Just to make you all jealous I thought I'd send you my work photos - I've been hard at work with World Health Organisation on Nias island dealing with the cleanup after the earthquake.
Recently I had to spend the night in a luxury resort on a tropical island - and to get there we had to heli in - our heli is the big ex-Soviet one in the background, the other is just dropping off some other guests - well, who needs taxis!

I had to collect some equipment which had been left on the mainland because there was nowhere to store it on Nias island after the earthquake, so it had been left in a store on the mainland. No problems, it was a good excuse to nip off over there - the joy of being in the UN is that you get access to all the toys which the various UN agencies have - the helicopter is doing food drops on the island every day - it carries a net of rice sacks underslung on a cable & drops a couple of tonnes of rice at a time onto villages in the mountains. It lives on the private island back next to the mainland so it flies an hour out to Nias each day, the back in the evening, so with the excuse of having to collect the surgical equipment I was going for I was able to ride back to its base - on the beach of the private island owned by a resort hotel! Sometimes it's a really tough life out here!
After having arrived at the hotel I and Rahel, my translator (who is also the Nias island surfing champion - did I mention Nias is known for having one of the best surfing beaches in the world?) had to get to the mainland, so we got someone from SurfAid (there really is an NGO made up of surfers who deliver vaccines etc to coastal communities from a fleet of ships which are funded by the Australian Govt!) ran us ashore in his powerboat - all together another exhausting day at the office!

It's hell working on a tropical island as you can see! This is one of the little ones off the coast of the main island, seen from the plane commuting in...

I'm also the UN Security Officer for the island, since I had the spare time to do that job as well (WHO doesn't really have that much Logistics work to do most of the time) so it's great, I get to know what everyone is doing and i have an excuse for being nosey about what other agencies are up to! The Power! It's particularly entertaining at the moment because down in the South of the island the villages are run by clans, everyone is related to each other and there are all sorts of clan issues going on, so Red Cross have already had to evacuate by helicopter in only the clothes they were wearing after a mob armed with machetes swarmed into their base camp recently! I happened to be going over there so I arrived just after the internationals had left, it seemed like a bit of a strange atmosphere, but it wasn't until I met the ones who had flown out down at the local beach where they had landed to regroup that I discovered why! Evidently the threat was specifically against Red Cross, not other people! Anyhow, the evacuation of an organisation like that naturally got everyone sitting up and paying attention, and now World Food Programme is probably going to have their warehouse looted! I'm not worried, I'm on holiday for a few days in Yogyakarta off in Central Java, three plane rides away from Nias (That's why i have time to write) and the locals in the south are not interested in hurting people, just in making sure that if anything is being given away their village gets some of it. There's so much corruption on a daily basis, and elections coming up, so everyone assumes that a different clan is being favoured over theirs... it certainly makes for an interesting time!

We are still getting fairly major earthquakes on a regular basis, about once a week we have one strong enough to get everyone calling up to see if we are ok, and every few weeks we get something strong enough to really shake things around a bit - but it was Bander Aceh where all the headquarters of the agencies are which had the most dramatic one recently - much lower in strength than most, but it put big cracks in buildings which had been structurally inspected and pronounced safe! I have little faith in the engineers reports having seen one posted up outside a hotel where I had been camping for several weeks; the rooms are plainly unsafe so we use one as a coolstore (it has AC) and had a tent outside - the engineers report said 5% damage and said the place was ok! One wing of the hotel has completely collapsed, and while the owner is happy to rent out rooms to foreigners (surprisingly some people sleep in them!) he admitted that he won't allow his family to stay in the place, they all sleep in tents! Presumably the engineer regarded the wing which had fallen down as the 5% and the rest of the cracked pillars & broken walls as just cosmetic!
Whenever we get a good shake everyone rushes to check the seismograph which is in the local governor's office - this is after a 5.6 Richter shake, everyone's just rushed in to see how much the pen wobbles on the rotating sheet.

Normally the sheet should show a series of straight lines:

when there has been a quake the line is marked by vibrations of the pen:

And then sometimes there is a real Earthquake!

:
Since we are in tents the earthquakes aren't a problem, in fact it's quite nice lying in my IKEA bed(I'm currently in a UN camp set up by a Swedish organisation!) and feeling the waves go through underneath me. The only worry used to be the risk of tsunami since before I was sleeping in the grounds of the falling down hotel right on the seafront, but now I've moved up the hill to the main UN camp (I had to when I was put in charge of security - otherwise I was 20 minutes drive away which wasn't very practical!) so we are camped on the tennis court of the island Chief of Police(!) and are high enough not to have to worry if a big wave comes in during the night.

