First post from Nias

This is the team house and office in Gunung Sitoli. It is home to me and Simon my logistics manager. And Rebecca is expected to join us as HR/Admin manager at the end of the month. There are coconut palms in the garden, we are 150m from the beach.

And here is the beach looking north
and looking south. Fishing boats work off this section of beach
And this is the house in Tuhemberua, about 2 hours drive from Gunung Sitoli. The first half of the journey is on new tarmac, the second half on rough stone tracks with some very steep and bumpy sections. This is home to Kathleen (beneficiary accountability and base manager) and her husband Pieter (was project manager moved to construction when I arrived) and Allison the health manager. We rent 4 Mitusbishi Strada 4x4 pickups which come with contract drivers. There are 3 rooms upstairs and downstairs are offices, meeting room, kitchen etc. Most of the water comes from rain water harvesting, that is collecting water from the roof into a large open concrete tank called a mandi - perhaps 10,000 litres of water.
The office is on the left, this is the road you come along to approach the office.
But 100m in the opposite direction is this hole which appeared on 28 March 2005 when there was an 8.7 earthquake. The road dropped 20 metres

Allison celebrated her birthday last week- we got her chocolate, rambutan and a cake.

Allison and I walked along a beach about 20 minutes drive south of Gunung Sitoli. Not quite tropical paradise but coconut palms over the beach give a good impression !

This is a creek near the Gunung Sitoli house - quite tropical.
And belwo the same beach again that Allison and I walked

This is typical of houses in the jungle - thatched roof over wooden plank walls. Most people farm - rubber, cocoa, cassava, rice and some thing used for perfume but I haven't worked out what it is. And pigs.

This is also typical but this time stone built and with a TV dish a wealthier family. There is another design, a wooden structure built on legs which rest on rocks - it's meant to survive quakes well. I'll get a photo of such a house soon.
Cocoa pods, one of the cash crops.
Now to the work. This is a Pustu, a local clinic, this one in Sifaorasi. We had to sack the contractor on this one and appoint another. We have built 4 pustus and we are in process of equipping 8 of them with all the equipment they need. You cannot drive to some pustus, we will employ local labout to carry the equipment.
And this is the puskesmas, a regional health centre, which we built in Tuhemberua about 10 minutes from the team house/office. It's complete and fitted out.
The white block is a rain water harvesting tank at Hiliowatua school about 10 minutes in the opposite direction from the house, one of 4 at the school which Medair installed. The tank feeds the latrines with the red roof. But the tank is really about 1m too low and the latrines and the new school building to the right unfinished due to a dispute with the contractor. The school was built under BRR the official reconstruction agency for Northern Sumatra. It makes me angry to see donors money not well spent.About an hours drive from the house and across a river is Sambulu. The road stops there. If it rains you have to be careful that you can cross the river to get back. This is a communal bathing shelter, the old one was destroyed in the quake. Water is piped from a spring in the hills. There is a male and female section and a second bathing shelter 200m further down the village to the right which will be fed with the same waterBehind the Tuhemberua Puskesmas is a protected spring - that means there is a natural spring behind the bamboo to the top left but by piping it away from the spring itself and covering the spring over, we protect the water from contamination from animals and soil. So the clinic will always have a supply of clean water. They also have a rain water tank to supply the toilets (but please don't think flush toilets - porcelain hole in the ground flushed with a bucket of water from a smal tank in the toilet which is replenished from the rain water tank.
So there are some intial visual impressions of the tropical island of Nias, 0.5degrees north of the equator, about the most westerly part of Indonesia and nominally Christian