fighting the socialists, in my ceiling

Yet another installment from the situational comedy for everyone:

Stepan: [entering the room] Matthew, ve need to have a conversation about food waste.

Matthew: [incredulous at his good fortune] Awesome.

Stepan: Yes, vee must be so very careful about leaving food out.

Matthew: I could not agree more…

Stepan: …and covering ze rubbish…

Matthew: …Yes, though I think the housekeeper just throws the trash over the wall into the swamp next…

Stepan: [become more clipped, emphatic] because vee vill gets da rats.

Matthew: [after observing a respectful pause commensurate with Stepan’s gravity] That would be a bummer man.

Stepan: And once you gets the rats, then they will go—eh—will go Svedish and live in the ceiling and [staccato] you vill nevah be free of them.

Matthew: [stifling laughter] Wait, so a rat who lives in the ceiling is Swedish?

Stepan: [seriously] Yes, and impossible to get out.

Matthew: Where does that come from? ‘Swedish Rats?’

Stepan: [indulges in a little laugh] Eh—I don’t know. Svedish rats, you know you Americans talk about paying, ah, you know, ah, paying Dutch. Is like these rats, you, ah, you go Dutch. Svesdish, Dutch, what do ve know?

a threat to our way of life

Life in most parts of Indonesia is life with the menagerie. Chickens, cats, water buffaloes, cows, dogs, horses always seem to be around, mostly looking to cross the road. However, there is no animal more of a complete and utter menace to society, no beast on either two legs or four that lacks such a fundamental respect for fellow creation as the goat.

Where to begin? Well, the devoted of you may recall my prior complaints dealing with the goat penchant for inopportune road crossings. Heck, even Slate has run a piece on goats, where the writer and the proprietor of the suspiciously photogenic and Labrador populated ‘Bedlam Farms’ (est. 2003) complains that his goats will not stop jeering him. (Perhaps they know that they are being exploited.) Uncouth or not, surely this is enough exposure for goats?

I say no, readers, and let me tell you why.

More than anything, the entire goat program is based on a simple and utter refusal to acknowledge the limits of good taste. For your average goat, the quest for chaos and disquiet is never completed. Whether it is ‘accidentally’ wandering into the path of an approaching motorist, breaking into even the most secure location, or generally ballyhooing late into the night, a goat is never satisfied. After all, can you ever really trust something with a digestive tract so tenacious that can handle tin, drywall, and parsnips?

This is frighteningly apparent the first time you truly gaze into the subtly askance, completely off-center gaze of a goat, eyes that intone, with fiendish repetition and indefatigable vigor, but one thing: “I am a goat. I am a goat. I am a goat.”

What is more, the goat mind is truly the mind of a mad, mad genius. Confronted by a fenced vegetable patch, the goat not only employs his omnipotent doggedness to break in, but also his calculating shrewdness, leaning and casually butting (miming what the uninitiated interpret as innocent scratching) against the fence. Hours later when the fence crumples, the goat, having prepared long before, just happens to tumble ‘accidentally’ into the veggie patch in question. Throwing the sauciest of ‘if these veggies were not for me, you would have built a better fence’ looks over his shoulder, the goat then proceeds to devour the garden, pausing only to catcall and abuse (with his mouth full) anyone within earshot.

Of course, the goat life is not always vegetable gardens and traffic snarls, and most of the goat schedule is devoted to trotting, trash foraging, and throwing loud mouthed and embittered insults at the good, god-fearing people of their communities. They must be stopped. I have taken to running them down with my bicycle. What will you commit to do today?

meeting with beneficiaries, not always a parade

I have always read about how the Acehnese are an especially proud people. As the first foothold of Islam in Indonesia (it was introduced to maritime communities by Arab and Indian traders who—smartly—married up and down the coast), the Acehnese are prone to self-aggrandizing, nicknaming (in violation of all rules governing nicknaming), for instance, their home ‘the verandah of Mecca.’

International NGOs operating in Aceh cower in fear of so-called ‘social jealousy,’ the term given for the idea that people will get upset when their neighbors have something that they do not have. The first time I heard about this I thought it sounded kind of funny, until I realized the deference and lip service paid to this idea, as it can be wielded by communities to the point of extortion.

Nor does it take a long time on google to be able to dredge up message board posts where Acehnese advocate the expulsion of all foreigners and the sealing of the province’s borders. The most astonishing revelation is that the author then goes on to detail how then utopia will be achieved, social problems will evaporate, and (—the best part) mathematics and science will flourish.

