Hari dalam bahasa Indonesia

     Wisata bencana is an Indonesian phrase for an Indonesian phenomenon: distaster tourism.

             Any description of our day on Saturday should by rights begin with an act of unwarranted voyeurism, with me standing on the steps to stranger’s kitchen, looking in at a stove and some dishes, presumably drying, me standing there for how long I do not know, staring in, transfixed by a vision of the mundane turned extraordinary.

            I knew it was a kitchen because there was a stove there, and those dishes, but aside from that there was little to distinguish it from the wasteland I stood in. Covered in ash, everything blasted or turned or leaning to the south from the force of pyroclastic flows carrying a heat cloud of 1100-1500 degrees Fahrenheit, moving at a speed of  around 150 miles per hour, the kitchen was part of a landscape in which familiar objects were monuments, a garage, or a siphon, or a clothesline, or the charred ruins of a mosque transformed into memorials of a lost normalcy.

            When we first drove onto the slopes of Mount Merapi, talking our way through one roadblock and bribing our way through another (my family and I were not involved in this talking or bribing, by the way, and none of the money donated by our friends and family was spent on said bribe), we passed through abandoned but otherwise normal seeming terrain, houses, small warungs (shops), farms, schools, in lush forests muted that day by a light fog. There were people around, allowed up for the day, in limited numbers, to attend to their property, though they would return to the refugees camps before it got dark. The emptiness, itself remarkable in this densely populated place, and the layer of ash along the road (washed off by the rain everywhere else) visible clues to the destruction wrought by the eruptions. Indeed, moving closer and closer on the 2 ½ hour drive, we saw a series of strange sights: the leaves of palm trees, broken and inverted by the weight of the ash; rivers torn by the flows of ash and mud carried by subsequent torrential rains; communities newly reoccupied, struggling to bring life back to the farms destroyed by the fallout. It was one of those drives that occasions increasing silence.

            Even so, nothing prepared any of us for the sudden and complete transformation, for what seemed like a crude and arbitrary line drawn, separating the dense green foliage and the colorful houses and the signs of daily upkeep from an apocalyptic landscape unlike anything I have ever imagined. There was a house, surrounded by bamboo, and trees, boarded up but otherwise apparently perfectly intact, and then twenty yards from it, the twisted and grey remains of trees and buildings stretching for miles, hills with the outline of roads winding through neighborhoods where no one will live again for years. There was a new graveyard for some of the first victims, and the smell of decay, and flies everywhere, in huge cloying swarms, that besieged us in the car as soon as we opened the windows to see better the surreal sight unfolding before us.

Graham, standing near a stand with a siphon on it, like stands everywhere in Indonesia that sell fuel in small glass bottles. "I could just imagine myself driving up on a motorcycle," he told me later, "buying some bensin, opening my gas tank and using that siphon to fill it up."

            I thought, after we stopped and I walked slowly through the debris, some still smoking, of power and of death, of the incredible force unleashed by that volcano that could turn this place into what we saw, a ripped skeleton of the earth, trees stripped and blackened, one wrapped in a piece of metal, and rows and rows of charred bamboo, lying on its side, all pointing the same direction, of the vast, and of the immediate, of the family whose broken dishes lied still neatly placed against each other.

            I don’t have the descriptive vocabulary to take this further. I need Cormac McCarthy or Dante to step in perhaps, to find the right Biblical syntax, or Shelley, maybe, to offer up the sublime with its terror and transcendence. I will never forget it, I cannot stop running the scene through my head. I just offer it, because it matters, it matters to the people who reached out over the distance of thousands of miles to offer a small but welcome helping hand. This is where the people you helped lived, until a month ago, until they moved to the cramped quarters of the schools and churches and mosques and dormitories and warehouses and whatever else that could be commandeered to take in the hundreds of thousands lucky enough to flee alive.

            Laura spent all of Friday in Semarang with Ibu Maria, shopping for the 300 individual bags we assembled (with ten people, total) on the ground floor of our house late into Friday night. Each bag had five packages of dried noodles, a can of sardines in tomatoes, a can of chocolate sweetened condensed milk, a bag of dried shredded beef, a container of kacip manis (sweet soy sauce, the Indonesian go-to condiment), three eggs boiled in a traditional Indonesian way, five small notepads, three pencils, and a package of feminine sanitary napkins. We also had several bags of diapers for families with babies. We passed these out in three locations – at two schools, where the teachers brought in students who were living in refugee camps and we gave a bag to each one, and at a refugee camp on the outskirts of Yogyakarta, in a school and a police station, with the army set up in a bivouac along the side and some aid workers in another canvas tent. There were 500 people in this refugee camp, some of them people whose homes were in the area we had visited earlier that afternoon, and the children and mothers (almost none of the fathers) lined up and took one bag at a time, along with three boxes of vitamins.

