|
|
|
|
|
Stories from my internship with Wildasia |
|
|
|
|
31/5/2013: Last day of May already!!
I can't believe May is already over... That not only means that I have already been in Malaysia for 2 months, it also means that I would now have been done with college had I not been so unfortunate to get sick - This afternoon my classmates will be celebrating getting the exam results and will be on their way out into the big world with their fancy new degree.... I have to admit that I have been a bit jealous the last few weeks, thinking about how wonderful it would have been to finish my studies in Dublin this year but last night I realised something: I'm alraedy out in the big world using the skills that my "almost finished" fancy degree has taught me, I get a whole more year as a student in Dublin where I get to meet new people, learn even more things and engange in new things AND, I get to have a whole more year before I have to worry about applying for Masters - So really, I just do things in a slightly different order and different way to other people and, I guess that is not anything new for me!! Who knew that getting sick would end up giving me so many new and exciting opportunities that I probably wouldn't have had if I had just finished college this year as planned :) Happy days!!
Anyways, after a little while of heavy thinking about college and me being here in Malaysia, I now feel that I have come to peace with it all and I'm now flying high, ready to work hard, learn as much as possible and enjoy every minute of my stay here in KL (not that I haven't enjoyed it up until now, the last few days I have just constantly had this nagging feeling of "I should have been somewhere else right now")!!
Yesterday I had a great introduction meeting with my new boss, my supervisor and the technical manager of Wildasia and we have made a good plan of what my time as an intern here should be spent on. In short, I will be working on the WAGS project which I briefly introduced here on the website when I was in Perak (basically working to ensure that small oil palm farms get the global RSPO certification so that they are sustainable agricultural practices) and what I'll be focused on, is uptimizing the work process from data collection to the end report and I'll also be working on compiling a document that should work as a step by step manual on how to use the collected data to produce the final report so that it not only satisfies the required standards of the RSPO but also incorporates as much of the data from the baseline assessments as possible in a useful and simple way!
It will unfortunately mean that I will have to be in the office most of the time but I'll be going back to Perak on the 10th-14th of June to carry out more farm audits and I'll hopefully get to lent a helping hand with other fieldwork assignments during my time here - BUT even if I don't, then I think it is a really, really interesting task that they have given me and "the big boss" said that it would be 2 very useful documents that I will be producing, so what better way to spend the next two months than to create something that will be used by this office on a daily basis :)
Now I got to bounce, I should start work (they are very relaxed about when you start work, you can start any time in between 8.30-10.00 am but the sooner you start the sooner you can go home) so that I can soon enjoy my weekend!
I hope you'll have the most lovely Friday! I'm sending a million happy thoughts and my very best wishes to all of you out there - Today is going to be a great day!!
Susannah x
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
27/5/2013: Meeting up with a Pom Pom friend
This evening I went to see Sofie that I met during my time on Pom Pom Island - It was so great to see a familiar face around here!! I haven't been here for very long but it can sometimes be a little difficult to deal with constantly meeting new people, seeing new places and being introduced to new things... Sometimes it is simply just nice with a bit of familiarity :)
After work I took the train to KLCC to meet her in the Suria Shopping Mall (she has been in the jungle since we left Pom Pom island and she is heading to the most remote areas of Indoneasia the next 4 months so she really badly wanted a night of big city luxury) where we had a nice Indian meal. It is amazing how you can eat at a food stall or street kitchen for somewhere between 6-9 RM (12-18kr) but as soon as you go to a nice normal restaurant in the city you end up paying at least 60-80 RM (120-160kr)! I know that by Danish standards that is still very little to pay in a nice restaurant but out here it is crazy money compared to the quality of the food - I find that the food at the food stalls and in little local family run restaurants is just as good if not better than the fancy restaurants in the shopping malls!!
After enjoying a 2 hours long meal (the actual eating of the meal didn't take very long but we had so much to catch up on that we just kept talking without realizing that we had spend 2 hours in there), we went outside to have a look at the Petrona twin towers in all the up lit glory (very impressive buildings) and after a little walk around the beautiful park area we went to the Trader's hotel where we had a nice cocktail at the Sky Bar on the rooftop of the hotel!!! I half expected a posh place where we wouldn't fit in at all but the atmosphere was actually very relaxed, they played chill music, the cocktails were nice and the staff very friendly - so a great place to end a great night in good company :)
 "Beautiful fountain outside KLCC"
"Petrona twin towers - The next time I drop by I will bring my good camera so I can get a better photo"
It has been a long (but great) day so I'll head to bed now and hopefully get a good nights sleep before I have to do another 7 hours at the office tomorrow!! I think it will take a while to get used to sitting inside an office for so many hours a day - I haven't spend that many hours staring into a computer screen since I worked in IBM 3 years ago and with all the physical activity I have done the last 2 months on the island I find it VERY difficult to sit still in front of the computer for more than half an hour at a time... Bbut I'm sure I'll get used to it eventually and if not then I'll be going back to Perak to do fieldwork again soon!!
