July 21st - The end of my orientation

I started this week (or ended last week) with an extremely relaxing weekend. The guesthouse in Meulaboh was full as there were other visitors from the main office in Banda Aceh. This made it very pleasant. Long walks along the beach, enjoying rich coconut juices and reading good books is about as stressful as it got. As I mentioned last week, you can get the most delicious juices here; my new favourite is a mix of carrot juice and tangerine juice. Perhaps a tad unusual but it tastes fantastic! The same is true for the red bean and sweet corn ice cream! It might sound a bit off but I could easily eat it on a daily basis. I think every country has its culinary oddities that would not be very popular elsewhere. In the Netherlands, for instance, we have our famous raw harring. Here it would have to be the durians: they really love them (picture)! I try to eat some every time it gets offered and I am starting to develop a taste for it but I am still having a hard time getting over the smell. It smells terrible! Also, durians start to ferment in your stomach and eating enough of them will actually get you tipsy. It is a funny thing that they are so popular in a place where there is a general prohibition on alcohol!

On Monday morning I went to Suak Seumaseh, in the sub-district of Samatiga, to have that focus group discussion with the Community Development Board (CDB). We were going to talk about the CDR programme; how the process went and what we could do to improve it. I had previously conducted a number of focus group discussions in Mozambique for my master thesis. Ideally, there should be between six and 12 participants, each one being an expert on the topic of discussion. I would merely have a facilitating role consisting of stimulating the participants to discuss a number of themes among themselves until they reach consensuses. In Mozambique the problem was that the focus group discussions tended to evolve into full-fledged community meetings! In Suak Seumaseh, the exact opposite happened; of the seven CDB members, only three showed up! For the rest, the constraints were similar: language problems, the fact that I had one rather than two helpers (one to keep the discussion going and the other to translate for me and take notes), the analytical skills of the participants and the interpreter’s and, of course, my own level of experience. But you learn something every day and you also learn to work with the limitations. In any case, a number of interesting observations were made during the focus group discussion. I will briefly summarise the main findings.

The IRC’s approach, the length of the CDR process, the active participation that is required of the community and the IRC’s demand that the community make a significant contribution to the programme have been mentioned by the three CDB member in Suak Seumaseh as constraints. As is normal in an emergency phase, organisations implement their own programmes. The IRC has now taken the lead in applying a Community Driven Approach. By building their capacities, the CDR programme seeks to empower local communities to assume responsibility for their own development. They are merely assisted in organising their knowledge, identifying and prioritising their problems and finding their own solutions. The communities then develop and, with a cash grant from the IRC, implement their own programmes. Active participation and social inclusion as well as a sizable contribution in money and/or in kind are essential ingredients for ownership which, in turn, is crucial for the sustainability of the programme. However, because many organisations still implement their own programmes, it takes time and effort to convince communities of the long-term benefits of such an approach. It also demands a lot from the communities themselves; that is the whole idea of placing them in ‘the driver’s seat’. Interestingly, they subsequently mentioned all the above-mentioned constraints as strengths of the CDR programme: ‘it took a while but we now appreciate the advantages of this approach; we do everything ourselves and it ensures that, after the IRC has left, we will continue to carry out projects in our community’.

During the rest of the week I went on a number of field visits with different CDR teams. I went to Kuta Teunogh and Sereumpoh in the sub-district Arongan Lambalek, to make arrangements with the CDBs in order to open bank accounts. I also went to Kuta Nibong to help the CDB make the final revisions to their project proposal (as you can see in the picture, Kuta Nibong may be difficult to access during the wet season). In addition, I helped one of the CDR teams go through two community proposals to identify gaps and weaknesses and I have talked at length with another team about the steps in the CDR team in order to draw best practices. I am not going to write about what came out of this discussion because I hope to be able to hold the same conversation with other teams, so I will surely come back on this at a later stage. But one thing is clear: they wish they had more time! To conclude, our CDR advisor has returned from leave at the end of this week. This means that my orientation has come to an end and that we will sit down on Monday to work out a programme for me with a clear set of tasks. Although some of my activities this week have been more substantive, I am extremely eager to start with the real work! I should also mention that today I returned Banda Aceh with the car; it was a long but very nice trip (see the last picture below).

That was is for this week. As most of you have now come to expect, I have again included a number of scenic pictures below. Enjoy!