Labor Day Weekend

Friday was Ascension of Muhammad, so it's been a 4-day weekend for US-based organizations in Aceh. It's been kind of a wet/depressing/dark weekend.

The raining season is beginning to kick in. It's been overcast the entire weekend, marked by short periods of tropical down pour. When it pours in Aceh, it really pours. Think of afternoon thunderstorms in Washington multiplied by 10 times the amount of rain coming down per second. Because of the nasty weather, our electricity has been in constant limbo. We've had a brown out most of the weekend punctuated by 5 min to 2 hours of complete blackout. During the brown outs, the lightbulbs operate at about 80% capacity, no AC but fans work, no Internet but TV works.

When we did have enough power for the TV to be functional, Chris and I watched a lot of Hurricane Katrina coverage on BBC and CNN. What a royal mess! On Saturday night, we had a surprise birthday dinner party for Chris' 60th birthday (highlight of my weekend). Our Indonesian staff couldn't believe what they were seeing on TV. They were surprised at the level of lawlessness and chaos that was in America. They were particularly shocked by the looting. They said even during the aftermath of the tsunami, survivors did not loot. Friends and neighbors removed gold rings/necklaces from corpses and gave it to the family of the victims.

Adding to the depressing weekend, a Mandala Air plane crashed this morning while taking off from the Medan airport. All flights to/from Aceh fly out of Medan, so I'm a frequent visitor of the airport. The plane with 117 people headed towards Jakarta crashed into a densely populated residential area - only about 2 blocks away from our Medan office. They think the Governor of the Northern Sumatra Province is on the flight. 13 of us from the Aceh office are scheduled to fly to Jakarta on Wednesday morning. I wonder if any of my staff will refuse to fly.