Bangor man returns for tsunami cleanup DEP worker helps rebuild in Indonesia

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Robert Sypitkowski always wanted to do some serious good in the world.

In the idealistic 1960s and early ’70s, he planned to join the Peace Corps after college.

He married a woman who shared his philosophy and enthusiasm for providing service somewhere in the developing world.

They were beginning to make plans to sign up, Sypitkowski recalled in a recent interview, when they discovered they were expecting a child, and their lives took a more conventional turn.

Now 55 and an environmental engineer with the state Department of Environmental Protection, Sypitkowski has just returned from a six-month assignment with Doctors Without Borders in tsunami-stricken Indonesia.

His mission there was to improve access to safe drinking water and to improve sanitation on the isolated island of Simeulue, 100 miles off the coast of Sumatra. The island is the closest land mass to the epicenter of the Dec. 26, 2004, earthquake and tsunami that killed more than 200,000 people.

Another quake and a smaller wave hit the region in March of this year.

There were few casualties on Simeulue, Sypitkowski said, in part because islanders recognized the signs of the impending tidal waves and fled to the island’s low inland hills.

Still, towns and villages on the coast were largely destroyed, and the island’s tenuous infrastructure crumpled. Wells were flooded with salt water, and the few public water systems on the island were crippled.

Open sewage canals could no longer drain into the sea because the slope of the land had changed. Streams and creeks, traditional sources of fresh water for drinking, washing and other uses in the most remote areas, were fouled.

The purpose of the project was to head off the possibility of a cholera outbreak, according to Sypitkowski, who serves on the board of directors of the Bangor Water District. Within three months of applying for a post with Doctors Without Borders – or Medecins Sans Frontieres, as the Geneva-based organization is officially known – he was notified of the engineering position and accepted it eagerly.

He was able to negotiate a six-month leave from his position at DEP in order to volunteer.

After a two-week orientation in Geneva, Sypitkowski flew to the Indonesian city of Medan on the island of Sumatra. With a population of 2.5 million, Medan is the third-largest city in Indonesia.

Sypitkowski calls it a “failed city” – battered, chaotic and dirty, with little evidence of the culture, infrastructure or civic pride that characterizes other cities in Southeast Asia, such as Bangkok, Kuala Lumpur or Phnom Penh.

From Medan, he journeyed to Sinabang, population 15,000, the largest city on the island of Simeulue, which has a total population of about 75,000.

Sypitkowski spent the next five months sharing a small house in Sinabang with a changing roster of relief workers from Doctors Without Borders and other agencies. About once a week he traveled the 80-mile length of the island: 41/2 hours over tortuous roads and washed-out bridges by motorbike or five hours by boat. He oversaw the building of a system of dams, wells and piping to bring untreated water to villages on the northern coast.

On most days, he worked closer to home in the village of Labuhan Bakti, just 30 miles from Sinabang but a 11/2-hour drive over rutted roads.

In this village of about 1,300, he designed and supervised the building of a small treatment plant that took murky, silty water from a shallow pool and settled, filtered and chlorinated it into water safe for drinking and other purposes.

Residents of the island by long practice have boiled all water they use for drinking or cooking, but opportunities for contamination abound, Sypitkowski said, especially since the earthquakes and flooding created new areas of poor drainage and standing water.

Sypitkowski organized and paid local workers to clean out sewage ditches in the communities he served, removing trash and litter as well as inches of accumulated human waste to improve drainage and reduce the likelihood of disease.

Throughout his stay, Sypitkowski interacted with a wide variety of people: fellow relief workers from various countries, village leaders, interpreters, trades people and laborers. He found great frustration in the difficulty – or impossibility – of obtaining quality materials for his building projects and of communicating Western notions of hygiene and environmental protection.

He chastised himself for not learning to speak the common languages of the island and having to rely so heavily on his translators.

He missed his wife, his friends and family, music, quiet, a sense of order, and beer.

Now back in Maine, Sypitkowski is reflecting on his experience, weighing the value of the work he did on Simeulue against the odds of its longevity.

Already, he has heard that someone put the wrong kind of gravel into a filter at his treatment plant, causing one of the pumps to break. Residents disconnected sealed water treatment pipes in order to divert water for their private use, opening up the whole system to potential contamination. He doubts it will be properly maintained or managed for more than a couple of years, despite his efforts to train local operators.

He is pondering the peculiar bureaucracy of private relief agencies working amid traditional lifestyles of remote societies, and the inner conflict between his relatively privileged life and his newly realized understanding of how simply much of the world lives. He has renewed appreciation for such amenities as traffic lights, zoning setbacks, noise ordinances and other order-imposing regulations.

“I appreciate more, now, how lucky we are to be here,” he said. “It’s entirely an accident of history that we live the way we do.”

Sypitkowski said he misses the friends he made on Simeulue and on his travels around the area. The harsh circumstances on the island brought international relief workers together in intense relationships, he said. He also came to care deeply for many of the island natives he worked and socialized with.

He’s looking to extend his personal connection with the area by supporting the education of two young people whose lives touched his during the assignment.

Rony Bintang, 26, acted as his assistant and translator, and Sypitkowski was privileged to play an honorary role in his wedding. Bintang wants to study engineering so he can continue to serve his community on Simeulue.

Asima Siallagan, 20, hopes to become an English teacher. She lives in the “failed city” of Medan, and has limited access to the classes she needs or the computer technology that would make her studies more meaningful.

Sypitkowski has established a scholarship fund for these two aspiring professionals and is seeking donations. Find out more by sending him an e-mail at sypit1@gwi.net.

Sypitkowski kept a richly detailed journal in the form of e-mails to friends and family and took scores of photographs. He will present his slides at 7 p.m. Tuesday, Jan. 31, at Bangor Public Library, with a Feb. 1 rain date.