            It felt both very small, and very important – small because they are still where they are, and still without a sense of what the future will be, still, as one of the refugees I talked to put it, faced with “banyak kerja dan bukan uang” (“lots of work and no money”), with leveled houses and decimated farms. It was not a happy place, but the people were quietly grateful, and I was even more grateful, grateful that I could live in this place, at least, with a sense that I was a member of my community in a time of need, grateful even more for the community I was even more aware of from my home, who made our outreach possible, who supplied 300 families with goods and food to augment the rice most camps have in abundance.

            I was grateful, too, for my children, who took in the sight of the ruined landscape with silence and awe, who arrived at the camp with enthusiasm and compassion. Seamus ran across the street and bought bunches  of candy and two soccer balls, and went around to each person he could find, offering them candy, and passing off the balls to groups of eager children. Graham reached into some place deep, played a role he hasn’t played so much, that of the playful older kid, who swung small children in circles, threw kids over his back and ran around with hordes chasing him, put a box on his head and chased groups of laughing screaming kids.  And we spent a hour there, delivering the goods, playing with the children, greeting the soldiers, all of whom were from Salatiga (and who insisted, to my great embarrassment and reluctance, that I eat some rice and vegetables – I took as meager a portion as I politely could), talking to the refugees and the volunteers.

            Earlier that day, when I was addressing a group of teachers who had been displaced by the eruption (another amazing experience that I will write about next), I told them how glad I was to be there, what an honor it was to meet them. And I told them something like this: “I want you to know that my friends and my family in America know what happened, they are aware of your suffering, and they send their love, prayers, and money for you.  They know you are here, and they want you to know that.” After Ibu Maria finished translating that for me, the teachers applauded. They were applauding for all of you who reached out when we asked you, for all of you whose gift was not only the supplies a (large and grateful) handful of families got to help them through a part of their trials, but also to know that they have not been forgotten, ignored, passed over. Such is the looming plight of an on-going refugee crisis, and you lifted that, even if briefly, gently and with compassion that stretched from the other side of world, to a community of people whose world has been flattened, whose most intimate spaces are recognizable only by the destroyed detritus of their previous lives. I know they are grateful, and we are grateful too, and honored that we could be emissaries of a such a wonderful group. I thank you again and again.

Graham, playing games with the kids at the camp, who chased him and called him "Mas Graham" and who treated him, to his great delight and with his complete encouragement, as a human jungle gym.

An Indonesian Thanksgiving

   Last night, at our Indonesian neighbor Ibu Lala's house, with her family Pak Eko, Larissa, and Ezel, we had Thanksgiving dinner, with her sister's family and a Korean family who live down the block. We had written off Thanksgiving, with little grief, but when we got the invitation, we were of course delighted, and my pleasure at actually having a Thanksgiving reminded me of why I like this holiday so much. And it was a great Thanksgiving, a delicious dinner, and great company - Pak Eko is a television producer who develops Indonesian reality TV shows - he got written up recently in the New York Times for his reality TV productions - and he talked me through several of them: the hidden camera that sees if people volunteer to help strangers in pretend need on the street, the 12 hour version of Extreme Home Makeover, the I-almost-died true story reenactments. Though his house is 10 feet from my house, we had not yet met ("That is the American way," he said loudly - he lived in Tulsa for 6 years when we went to Oral Roberts, "but not the Indonesian way!" And he laughed, a big and very happy laugh).  He decided last night that he wants me to be the host of his new documentary feature, Garbage Nation, which deals with the unbelievable problem of trash in Asia. In any case, we'll go down to Semarang sometime soon, the four of us, to watch them filming and producing one of the several reality TV shows he develops. It was the first time I wished I had a TV here, since some of the shows sound very funny, and reality TV shows are actually programs you can understand with limited language skills.

    Turkey, stuffing (delicious from the wok), string bean casserole, mashed potatoes, salad, cranberries, all served elegantly from a table set up in the car port - we ate in the front hallway, since there was no table large enough for us all. Pak Eko's brother-in-law, a pastor, prayed in Indonesian, and then Pak Eko gave a wonderful prayer as well - that I might transform my students at the University, that our family will bring great things to Indonesia, that the Koreans will find a way out of their present conflict peacefully - and we ate, and talked, and ate some more, and talked. No wine (alas) and no pumpkin pie, but apart from that, it felt just like Thanksgiving, and we were so pleased for the invitation and the dinner and the new friends. It was one of those banner days.

