Small and quiet

August 25, 2010

            One of the attractions of Salatiga, as we envisioned it from our house in Bozeman, was that it appeared to be a small town, or smallish at least, and quiet, perhaps. I can’t remember if anyone used those words, or if we projected them onto Salatiga, but if you suddenly found yourself on a Salatiga street corner during just about any hour of any day, “small quiet city” is not the first thing that would come to mind. Perhaps you would think, instead, “absence of traffic regulations” as you watch a truck pass a bus into oncoming traffic on the right (they drive on the left here) while about 20 motorcycles also pass on either side of the bus. On 10 of the motorcycles you’re likely to see a family of 2-3 that will include a toddler standing up in the front wearing no helmet (often even when the parents are both wearing helmets) or sitting between her parents (no helmet, in any position). We first saw this alarming sight on a Jakarta freeway when we arrived, and it seems to be the normal state of things. I watched one man zoom down the street with his small child calmly resting his face on the metal bit between the handlebars. 

            I’ve been enjoying these roads, now, on my second-hand bicycle (rattling gears and brakes that demand a little lead more time) back and forth to campus, and it’s quite funny, I’m sure, to observe me stopped at an intersection, in my slightly-too-small-because-it’s-S’s-because-mine-shattered-in-the-bag-on-the-trip–from-Bozeman bicycle helmet (perhaps one of 10 bicycle helmets on the island of Java) waiting politely for a break in the onslaught of motorbikes, bicycle taxis, buses, cars, trucks, etc. etc. while zooming by me without stopping to observe that oncoming onslaught is another onslaught on another road, somehow merging and crossing without a pause. I can sit there for five minutes while traffic flows heavily in all directions and no one stops. Pedestrians begin to wonder why this bule (the Indonesian word for gringo) is just standing there on his bike, I can tell. No one ever really honks that much (unlike Cairo, about which all I remember is the honking), so the honks here are serious – they mean that you are about to get hit, though I haven’t seen anyone get hit yet.   But once you get the hang of it (these are words you can quote to me while I’m in the coma from head trauma) it’s kind of fun, as much fun as I’ve had riding in traffic since I used to zoom through downtown Seattle going south on 4^th Avenue during rush hour – exhilarating and life-threatening, and when I arrive at campus I’m bathed in sweat induced by humidity and adrenaline.

            Still, when we ask about a quiet place that is close to Salatiga everyone looks at us a little funny and says “Salatiga is a quiet place.” You find the quiet when you turn off the streets into any one of the hundreds of alleys that criss-cross the town. I call them alleys, but they are pedestrian walkways that zig-zag through every part of town, usually narrow, passing front porches with 4-5 bird cages and dozens of lush houseplants, mosques busy with people at prayer or blasting out something sacred from over-worked loudspeakers, tiny little stores, the occasional noodle stand, some stray cats, at night bats everywhere. Almost as soon as you leave the main road it is pleasant and more relaxed on those alleys, the sound of the traffic mostly blocked by the buildings (except when the motorcycles go down the alleys, but they are restrained here and seem in this context to see pedestrians). As long as you have a general sense of the direction you need to go in, you can get anywhere in Salatiga via those alleys, and they are the best way to walk or ride bikes around town.

            We’ve been here ten days now, which when I type it seems impossible. It seems much longer, perhaps because there is so little that has any kind of familiarity to it. My children are attending a fundamentalist Christian school (the biology class is still all creation, all the time – Monday S told me, eyes rolling, that he learned in biology that the reason we die is Adam and Eve), I have only the most hilarious smattering of Indonesian, the food is still mostly a mystery (quite delicious, I think, though so far only G and I have dodged the traveler’s GI curse, and sometimes I could stand a tad less fish sauce), we don’t have access to the internet too often and when we do it’s like the pony express version, a website galloping bit-by-panting-byte to your computer from somewhere on the far eastern part of the island. Most tedious, at the moment, is the fact that the house we are going to live in isn’t ready yet, so we are living in a “guest house,” which when I heard the term in Bozeman I thought was a house that the University keeps for guests but it is not – it is a sort of boarding facility with two floors. My university is graciously footing the bill for us while we stay here, but the rooms are sort of small (we are spread into three at the moment). All the rooms have bathrooms, but none of the bathrooms have sinks. Instead, you are supposed to use the big blue plastic bucket with little scooper that sits next to the toilet which is also the shower room. Laura and I don’t have hot water in our room, and S’s shower head keeps popping off, so we go from room 208 down to room 202 every morning to use G’s bathroom, but god forbid you turn the hot water on first or you will receive severe burns immediately.  All our beds are double beds, and fairly comfortable, except for the fact that all the sheets and blankets are made for twin beds, which is slightly annoying when you share a bed with someone. 

