09 February 2005

Based on the list provided by Herri from the PMI and his subsequent request for mosquito nets, we set about shopping.

As I was busy with work, Novi did most of the shopping this time with the exception of a few trips to Ace Hardware and also one trip to Mangga Dua mall to get some walkie-talkies when I decided to join. Apart from not having the time to go on every shopping expedition, most of the shopping was done in markets this time where getting the right price requires haggling, which meant I wasn't allowed to come along anyway as Novi said I'd only push the prices up.

As mosquito nets were high priority, we bought a total of 1000 square metres of mosquito net material which comes in rolls a metre wide. One of our neighbours happens to be a dressmaker and she agreed to tailor the material to make box shaped nets which can be suspended inside tents. For the first few she used thirteen square metres of material for each but we asked her to make them a bit smaller to get more out of it, so she reduced the remainder to ten square metres each. So we have in total 90 of these box shaped nets. That should protect 90 families so if we assume an average on four people per family then we'll be covering 360 people or so.

We also bought 100 paraffin stoves, 100 woks for frying and 100 rice steamers. We plan to hand out a pack containing a stove, a wok and a frying pan to 100 families. Additionally we bought 100 bucket and scoops (I really don't know gayung is in English?). There are useful for cleaning up and also showering. We will include a bucket and scoop with each pack.

We're currently not planning on taking any paraffin with us as we don't want to risk spoiling anything if it gets spilt. We will ask Herri if there is a shortage of paraffin in Meulaboh. If not then maybe will can buy some there, otherwise we can buy some in Medan.

We bought 100 schoolbags, 200 exercise books, 200 pens, 200 pencils, 100 pencil sharpeners and 100 erasers. We plan to hand out a schoolbag containing two exercise book, two pens, two pencil, a sharpener and an eraser to 100 school children. We wanted to buy 100 school uniforms but did not get time to do so. If we have any time to spare in Medan we may have a look there.

In Ace Hardware we bought two petrol generators. Generators are extremely difficult to get hold as most stocks have already been purchased and send to Aceh. Despite this there is still a shortage of generators there. We had ordered three from Ace Hardware and they managed to get two from some of their other stores. This was a good result as we would have had to wait for a few weeks for new stock. We bought a Taiwanese brand called Krisbow which are quite cheap at 3.2 million Rupiah. This is about a third of the price of another American brand that was available. The American brand was probably made in China anyway so I can't believe the quality would have justified the much higher price.

Each of the generators has a capacity of 2700 Watts. We bought fourteen 150W floodlights and 200 metres of cable. So the generators will run these fourteen floodlights and there will still be plenty of spare capacity to power other things.

We also bought some things for the PMI (Indonesian Red Cross):

• 40 pair of wellington boots
• 20 rain suits
• 4 sets of Motorola walkie-talkies with 5 mile range
• 100 t-shirt and caps with PMI/Direct Aid For Aceh logo
• 3 portable floodlights
• 12 torches

Things were starting to build up again.

In addition to the items listed above we also bought 200 square metres of tarpaulin for making tents. Also we had some things left over from the first run that we could not fit in: some tolietries, matresses and cooking utensils.

The owner of the truck that we used on the first run to Banda Aceh refused to rent his truck this time. I think he hadn't realised how far from Jakarta Aceh was. Anyway we managed to find another truck and arranged for it to come Sunday morning for loading so that it could leave Sunday night. For some reason they pulled out at the last minute leaving us a bit stuck. The main problem with this was that once people know you want something urgently the price starts to go up. However we managed to find something which wasn't too much more expensive than what we'd planned and it turned up Sunday around midnight.

In preparation for the truck coming we started packing Sunday afternoon with the help of Max, Ana, Nona, Cucu and Dian.

They did a great job of packing everything into boxes for us so that loading onto the truck when it arrived would be a straight forward process.

After all our helpers had left, we gave Herri from the PMI a call to see if there was anything else to prepare. He asked that we already prepare the packs ready for handing out before we leave as we wouldn't have any time in Medan or Meulaboh. Unfortunately we had packed all the stoves separately from all of the cooking utensil as this would have taken up less space in the truck. So we had to open the boxes with the stoves, wok and rice steamers and repack, with each pack containing a single stove, wok and rice steamer. We saw the logic in this but we were a bit worried about space, as things would not be packed so compactly on the truck.

The truck arrived at midnight and with it a few welcome additional helpers to help our repacking. We were pleasantly surprised to see that our latest truck was quite a bit bigger than the one we had for the first trip. So no worries about space.

It took us until 5am Monday morning to get everything packed again. I decided to go to bed then as I had to get up for work three hours later. But things seemed under contol.

Later in the morning I went to work and Novi oversaw the loading of everything onto the truck.

This time we have five people travelling in the truck, three in front and two in the back.

We found that this time that we did not have enough to fill the truck.This was good in that we were putting two people in the back but we didn't want to waste space at the same time and also things could be packed more securely by having as little free space as possible.

So we bought 11 boxes of Indomie instant noodles. This mean 400 packet of noodled and these were divided up into 100 packs to be handed out with the cooking utensils.

The truck set of around midday on Monday. They're currently in Pekanbaru which is about 12 to 18 hours short of Medan.

Novi and I are flying to Medan tomorrow morning (Thurdsay) to join them. From Medan we'll hire the the same car and driver as last time and have the same PMI volunteers to accompany to. We'll drive to Meulaboh Thursday and we expect to return Sunday to Medan. Our flights back to Jakarta are early Monday morning.

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