However, in spite of all this, I had yet to internalize how proud these people are until I interviewed some of my organization’s housing beneficiaries.

Perhaps the idea of visiting this village looking for an easy and ‘ready made’ beneficiary story was a bit naïve on my part. Perhaps my colleague’s idea of a ‘funny joke:’ explaining to the beneficiaries that I come from the university where ‘all the wealthiest people send their children,’ did not help me set off on the right foot. Either way, I arrived in this village, about 500 meters from the ocean with a list of questions and a notebook (though I probably could have left the notebook in the truck), brimming with positivity just asking to be squashed.

Spending time in a village is always a trip, whether it is the excitement of the kids, the hilarious supporting cast of livestock, or the utterly troubled looks on the faces of the babies (probably my favorite part). On this particular visit I met with several mothers in the village’s communal pavilion like structure, as particularly mangy chickens ran around my feet (which I tried to discreetly keep off the ground).

Things did not get off to a really good start, as apparently most of the people in the village were unhappy because some people in the next village over had bigger houses, courtesy of another NGO. The people also refused to paint their houses, insisting that they would only pick the colors they wanted while the organization was responsible for the painting. Apparently a disagreement had ensued.

To say a few things about the houses, they are full wood stilted structures, designed with traditional architecture in mind. They have three bedrooms, a kitchen, and a ‘living room’ that runs the length of the house. As a beneficiary, albeit in a different village explained to me, “In my house before, you had to sit this close to the television [indicating a distance of about 1 meter with his hands], but now you can sit much further back [about 3 meters] and its way more optimal.” Though I must admit, I don’t know the Indonesian word for ‘optimal’; sometimes guys can just tell these things. Also, all of the houses have permanent toilets (with running water) out back.

All of my attempts to get the quote generation moving in the right direction summarily failed.

“How do you like your houses?”

“We don’t.”

“Do you have anything to say about the process?”

“It could have been better.”

“What do you like best about your new houses?”

“They need to be better”

“Do you think your children are healthier since they moved in here?”

“I don’t know.”

Finally, asking if anyone planned to make any improvements or personalize their homes in any way after they were handed over to the homeowners, I only seemed to elicit confusion and stares. In fact, I later found out that long after my organization’s houses are handed over (in effect, transferring the titles), people continue to call the construction department saying they have to come fix their fence or change a fuse in the circuit breaker.

An Indonesian colleague, feeling, I imagine, a bit embarrassed, tried to prod one of the most vocal of the group into saying something pleasant: “Maybe you want to say something as we wrap-up [it was pretty apparent that we were leaving] perhaps ‘thank you’ to S_____?”

“No. I will not say ‘thank you.’”

Wow.

In a way, I completely understand that the people of Aceh have been through a great deal of trauma (30 years of conflict, tsunami) and the last thing they should have to stomach is a goofy white kid poking around their village trying to massage quotables for a slick exploitation piece. I also understand that lots of posturing takes place in these sorts of meetings and there is an inherent and flexible power balance between an organization and its beneficiaries.

However, on the other hand, it bears pointing out that before the tsunami families like this one lived in a one room hut and went to the beach to go to the bathroom. Immediately after the tsunami they lived in a shanty of debris they found and went to the beach to go to the bathroom. While I certainly was not expecting anyone to throw themselves at the feet of the organization, I had no idea that they would be so demonstratively ungrateful.

in town

Sometimes, especially now that I have a bicycle, I occasionally find myself pedaling around Banda Aceh in the evening time. I say ‘find myself’ not because I am especially lost—I know that I can always point myself towards the massive cell phone tower and, failing that, the loudest and most vitriolic sounding mosque—and thereby become un-lost, but because I never go out with any fixed intention beyond eating dinner.

It is not quite dusk, but at the tail end of the day. To me dusk represents the most difficult time to see all day, darkness in some ways included, and the time I am thinking of is certainly not dusk. It is a far too visual time for it to be that time yet.

It rains a lot in the afternoons, in spite of it being ‘dry season,’ though the local people do not pay much credence to such designations. To them, if it is raining, it is ‘rainy season’ and vice versa if that day happens to be clear. I suppose if you can have multiple Buddha’s birthdays every month, there is no reason why the seasons need to stick to any sort of schedule either. Anyways, I think Banda Aceh is situated (as you may know, at the very northern tip of Sumatra) such that the weather is kind of wacky, as it spirits back and forth across the equator, without much land mass to scold (or sivilize) it into a properly regimented monsoon weather pattern.

