WEDNESDAY 10 JANUARY:

I sleep pretty well and wake up feeling a bit better – hallelujah! Despite the gaping holes in the room, we don’t seem to have been bitten – double hallelujah!!

Diving problems

The weather is no better – it is still very windy and there is a lot of rain. I go through my “To Do List” and catch up the diary. Haggis wanted to dive today, but after a quick walk down to the beach between rainstorms, he decides not to, as it looks really choppy. His ears played up badly when he dived last week (his own fault as he went down too fast without equalising properly, and then stayed down with them hurting, silly thing!) and really he should do a gentle beach dive and descend very slowly to only shallow depths today. But there is no beach dive, only a boat dive to a dive site about an hour away. If he goes down and his ears hurt, he will have to come up again, and then sit in a boat on a choppy sea waiting for the other divers to emerge – as he gets pretty sea-sick, this doesn’t seem a brilliant idea, so he decides to leave it till tomorrow (which is theoretically our “:day off”, when hopefully the weather will be better.)

We organise transport to take us the 10-minute drive to Iboih for our show and workshops this afternoon. Hags goes down to the beach in a break between cloudbursts, and I will follow once I have finished this diary and done a bit of meditation practice.

Praying for calm weather

I really pray the weather will calm down soon – we really need to get back to Banda on Friday for 5 shows before we fly down to Mbolloh on Monday, and I HAVE to get the Somerset Community Fund application off by Friday, their cut-off date. The hotmail doesn’t work well on this island, and I am relying on sending it off once we have got back to Banda. Fingers crossed!

So far, so good

So, to summarise – so far the Tour has gone really well. We have done 8 sessions, and all save the very first have been huge successes – actually even the first one went down very well, but we were very pissed off to have been made so late and not be able to do the parachute games and badge making, only the show. We have one more show on the Island, then we have 5 more shows and workshop sessions in Banda on Friday afternoon and over the weekend, and then 2 down near Aloe Ambon in Teunom when we go down there next Monday and Tuesday. Then 8 more in Banda between 18th and 22nd. Then back to the Island for 1 more show and then 3 days off for a mini diving holiday (if the weather is good enough!) Then 4 or 5 more sessions in Banda before flying out to Medan and on to Singapore on the 29th.

8 down and 20 to go, so we are just over a quarter way through, and we have used only just over 1,000 of the 4,000 badge components - so that is panning out beautifully. All is good, and we expect the shows, workshops and games to get better and better. Hags and I are well and happy and send our love to all our family and friends and workmates, and will write again soon.

Later: A quiet day, catching up the diary and then I joined Haggis down at the beach and had some spaghetti with cheese and vegetables (and yet more cold Milo). We managed to play our second game of Carcassonne and he trounced me again – I tend to only beat him about 1 time out of 8, sadly, but it is a great game.

To Iboih

I make a few more “example” badges, and then at 3.45 Mr. Moos comes and collects us and drives us to Iboih for the next session. We came here in April, not, I think with Muslim Aid, but off our own bat, and the villagers clearly remember us, which is great. We can hear an announcement going out on the tannoy mentioning the work “circus” , and more and more children come running towards us. Mr. Saiful finds me a very damp and rotten table from somewhere and a chair, and I set up and start the badge-making. Haggis meanwhile has been on a “reccy” to find the best place for the show – which turns out to be the abandoned fishmarket, with marble floors and raised marble tables to sell fish from. As the weather is looking a bit “iffy”, we move the badge making in there as well. I can’t find my notes, so am unable to give them really good badge instructions. The first children always seem to really rush their designs, and I long to slow them down and say, “Don’t hurry, there’s lots of times, use some more colours and make your badge look really good!” Thanks to Linda’s translations I normally can do this, but I fear I may have left my notes behind when we packed up after the session at SMA Dua – I was feeling very rough and may have forgotten to put them in the badge bag – hey ho!

THE PIC ON THE RIGHT SHOWS ME IN THE BACK OF THE SAND LORRY WE DROVE BACK TO THE HOTEL IN

But after a while, the children always seem to grasp that they can actually do more complicated designs with lots of colours, and some really great designs are produced. All the children finish their badge designs and I am absolutely surrounded, so I down tools for a bit, and Haggis takes them all out to play parachute games. Then I start on all the badge-making – there is a huge pile of designs to get through, and more and more children are turning up and mothers who claim they have 3 children asleep etc. I must have about 180 badge components with me – hopefully that will be enough, and I will not run out like I did at Lhung Raya Stadium. Amazingly, as I come to my last plastic badge back, I come to the last design – I had, literally, just enough – with not one spare left over – that was a bit of luck!

Good show!

Haggis’s show goes really well – the audience of roughly 80 children and 80 teenagers and adults are hooting with laughter the whole way through, and even Mr. Saiful (he of the grim face) breaks into a smile several times. Yee-ha!

Mr. Moos was meant to pick us up from Iboih at 6.00, after the show, but has obviously been detained in Gapang, so we hitch a ride back to the hotel with the sand lorry (standing up behind the cab, which is very cooling). We wander down to the beach for an avocado sandwich and iced Milo, and meet some Germans who say they saw a picture of the show on the front page of the Jakarta Post on Saturday. And we think we were in the Banda Today newspaper this Monday. We must try and find copies if we can, and maybe David, our wonderful web-master, can manage to find links to their websites, so that you can see them, gentle readers.

Power cut

I leave Haggis at the beach and potter up to our room. There has been a power cut, so everything is very dark and the path more lethal than usual – thank goodness for our miners’ head torches! Trying to get the room as mosquito-free as possible in the dark is hard work, and the bathroom is so dark and so slippy that when getting up from the loo, my feet slide forwards and I land on the floor with my right foot under the door – not a dignified end to the day!