Bye for now, please take care of yourselves and each other for me!
Susannah x
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
24/5/2013: My first night in Melaka
Melaka is a place of great history! Before the 14th century it was a simple fishing village but when the Hindu Prince Parameswara, who was also the founder of the city, was ruling the city became a favoured port for resupplying trading ships as they travelled between China, India and the spice islands of Indonesia. This meant that Melaka attracted traders from all over the East and became a powerful trading state. However, after the death of the Hindu prince, Melaka headed into a troubled time where the state was ruled first by the Portuguese, then the Dutch and for a while the Brits and apart from a short period of time when rubber was an important crop, Melaka never regained the power I had during Parameswara’s ruling but went back to being a quiet village until today when it is a major tourist attraction!!!
I thought this entry needed a bit of history to set the scene now that I am in a very interesting city that has been granted UNESCO World Heritage Site status. A World Heritage Site is a place that is listed by the UNESCO to be of special cultural or physical significance and there were in 2011 962 sites on the list out of which 4 are found in Malaysia. Since its listing in 2008, Melaka has been one of the hottest tourist destinations and it is said that that has affected the city’s charm but I must say that what little I managed to see today before sunset was very charming and I think they have managed to make the modernization blend in quite well!!
I started out from KL this morning taking a taxi to KL sentral from where I took the KTM (a commuter train) to TBS, the bus station facilitating destinations south of KL. This in itself was a bit of a journey because I haven’t been to KL sentral or TBS before so I had absolutely no clue where to go and for once Lonely Planet was no use at all… However, with a little help from various nice staff members I made it to TBS where I expected an absolute chaos (All the bus stations we went to in Thailand and Laos last year were more or less chaotic all of them so was expecting the worst) but there was no chaos at all… Everyone was standing in line, no skipping the queue and no hassle of people pushing from all directions – was so confused by the discipline!!!
"Such a beautiful queue - Have never seen such a beautiful line at a bus station in Southeast Asia"
After queuing for 30 minutes I finally got my ticket but I had if cause not calculated that the busses were going to be fully booked because of the bank holiday and so I had to wait for 1½ but it was actually just a fun experience! Yet again everyone queued beautifully to get on the bus and everyone were smiling and giving way and helping each other – I am very pleasantly surprised by the hospitality that is found everywhere out here in Malaysia! Everyone is so helpful all the time, not like in Europe where you have to ask for help and get the feeling that you are a complete idiot for not knowing where to go :)
At 5pm I finally arrived in Melaka and after a short ride on a local bus I managed to find my hostel straight away (a very lovely hostel by the way – I’ll explain and show photos tomorrow) and after 5 minutes I was out in the streets of Melaka (no time to waste when I’m only here for a weekend)!! I have planned a long list of things to do and see tomorrow so I just took a little walk around Chinatown, enjoying the laid back atmosphere. On Fridays and Saturdays the main streets of Chinatown turns into a night market and even though it wasn’t actually planned I found myself in the middle of a lovely little night market where you could buy anything you can possibly imagine – It was AMAZING!! A night market if cause, isn’t a real night market without delicious food, and this night market lived 100% up to that!! They sold the most delicious spring rolls, Samosa, noodles in all different shapes and flavors, rice dishes, a wide range of seafoods, fruit juices, local ice creams and a million different types of local homemade pastries – It was heaven!!
"One of the lovely food stall selling the most gorgeous fish dishes"
I bought a lot of nice food but I didn’t actually buy anything else, which now gives me an excuse to come back tomorrow night and enjoy another night of crowded streets full of the most wonderful atmosphere… I think it is good that I don’t have any guys with me, am sure they would go crazy over all the shopping that can happen at these markets – as you move down along the different stalls you find that all of a sudden you cannot possibly live without half the things they sell…. It is like a disease, you just have to buy stuff either because it is pretty, because it is cheap or because you didn’t think it was possible to buy such a thing – all I can say is that it is FANTASTIC :D
"Street view of the night market"
I will upload more photos tomorrow so don’t forget to check the website again soon!! I hope you are all happy, I’m very, very happy!!