The environs of Banda Aceh itself are flat, paddy flat, which you get the impression much of it was not long ago. I imagine I have already told you about how the unimproved lots go back to being kind of informal paddies, and this helps spread the houses out, in spite of the lots sitting right on top of one another. Banda Aceh itself is ringed by mountains, probably about 2,000 feet, to the south and west. They sit right up over the city, but most of the time a haze of heat, dirt, and exhaust draws down over them and moves them far off. Only after the rain, when the air has been all scrubbed and rinsed, can you realize how close they actually are. It is amazing how much these hills jump; you can suddenly clearly make them out, and easily examine the logging scars that trace most of the way up the sides.

Again, I cannot speak on any authority, but something about the lay of the land makes the sky seem massive. It feels nothing like New England, with a big expansive sky in all directions. Of course it could be the clouds, massive and coiled thunder cells that drift aimlessly around this big basin, leftovers from the afternoon’s storm. I think they are some of the sheer tallest clouds I have ever seen, and the fact that you can look up and see half a dozen of discreet masses—each like the fortress of Le Monte Saint Michel, which my grandfather saw in the war and always told me about—contributes to the sky stretching effect.

You cannot tell where precisely the sun is, but you cannot miss the incredible oranges and purples that it bathes the entire scene in, diffusing and fracturing around the thunder clouds onto every surface. Biking and walking are probably about equal, as far as head height is concerned, so there must be something about having your feet off the ground, because you are liable to miss it all on foot. But when I go spinning around in this twilight, and it is cool from the rain, and all the mosques are bouncing all around the air, echoing the evening prayer (the most mellow and melodic of the day’s prayers), and there are big thick shafts of color sluicing through the expanse just a little ways off, something about it is really quite striking.

toothpaste, the insidious side

Here is a funny piece I wrote about a tooth brushing exercise I went to:

At the SD Suka Jaya in Pidie district, many students are getting a crash course in the essential properties of a substance many might take for granted: toothpaste. The results are, in a word, messy, as no one seems to be able to shake (literally) free of the interloping white goop. Stowaway toothpaste goes from cheeks, onto a hand, only to end up on the other hand, and sooner or later shirts and pants too, as the children frantically try to get rid of it, most only succeed in spreading it around their persons. Eventually sympathetic teachers circulate, proffering boxes of tissues, through the besieged ranks.

Tooth-brushing activities like this one are part of S____’s School Health and Nutrition (SHN) program, which partners with schools and communities to address the critical health and nutrition factors that keep children out of school. Suka Jaya’s SD (elementary school), one of S__’s retrofitted schools boasting child friendly features and handicap access, serves as the ‘lead school’ in its sub-district level cluster of 6 schools. As the ‘lead school’ it functions as the cluster’s pilot for SHN initiatives, responsible for the dissemination of information, training, and staff within the cluster.

On this particular day, in addition to the school’s 163 students, teams of ambassadors from each of the other 5 schools in the cluster are participating in the activities, enabling them to bring back the information to their schools as trainers and mentors for their peers. This makes the day special for the children, especially Auranazilla, an 11 year old in Class 6, who says, “We are especially happy today to see all our friends from other schools.”

This day’s activity begins with a computer presentation—featuring a dastardly looking tooth decay character—designed to teach the children about dental hygiene and proper brushing. After the presentation the activity moves out of doors where every child receives toothbrush, toothpaste, and a plastic cup before a practicing brushing together. The children are especially taken with their new possessions and when the time came to brush, some of the children take such care to tidy up a patch of the school yard to place their cup on—some even casting about for pieces of plastic to use as coasters—that they have to be gently reminded to start brushing.

Auranazilla says, “I had knowledge [of tooth brushing] before, but it was not yet clear. Today I learned the swing technique [of brushing] and also to brush my tongue. Thank you so much.”

S______’s SHN program is an integral part of the mission to increase access to and quality of basic education through these school-age health priorities, working at multiple levels to this end. For instance, when the principals of this cluster came to S___ with concerns about snacking amongst the children—specifically that many snacks are laden with industrial dyes and preservatives not health for children—the organization convened a roundtable discussion with key stakeholders, including representatives from the ministry of health. This dialogue helped initiate a campaign for better snacks, emphasizing good materials, processes, and a return to traditional foods.

