SATURDAY 6 JANUARY 2007:

Breakfast with Saiful – he is off to inspect the building of more Muslim Aid houses this morning, and then he and Arwin will meet us here at the house at 3.30. The gig today is very near the house, so that will be time aplenty. We will be able to get all the props and equipment into Saiful’s car, so don’t need to hire a car today, which is better for the budget. We will pack our suitcases this morning, so that we can head back to Banda straight after the show – we should get back to Green Paradise between 9 and 10 pm with luck. I am really looking forward to having WiFi in my room so that I can get my backlog of internet work done and also send the final Fairbairn application information off – I am also very much looking forward to a proper pedestal toilet!

Forty years of conflict

Over breakfast I ask Saiful about the “Confict” that went on between Gam and the Government. It started in 1965 and only stopped when they signed a Peace Treaty, post-tsunami in August 2005 – 40 years of conflict! There is a lot of healing to do – in many ways the conflict actually caused more trauma that the horror of the tsunami, even though this was the area most devastated by the wave. And recently they had mud slides and floods as well – they really are incredibly unfortunate in their geography. There will always be earthquakes around this area – we can only hope there will be no more tsunamis!

Bigger audiences

Once we are back in Banda on Saturday night, we then have a show for the Red Cross at a barracks on Sunday morning and a show for Muslim Aid in the afternoon. This show was going to be at Alue Naga Barracks, but apparently now it is going to be in the centre of town. We ask Saiful to try to find out more about this Sunday afternoon show – if it is going to be in the centre of town and “open”, does it mean that there will be a very large audience? We love large audiences, but we are a bit worried about the strength of the sound tracks for the show. We are working off an I-pod and 2 quite small speakers, which is perfectly adequate for the size of our current audiences, but a bigger audience will need bigger speakers. If it looks like being a big audience, we will ring Linda North and see if we can borrow the bigger speakers that we used in April when we did the show at Yayasan Lamjabat. We also find the photos we took at a Kindergarten we worked at in April and find its name – we still have a couple of free mornings left in Banda before the end of the month and would love to work there again as the children and staff were lovely and had pleaded with us to return sometime – hopefully he will be able to set that up.

Hags is practising his juggling in the yard, and the diary is now up to date again, so I am going to sit in the yard and draw more circles on badge centres and put more pins in badge backs – boring work, but soothing! I will write more later.

SATURDAY 6 JANUARY……… continued……

Emails

I head down to the Internet Office to say goodbye to my kind friend there, who has tried to help me with my hotmails (not with any great success – but he gave it his all!) I have an hour “free”, so I want to give him some help with editing their funding application to an American charity, but it turns out that he is out in the field with the Indonesian Charity today, so I leave a message and my email address, saying that if he wants to hotmail me the application I will do a bit of editorial tweaking for him. Lunch of rice and a sort of spinach satay stew next door, as no one is managing to get online today for some reason (everyone is still blaming all internet problems on the Taiwan earthquake), then back to the house to pack up all our stuff so that we can leave Sigli pretty fast after the show.

Efficient Muslim Aid

Saiful comes to collect us at 3.30 (Muslim Aid have been wonderfully good about getting us to our venues on time since my hissy fit outburst 2 days ago after the 3rd late arrival) and we drive to our 5th and final Sigli venue. It is a large outdoor sports court. There are some covered bench stands, and I make badges there with the children while Muslim Aid workers erect the wonderful MA/CWI banner. There is great excitement about the badges and at least 200 get made – by adults and teenagers as well as well as children. Haggis does some excellent parachute games while the badges are happening, and then even manages to run a juggling workshop – he really is getting better and better at this lark!

Last gig in Sigli for Muslim Aid at an outdoor sports court in Sigli

A hammy Firestick Haggis
	Hags leading the parachute games
Hags leading a dance routine - see how the man sweats

REMEMBER THAT THESE AND ALL PHOTOS ENLARGE CONSIDERABLY IF CLICKED ON!