    That was yesterday - it's still Thanksgiving in the US as I write this, and we'll skype home to my parents in a few minutes, and then I have to teach (I presented yesterday at a conference - how could they hold a conference on Thanksgiving Day?) while Laura and the kids will go to Semerang. Seamus and Graham will go a movie, and Laura and our friend Ibu Maria will put together the supplies for the refugees we will visit tomorrow, outside of Yogyakarta.

     They will purchase these supplies with the $2,300 that our friends, family, and fellowship contributed for the Merapi refugees, from a request we put out last week. Laura has been working to process all the money, get it in cash one way or another (credit cards, with limited exception, are largely useless here) and working through all the details. We'll report on the visit next week, in detail, and we'll keep track of every rupiah we spend, in scanned documents, so that you can track them money you donated. But I want to tell you, here, how enormously moved we were by the incredible outpouring of support. With several villages incinerated, over 300 people now dead as a result of the eruptions, and communities that have barely begun to consider the process of rebuilding (or not rebuilding), and as the event falls from the attention of the media here, I promise you that this will be money well spent, and we have never felt so close to home, so far away, since we arrived here. Thank you thank you thank. That's my biggest Thanksgiving message - on Thanksgiving weekend we will deliver the gifts you so amazingly provided.

(I was sorry that the pass-through with Mountainview didn't work out, because it had the makings of a great joke set-up: "Did you hear the one about the lesbians, the Unitarians, and the Jew who gave money to the Fundamentalist Christian School?" I'll keep working on that one.)

Love, Gratitude, and Stuffing in a Wok

By the time we finish our turkey, family and friends back home will just be waking up, making coffee, trying to unstick the pages of Joy of Cooking and muttering, ‘is it 15 minutes per pound at 350 or 10 at 400 wait no 300?‘ Wonderful holiday tradition! Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday. I get to cook with my favorite people, the meal is all my favorite foods, and there is nothing overtly religious that I have to feel bad about. Every Thanksgiving, I re-live American football on the shores of Lake Washington, oysters at Pete & Jen’s, Bill Christmas’ cranberries, turkey on the picnic table, and Graham‘s first lost tooth. Devon’s dinner rolls, Cathy’s green beans, and my mom’s mashed potatoes. Oh! My mom makes good mashed potatoes. So today, just another day in Salatiga, I joyfully hopped on the number 9 and bought almonds at the pasar to go into the stuffing for the meal we will share at the home of our neighbor Ibu La La. And I remember all of those things for which I am so very thankful this year.

Note: If you are reading this and are not from the US, my apologies for the absurdly sentimental outpouring that is about to follow. It is tradition.

I am grateful for my family. For my kids who are being so game throughout this whole crazy adventure. My husband who is not afraid of anything, even when he should be. My mom holding down the fort and my dad who worries even though he has enough to worry about. My nephew Scotty whose enthusiasm for our trip knows no bounds, the list goes on. We are a fortunate lot.

My girlfriends, oh, my girlfriends! I would be nowhere with out them. They send me jokes, tell me the weather, share neighborhood gossip, and basically remind me that the world is really not that big a place and that everything is just fine. Kirk is grateful for them too but for different reasons.

Inextricably linked to this, I am grateful for the internet. For Skype and for Facebook and Yahoo. This would be a very different experience without it.

I am grateful for the deeply imbedded sense of hospitality that we have experienced throughout Indonesia. The offers of rides, of food, of furniture! The infinite patience I experience every time some poor Indonesian is subjected to my Bahasa. The sense of inclusion that we experience everywhere we go. A woman paid my bus fare the other day, just to be hospitable! We chose Indonesia, in part because we read the Indonesians were friendly, because they embraced foreigners and welcomed them. Really, we had no idea.

I’m grateful for so much this year. Mostly, I’m grateful for the crazy set of circumstances that brought us here and that I live in a time when I can crouch over my little two-burner, stirring my wok-full of Indonesian bread crumbs, Egyptian almonds, and California dates, in French butter with my coconut shell spoon (ok, truth be told, there were better implements for stirring but I loved the symbolism of it), laptop resting on my knees and celebrate with those thousands of miles away.

Love and gratitude, my friends. Happy Thanksgiving!

Hari dalam bahasa Indonesia

Diminutive, in Bahasa Indonesia, is mengkatapengantarkan pengecil.