Another principal, Asnawi, from the nearby SD Desa Blang Raya, spoke to the effectiveness of S___’s initiatives: “Before SHN, almost all the children were infected with worms, and this affected their learning. After S___ distributed medication, this ‘spirit’ of learning has been renewed in our school.”

Mohammed Kausar, age 12, says of SHN, “We learn all about healthy behavior, for example, daily tooth brushing, hand washing, and where to put our garbage. I can share it with friends and family. Thank you to S___”

The success of the SHN program is an example of how S_____, working with strong partners, can devise both cost-effective and immediate solutions to address fundamental educational issues. Through SHN not only is the quality of schools improved, but children achieve better individual outcomes, learning healthy and beneficial habits that they can share with the entire community.

malnutrition in Aceh

Here is something that I recently wrote for my NGO that I found particularly interesting. Please forgive the double dip as well as the 'corporate voice:'

In Aceh, the unfortunate problem of malnutrition is not merely confined to poor families. Rather, raising healthy children is a challenge that tests the entire Acehnese community. Positive Deviance (PD) is one of the novel methodologies that S_____’s health sector promotes to address children’s health and nutrition.

As a method, PD seeks to describe children who grow and develop adequately in spite of a background of poverty. Accordingly, these families have adopted ‘positive deviant practices,’ in essence strategies that promote health and nutrition in spite of more structural disadvantages. In turn, PD focuses on how such ‘deviant’ strategies can be applied throughout the broader community.

S_____ coordinates PD training for key health actors, particularly midwives and healthcare volunteers from communities where malnutrition is above 30%. The 12 day training program is led by 2 facilitators from the Department of Health and teaches the six steps of PD, from defining the challenge, to discovering the ‘positive deviant’ strategies, to effective dissemination in the community.

At a recent training day in the T_____ sub-district of Pidie Jaya, 26 trainees from three villages met to discuss and determine the practices that contribute to good nutrition. After participating in an activity in which participants pinned symptoms or activities onto cartooned posters of either the ‘healthy child’ or ‘unhealthy child,’ Mohammed, healthcare volunteer in the Rawa Sari village spoke to the practicality of PD: “The theories that we learn here have a direct application in our lives and help us devise new ways of helping each other; helping us to connect both rich and poor.”

And indeed, one of the hallmarks of PD is devising solutions that healthcare volunteers can both relate to and immediately apply. It can be said that PD is the practice of new behaviors: solving problems by better using the existing resources available to all, rather than focusing on needs and solutions that require external aid. PD is both highly sustainable and culturally appropriate.

Interestingly, malnutrition is often more of a problem amongst Aceh’s wealthy than it is among the poor. Therefore, PD participants learn to identify habits, often rejected by some members of the community for social/cultural reasons, which actually hold solutions to malnutrition problems. One such example is the inclusion of small fishes, dried and eaten whole, into the diet. Rich in calcium and other nutrients, these fishes are seen by many wealthy people as ‘garbage’ and of no value because they are ‘for the poor.’

Faphlina, another volunteer from Rawa Sari, articulates another example, “Rich people in the village do not like eating boiled bananas in a pancake, and yet it is truly better for our nutrition, not just a snack for poor people.”

Instead, PD trainees learn to look to the successful habits of the poor for nutritional wisdom, learning to identify, mentor, and communicate strategies that promote nutritional content and healthy habits. Faphlina emphasizes, “When things like nutrition and health are not good, we have to work together in the village to solve our problems.”

PD succeeds when it empowers members of the community to look for solutions from within their communities and communicate them effectively. As Faphlina espouses, S______, through strong partnerships with these communities, is instrumental in intervening to help the neediest children and strengthen Aceh’s social fabric.

acronyms

One of the most important elements of development work is acronym building. Without the cutesy communicative powers that only a clever, thematic, and catchy acronym can deliver, even the most well designed programs are doomed. No NGO can live without them. It is like it is in their blood, or something.

In fact, next time you need a development program, I would recommend coming up with the acronym first. Think about what you want to convey, preferably something that implies progress. AHEAD (Accelerating Health, Education, and Adolescent Development) is a great example. PEARL (Peace Education And Rebuilding Livelihoods) does not make much sense, but sure makes you feel good inside. Invoke children if at all possible, even if they are not directly involved, as in the case of TOTs (Training for Trainers).

