bucking the motorcade

Having hooked up with an NGO here, I have recently moved to Banda Aceh. I should be here for a few months, keeping occupied with a post-conflict project (in addition to the tsunami, Aceh has had 30 years of violence centered around its independence movement) in some of the non-tsunami affected areas. It is great to have a project that allows me to simultaneously feel stimulated (and excited) while also contributing something that helps other people. Too often during my time in Indonesia I have found myself only fulfilling one of these desires.
From time to time I field complaints about this blog, of which one of the leading has to be ‘you never tell us what your living situation is like.’ So, in an attempt to rectify this, let me tell you a bit about my new home in Banda Aceh.

My NGO has put me up in one of their many guesthouses here in town, which means that I have a room to myself in a nice middle class neighborhood. The house backs up to a fairly large mosque, ensuring daily 4:45am wakeup calls, and the neighborhood is largely expatriate (NGO workers), ensuring that they will be especially amplified. My room is massive—king sized bed, dual air conditioners, two makeup tables, three wardrobes—and it feels a bit like sleeping in a vault. My bathroom, private, has hot water, an absolute first for me in Indonesia. Lying in the middle of the bed, I can just get the very side of the mattress with the tips of my fingers. A big bed, but with only one pillow, I am unsure how to handle all the responsibility.

The nature of guesthouse living is that it is difficult to pin down exactly who you live with, since so many consultants, field workers, and members of the downstream branches are shuttling in and out of the head office, but I have taken to (and they to me?) the people that are around on a fixed schedule, the security guards that keep an eye on the place.

If you have ever heard of the ‘compound’ lifestyle of NGO workers, it is true. All of the guesthouses are gated the entire time and it seems as if all of the workers are shuttled everywhere—to and from work, to eat their meals, on personal outings on the weekends—in a fleet of sleek and burly-looking SUVs.

This has been the first thing that I have cropped up against, and my buddies the security guards are less than sure how to handle me. During the first few days as I met each security guard, I would roll out of the house to go get something to eat. Usually I might ask of a place to eat nearby—we bullshit for a little while. The problem always comes when I start to walk out the front gate. These guys, bless them, start to look absolutely apoplectic. They cannot believe that I am not taking a car. To me it seems logical: it seems a bit ridiculous to call a car (they all stand-by at the depot across from the office) to drive me less than a kilometer to get some rice. Mostly though, I do not really relish rolling up to a small little warung in an SUV with blacked out windows; I imagine this has something to do with the community relations troubles that all the NGOs scratch their heads about. Inevitably, a conference ensues, often involving security guards from other guesthouses on my road: Are you afraid? Do you know the way? Won’t you get tired? But, but none of the bules do this! In the end, we usually cobble out some sort of middle ground: he gives me a ride there on his motorbike, while I manage to extract the right to walk back on my own.

It certainly is funny, and probably only further secures my status as one of the crazier bules around, but I think it does say something about the difficult mission that NGO workers face, especially in emergency (of which Aceh is no longer, but was recently) situations where people hit the ground regardless of any linguistic, cultural, or local familiarity. In spite of all the good that they do (which people recognize) you still hear people on both sides complain that things could be better. Locals often do not feel as if their views, status quos, or contributions are accounted for, while NGO workers feel misunderstood and a bit like cash machines (i.e. ‘people only want to see me when they are getting something’). I do not want to sound too judgmental; after all I speak Indonesian and have had the experience of taking care of myself here for a little while, but for me this experience makes me reflect on a few sleek and shiny ways that NGOs could improve upon their relations with the community.