Sulawesi Utara
North Sulawesi
Indonesia has a somewhat straightforward administrative structure. There are 34 provinces. Simple. Each province has a governor and a Regional People's Representative Assembly. Everyone is elected for a five year term. So far so good. And now for the tricky bits.
There are five provinces with special status. Aceh has its own flag and provincial anthem, and it practices Sharia Law. A group within this province called itself the Free Aceh Movement and fought for an independent state for 30 years at the cost of 15,000 lives. They dissolved their armed wing in 2005 but not their intentions. They now call themselves the Aceh Transition Committee. The Indonesian government calls them the Aceh Security Disturbance Movement.
The Yogyakarta Special Region has a Sultan who picks the governor, and so is therefore pretty much the boss. They do not consider themelves to be a province, but a region at the province level. Each to his own.
Papua is almost a normal province, but they have a law that the governor has to be of Papuan origins. They also have somewhat more autonomy over their government.
West Papua split from Papua in 2003. They maintain the same semi-autonomy that Papua has.
Jakarta Special Capital Region is a city-cum-province. The governor can appoint and dismiss the mayors of the region, and the local government is allowed to deal directly with other cities in different countries.
So there are 34 provinces, 5 of them having a special status. Under the provinces we have the Regencies and Cities. This is the level that handles Health and Education. Under these are the Districts and these can be broken down to the Villages or the Urban Communities.
The 34 provinces can be grouped together into Island Groups. For instance, our first province, Sulawesi Utara, is part of the broader collection of Sulawesi Islands. But these groupings don't seem to have the same significance as the groupings we have run into previously, so we'll just divide the country up by province, which might mean we're in a different province for each flight. C'est la vie.
So here we go to Sulawesi Utara province.