Sorry for the delay in general, I’ve been back in bali for almost a week now and so I’ll try to tie up the rest of the trip to rote and about my time back in bali.
The rest of the time in rote was spend doing fairly menial administrative tasks and hanging around the hospital. It was a little tricky really, Suzanne has a direct counterpart and who speaks decent English so they started looking at things they wanted to do and doing ward rounds and alike. I on the other hand appear to be a link between an administrative office and senior management so will have to take the few months that VSO recommends to settle in and survey the landscape. This was a little tricky as I think the management saw what Suzanne was doing and sort of wondered why I wasn’t launching myself in.
There is also a possibility that Suzanne will move in with some of the doctors leaving me the little two bedroom house to myself which will be very nice. It’s all a little complex and probably a little dull so I won’t say any more.
Anyway, I’lll skip to the last twenty four hours or so in Rote. On the last evening I ended up on the beach playing football with a group of teenagers which was pretty cool and trying to explain to them who Blackburn rovers are, why we are better than man united, that I think christiano ronaldo is very good but I don’t like him and that it’s pronounced Rovers not Woahvers which they didn’t grasp.
It is a little weird there as you will have an audience if you stop moving for more than a couple of minutes. We were waiting to be picked up one day and heard two people discussing us, they knew where we were from and what we were doing there without us ever having met them!
Anyway, on the last day we went to settle the bill of the hotel that VSO had put us in. It was at this moment we realised that we didn’t have enough money. We had not been spending wildly, in fact virtually nothing as the doctors had paid for most of our meals, it was just VSO had wildly underestimated how much money we needed. Thankfully we had just enough other cash to settle the bill and buy the ferry tickets and spent the next 48 hours scrounging our money from our VSO manager who we were travelling back with. There is only one cash point on the whole island and that’s normally out of order, we were seriously facing the prospect of being stranded.
Our situation wasn’t quite as bad as Sams whose hotel bill was 1.6miilion rupiah, VSO had given us about 1.7 million and there were many other unavoidable expenses such as eating (about 20,000 per meal) and aiport tax (30,000 each way), so that amount of money would never be enough. Well liveand learn I guess!
On Saturday night we went out for a meal with Dinnia our managers friends, its sort of a restaurant group although in reality I think it’s just a bunch of English speakers and those who want to learn English who hang out. They were all pretty down on Kupang and I had to keep reminding them, this will be the big weekend treat for us to visit!
The very good news if that if I pay for my own in country motorbike training, then dinnia has managed to sort it out for me to be able to ride motorbikes out here. This is really good news especially as the hospital has a bike I can use, it just gives me freedom and independence. I have to squeeze in a day and half worth of training in the next week or so. There is a theory briefing which as far as I can tell from what I have observed thus far is there are no rules on the road, just make sure you’re alert at all times.
BY this point I had a pretty grim cold, this would be the problem with having your office located near a load of ill people! By the Sunday it was pretty bad. POstive was that in the airport the plane was delayed which allowed me to watch highlights of that weekends premiership matches in the waiting room. It was the first football of any sort I have seen in almost 2 months.
After the flight I was rendered completely deaf and felt like my head would explode. I don’t know the exact medical reasons but I think it’s to do with phlegm and ears (sorry to much detail I know). Now speaking and understanding a foreign language is tough, doing it whilst temporarily deaf is far harder, there are some deaf volunteers and kudos to them, it must be really tough.
As a result I actually had to skip language school on the Monday, I went in and explained to our new teacher. I felt guilty really, we have switched teachers for the last two weeks of training and dorothia is only here for a year so has started work, sam had to stay in kupang an extra day so Suzanne and a full day of language school by herself and the poor teacher developed a complex on her first day that we were all boycotting.
Since then things have just trundled along this week. Things are really sweaty of late here with the rainy reason sort of starting so it will be nice to leave for Rote. Just in preparation mode really now. Going to a VSO housewarming on Sunday then going to watch Rovers vs Chelsea, the first live match I’ll have seen in two months and the last one I’ll see for period unknown.
SO I guess in summary, it wasn’t an island prison or a island paradise, it was too beautiful for the former and too flawed for the latter.
I promise better annicdotes for the next post, I’m wary I’ve had a few too many serious posts. The internet access is limited over there so will probably post when I visit kupang.
Talked to my parents on skpye so it does work if anyone wants to ring me and remember to get that snail mail sent, I’d really appreciate it............
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