My dancing

Some really big speakers have been provided for this show, which will make the music nice and loud. While Haggis has his “rest” and gets changed, I put on “Hey Micky!” by Toni Basil, which is very dance-able and start getting the children to dance. Haggis instantly re-emerges from behind the van and takes over – he doesn’t think very highly of my dancing (which is reasonable) and thinks (rightly) that he is a very good dancer. So much for his brief “rest” period, when he is meant to cool down a bit before the show – performers just can’t resist performing! Eventually he retires again to his rear-van, improvised dressing room position – but the children still want to dance! So 3 very jolly ladies and I lead the children in more dancing – they don’t care how good or bad we are – they just want to have someone to “follow”, and they want to dance and they want to have fun. It’s very good for me to have to be unselfconscious and not care what I look like and just concentrate on them having fun. (Out here one really can’t worry too much about what one looks like anyway, as it is difficult to look nice when covered with sweat – I find that for the first couple of days, I try to constantly wipe the sweat away and re-brush my hair regularly, but soon you just realise you are going to be dripping wet all the time and you learn to live with it. It’s fine really, once you have accepted it!)

Hags hamming it up for the camera
	With our hosts at the Sigli house
The Kentucky Fried Chicken stall

A natural

After a few more minutes of very jolly dancing, Haggis is ready for the show, and I put on the “Sweet Georgia Brown” track, and he makes his entrance with his turquoise suitcase. We have an audience of about 80 children and 80 adults, and they are absolutely “with” Haggis from the start. Applause and shrieks of laughter the whole way through the show. A really good boy as a volunteer – a natural! We are brought a weird coloured drink and lots of coconut biscuits to eat and drink, and then everyone bids us a fond farewell. A really nice session for our final day here! Actually all the gigs up here in Sigli have been absolutely great, with the exception of the very first one, when Farid rolled us up more than an hour and a quarter late, and there were 300 children and adults, over-excited and a bit ratty from having had to wait so long, and there being no chance to do the parachute games or the badges - and then to top it all there was no power and therefore no music for the show. Then it rained and more and more people crowded into the balai, and there was hardly room for Haggis to throw a cat, let alone a juggling club! That really was a horrible start – but things have thankfully got better and better since then, and I would say that all the 4 other Sigli gigs were out-and-out successes. It really does make a huge difference being able to make badges and play parachute games with the children before the show, and we will definitely stick with this format wherever humanly possible.

Stop for prayer

Back to the house to collect our luggage, but before we leave our driver wants to go and pray, so Haggis and I rush down the street to our favourite “Kentucky fried chicken” stall and Haggis has his 5th and final hit of Sigli chicken, which he loves. I only have one piece of chicken (Haggis manages 4!) but I do get to try the “roti” that I had seen people eating the day before. The stall-man takes a very light mini-loaf of bread, cuts it in half and spreads butter and a sort of chocolate sauce in the middle and then fries the other surfaces on his griddle, banging it down till it is fairly flat. Then it is cut into bits and more sauce poured on top and some nuts are sprinkled. Very yummy, but definitely not for every day!

Horrendous drivers

We rush back to the house and prayers have just finished, so we pile all our stuff into the back of the 4 x 4 and head towards Banda with Saiful and Dodie. We stop for coffee halfway, on the top of the hill, as we did on the journey here, and have some more of the weird fermented fruity things. The road is full of horrendous drivers, but luckily Dodie takes it nice and slowly and carefully, and we eventually arrive safely back at the Green Paradise at about 10.30 pm.

Connecting to the internet

Oh the joy of our lovely little room there and a proper loo! After availing myself of the lovely loo, I head straight for my computer – it has been really frustrating trying to send messages to England from Sigli – and only plain hotmails have got through either way. Attempts by me to send attached files have been worse than useless. and every time I sent off one of the files with information for the vital Esmee Fairbairn Foundation application, it would arrive in our Glastonbury office corrupted. To my horror my connection to the Green Paradise hotspot seems to have disappeared. It is now 11pm and I am loathe to disturb anybody, but I really do have to send a lot of stuff off tonight and very early tomorrow morning – so I potter outside and try to explain to one of the guards. They have no English, I have no Indonesian – a lot of rather poor miming goes on, and eventually he rings someone and after about another 20 minutes my laptop is attached to the Green Paradise hot-spot again. Hallelujah! I manage to get straight into hotmail and catch up on the many messages that have arrived – some from my daughter and friends, lots from theatre and circus performers about being booked for the Glastonbury Festival and masses from my assistant Chris in Glastonbury. I make a list of what I need to do most urgently in the morning and collapse into bed.