One does not need to feel hemmed in by the secular world, as a choice like PRAISE (Peace Rehabilitation And Initiatives through Services and Student Empowerment) not only implies a better place, but maybe even with a shade of the higher power. It also brings up the point that a successful acronym need not actually really correspond to the long form. Take ENABLE (Enabling Aceh to Combat Exploitation through Education) as a shining example of the liberties one is able to take, provided some other criteria (in this case progess and jus plain feelin' good) are met.

I, of course, am terrible at the acronym game. I am far too attached to the idea of writing the program first, often with disastrous results. I guess donors just are less than interested in investing in something called SSKINY (Services Supporting KIds and Youth). I know, I was surprised too.

teefs and fishes

Part of my function for my NGO is to visit project activities in the field, taking notes, talking to beneficiaries, snapping photos, sort of as an internal (and wholly biased) journalist for the organization. It is always a good time to be the white person who inexplicably turns up at, for instance, a breastfeeding discussion group so if you can handle all the attention, requests for your cell phone number, and prying questions (as well as shaking every single hand there, often including people who just happen to be hanging out), it is a fun job.

This week I did just this, spending a few days traveling up and down the North Coast visiting various project sites. I went to a tooth brushing training, a unit on how to combat malnutrition using community-tried practices, a vocational training program launch, and a village where we built some houses. Interesting experiences abounded.

The tooth brushing campaign was predictably cute. It took place at a school that my NGO had rebuilt post-tsunami, just a couple simple buildings in the middle of a paddy ringed village (actually about the least clarifying description one can give of an Indonesian village: there was a paddy). After a puppet show on the material (lo, be still my heart!) all the kids received toothbrushes, toothpaste, and plastic cups, before lining up for the brushing ‘practice.’ It was abundantly clear that toothpaste is a new substance for the kids, as it ended up everywhere—faces, fingers, noses. Things only kept getting worse as they unsuccessfully tried to wipe it off, only to end up with more on their hands and I walked around dispensing tissues for the strong of heart who would chance taking anything from this towering foreigner. The rest of the time I spent with a star-struck principal especially enthused to tell me all about his theories on the Indoensian snack industry: long, sustained ramblings about the use of addictive chemicals to create what he termed ‘fanatical snacking.’

Later on down the road I went to training for midwives in ‘Positive Deviance’ and its application to combating malnutrition. It basically describes children that live and grow in families that are impoverished and the practices that help them succeed in spite of poverty. It is an interesting way for the development community to address problems because it looks a resources that are available to the entire community, not those that require external aid. The solutions are generated by the community and are thereby what those in the biz (warning, buzzwords imminent) would call ‘sustainable’ and ‘culturally appropriate.’

This method has even more traction in Aceh (and Indonesia) because, as it turns out, many of the rich are the ones who are malnourished. A large part of this is related to classist views and taboos about foods. For instance: tiny fish. These little fish are a great source of vitamins because they are so small that they are just eaten dried and whole.

I can recall in Sukadana that this was how many in our community got their calcium, often from the mixture of peanuts, chili, and tempe that was served with many meals. Well as it turns out, the Indonesian rich view these little fish, along with plenty of other foods like tempe and some veggies as well as certain preparations, as ‘garbage’ and ‘for the poor.’ My NGO facilitates midwives in the identification of these strategies and then trains them to communicate the information with the entire community. I was simply surprised that even in Indonesia, where the cuisine appears so linear to an outsider, society still finds such simple (and unfortunately in this case ill-advised) stratefiers.

the matt and stepan show

Matt enters to Stepan, wearing a red flannel shirt and sea foam flannel boxers, watching Drew Barrymore and Hugh Grant engaged in a tense and serious movie moment at 90 decibels.

Matt: Whatcha watching?
Stepan: Eh...Music and Lyrics.
Matt: Oh, wow. Hmm, what is it all about?
Stepan: Eh…you know, ah…[clearly involved in the moment, on screen Drew looks expectant]…eh, [suddenly, quite directly] a man struggling with middle age.
Matt: Wow, I never gave Hugh Grant so much credit. It looks a bit sappy, no?
Stepan: Yes, and, [drifting]…and, fun.

The cathartic love confession/symbolic stage duet montage rolls almost on cue. Stepan appears blissful.

Ed note: There is something really German about this guy, in a good--no great--way. ‘A man struggling with middle age?’ Strange. Provoking? Upon second glance, genius!

