10 March 2005

This week Friday 11 March is a public holiday in Indonesia so we made a quick decision last week to start planning the communal toilets and aim to go to Meulaboh this weekend to start work.

We found a builder who was ok with going to Aceh to work for us. He asked us for 80,000 Rupiah per day, which is around ₤5 or 9USD. This might not seem like much but it is double the Jakarta rate.

We also found someone who drills wells to make water supplies. The good thing in Indonesia is that there is a lot of groundwater due to the tropical climate so you drill a well almost anywhere and you'll find water. Most houses in Indonesia have their own wells rather than use the water company. Normally the well has to go a least 20 metres in depth so there is bit of work involved, given that the wells are drilled manually without anything more sophisticated than steel rods.. Normally it takes three people or so a week to do this. Our man is on his own so we'll have to find him a helper or two locally in Meulaboh.

Novi's friend Dian is coming with us this time. She is not working at the minute so has agreed to stay in Meulaboh and oversee things for us until the toilets are complete. We're paying her a per diem to cover her costs.

Having bought some land in Jakarta last year, I've had some practice over the last few months using a software package called Punch! Home Design - Architectural Series 3000 to design our own house. So being a bit nifty with this package designing some communal toilets was a bit of a doddle. It did take me a few iterations to get something realistic though. The main constraint was not so much the budget but more the capacity of the truck to transport everything to Meulaboh. We explored the possibility to buying materials a bit closer to Meulaboh but it became obvious that this wouldn't solve anything. It's next to impossible to buy building materials anywhere near Meulaboh. There is now such a demand for building materials there that if you find something the price is so highly inflated that it does not make any sense. Even in Medan there is quite a high demand for both materials and also transportation via truck that we would not have saved. So it seemed less hassle just to buy everything in Jakarta and ship it there via truck. There was simply no easy way around this. We could have planned sending two trucks but then this would have been stretching the budget and it would have been more difficult to coordinate.

For the first bash at this, I optimistically planned ten wc units. The budget was just about enough but as I said the amount of materials and our capacity to ship them to Meulaboh was the limiting factor. By the the fourth iteration we had a more realistic plan with four units. Here's the latest plan that I have:

The building consists of four 2x2 metre toilet units. Doors for the toilets are on the front and back. Each toilet has a mandi which is a big sink full of water. The water is scooped out of this with a plastic ladel for a shower. This is the traditional way of having a shower in Indonesia.

On one side I've put two sinks for washing dishes and clothes. These are shown on the right of the picture on the right. Also I've put an enclosure to hold a generator and a water pump. This enslosure will have a door on top so it can be locked to stop anyone from stealing anything.

On the other side I've put a number of taps for 'air wudhu' which is used for the practise for Muslims of washing before praying.

The builder sat with me as I did this so he was ok with the result. With his help I put together the following estimates for the above plan:

I've been quite busy with work over the last week or two so I left most of the shopping for building materials to Novi. Here's the results of her shopping:

Our truck was supposed to arrive for loading Sunday afternoon but cancelled at the last minute again. At short notice we managed to arrange two smaller trucks the same as those we used on the first two trips. They turned up Monday lunchtime, a day later than we had planned. We got everything loaded on Monday and the truck set off Monday night:

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