Rough week for Indonesia

  So the volcano keeps erupting, the third time yesterday, fairly gigantic eruptions with large pyroplastic flows and ash now over a good part of southern Central Java, but not here. It erupted again yesterday for 45 minutes, and the people evacuated from the mountain look to have a long time in the refugee camps around the area (none in Salatiga). There are about 50,000 people now evacuated from the mountain, though many of them appear to be sneaking back up during the day to feed their cattle and maintain whatever has survived the three large eruptions over the past week. The vulcanologists are even cagier than before, since their predictions haven't really been accurate, and things appear to be getting even more pressurized inside the volcano everyday. But as I have said, we appear to be in no danger here, shielded by Merbabu, gloriously inactive.
   Also, of course, the tsunami aftermath keeps getting worse, the death toll up to 450 as of this morning (Monday morning), with about 100 still missing. They've had severe storms on the western coast of Sumatra, which has meant supplies and food and volunteers have been almost impossible to get in, and those survivors in the most dire need of emergency treatment have been almost impossible to get out, or to medicate and treat properly.
    Jakarta has been flooding almost daily, as well, in some torrential downpours (downpours which steam up the inside of the volcano and make the pressure even stronger). There are two other volcanos, now, in Indonesia, that have reached a serious alert status.
    So of course be concerned, but not for us. There are massive emergencies occurring all over the Indonesian archipelago, with an infrastructure sorely unprepared for such things, even when they come singly. There are displaced people, struggling for resources and daily survival, whose villages and livelihoods and in some cases entire families have been killed. It's one of those moments when you see Indonesia caught in the crossroads of national development. On the one hand, it's the most powerful country in Southeast Asia in some ways, working to lead ASEAN (the organization of Southeast Asian Countries) and be a primary economic engine in the region. On the other hand, 12 years after the overthrow of a corrupt and hardline dictator (an overthrow led by Indonesian students), the country still struggles with massive corruption, a staggering gap between wealthy and poor, and a collapsing infrastructure. (Some of my readers might find that description hits rather close to home, but multiply it by 10 for a clearer picture.) The country, as a friend put it the other day, "lumbers along," creaky and under threat from its own geography, its extraordinary diversity, its size (2000 miles from Northwest Sumatra to Papua, 17,000 islands), the daily tensions around religion  and ethnicity ("the church burning center of the world," as one Christian leader put it the other day).
   In Bali, we saw a performance called a "kecak dance," that ended with a man in a trance doing a dance through burning coconut shells (a dance described to Seamus by one of his teachers, upon our return, as "demonic" - this part of our daily existence is now just downright silly and tedious). It was impressive and awesome, and it's not a bad metaphor for Indonesia as a country right now, dancing on burning coconut shells, scary and beautiful and otherworldly, not quite in control but alive and rich.  Whatever else, I can't take my eyes off it.