A Day in the Village

I spent the entire day (7am to 9pm) on the road yesterday. We went to visit the other 3 villages that are supported by ConocoPhillips -Teumareum, Bahagia and Kuala.

Teumareum is located right across the river after the makeshift ferry. There were about 15 trucks waiting for the river crossing, so we ended up leaving our car beind, took the barge and walked to the village. We walked in on one of our staff giving leadership training to the village leaders in the temporary mosque built out of wooden planks. While listening to Kamal give the training, a big truck from a NGO pulled up to deliver school supplies to the children. It was quite a scene with all the kids running up to the truck and dragging boxes of notebooks and lugging new blackboards to their newly built classrooms. It was so wonderful to see the kids so excited by the brand new school supplies.

Before we joined the villagers for a crab feast, we were shown to a tandem bike a couple of guys had built from tsunami ravaged bikes. They painted the bike red, white, and blue in honor of USAID. They couldn't refurbish the bike seats, so instead, they fashioned 2 pieces of jackfruit tree wood (REALLY REALLY HARD WOOD) into saddles. Recommended only for well-padded butts. The bike comes completely with a bell, light, kickstand, lock, and portable pump.Quite fancy!

We went to the other villages and didn't end up leaving Lamno until about 6:00pm. It was quite late, since we're not really suppose to be driving around the rural areas at night, but it also meant catching a beautiful sunset on the road. However, I only got a few pics before my camera ran out of battery. More next time! I've been invited to go back to Teumareum in a few weeks to hike to a waterfall.