Susannah x
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
23/5/2013: 3 day work trip to Perak
As I briefly mentioned in my last post I was in Perak for work this week! We started out early Tuesday morning driving up to Tapah (an area in Perak), which is a 2½ hours drive from KL and drive directly to the dealership that we work with. The dealership that we visited takes care of the day to day running of around 700 small oil palm farms around the Tapah area and over the space of 3 days we visited 25 of these farms.
One of the workers from the dealership drove us around to a number of the farms that they reckoned would be suitable for the WAGS (Wild Asia Group Scheme) project that Wildasia is running - so farms that are good in terms of environmental impact and general management! Our job was then to carry out a baseline assessment of each of the farms which will be used to evaluate whether a particular farm is likely to be able to reach the RSPO standards (Global standards for use of sustainable palm oil products).
As part of the baseline assessment Andrea and I carried out farm audits which is a type of evaluation or examination of the standard of the farm. Basically, we were rating the farms based on a number of different categories like maintenance and upkeeping, health and safety, waste management, social implications, environmental risks and general farm management. Each farm get a score for 33 different parameters within the different categories, an average score is then calculated for each of the farms and this is then used as an indicator of the state of the farm. It might sounds very technical but it is actually fairly easy - There is a checklist with explanations to the different scores and the dealership worker knew a lot about the farm management and was therefore able to tell us details that weren't necessarily visable.
During out stay in Perak we stayed in a small hotel in a tiny sleepy town called Langkap! There wasn't much to do in Langkap but I'm not really sure we would have had the energy to do anyting anyway even if there had been things to do - It is surprisingly tiring getting in and out of a car, walking around farms and learning all these new things about oil palms. Meals were mostly Chinese (the majority of the population in the area seemed Chinese) and like everywhere else I've been so far, the food was lovely but very different from the Malaysian food in that it seems a lot more "oily"!!
All in all a very interesting trip and I was very happy to get out of the city for a few days as I find it a little difficult to be back in normal surroundings!! Getting ready in the morning is such an effort.... waking up to an alarm, getting out of bed, picking out something to wear, shower, making the bed, washing up the dishes after breakfast - All so much more complicated than on Pom Pom island where mornings (most days) were a none existing time in between no sleep and snorkel surveys and therefore rarely entailed any form of getting ready, cleaning or trying to look decent :D
I'm now back in KL but tomorrow is a bank holiday so this afternoon I made a quick decision of going away for the weekend!! Why stay in the city when you can go away to visit a World Heritage site?! Tomorrow morning I'll be heading to Melaka which is the third smallest state in Malaysia but it is located convieniently close to KL (a 2 hour bus drive) and it was in 2008 listed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site which (along with a lot of other reasons) makes it a very interesting place to see.
I haven't planned much (truthfully I haven't planned anything) yet but I will tomorrow morning, accompanied by my lonely planet book (my new best friend), head to TBS bus station to find a but that can take me to Jalan Jalan Besi which is supposed to be a lovely little guesthouse located in the busy Chinatown of Melaka where I've booked a bed in a dorm room - I can't wait!!!
I hope you all have an enjoyable weekend!!
Take care,
Susannah x
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
20/5/2013: First day as an intern!
Today was my first full day at the office starting my internship with Wildasia! Wildasia is a Malaysian company that operates as a social enterprise – this means that it is a non-for-profit-organization who is not working towards maximizing shareholders return but to make a social and environmental difference. Wildasia works to inspire businesses to improve their social and environmental practices to meet and exceed global standards – so in short: They work with sustainable oil palm agriculture and ecotourism!
I’m not 100% sure what exactly I will be doing here the next 10 weeks (the introduction meeting with the director, technical manager and my supervisor was postponed as the director was out sick) but no time is wasted so I’ll be going to Perak with Andrea (the Italian intern) and Jyun (my supervisor) tomorrow to help out with their smallholder project there. The Perak smallholder project works towards getting small oil palm farms in the area around Tapah RSPO certified (a form of sustainable agriculture certification for oil palm plantations/farms) and our job is therefore to carry out farm audits and baseline assessments to assess what types of improvements the individual farms need in order to be considered for certification – far from all farms are at a standard where it is realistic to get certified within the near future and the farm dealer that Wildasia works with has therefore picked out 70 farms around Perak that they believe are the best and we’ll then visit all of those before the end of June. I’m not yet exactly sure what the actual farm visits entail but Jyun will brief us on the way there tomorrow so all should hopefully be clear before we get to the farms!