Special Request

Several people have asked how they might help support the relief effort for those affected by the recent eruption of Mt. Merapi here in Central Java. For a time, we were as confused as everyone else! The relief effort was hampered by wild media coverage, news of conflicting (and competing) NGO’s, and lack of government direction and oversight, even our local friends were confused. Meanwhile, over 200 people have died and thousands remain homeless. The eruptions have died down considerably. From where we sit, Mt. Merapi looks once again like the picture postcard volcano with charming but harmless little puffs of smoke rising from the crater but frankly no one, local or otherwise, can say if the current crisis is over. And, the people in the camps, who were living pretty hand-to-mouth to begin with, have nothing to return to -- no houses, no schools, no livestock, no crops, no mosques, no churches. Everything has been incinerated.

Graham’s Indonesian teacher, Ibu Maria Teguh, who has become a good friend, is organizing a delivery of supplies to one of the refugee camps in which she has a colleague. The Indonesian government has, from all reports, flooded the camps with rice and pop mie (instant noodles of marginal nutritional value) but little else. Our hope to provide some badly needed supplies to one of the camps outside of Yogyacarta. These supplies -- protein in the form of salted eggs, dried beef and tinned fish, diapers and powdered milk, vitamins and school supplies -- will be purchased in Salatiga and driven over to the camps on Sunday, November 26, by Ibu Maria, a couple of other teachers, and ourselves.

To be frank, American dollars go a long way in this part of the world. Ibu Maria gave me a list of the supplies they wanted included in each family packet: a weeks worth of eggs, milk, diapers and supplies came to about 65,000 Rupea. At 9,000 Rupea to the dollar, that’s a little over seven bucks. It’s not enough to live on, but it will make a HUGE difference!

Please consider helping us with this effort. I know that there are many important causes competing for your attention at home, but for the time being, this is our home, and we feel obliged to do what we can to help the neighbors and friends who have made us so welcome in it.

If you're still interested in helping with Merapi relief, please make your check payable to:

Laura Prindiville
Account: 10043487
In the memo line, please write "Merapi Relief".


Then mail it to:

First Security Bank
208 E. Main Street
Bozeman, MT 59715


As the timeline on this is pretty tight, please do email me at prindylou@yahoo.com and let me know how much you are sending. That way, Kirk and I can cover any gifts that don't clear before the weekend. I promise to keep all donations confidential.

Laura, Kirk, Seamus and Graham Patrick

The Teacher is the Ruling Class

November 18, 2010

            A student who helped usher us through the hullaballoo and confusion of arrival smiled politely at me, before the semester started, when I told her I was determined to have a discussion-based class, and told me I would have a difficult time doing it in Indonesia. “Students don’t want to talk in Indonesia. They are very reluctant to participate.” It is not as if my students are competing for the floor in my classes in the United States, so I didn’t let her prediction concern me too much. I told her it didn’t really matter, that I wasn’t really able to teach in another way, and that my students were out of luck if they hoped for me to just pop in and lecture. “I didn’t travel to Indonesia to hear myself talk,” which might not be true given that I have also started writing a blog.

            So I was slightly prepared in my first week of classes when my students really didn’t want to speak at all. It made quite a bit of sense to me actually. I’m not a small person, and I am very white, and very American, and I speak loudly, and I learned later very quickly, and I was sweating profusely, the way someone who lives in Montana sweats when he moves to the tropics and then is a little amped up on coffee and nervous energy and has ridden his bicycle in busy traffic to a stuffy room on a sunny day. I think I might have looked somewhat alarming, and perhaps they thought I would pass out, and hurt one of them in the process.  So their silence, in that first day in my critical reading class, was not terribly hard to understand.

            After my first week, teaching my two other classes that were likewise perspiry and quiet, I of course asked my students what was going on. I intentionally had them do a very simple free-write in my critical reading course,  something along the lines of “what was a word that you saw in the reading last week, and why did you see it?” My plan was then to ask for someone to tell me the one thing that they wrote down, in the knowledge that everyone in the room would have that one thing written down and they would certainly read it for me off their paper. When they did not, no matter how politely I phrased the question, I said, “Listen, you need to tell me why no one is speaking,” a question which, somewhat more predictably, got no response.

            I am a patient person in the classroom, however, and determined, and I waited, until Severine nervously raised her hand and said, “you do speak a little fast, sir.” (There appears to be nothing I can do to not be addressed as ‘sir’ several times a day.) This was a breakthrough moment, because of course while it might occur to most thoughtful people to speak slowly to a group of non-native speakers in a classroom where learning to read in English is a central focus, I had not considered the possibility.

            Now

            I

            speak

            more

              like

               this.

            (Really. I picture my words leaving my mouth in a sort of vertical descent, rather than horizontally, at least when I am concentrating on speaking slowly enough and with the right sort of not-patronizing-but-not-obfuscatory English language.)

