This week...so far

It's been quite a busy week - which is good. I always go through this "I'm so bored in Banda" phase whenever I return from a city, and I was once again in a funk after coming back from Bali. Demonstrated by the hours and hours of Alias I watched this past weekend.

Tomorrow the #2 dude from USAID will be arriving to do a 2-day field visit. The visit is extremely important as this dude has a lot of pull when it comes to budgetary allocation for next year. And lucky us, #2 dude will be visiting 2 of our project sites. The first site is 2 of our villages in Lampuuk (See June 23 post on Lampuuk). We are helping the villages build a water filtration and storage facility. The village is blessed with a mountain spring, but the water needs to be purified and stored in order to make it potable. I will post some pictures of the project later. Also, we helped the villagers to start a small business making well rings. When constructing a well, first you drill, then you line the sides of the well with these cement well rings. Typically a well will require abut 10 rings. So instead of buying rings, these villagers decided to buy some molds and cement and build their own and then sell to other villages. They're lucky because the guy who knows how to make the rings survived the tsunami.

The 2nd site #2 dude is visiting is Baitul Qirath. BQ is a microfinance organization that we're supporting. Recently, we just signed a public-private parternship agreement with Microsoft, and Mr. Gates will be providing BQ with $200,000 over the next year or so to strengthen the capacity of their staff, to write up a business plan, and to increase the lending capital. BQ right now has about 300 customers in Banda, all are shopkeepers in 5 main traditional markets around the city. USAID digs the whole public-private partnership thing, so we gotta show BQ off.

On the home front, I've been getting an illuminating crash course on electric systems, as we’re getting ready to make some upgrades to our office and guest house's current system. Since it’s over $500, per US government procurement directives, we must obtain price quotes from 3 different firms. So I’ve been interviewing contractors and learning about how and how much electricity gets beamed into my houses. Did you know an ampere is a constant current which, if maintained in two straight parallel conductors of infinite length, of negligible circular cross-section, and placed 1 m apart in vacuum, would produce between these conductors a force equal to 2 x 10^–7 newton per metre of length?

In other news, it looks like I'm stuck in Banda for the first anniversary of the tsunami. It might not sound so bad, but it's December 26! I was planning on going to the Philippines to meet up with Lillian for X'mas, but now, it looks like I'm stuck here. I'm still hoping to see her in Singapore for New Year. Major Bummer.