Am really excited about doing field work already – after spending 6 weeks on an island it will probably be difficult to adjust to “office life” so I hope my work here at Wildasia will have a lot of outdoor field work :)
I’ll be back soon with lots more,
Susannah x
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
19/5/2013: A fun night and a day of dancing and eating
I have to admit that I was a little hesistant going to the pub crawl last night because it was only my second night in KL, I don't yet know my way around and everyone I talk to keep scaring me with all these horror stories of awful things happening to people when taking taxis but I went to the pub crawl anyway and I had a really great time!!! I met quite a few people (both locals and foreigners) that live in KL permanently (or at least for a couple of months/years) so I swopped phone numbers with some of them and am hoping I get to meet up with them again at some point - I am going to Perak with work this week to do field work so won't be around KL for a few days but maybe I will get a chance when I get back!!
Since arriving in KL (or I guess a lot longer than that) I have had big, big sleep problems... I wake up 4-5 times every night and at 6am I can't sleep anymore even though I am still super tired so this morning after coming home late and waking up early I was a bit tired but there was no time for that, because some of the people from the office were going to a Latin American Festival this afternoon and asked if I wanted to come. The festival was arranged by the different South American embassies here in KL and it was a great combination of entertainment, dancing, singing, eating and drinking. It was such a great atmosphere and it actually made me think about maybe going to South America some day (somthing I have never considered before)!!!
  
This evening I was looking forward to having an early night but I discovered somthing amazing..... a really cool invention.... you might have heard of it.... SKYPE!!! Oh yeah, for the first time in 6 weeks I was able to logon to skype and actually have a proper conversation without having to run around looking for signal!!! I tried talking to my mum and grandmother but that unfortunately didn't work very well and we had to reschedule but I managed to talk to my amazing flatmate Lucy and my German friend Franzy both of whom I miss very much! It was so great to be able to see them and hear all their news. In some ways it seems like I have been gone forever already but I am hoping that now that I'm living a more normal life out here that I will be able to stay in contact a bit more because as much as I LOVE it here, I also miss talking to my family and friends - It makes me happy getting messages from them saying that they are happy but it makes me even more happy when I can see their faces and see the happiness myself :)
Tomorrow I'll get to talk to my really close friend Clare back in Dublin (who got offered a PhD in Trinity College next year which means that I will get to spend one more year with her - Am so excited that I cannot even describe it) and I'm hoping that my mum, Arne and the twins are back home from the summerhouse so that I can talk to them as well!!! I can't imagine what a trip like this would be like if skype hadn't been invented :D
Anyways, it is now getting really late (skype is great but the time difference does make it a little difficult to get an early night when skyping people in Europe) and I should get to bed so that I'm rested and ready for my full day at the office tomorrow.
Take care everyone,
Susannah x
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
18/5/2013: My first full day in Kuala Lumpur
Yesterday afternoon I arrived in Kuala Lumpur (out here commonly referred to as KL) and already 2 hours after touch down at the airport I was in the office working!! It was a joy arriving at the office being greeted by my new colleagues who had already set up an email account for me, had a workspace ready, had printed out a contract for me to sign and who had a few tasks ready for me to start working on straight away - the place oozed of structure and efficiency, exactly the kind of place I like to be in!!!
Interns get offered free accommodation here at the office which I gladly accepted since I would have absolutely no idea where to start looking for an apartment and while living in a hostel would have its advantages, I think it could get frustrating after a while with people coming and going all the time (and it is if cause also nice to save money)!! The office is placed in one of the nicer neighbourhood in KL about 15 minutes drive from the city centre and while the room I am staying in is very basic (and I will have to share with another girl in a months time) then it seems like comeplete luxury compared to a tent on the beach :D There is currently one other intern working at Wildasia, his name is Andrea, he's Italien and he'll be staying here for the next 4 weeks or so but we have a room each and there is even two bathrooms so we have lots of space and it is nice to have company in the evenings!!
This afternoon I went to Chinatown to buy a few things (needed a pair of walking shoes that I can throw out when they get too disgusting from the mud on the plantations and a weekend bag) and I completely by chance ran into two Danish guys who are friends with two other Danish guys that live here in KL permanently and who runs a KL pub crawl every Saturday night. Unfortunately they didn't have flyer with them but they got my number and said they would call me later today with the details so that I can join them on the pub crawl - I figure that will be a good way to get to know people (even if it is only the two guys that live here then at least I will know them) here!!
I must say that the first 24 hours here in KL have exceeded all my expectations and I have a feeling that I'm going to like it a lot here!!
Now I should really go, because Andrea (the other intern) and I are going for dinner before I'm heading into town to meet up with the pub crawl people :)
Auf Wiedersehen,
Susannah x
P.S I'll tell much more about my work here at Wildasia in a couple of days - I'm having an introduction meeting on Monday and after that I should have a better idea of what my day to day work is going to involve - Am super excited!!
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|