            After that, the students started speaking, no torrent, certainly, but a small spring of discourse that cheered me no end. I learned all sorts of interesting things that first week, when variations of this discussion occurred in all of my classes. I learned, for example, that Indonesian students are conditioned to extreme deference toward the teacher, and that this included a rather deep anxiety, magnified by my being an American teacher who couldn’t speak any Indonesian at that point, of making mistakes in English pronunciation and grammar. In my writing class, I learned that this regularly translates into a paper that is full of marks of grammatical errors, and that one of the points of many of their English classes appears to be learning that they are not native speakers of the language and thus make errors in pronunciation every time they speak and in grammar every time they write. (I comforted them by showing them some research done on multi-national speakers of other languages who communicate in English for business and other transactions, situations in which, quite literally, error does not exist, because no one is marking it, everyone is focused on making sense, and the goal is understanding one another. There’s a lot of miscommunication, and a lot of round-about face-saving discussion to help discover the actual gist of the conversation, but no error, because error only exists in language, I told them, when someone is looking for it. I’m not much of an error-seeker, but their other teachers are, and my lack of attention to error worries them a little.) Essentially, they learn quite a bit about how poorly they speak and write the English language, at least as they told about their classes. They have a sympathetic ear in me, to be sure, because the thing I know better than I have known anything else in my life, and the lesson that is reaffirmed to me anytime I am within earshot of Indonesian language, is that I speak and listen to Indonesian very poorly.

            I was instructed by students in my public speaking class to do something that I have never liked to do as a teacher, which is to ask a question and then call randomly on students to answer it. I’ve always found this to be a failing strategy in my classrooms in the United States. It kind of irritates my students there, like I am somehow over-stepping my bounds. But in my classrooms here it actually relieves the mounting pressure. All teachers are familiar with the ways silence in the classroom creates tension, and one of the secrets, of course, of getting students to speak is to let them become more nervous by the silence than it makes you (a very hard thing to do, as any new teacher will tell you). But in Indonesia, it’s comically extended, and my students here are actually capable of out-waiting me, of not responding to the most basic questions so resolutely that I give up. (I now preface my solicitations from students with the phrase “I know I am not supposed to ask questions like this, but does anyone have any comment about….?”) Almost always, though, when I call on them randomly (“Agam, what do you think?”),  my students have an answer ready, usually a pretty good one, and they seem perfectly happy to tell it, and even sort of glad sometimes when I asked.

            I was doing this in my writing course during the second week of the semester, making my students read things they had written during their freewrite (another violation of my teaching code, but if I didn’t do this I tell you nothing would happen, and then I would have to listen to myself talk, which I am perhaps protesting too much about not enjoying). “Does this bother you, to just ask you like this?” I asked one of them, as I was going around. “Oh no,” she replied.
“We are used to it. In Indonesia, the teacher is the ruling class.”

            In a place like Indonesia, a carnival of post-colonialism, that comment continues to resonate with me. There are ruling classes everywhere, of course (tax cuts for the top 2% anyone?), but for most of Indonesia’s history, the entire point of everything that happened was (at least from the Dutch and then Japanese perspective) justifying and increasing the visibility of the ruling class. Two rather long-lived and slightly unhinged president/dictators powerfully and often quite brutally dominated their “independence” up until the end of the 20^th century. Indonesia is no slouch at colonial power itself, having fought a long and failed war in East Timor and struggling still in places like Papua and northern Sumatra with pesky freedom fighters/unpatriotic insurgents. To mention, in such a delightfully offhand way, that “the teacher is the ruling class,” well, there is something almost resistant about its comfortable transparency. The teacher is not the ruling class here in the way that if you assign something, the students will go and do it – not even close, actually, sometimes to my great frustration. Here, the teacher is the ruling class in the sense that no one wants to tell the teacher that what he is saying doesn’t make sense, or that he might be talking too fast, or that they don’t like the assignment, or that they don’t know why you’re asking them to do this assignment in the first place, or that they didn’t think the test was fair. The teacher is the ruling class in the sense that the teacher’s presence engenders not cooperation, but complicity and silence. I’m still learning how to cope with this, and I am certainly going to write more about it, but I am finding it one of the most fascinating aspects of learning to teach in this new place.

Our neighborhood

November 13, 2010

            We live down a smaller road off the main street that runs by our kids’ school. They have a very short walk every day, just up the block and to the left, perhaps a 200 yards total from the gated entrance to the school, with 2-3 guards who check your bag every time and run one of those mirrors-on-a-stick under cars heading in. Our house is the tallest and biggest one in the neighborhood, three stories, the top largely unused except for a tiny deck where I sit, sometimes, and read, looking out over the houses and the palm and banana trees that grow everywhere here. We have a big gate that is usually open but that Pak Devri, our guard, locks every night. He stays in the small guardhouse alongside the driveway, or in a small room behind the back garden. 

