Going bush - in Central Java

I was born in what Australians call 'the bush' - that part of the world beyond the big cities.

At age 18 I was happy enough to get away from always being someone else's son or grandson. For at least 20 years I enjoyed the relative anonymity of big cities. Since then it has suited me to spend more and more time with the type of people I grew up with - as I have been doing these past 3 days.

The good people of Blenheim would not necessarily see the similarities to the people of Kudus in Central Java - but I can.

Just 10 minutes ago at breakfast a man about my own age took it upon himself to greet me (an obvious stranger) and ask me what my business was in Kudus - much as Harold or John Spark or JC Irving would have done - just out of interest and good fellow feeling.

I am here to try to help the local water authority to attract loan funds to enable the extension of basic drinking water infrastructure. When I did similar work in Australia I always found it easy to empathise with local people and easy to get irritated by the hoops that various bureaucracies put them through. So it is here also.

The forces that work for good and progress always coexist with other more malign forces. At age 18 I lacked the maturity and wisdom to sort the one from the other in a place where my roots went back more than a century. At 56 I find it a little easier to see the parallels and guess just who might be on the side of the angels - and when.

Today I have to look at the first cut of a capital program for the next few years. The question I'm expected to shine light on is whether it's 'bankable'.

Bankability is actually a very useful concept to apply to such circumstances, as it's more than just the sum of its parts. We're looking at four contributors to bankability - their governance, their reporting, their planning and their tariff policies. Then we are asking whether it all comes together in what I'm terming 'a good story'.

Bureaucracies everywhere love to define things in terms of their inputs - if all the inputs are ok - or have a policy in place to 'pretend' it's ok - then, by definition, the sum of it all must be ok! Not so .... !

The first number I heard late last night for the Kudus capital program was very high - bordering on the bizarre. I can hardly wait for the process we'll go through today (and over the next few weeks) to (hopefully) pull it together into a coherent 'good story' that a bank can consider supporting.

I'd love to show you some photos of the beautiful landscapes around here - of the fields of peanuts, sugar cane, beans and other dry season crops I don't recognise. Unfortunately my photographer is back in Jakarta - so you'll just have to use your imagination.