A Trip Upriver

Earlier in the week I went on my first site visit to a region called Ulu Papar (literally 'upriver from Papar').  Also in the truck were the project engineer (Topo), two local student interns at TONIBUNG (Chester and Ferdinand), two EWB Junior Fellows (Ben and Rory, students from Strathclyde University), two computers, 20 energy meters with pre-paid cards, and a fridge! My job was going to be to set up the pre-paid electricity metering systems in two villages, Kampung Pongobonon and Kalangaan.  The microhydro generators are already up and running for both of these villages but the next step is to install meters in each household so that the community can buy back the system over time.

Dropping off the fridge at Pongobonon!

It was about a three-hour drive to Kalangaan where we would be spending the night - the journey started off on tarmac but as we went further into the forest, it became much more difficult driving conditions (and a less comfortable ride for the passengers!)

The good section of road is actually relatively new - it's been there for about a year or so and is currently being extended to allow construction traffic for a controversial new dam project, Kaiduan Dam. The project proposal would build a reservoir to supply water for the Kota Kinabalu area but will mean that several indigenous communities in the area of Ulu Papar, including those villages which we visited, will be displaced.  Activists feel that the voices of the communities in this region are not being given a fair hearing by the officials, that alternatives to this scheme have not been properly considered and that the resettlement arrangements will not be suitable. 

Intensive roadworks

Activists feel that indigenous communities in the area are not being fairly represented

To get to Kalangaan, we continued for a short distance on foot, and then through the river!

 

Kalangaan is a very pretty, peaceful place and felt gloriously cooler than in the town (particularly when the rain started thundering down later in the evening!).

The view from the room where I slept

There were chickens everywhere! One also got carefully selected to form part of our evening meal.

In the afternoon we got on with some work! We needed to demonstrate how to install one of the electricity meters and how the charge cards and software would be operated.  This proved to be more tricky than I had anticipated because the cheap software we are using turns out to be incredibly buggy. The software also has no real instruction manual (in English or Malay) and definitely no troubleshooting tips... My task over the next week or so is to try to work out how to tackle this and then go back! The other challenge (which I naively hadn't thought about) was that the lesson had to begin with how to turn on a computer, double-clicking practice and the importance of the 'save' button!  

Trying to demo the electricity pre-payment system

On the route back to Kampung Nampasan we had a couple of pit-stops: Kampung Pongobonon (just to let them know we'd come back in a week or so), a village en-route (for a lunch-time glass of rice-wine), Kampung Tiku (to collect some of the data from an existing payment system), and to tackle some of the road obstacles. The largest obstacle was a tall rubber tree which had fallen virtually intact across the width of the road. We did finally get it out of the way by using the towing hook on the truck and some brute strength!

We did manage to clear the path 

The route across to Tiku

All-in-all it was a great experience but I've got some work to do before we go back again, and I will definitely be taking a cushion to sit on for the truck ride!