            My teaching, too, is slightly frustrating. I will be teaching three classes starting next week  – three actual classes that each meet every week – and that’s a little annoying, but by the time it transpired there was little way to resist without looking like a complete prima-donna. I am teaching Critical Reading (35 students), Academic Writing (16 students) , and Public Speaking (16 students), and yesterday I met with the team who is also teaching critical reading. We have a handbook and a syllabus that we all have to follow – I think this is the same in the other classes too, though I haven’t really had a chance to examine the handbooks all that closely. The critical reading course seems to focus less on the critical and more on sort of loose reading strategies – making inferences, finding the main idea, etc, but no place where you can say “This writer appears to be a crackpot” or anything like that. The academic writing course, as far as I can tell, addresses the topics in ways that clearly are not inspired by anything I’ve been reading for a long time. And public speaking? Well, who knows. I have my first meeting tomorrow with the team, so I’ll know more then, I guess.  The word is that getting students to talk is like pulling teeth, but that’s fine. I have ways to make them talk.  I’m actually looking forward to it, just because I know it’s going to be so odd and so interesting, and because out of the group of 65 students I’ll have I know that I’ll become very attached to several.  I am rolling with it, and not so concerned, in part because I will make sure this doesn’t happen again next semester (or try to) and in part because I think it will be fun, in any case, to negotiate a brand new teaching context like this.

            Today (Wednesday) we finally cleared the immigration hassles. I am now registered as being in Indonesia with several ministries in Jakarta, the Indonesian consulate in LA, the provincial office for Central Java in Semarang, and the Salatiga police. Each has their own picture of me and my family, and all our fingerprints, all 40 of them. As promised, the university made the day a sort of excursion, and they sent along Eka, a wonderful young woman who has accompanied us on a couple of other excursions as well, and is fast becoming our best family friend.  We stopped first at a beautiful Buddhist temple that overlooks Semarang, then went to the Ciputra Mall, where S wanted to go to the movie store, and we did, after getting lost inside. In Bozeman I am kind of a stickler about never buying movies – it’s always struck me as silly – but here you can buy DVDs for $1 a piece (and no pirating, I am sure, never mind that they have Inception on the shelves) so we bought a whole bunch to watch in the guesthouse. After immigration (blissfully fast) and a quick lunch at Kentucky Fried Chicken (staffed by three women in hijab who must have a hard time working all day in a fast food place during Ramadan), we went to the House of a Thousand Doors.

This was the administrative center of the Dutch Railway system in Central Java, built between 1906 and 1916. It’s a giant imposing building that speaks authority and power, extremely well-built (likely with not too much Dutch physical labor) with giant double-wooden doors everywhere. S wanted to go because he heard it was haunted, and we paid extra (actually, the university paid extra – they covered all the expenses of the trip, including the private car hire from Salatiga to Semarang and back) to go into the basement. The basement was where the Japanese, after they took over the island in 1942, kept prisoners – Indonesian men suspected of being rebels (the women became “comfort women,” an appalling euphemism that doesn’t get at years of daily rape) in miserable conditions. The Dutch rerouted a river to run under the building when they built it, so that the water would cool the rooms above, with concrete holding tanks about 4 feet deep and five feet square, which the Japanese converted into cells that would hold about five people each, in pitch black darkness. There were rooms where prisoners were executed, cells where they kept groups of prisoners standing. We had to put on Wellingtons to go down, because the basement is still full of standing water, and the whole place had that odd power that often resides locations where deep suffering has occurred. It was the first physical brush I had with the colonial past of Indonesia, and I left the building with a deeper respect for the country and the trials faced on a still tortuous road to independence.

            Amazing – such a long entry and I feel like I’ve barely scratched the surface. This has not been an easy 10 days. Both my kids have resisted this place mightily at times, sometimes in spectacular displays of unhappiness, and I can’t really blame them – it’s nothing like anything they know. Laura has had a hard time too at particular moments – she’s been a little ill, and trying to manage a family that is completely adrift when you can’t even manage your own daily existence is rather overwhelming. And I get worried about all sorts of things, most of them centered around S and G: will the school ever seem not so silly? Will S make any good friends? Will he ever start to enjoy the food? Will the mosquitoes ever bite one of us besides Graham? G is rolling with things a little more than S – last night in the Chinese restaurant he spent about 20 minutes in the tiny little kitchen helping the woman stir the wok – but he collapses too, somewhat regularly, homesick and exhausted. They both had a wonderful day in Semarang today, however, and it put me into better spirits about everything.   I know, though, that this emotional roller-coaster will continue for a few weeks.

This entry, thank yous to Duncan, Ibu Wemmy, Eka, Alfa, Yuko, Ibu Frances, Ibu Dia, Pak Hendro, Yunen, Eko, Deven, Suwardi, our two drivers, the woman who’s doing our catering ($2.10/per night for 4 delicious portions delivered to our guest house – going out to eat was turning into a nightly cat-fight), the people that sold us our beds, the Hotel Grand Wahid, Universitas Kristen Satya Wacana, and the woman ghost with the long dark hair in the basement of the House of a Thousand Doors.