There is another house on the property, smaller but still grand, where an Indonesian family whose children attend the school lives, very generous and friendly, but with a beagle named Gibson (I call him Fritsom, because that’s what our first guard, Pak Roni, used to call him) who barks all the time on their back porch when they aren’t home. Sometimes Fritsom is out there all weekend while they go to Semarang, fed and watered by one of their team of workers but otherwise neglected and very annoying. 

Across the street from us is a lot with palm trees and banana trees, occasionally harvested. On a clear day, from three of the four balconies, we have a wonderful view of Mount Telomoyo and Mount Merbabu, neither of which explodes.  All around us the green of the foliage mixes with the red roof tiles of the houses (the first thing I thought when saw these roofs was: “No hail here.”)

Just up the street on the main road are two shops that we use for our basic needs, Toko Lancar, where we buy snacks and drinks and gum and sometimes some eggs, and Toko Yani, where we get our water and propane. Ibu Yani runs that store, and it’s got more of a neighborhood feel – Toko Lancar is more like 7-11. We head up to Toko Yani’s pretty regularly to order more bottles of water, and less often for propane for our stove. Ibu Yani always patiently talks me through whatever requests I mangle when I head there – today I wanted to buy some milk, but I told her I wanted to buy some difficult (susu or susa). We buy eggs by the kilo from her (which is why the first time, when she asked how many I wanted and I said about 10, she was rather surprised). Around the corner, about a five minute walk from our house, is a glorious snack shop packed full with all sorts of fried things – cassava chips, peas, string potatoes, cow lung – and crunchy sweet things. There are a couple of stands for eating on the block, one with a delicious bowl of chicken noodle soup that costs about fifty cents but which I have stopped visiting ever since the demon who lived in my intestinal tract inhabited me. (Said demon now seemingly well cast-out.) There’s also a coffee shop around the corner, run by bules and open only on Fridays, solely visited by other bules, most from the school, who order very expensive coffees that take an extraordinarily long time to come. On Fridays after school it’s quite the scene, with bunches of students and families waiting for their fancy coffee drinks. I don’t go there very often, in part because it’s very very slow and in part because these aren’t my people.

The other way from our house takes us into the neighborhood of Dukuh, where we live. Down the street is mosque small in stature but impressive in loudspeaker-amplified call to prayer, though it has help from the other mosque just around the corner and the five or six other ones almost as close, all with blocks of loudspeakers that helpfully remind us when it’s time to pray. Amazingly, though I thought it would never happen, I now sleep through the 4:45 AM call to prayer, and I have come to enjoy the sonic blasts from them that come several times a day. There are also small houses, and smaller little streets cutting off, and some tiny stores run out of the front of houses, and it’s a very pleasant outing to wander through small quiet brick and asphalt streets, mostly shaded by large trees. Most houses have at least one bird cage hanging on the front porch – in some places, there are entire aviaries, but that’s in other slightly more prosperous neighborhoods. There’s a small Muslim cemetery near us too, and a fancier one near the school (which is one of the reasons, the Indonesian language teacher from here who has become our friend told us, that the school is haunted – this country has a lot of ghosts).

Across the street from us are Colin and Retno, who own an export company that ships mostly furniture to England. Colin is British, and Retno is his Indonesian wife. They have an eight-year-old daughter, and they have become good friends already. We have dinner with them about once a week, and Colin pours me a gin and tonic, which one can get here only in the nicer hotels, and only for about five dollars a piece. Colin has a stash of liquor from his regular visits to duty-free shops. Colin and Retno have helped us with so much since we moved here, always willing to come to our aid when we can’t figure something out, which is several times a week, and we’re super grateful to have them close at hand.

Everywhere in the neighborhood – and all over the city – are heavy canvas campaign posters. “Friend to the small people” – “Closer to the community” – “He offers proof, not just promises” (my personal favorite).  These are colorful, usually centered with a picture of the candidate looking regal and rational. The election – for Salatiga mayor - is in January, though at this point I have no idea what any of the issues are about, though I too am a friend to the small people, as anyone who knows me knows.  There are also all sorts of planted fields around our house – everything, in fact, that is not a house is a planted field, even when it looks like a forest. It’s a palm forest, a jackfruit forest, a snakefruit forests, a banana tree forest, and there are tight well-trodden paths weaving through all of these, paths that seem to tread on no one’s private property – or maybe it’s more the point that when I tread on those paths and come across the people who live around and cultivate the land, they don’t try to shoot me or kick me off their land.