On the downside, because we are based in the middle of the police barracks we had to go to the Chief of Police's leaving do a few nights back, a very surreal experience! Th party was very odd - everyone was sitting in rows, we got ushered into the second row as honoured guests after lots of shaking hands... Then they started singing, first a woman who was obviously hired to get the atmosphere going, but then the departing chief & his wife belted out a couple of numbers, then the police wives all came up & did a sad song for the departing one, and a greeting song for the new one, then the new one did his songs, and then the one leaving & his mates came on again & did a threesome which pretty much blew the roof off, and the Chief of Intelligence came up and did his bit... - not quite karaeoke (better singing for a start) but just singing traditional songs & evidently having a great time of it! Only a few boring speeches, during one of which I fell asleep, oops! Still, altogether not something I'd want to do every day but fascinating to see once!
I've now had a week away - had to go to Singapore to get my Indonesian visa renewed - unfortunately our office in Medan, the largest city on Sumatra island and 3rd largest Indonesian city (which makes it pretty big) forgot to get my visa renewed for the 2 weeks preceeding my leaving, so I had to go through the immigration at the airport with a 14 day expired visa - the man on the counter couldn't believe his luck - a real criminal! $280 fine later I was allowed to leave.

Singapore was surprisingly entertaining, they were having a big festival, which included a Chinese Dumpling Festival on one street! My laptop had finally died after 3 years of wars and general abuse, so it seemed like the place to get a replacement; I found a place which sold second-hand Apple machines - so I now have a machine which is about a year old, burns DVDs, had massive RAM etc, and is the latest version of the laptop I had before, and it was £500 - bargain! I'd never thought of Singapore as a second-hand computer destination, but of course somewhere that is totally into the latest tech has massive stocks of second-hand! So, I'm now back on Nias island in my tent with my WiFi connection straight out to the VSAT satellite Broadband dish made by Lear Corporation (they also make jets!) and sleeping on my comfy futon equipped bed - oh, it's hell out here!

While I was in Singapore I also had the opportunity to check out Les Arts Saut, the finest Aerialist show in the world, doing a trapeze act in Singapore for the random festival they were having - I got in for half price too, because someone who had biught tickets for tehir friends who hadn't shown was trying to sell them - in Singapore such a concept is so odd that it was lucky no-one had called the police, so I got his spare ticket at half price and we were both happy to undermine the fundamental principles upon which Singapore is built...

I've just had my R&R (Rest and Recreation - well, it's so tough out here I needed to get some downtime!) Normally I don't have time to take the breaks that are avilable on these sort of jobs, but, ironically, on this one because I don't have much to do I can afford to take some time off, so I went to Yogyakarta in central Java for a few days - visited Borobudur, the Buddhist monument which is fairly impressive, then, having got that out of the way at five in the morning the following evening I climbed Merapi, the local live volcano, setting off at 1 am from the village at the foot we climbed (myself, a guide and a French couple from the French embassy in Beijing who had decided to avoid going home to France this year) through the pre-dawn morning up the side of a 3000 metre cone volcano. Just before dawn we were scrambling up the scree slopes on the top, every so often a rock you reached out for a handhold on was hot... As the light built up the smoke rising from vents all around became visible, then, just to spoil it, as the light got better we could see all the rubbish & graffiti left by earlier Indonesian visitors... Some had even walked out on the solid lava of the caldera to write their names in stones on the flat surface - about as stupid a thing as possible to imagine! Still, apparently a couple of years ago someone fell through the crust into the lava - serves him right! The whole of the Indonesian islands are built of volcano cores which created the place, in Sumatra there is the super-volcano which is now Lake Toba - when I fly out to Nias the plane goes over it, it has a lake about 50km across, with an island about 30km across in the middle, and the actual volcano is what created Sumatra island, the Westernmost of the Indonesian archipelago. Just recently we got reports that it was showing signs of activity which was a bit worrying - if it goes off it will destroy pretty much all life on the planet! Still, on the bright side since it will kill us all it doesn't help to be further away so we don't have to do anything!

So, that's the news from Nias ...
After this is 3 months in Ireland fixing the house up, so keep an eye on the website -
http://www.caroltony.clara.net/Ireland.html
And that's it from here for now...