CRP - Completely Ridiculous Project

I am back in civilisation, for the weekend. I will have to return to Malacca on Sunday for another week of the CRP. I have decided to rename CRP as the Completely Ridiculous Project. What's so ridiculous, you ask? Well, apart from the rural health survey we had to carry out, we also had a couple of field visits to various sites of so-called importance to environmental health. These have so far been rather disappointing and IMHO, a waste of petrol. We stayed in the middle of nowhere, between Elephant Track (Alor Gajah) town, and Clay Mosque (Masjid Tanah) town. Every morning we had to meet at the health office of either town. Therefore, we had to travel to and fro on the same freaking road, a few times a day. Due to lack of planning on whoever's part I would like to know, we made a lot of unnecessary trips. Let me explain... On Day 3, we drove all the way to meet up with the MOH people at the Clay Mosque health center, to later double back on the same path, all the way to some perkampungan orang asli to see a water pump (1) and storage tank (3). We later had to hike up a hill to see the so-called gravity feed system, which according to my lecture notes was supposed to be river water piped from high ground to the village. I expected some waterfall thingy but it turned out to be a small hexagon shaped spring in a pool (2) with water flowing down a pipe to another pool, and to yet another pool (4). Anyway, we later had to drive another 30 km to see the latest state-of-the-art "system" which filters the dirty water from the house before releasing it into the drains. Turns out that all 33 of us travelled all the way just to see this small, rectangular hole of goo. Why didn't they just show us a photograph of it during the briefing? The following day was The Mosquito Day. We started our journey at 8.00 am to the Elephant Track (ET) health office to hear a short briefing about dengue and the Aedes mosquitoes. We then travelled quite a distance to some housing area which the officers had to spot-check for Aedes larvae. We broke up into 4 teams of 8 and entered a few houses looking for potential breeding sites. After a few houses, I decided to sulk outside the next house as I was sure we would not find anything anyway. To my surprise, my group mates shouted for me to get into the house as they actually found some larvae. After that, we made a trip to Pulau Sebang, which is not an island by the way, to see the anti-malaria drain. As you can see from the map above, it was a long way up on the right side. We had to hike into the jungle again to locate this amazing "drain" which looked more like a tiny river. How ironic that I was bitten by quite a number of mosquitoes while I was there. In the evening, we once again went all the way to the ET health office, who later lead us as a convoy all the way back past our place of stay to Clay Mosque to see them fog the police quarters there. Spare me. It's not like I've never seen fogging at 6th college in UM, as well as at the Klang hostel. We had to follow behind the guy in the Darth Vader mask, as he went floor by floor pumping white fog into each unit. I think the Aedes were pretty immuned to it, as they were still flying around after that, while I was the on the verge of death after breathing in that much of insecticide. Ugh. Anyway, here ends part 1 of the CRP story. Tune in next time for more CRaP...

# scribbled by j e l l i o ` at 6/10/2005 07:23:00 PM
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