numerous people. I understood that we had to do a lot while we were there since we couldn’t do it over the weekends spread out over time. I also have been feeling the pressure of arriving and having o find all the old materials because there is not a particular place to keep things. In the past two years, there has been a tsunami, an 8.9 Richter-scale earthquake and major flooding. People are hard up and there’s not a lot of “extra” around. The Forum for the Poorest of the Poor (FPRM) could use an office on a daily basis and could keep an office up. Then it could be used for the monthly refresher meetings and workshops. They talked about all the people and groups who could use the office. Syarwani already has a position with SHEEP. Putra is working for Aceh People’s Forum/Oxfam, but that’s only temporary. He’s really displaced from Pidie and isn’t stable yet. He needs his own time and focus. That leaves Ferry. He’s been the most dedicated and has the best natural command and understanding of the AVP material. He also works for FPRM, that needs an office. It took awhile to think this all through.

Tengku Syarwani was at the SHEEP office when I arrived and excused himself quickly. The next morning we went to Bagok to the <b>Al-Husni Preschool</b>. It turns out he had rushed home to have the teachers clean up the school. I am so sorry I was not able to see it in its usual state. The teachers are still working for free, so I don’t know how much they are actually teaching. The village seems divided. I asked the teachers how many of the preschool children in the village were coming to the school and they said about half. To me that means half the village is supporting this and half is not. Syarwani has been replaced as the Imam at the pesantren. It seems to be a mutual agreement that he is traveling too much and wants to travel and they need an Imam that will be there more. He got money from the Bureau for Rehabilitation and Reconstruction to build a library in the village. It is very small, but the materials and style of construction are very flashy. It stands out in the village as reeking of money and not belonging. He says they say he must move the preschool off the pesantren grounds within a month. He showed my land he wishes to purchase for 15 million rupiah and then build a school on it for another 30 million or so. I was stunned and did not know what to say. The next day I tried to get contact him, but he was off to Banda Aceh and I was not able to speak to him again before I left. I left him a message that I was not able to support a school in that manner. It needed to belong to the community. They needed to feel moved to give the land to the school, not sell it. I felt he needed to return to his community and build relationships there and seek ways to support his teachers, not support his buildings alone.

In retrospect we did not adhere to any protocol. We did not stop by the village head’s house, although I stayed there for a week the last time I was there. They tried to “hide” me in the car, which is ridiculous since I’m sure the whole town knew I was there.

I met with the teachers. We did training on social development and dramatic play center and how to keep the children’s interest. I used examples of adding a shop, a farm, a sewing area in the living room and more props. I wish I’d suggested a Mosque. We talked about vocabulary with the blocks and painting every day for the developmentally young children. We talked about keeping examples of developmental progress on each kid and posting the stages of development in the centers up high for the teachers. We talked about bringing some of the poster for the kids down to their eye level. We talked about their need for food coloring to make paint and play dough (theirs is dry powder and doesn’t mix well). Dramatic play had the weakest teacher as usual. They have no sand table and virtually no m thought icro play. The teachers themselves have little representational. I told them they must all draw with all the various materials, not as a competition on the outcome but on the feeling of the material. Show up, pay attention, tell the truth and don’t be attached to the outcome.

Others from Simpang Ulim, a town in the far north of East Aceh, were there because they heard that I was coming. They are providing activities for small children and wish they could get training too. Pak Is from JRS was there; he says he wants to learn for Simpang Ulim, but he does not listen. He and Agus want to join SHEEP. If we did some more training we should invite them, especially Agus from Simpang Ulim and Ferry from the Forum of the Poorest of the Poor.

Their supplies provided by Abe Kenmore through Paper and Pencils for All are holding up well and they still have $100 left of the $300. They said their biggest problem was food coloring. They can only get powder and it doesn’t mix well for play dough, paint, and finger paint. The liquid type from Jakarta was much better.

Wiza and Ayub were working with Syarwani. The <b>chicken coup</b> I had left the funds for Ayub to build had not been successful. BRR had come into their community of Idi Cut with lots of money and jobs and taken the labor away. The BRR work will be short lived compared to the chicken coup, but young men were lured away. Disease had also struck the chicken coup a couple of times. Ayub said he would be holding a chicken and it would die right there in his hand. It was spooky. He did not understand and wondered if it was the land or being so close to the sea. So he divided the chickens. One third of them are at the pesantren in Bagok now, some are still in Idi Cut and some went to another one of Ayub’s friends. They are being well cared for, but were not able to provide the young men who get sick at sea a method for long-term employment.

Langsa, East Aceh

By Nadine Hoover on January 16, 2007

Plane cancellations along the way made the trip from Rochester, New York to Medan North Sumatra extra long, leaving January 13th and arriving the 16th and loosing a day at the dateline to boot. Left my power cord at Gate B9 in Rochester. At JFK they wanted $89.95 to replace it! Ah, well.

