I am sitting near the equator in a beach front hotel in Balikpapan, East Kalimaten, Indonesia. Wasn't quite expecting it but it's a great way to end this long trip. My time in Indonesia started in a chaotic fashion even before arriving. The itinerary of this last leg changed daily and when I was dropped off at the Beijing airport early Sunday morning, it turned out that I was left at the wrong terminal - but with shuttles running in between. With a bit of rushing managed to get through all the various steps to get to the flight gate with time to spare. I was met in Jakarta by a PH staff member and enveloping humidity.
Monday morning, the country director (CD) and I set out at 6a to make our way through Jakarta traffic to the ministry of health for a meeting about our assessment. We'd been invited by a diabetes sub-director to meet with the NCD director. After several hours, chatting with the former's staff, we were finally informed that the latter was not available and had forbade her staff from accompanying us on our assessment trip (though we'd be told to bring our bags packed to get on a plane). In the end, we decided to go to one of the sites anyway (where I am now) because our CD has many contacts here and it was at least one of the locations the MoH staff had pin-pointed as being a province where they would support our work.
No sooner had we set foot in Balikpapan, and it became apparent that the CD is very well known. He was warmly greeted by many of the hotel staff (where he was a hotel doctor), and when we went to the hotel seafront restaurant, an Australian voice called out his name and said "This man saved my life" (from thyroid cancer). This trip is looking up. Hopefully our meetings over the next few days will yield the outline for our project to be successfully implemented.
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