I am less self-conscious about the house we live in, its spectacular ostentatiousness and size, than I was when we first arrived. I’m less self-conscious about everything, really. It’s odd, from the perspective of only a couple months in, to consider the stifling feeling of paralysis I experienced when we first arrived, the inability to negotiate even the teeniest situation coupled with a gnawing trepidation to even try.  One of the pleasures of this experience, in fact, is to become ensconced in a neighborhood, no matter how much we aren’t of it – to be familiar, and greeted, and known, and spoken to. Everyone assumes we’re phenomenally wealthy – correctly, in this context – simply because we are white and living in Indonesia, and they would assume it whether we lived in Rumah Besar or not. To be abroad, in the most unfamiliar place I have ever lived, and feel like daily life is, in the end, sort of mundane – in some ways, that’s one of the coolest parts about living in, instead of traveling through, a place.

Obama, heroes, and goats

November 9, 2010

"Of course, democracy is messy. Not everyone likes the results of every election. You go through ups and downs."   President Obama, in remarks at the University of Indonesia today

          Obama left Jakarta this afternoon after a highly anticipated whirlwind visit to his former home of four years. Much to the chagrin of Indonesians, he had cancelled two previous visits, the first to focus on getting the health care bill passed, and the second because there was suddenly an extraordinarily large uncontrolled oil leak filling up the Gulf of Mexico. These seem, from an American perspective, perhaps legitimate reasons for cancelling, but Indonesians were nonetheless offended (health care? As my grandmother used to say, “Oh, plap.”)  There was some discussion that Indonesia’s President Susilo Bambang Yuhoyono, known here as SBY (fondly, I should add, unlike those who use BHO in America) didn’t attend the ASEAN summit in New York last month because he was offended by the dual slight. So by the time Obama showed up here, enthusiasm was slightly decreased, and they were disappointed the visit was so brief. (And one, of course, a very conservative Muslim, disappointed that in shaking hands with Michelle Obama he made physical contact with a woman not related to him.)

            The Jakarta Post, a very strange English language newspaper here, has been packed with Obama stories for the last two weeks. Will this improve relations? (Maybe.) Will he visit his old school? (No.) Does he like India better than Indonesia? (Consensus: yes, because India can do more to contain China.) Will he remember how to speak Indonesian? (Sedikit, a little, at least the food he ate at the banquet last night – but he was wearing a headset, presumably for translation. One can forgive this, given that he was 10 when he left and probably not fluent in diplomatic vocabulary.) Why isn’t he bringing his daughters? (I don’t know.) Will he be chastened after his electoral setback? (Who knows?) Will he come back soon? (Probably not.) Will he say nice things about Muslims? (Yes.) Will the American right wing go into deep apoplexis because he visited the largest mosque in Indonesia. (I’ll let you field that one.)   Here less than 24 hours, Obama did seem, in his remarks today at the University of Indonesia, to be pensive and nostalgic about his time here.

            He spent some time in the speech recounting Indonesia’s truly extraordinary history over the last several decades since he left, a period that has seen Indonesia come out of a brutal and tight-fisted dictatorship into a clumsy democracy, that has seen it recovering from a terrible economic crisis in the 90s. He nicely left out the part about how amazingly corrupt the government remains – stories of the bribes, and murders, and favor-currying of politicians are 2-3 pages of the Jakarta Post every day.

            Today is “Heroes Day” in Indonesia, not celebrated with time off from school or anything like that, but acknowledged anyway. (Maybe it’s not a national holiday because there is another one, next week, feast of the sacrifice, celebrating the wonderful loyalty in Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice his son as commanded by god. We can expect, apparently, a lot of dead goats.) It commemorates a battle in the East Java city of Surabaya, in 1945, against the British (who found themselves, after World War II was over, for 13 unfortunate months trying to “help” Indonesia transition out of 3 ½ years of misery under the Japanese and back into 350 years of misery under the Dutch.) This was the first fight against foreign occupiers after the August 17, 1945 Declaration of Indonesian Independence. Obama praised Indonesia’s history, comparing the staggering ethnic and religious diversity here to that in the United States, commenting on the similarity of e pluribus unum to Indonesia’s national slogan, bhinneka tunggal ika, unity through diversity. It’s the thing Indonesians seem most proud of, and most troubled by too – in that we share another commonality.

