New Year, New Jobs, Still Fun.

With the arrival of the new year has come a flurry of new job and volunteer opportunities that we have started to really get involved with, which has brought on a serious and fulfilling lifestyle change for us here in Bali. But before I get into that let's talk about New Years Eve.

For New Years Dan and I decided to take a little trip to Gili Trawangan island, a small island off the coast of Lombok (the island directly East of Bali) that is notorious for it's free spirited parties. In order to get there we had to take an hour and a half cab ride across Bali to the coastal port of Padang Bai. There we waited for an hour for the next ferry as we literally walked up to the previous one as the gate was closing...it's a frustrating things to see. We sat at the food stalls in the port and ordered some Nasi Campur from a small stand. Nasi Campur in this case means that the little old woman working the stand takes a plate of rice (Nasi) and mixes it with a few other things (chicken, tofu, eggs, chiles) that are already cooked (god knows when...hopefully fresh each morning) and on display in the window of her small cart, along with the bevy of flies that tend to accompany carts such as this one. She then proceeds to grab each part of the dish with her bare hand and place them around the rice. It may sound like at this point one would lose their appetite but I think you get used to things like this once you live out here for a little, and besides on trips like this you have to adopt the cliched mantra "when in Rome." The meal, including water, cost a total of 10,000 Rupiah (roughly 90 cents) and was surprisingly satisfying and definitely filling enough.

After continually convincing everyone else at the little port market that we didn't want to stockpile sunglasses, or buy water to supplement the water we were already carrying, or basically that just because we're obvioulsy western doesn't mean we'll buy anything that is for sale, we got onto the next ferry. The ferry ride took about 5 hours and docked in the southern Lombok port of Lembar. We then took an hour and a half bus ride to the north of Lombok, passing small villages and herds of monkeys (is herd the correct nomencalture? packs? hoards? There were really a lot of them) to the northern coast of Lombok where we sat and waited for the ferry to Gili Trawangan while succumbing to the hard sell put on us by the local travel agents, a.k.a. every local person as they all seem to work for one "travel agency" or another, that all seem to sork together, to organize our trip back to Bali. We ended with an arrangement to pay just around USD $14 for the same itinerary back...not bad if you have 12 hours to spare and don't mind arriving home with next to unbearable ass pain.

Finally after a short ferry we arrived at the island and jumped in a donkey pulled cart that took us to our hotel. Our room was nice enough, in other words it had two beds and a bathroom, and was just a short walk from all the bars and restaurants along the beach. The running water for the sink and shower was salt water, and as far as I can tell was probably pumped directly out of the ocean...so I would end each shower by dumping a bottle of fresh water over my head.

The first night and next day leading up to New Years Eve were filled with torrential rain storms flooding the streets so unfortunately I didn't bring my camera and therefore have only a few pictures from our stay out there. The bars along the beach are all built for comfort; open air, bungalows and tables on the beach, cheap beers, and tons of people there raring to celebrate the occasion. Each bar, restaurant, and hotel had their own new years celebrations that were open to everyone. People overflowing into the streets, climbing and dancing on chairs and tables. Clubs and stages were built over the ocean with fireworks at midnight, and everything else that goes along with a party of this magnitude. Gili Trawangan is notorious for its lax drug policies, which not surprisingly leads to a lot of people selling marijuana throughout the island, and it is also famous for the fact that Magic Mushrooms are sold openly at a bunch of the bars. It's really a one of a kind place, and with so many people there for New Years that it was probably even hard to find a spot to sleep the night on the beach, I can safely say it was quite an experience.

New Years Day was spent lounging on the beach, snorkeling, reading, and watching a movie in the beachside bungalows. On January 2 we started our long journey home at 8:15 AM and got back to our house about 12 hours later.

Now onto the serious side of life. I'm still doing work for Craig smith on his Meaningful Broadband report on a task by task basis even though he is currently based out of Bangkok. On top of that I've also found a few other great opportunities that I am very excited about.