I found my own way to the moneychanger and bartered a fairly good price for the dollars I had brought; I saved about $200 in the barter. The owner called a motorcycle rickshaw to take me on to Kamagoro on Jl. Gajah Mada, the group car rentals to East Aceh. They rent out mini vans for 50,000 Rph per person for door-to-door service. I rode the five hours to Langsa, East Aceh with six other people and the driver. The driver said all the flooding was because of illegal logging that goes into the international bio-reserve in Langkat.

I asked if the conflict refugees were hit by the flood. He said, “No, there are no conflict refugees anymore. There used to be tsunami refugees, but now they are called flood refugees.” He spoke like these were news seasons, not like they were real people who still exist and don’t just disappear because the media is done with them.

I was greeted warmly at the door by Jufri, Petrus, Rina, Ferry, Nasruddin and Junaidi all waiting at the <b>SHEEP office</b>. His family is in Jogjakarta and he gets to go home every couple of months. He is trying to coach Jufri to take over the office after another year or so. He was so glad that Rina was still there from Jogja as well. Rina has a new baby, Jorie, with Dimas, SHEEP video documenter. Rina is organizing the “People-to-People” exchange with Bob and Helen Clark, which went independent after American Friends Service Committee did not renew their contract. They have tried to keep it alive. Rina will be going to Canada next month for fundraising for People-to-People. Maybe we could meet up there. She wishes to participate in the next round of Alternatives to Violence workshops, so she’s hoping we can work out the schedules to not conflict in April. We talked about the staff of SHEEP in East Aceh and how the office was going.

The first topic of conversation was the human rights violations and how Jufri said that he had been encouraged by so many to get together people to take their case to the courts. When the crack down came and he was smuggled out of Aceh, he remembers that the first day in Jakarta all those people who had encouraged him and thought it was so cool he had risked his life and the lives of the 178 people who he found to go public were too scared to pick him up at the airport. Only the foreigners from Peace Brigades International would come to the airport to pick him up. But they wouldn’t let him sleep at their house. He went to others, but they said, “Who sent you here?” They finally let him stay, but not right away or easily. Then the government offered reparations for dropping the case. Twenty-five million rupiah ($2,800) per person, so they took it. Even the key witnesses were considered victims by the government for having witnessed such atrocities and given money, which they took and left the case. No witnesses, no testimony, no community, no justice. They talked a long time about local activists who are now taking non-governmental (charitable) organizations’ project money and no longer speaking about the human rights abuses or of the villagers, they just talk about mandates, targets and money.

They talked about the meeting they had just been at of international NGOs who talked of all their accomplishments. Nasruddin spoke up and talked about all the things the local NGO had done, the Forum for the Poorest of the Poor, which exceeded even Oxfam and was done with almost no money. He talked about how the voice of the people was not being heard at this meeting. How they were only serving the refugee camps, but what about those who were in their villages trying to clean up with no drinking water and no food. Giving people water and food at the camps keeps them there. But the NGOs said that serving them outside the camps was outside their mandate. They supported refugee camps, not homeless people in their villages. They asked me if I had seven million rupiah each for two machines ad 50,000rph/day per worker for two workers to run the machines so they could clean wells in the villages.

Then Jufri began to lament his own culture and how he was getting sick of working with the Acehnese. In Central Java, when he was in exile and working with SHEEP there, people came out early to meet them and stayed late into the night to ask questions. The Acehnese weren’t doing this. They seemed to have no energy.

Nasruddin had gone to a workshop in Java run by a Vietnamese man. The other participants were excited and engaged and the leader came to the Acehnese and asked them why they were so unengaged. They talked for a long time and then the facilitator realized they’d come from a war zone. He gave them his consulting fee and sent them for a vacation to Bandung. Then found more money and extended their vacation. After awhile, Nasruddin said he began to feel better.

Thirty years of war. The trauma is so deep. Is the lethargy culture or is it trauma? Is it “real” Acehnese culture or one that is a result of years of war? They are concerned about how to approach villages and make any real changes. How do you connect the physical immediate needs to the longer-term principles? How do you not get into the handout-entitlement mentality? How do you do it with people displaced by a war, tsunami and flood? How do you partition time and resources? What will happen when there’s no more funds for the gas to run the water machines and they take them away and no longer distribute water? Why is Oxfam just distributing water and not cleaning wells?

Rochester, New York

By Nadine Hoover on January 13, 2007

I went up to Rochester late on Friday to work with my friend, Javier Morales on a web site. He opened a website, http://ConscienceStudio.com. We have designed the structure of the website and a logo. We used the bird since Friends Peace Teams used the bird. It seems a bit clique, but it looks nice nonetheless. He also made business cards and letterhead for me with the same logo.

The Conscience Studio is a thing I started on Sunday afternoons for people to gather and to work on issues of conscience at my house. We have been working on the conscience workshops, videos and articles. Alfred is a university town, however, and I end up bringing people along and they are gone before they can do much to really produce. So I have backed off from doing it in my home. But I still like the name and the idea that this is a place to do work, which takes personal time, discipline and vision.