Trip to Central Aceh

So I have been out in the field a good amount lately, hence not being able to put much up here. The ‘field’ is an interesting place to go, but after the first visit the immense boredom of actually getting to and from it, really puts a damper on the experience. There are not a lot of main roads in the province and there is one that runs across Aceh’s North Coast and through our project area—250 km of top-heavy semis, mini buses, bicycles, motor scooters, and daredevil goats ebbing and flowing (but mostly abruptly and unpredictably stopping) every which way across two lanes of blacktop. It takes a very long time to go anywhere and the scenery is a sun shimmering mixture of clear cut forest (dotted by the occasional timber protection tower, a hilarious feature that proves, as my boss pointed out, “Well, he did a pretty shitty job.”), banana plantations, and fish ponds.

Last weekend I had the good fortune of going to Takengon, in Central Aceh, to do some research, specifically on the coffee economy, on an area where my NGO may extend their programming. Central Aceh is coffee growing highland (1000 meters and up!) and produces some absurd percentage (I heard as high as 90%) of Indonesia’s total Arabica export. So, in more than just a way, I saw firsthand the coffee that will soon help to bring you the venti lattes you (and America) love so much; mostly there were dogs sleeping on it.

One of the most interesting things I learned about coffee is that in Indonesia it is a highly decentralized industry. There are no sprawling coffee estates, large scale collectives, or economies of scale. Instead, coffee is a family level livelihood, with small plots (something like 65,000 ha are under cultivation by 60,000 families) producing piddling yearly yields of about 500 kg/ha. Considering that unwashed, organic Arabica sells for about $3.85/kg, this seems a precarious existence. (I also could not help but wonder when the rest of the money ends up when I buy the coffee for $30/kg in Cambridge.)

The other unexpected thing that I learned was that people do not really take very good care of this coffee. I had heard that Sumatran coffees were among the most inconsistent in the world, and now I understand why. Farmers, angling for better prices, often try to perform themselves as much of the processing as they can. This leads to them pulping (separating the fruit, called the cherry) with ancient hand cranks and drying the coffee (to convert it from ‘wet parchment’ to ‘dry parchment’—parchment meaning that the inner seed case is still attached, ie pre-hulling) on the ground beside the road. Exhaust and dirt shower the coffee all day, school children walk over it on the way to school, dogs sleep on it all afternoon (it reminds me of a Brookstone ergonomic bed for doggies), the children stomp back over it on the way home. No one seems at all concerned about any of this.

The region itself was one of the most beautiful places I have been in Indonesia, complete with towering mountains, cool coffee groves pinched into every nook and gully, an active volcano, a 26 km long mountain lake, less Islam than found in the Aceh lying at sea level, and some fantastic afternoon thunder storms.

Central Aceh, like most of the province, is post-conflict (I may have mentioned this before, but Aceh has a long history of rebellion, the most recent incarnation against Suharto’s natural resource plundering, Java-dominated centralism) and between 1995 and 2002 50% of the residents were displaced, usually by force. What I found was one of the most chronically left behind places in Indonesia, with an infant mortality rate of 47 per 1,000 live births (Indonesia’s figure, by contrast, is a none too rosy 32), a complete lack of basic sanitation, a large problem with disaffected young men who had their school disrupted by the conflict, and a staggeringly high incidence of trauma (it is estimated that half the people have post-traumatic stress disorder) from the tactics of both the guerillas and Indonesian military. If I know one thing about developing communities it is that idle, young dudes never portend anything good, and many are concerned the peace might not last.

Takengon, in some ways, is a sad place to be. In terms of toilet facilities, schools are particularly lacking and girls often stop attending for this reason. Last month someone settled an old conflict score by locking 5 men in a building and burning it down. There is a lot of overheated rhetoric surrounding the creation of a new province and how it will be akin to an ethnic partition (the area now is tri-ethnic: Acehnese, Javanese, and Gayonese). However, there are some bright spots: the people are much more genuine than the lowland Acehnese and it is close to the only beggar free place I have ever encountered in Indonesia. Usually intersections are trolled by children who surround the cars—often surreptitiously pulling an arm into their shirt—wailing for money, usually as their ‘pimp’ leans on a lamppost waiting for the take. In Central Aceh I did not see any of this, and as one of the government ministers I met with explained to me, society seems to have reached a collective sense of dignity and decided that the children in Central Aceh have already been through enough.