Dan and I have started volunteering for an organization known as the East Bali Povery Project. Started by a man named David Booth, it's aim is to bring health and nutrition information, education, resources such as water and food to a series of villages in Northeast Bali that are living in abject poverty. David started the organization in 1998, and since then he has done absolutely amazing things with the cooperation of the village. In his work he has devised several models for sustainable development within these villages that allow all of the people living there to become actively involved in the betterment of their own lives. I could go on forever about the things he's done for them such as building several schools, building several water resevoirs, teaching them how to farm for things to supplement their traditional diet of Cassava, Corn, and rice, and teaching them about property nutrition and hygiene. The biggest part of his mission with the villagers is to teach them the idea of "learning by doing." He refuses to simply bring them food and supplies because this way they would never learn how to improve their lives and the lives of their children once he's gone. If anyone is more interested you can check out the website as some of the projects he has put into place are absolutely remarkable.

My first project with EBPP is to design a curriculum for a journalism class for their higher level students. Keep in mind this will be a very basic level class, and even though I myself am not a journalist David seems to be impressed with my work so far. Maybe working at the magazine paid off? After doing this I'm going to go up to the village once a week and help teach the students there how to put together their own village newsletter that hopefully in the next couple months or so we will start printing and distributing around the village itself and to neighboring areas.

Last Friday Dan and I went with him up to the village and saw what a profound effect he has had on thousands of lives. People stopping him, and us, along the way to thank us for he has done for them and for what we might do. Going into the schools and seeing the smiling students who are so happy and eager to learn, and who know that just 8 years ago there were no schools in the area. We saw kids practicing Karate in unison, one of the only sports David could bring to the village being that the whole area is located on a mountainside terrain, with only tiny plots of land that can be flattened or used in this way. We saw kids in uniform making the 2 hour hike to and from school along the mountainside. Once again I could go on for hours about what we saw, and how inspiring it was, but I think that this short description can suffice for now.

Another organization I hope to begin work with shortly is a startup non-profit that is tentatively called ECO (Environmental Communications Organization) which will have a subsidiary organization called START (Sustainable Tourism And Responsible Travel). I met the founder, Muriel Ydo, through our friend Alan out here and took immediate interest in her mission. Muriel has been working with various non-profit organizations around the island helping with education, healthcare, and environmental management for years now. She brought the Cleanup the World campaign to Bali a few years ago and managed to gather 10,000 volunteers the first time around. With this new organization she wants to do a variety of things, mainly focused on saving the environment, around the island. Some of her ideas include establishing a set of best practices that we can push organizations (mainly in the tourism industry which literally is linked with almost every business on the island, which is where the idea for START comes from) to adopt that would not only be better for the environment, but will also help the businesses to save money in various ways. She also wants to use the organization as a logistics base for all of the non-profits and NGO's around the island. In doing this she hopes to makes all of these now separate entities work together in order to become more efficient, ensure less duplicitous efforts, thereby saving time and money that could be focused elsewhere, gathering and supplying research and information for anyone involved and interested, helping to align efforts on the island towards common goals and the most effective means to achieve this...etc. etc. etc.

I'm not sure exacly what I'll be doing for her yet but in the conversations that we've had so far it seems more and more likely that I might be able to play a nice role in the development of this organization.

There are also a couple other opportunities that could turn into part time jobs/ways to make money but as I've already probably bored all of you to death I'll hold off on any more details until it's worth elaborating.

With these two quasi jobs along with volunteering I've suddenly found myself pretty busy out here. I still try to run every evening along the beach, and go swimming a good amount, but most of you would be happy to know that my life out here is no longer simply a carefree vacation...it has transformed into a vacation with a purpose. but seriously, it's nice to have nothing to do for a little but after a while you just get restless, and start to feel unfulfilled. Now that I'm busy with work I hopefully won't take my free time for granted as much, and I'll get just as excited as I used to about going out on Friday and Saturday nights. On top of that the fact that I'm not just working as a bartender or some other "just to pay the bills" job, but actually working on projects that I care about, it makes me feel like I'm actually starting to achieve my objective out here of a well-rounded character growing experience.

One quick aside about this blog is that the material I was discussing didn't have many correlating photos so I just threw in a few nice pictures here and there to spice things up.