FRIDAY 12 JANUARY:

It is now 5.30 am – I just have to finish some work for my English office and then I will get up and pack (bang in the middle of mosquito-time, but hey, thank goodness for Autan!) and we will catch the 7.00 am mini-bus to the harbour to take the 8.30 am ferry back to Banda. Vital we catch this as we have a show this afternoon and then 4 shows over the weekend – plus, today is the last day for our funding application to the Somerset Community Fund to go in, and I am counting on the WiFi network at Green Paradise to get my hotmails off to England. So this is one ferry we are determined not to miss – let’s just hope it’s running!

My legs are very sore from being hit by the plank yesterday, especially under my left knee, which is very swollen. Still, I can walk, which is a relief.

Full of holes

This room is full of holes (they have promised that when we come back next time we can have Room 1 – same price but considerably nicer, and far more mossy-proof!) It’s very hard not to get worried about the mosquitoes, as a lot of people seem to have gone down with Dengue Fever recently – which is a generally debilitating disease that makes you exhausted and unable to work – I haven’t actually looked it up in Lonely Planet, because that way lies paranoia – they describe every disease in the most disgusting detail and you start imagining you have caught things!

Getting up in “mossy time” is always difficult and horrid – it goes something like this: grope under pillow for head-torch, put it on, look at time, 4.30, OK, better get up. Ease my way out of the mosquito net, tucking it in carefully again so that Hags doesn’t get any mossies in there. Rub some Autan onto hands and feet. Try to ignore insect noises and try not to be paranoid. Go the loo – light won’t work, tread very carefully into the bathroom, avoiding the hole by the door and trying not to slip on the wet floor (the mandi leaks), don’t want to land up on the floor again! Hold nightdress just high enough to not get wet from floor and be able to use the loo, but not so high that the mossies get up my legs. Throw mandi water down the loo, trying not to get it on myself. Cuffs up for water bit, cuffs down immediately after so as not to be bitten. Delay teeth-brushing till there is more light. Put kettle on while turning on laptop (no power cut overnight or this morning thankfully, so it is fully charged), trying not to trip over all the wires on the floor (the kettle wire, the recharging of the computer wire, the recharging of the 2 mobile phones wires, and the re-charging of the I-pod wires – only 2 plugs usually, so we constantly having to decide which machine gets priority at which moment!) Wait for kettle to boil, jigging gently to avoid mosquitoes, mopping sweat away with towel (the air con in this room is pretty pathetic), make 3 in 1 nescafe, grab my work notes and itinerary and crawl back into bed with the laptop to work. Then realise there is another huge hole in the mosquito net and I have no more badges handy (most of the holes are plugged with badges!), which makes the whole idea of the net being a protection a bit of a farce. Hey ho!

'This is a bed, not an office'

Haggis semi-surfaces and snorts, “This is a bed, not an office”, and rolls over – I will placate him with coffee when he needs to get up at 6.30. Type, type, type – Haggis hates this laptop – I have typed on it so much that the letters on many of the keys have disappeared, and he is not a good enough typist to do it just by touch.

My mobile phone alarm rings – 6.00 – time to get up and pack. More Autan, which of course makes the sweating even worse, and onwards and upwards! Will hope to get the diary emailed from Banda this morning, and also some of the best photos to break up the acres of text. Good wishes to you all – I will write again soon.

Reading this through, I realise it sounds a bit complaining and carping – honestly, it is all fine – the small niggles are fine and worthwhile because the children are enjoying it so much. So despite a few grouches mostly about rooms and mosquitoes we are actually very positive and happy!

Later: We caught the ferry back to Banda Aceh with a nice English couple, James and Nikki, who we met on the island. A far smoother crossing. Taxi and becak in tandem back to the hotel, and I leap onto the internet, thanks to the WiFi hotspot, and Haggis heads in to town with James and Nikki to get some cash from the ATM, more paper for badges, more coloured pens for badges (which we are whoofing our way through, but no problem, as they are really cheap) and to help J and N get air tickets to Medan for later today.

Admin

It is wonderful to be able to just push a key or two and immediately get onto the hotmail after all the frustrations of communications in Sigli and on the island! I send off our funding application to the Somerset Community Fund in the hope of CW obtaining a grant to undertake for a “Science for slow learners mini-tour” in the first half of the summer term. I also send off the draft letters of invitation to the special schools we hope will participate in the Light Beam Training Tour if we get the hoped-for grant from the Esmee Fairbairn Foundation, and I send off the Aceh Diary and lots of photographs to our webmaster in Somerset – so hopefully lots of photos will now be adorning this web page and making it more interesting.

Haggis returns with James and Nikki – they have got a flight to Medan, but it is not till 5.00, so they have come back to have a swim and give us a hand drawing more badge circles and putting pins in plastic badge backs, which is a great help.

Farid and the loely Muslim Aid driver and a nice new Muslim Aid volunteer from Malaysia come to collect us and we head to Lampasi Engking to do a session. (NO PHOTOS OF THIS SESSION AT THE MOMENT, I'M AFRAID AS THE CAMERA BATTERY WENT FLAT - I WILL GET SOME OFF MUSLIM AID WHO WERE CLICKING AWAY) I set up badge-making at a tall table affair and Hags takes the children out to play parachutes on a slightly boggy field. Once the games are finished I am besieged by about 100 children, all of whom lean on the table which starts shifting in the most alarming way, so I decide to up sticks and do it all outside on a different table – this new one very small and plastic and also in danger of breaking, but at least it won’t cause broken legs, which the other one might have. Yet again, I seem to land up making many more badges than there are children, but hey, who’s counting? Hags does a great show, and we head back to the hotel. We order home delivery pizza from Pizza Express, as we are too tired to go out and watch “The Man in the Iron Mask” on Sky TV, interspersed with lots of phone calls to United Nations about flights for our journey down to Teunom.

Plans

Eventually I manage to talk to Steve Ray, the main guy there. We had already accepted that we would not be able to fly down on Monday 15th and are going to rent a jeep and driver, but we were hoping to fly back to Banda on Wednesday 17th – but Steve is not at all sure that the flights will be functioning by then (a lot of maintenance is going on on all the planes – I think everyone got a big shock when an Adam Air Flght was lost last week over Java). So I ring Ellen at the Red Cross and ask her to see if she thinks the driver would be prepared to stay down in Teunom and drive us back to Basnda on the 17th as well as drive us down there. She will get back to me in the morning. Very tired, so sleep like logs!