Pertama Hasil - First (tangible) Result

Happy April to all of you in the land of 4 seasons.  Most of you will be seeing spring bulbs coming up, some will even have had the blooms – west coasters for sure! Here, we are mostly out of the rainy season although the odd rain does surprise me but only lasts a short half hour at most. But the end of rain means it’s now hot and muggy and the breeze is now coming from the south which means my balcony does not catch the lovely breezes that have been so helpful to me in the last few months. It’s pretty hot out there once the sun comes around! But this is the last month in this house as our lease is up and the end of April and I will move in with my friends Angela and Morton until I am finished my time here. We make a good group and as I stayed with them a year ago for a month we’ve already done a trial of living together and we more than survived.

drying clothes-tin roof and 32C perfect dyer and no electiricity

 This morning greeted me with my neighbours who are within a few meters away, burning their garbage that they pile at the end of our balcony below us.  Also where they live.  The lovely smell of burning plastic wafted across as I stepped out with my coffee in hand, so quickly backed into the house to wait it out. Piling and burning garbage is a common practice, even in the large cement bins that are along roadsides for the purpose of dumping and they are supposed to have garbage truck pickup regularly but sometimes they are overflowing and people burn some of it after they have climbed into the bin and sorted through for any good “finds”. It sure gives me the worries to see people sorting through, even young children, bare foot clambering through a pile of garbage with who knows what in it.  We’ve started to separate ours into a bag of stuff people might want and the kitchen wet stuff they might not so that they don’t have to sort through all of it to get bottles and cans etc. It’s a real dilemma as to how we can help out the waste management here! That’s our little bit that we thought of so far.Also see the laundry below us on the rood of the housing. Great way to get the clothes dry quickly.

my speaking debut!

Well, I left my last Blog with a comment of “see what’s next” after experiencing my epiphany of the education I think is needed regarding people with disability. That being just illuminating the “abilities” rather than the “disability” of people with physical differences such as missing limbs, body size, vision and hearing loss. All the power points in the world explaining symptoms and encouraging inclusion is far too generic. So, in consultation with my colleague Berty and my man Don (by Skype) the idea of doing a film of Elmi and her independence could be the start of showing how someone from their own village is independent, more so than they ever imagined, and begin to plant the seeds of seeing “ability” rather than pity for “disability”. There are many clips of videos shown here of white foreigners who have very serious limb losses doing spectacular things like playing piano with their toes, getting around with paralysis of the lower body etc but people see these and just look at them as movies from far away and can’t relate this to people here. They believe that these “miracles of ability” happen because foreigners have lots of money. Now they will see that every day independence and the learning of a skill to make a living can happen right here if they know about the resources available to them, mostly from government and can get connected.

Berty introducing DVD of Elmi and independence

watching the DVD

So, Elmi thought this filming was a marvelous idea; Berty used my camera with my coaching on what we are looking for and the night before Elmi flew to Solo, Java for her 10 months of computer training, they filmed and re-filmed until 2am! But they got it. I located a studio to do the editing through my friend Chrystal, and Berty and I spent many hours with the editing, writing script for Berty to narrate the introduction and purpose of the film, choosing music, colour – very bright ones catch Indonesian’s interest who love lots of colour. And we figure at least 40 hours start to finish, we are having the debut of the DVD in Elmi’s village this week. We are starting with a workshop on disability in general, then letting them know I will be going home, so we need 3 people to volunteer for us to coach on how to keep up to date on government resources and how to help people get applications in for what they need. Then we will end with the DVD of their neighbour Elmi. I think they will be very surprised when they see how able she is, as some have not seen her since her accident a year ago as they fear seeing her with missing legs.

I will not post this until I have a few photos from our film debut in Oesena and the workshop. Take care all, and enjoy your spring. 4 seasons is a blessing I think!