            I wasn’t invited to any of the events, though I waited expectantly for the gilded invitation. I did get invited to a special Thanksgiving Day dinner at the American Consulate in Surabaya for all the Senior Scholars, but then found out that only I, and none of my family, was invited, in the true spirit of Thanksgiving. I was ready to go just for a glass of wine, which is extremely hard to come by here, and then absurdly expensive and not very good when you do come by it. Ah well.  I’ll just stay home and sacrifice a goat next week instead, in lieu of putting one of my kids on chopping block. Happy Heroes’ Day.

            Obama’s gone now, flying onto wherever. There was no terrorist attack against the “Great Infidel,” as called for during his visit by the Imam in prison for the Bali bombings, and everyone seemed to have dug the speech, at least as reported so far. Perhaps under Obama Indonesia will become more than a blip on America’s radar, all it was for me until a few months ago. 

           

Cilacap

Despite our close proximity to Mt. Merapi, we remain relatively unaffected by the eruptions that have claimed the lives of almost 200 people now. The tall and very stalwart Mt. Merbabu which stands between Salatiga and Merapi has protected us from anything more serious than a couple of dustings of ash and some hazy skies – nothing more dramatic than you’d experience in a typical Bozeman fire season. When you get beyond Merbabu’s shadow however, things get nasty quick. On the drive to Cilacap where Seamus and I spent the weekend with his class, we were stunned by monochomatic views of the landscape -- every leaf, every blade of grass, every stalk of rice literally coated in ash. On the far side of Magelang which is out of the evacuation zone but in direct line with the volcano, ash was piled up 6 – 8 inches on the road. Trees and stands of bamboo collapsed under the weight of it, crashing into houses, bringing down power lines, and blocking roadways. By the end of the adreneline packed drive (all drives in Indonesia are adreneline packed to be honest), one of our drivers had to hang out the window in the dark while barreling down a mountain road, to splash water on the windshield, clearing the rain-soaked ash which blocked the driving driver’s view.


Drama aside, the trip to Cilacap was well worth it (I can say of course not having been the one hanging out the window). Mountainview School hosts an annual service trip for its students. Cilacap, located on the southern coast of central Java was selected as a site this year for the first time. Cilacap (pronounced chill-A-chop) is a pretty rough and tumble town. For those who can find work at one of the oil refineries, the Holcim plant or the sugar factory, life is pretty good, but for those who can’t, it’s a rough go. We arrived to a fabulously Javanese reception after seven junk-food fueled hours on a bus. Because of the ash and rain, we were at least two hours later than expected but that did not deter the crowd of well-wishers who waited at the Mayor’s house to welcome us with gamelan, traditional dance, lots of well-amplified speechifying, and an elaborate dinner that included fish-too-spicy-to- eat and stir-fried cow’s tongue. The Mayor was not there to greet us because he is in jail, a fact which remained cloudy throughout the weekend despite several attempts get the full-story. After dinner and an incredibly long presentation on the depletion of the mangroves which grow in the lagoon, the seventeen students and seven adults were split up among the crowd for our homestays.

I will say one thing about Cilacap, they know how to treat their guests. Javanese take an incredible pride in being good hosts and most are pretty good at it but the people we met in Cilacap took this to an entirely new level. We were fed pretty much non-stop, and not just bags of chips, we’re talking picnic boxes with yellow rice and fried noodles, huge platters of cakes and rolls, boiled bananas and boiled peanuts, ginger tea and fresh fruit juice. Whenever there was a pause in the conversation, here would come the ibus, arms laden with goodies. My host family was truly amazing, generous and kind. I complimented the grilled fish we ate for breakfast on the last morning, and arrived at the bus for our return trip to find an igloo cooler filled to the brim with fresh seafood to take home. The thing would have cost $400 in the US. Seamus’ host family was a bit more traditional in their diet but he claims that he pushed the cow brains to the side of his plate so delicately that no one noticed. The previous morning he was served chicken foot soup. We’re still laughing about that one.

After far too short a night’s sleep, the students reconvened at the harbor for a 90 - minute boat ride to the small island where the kids would be teaching English and helping with a construction project. A short distance through open water brought us to a gorgeous mangrove forest (I don’t know if that’s what you call a bunch of mangroves, maybe just mangroves). It may have been sheer exhaustion, but the students were very quiet making for a wonderfully peaceful ride. This of course came to a screeching halt when we got to Kampung Luat. Situated in a small fishing village, foreigners are a rare sight and great groups of kids came running to meet the boat when we arrived.

It was really interesting to watch the Mountainview students’ reaction to this new environment. Mountainview students by-in-large are a pretty well-heeled group. The two-room school house which was the site of the service project was about as basic as you can get -- no electricity, no playground, a hastily constructed bridge of two by fours connected the buildings when the water rose during rainy season. While I’m generally not one to brag on my kid, Seamus was a stand-out. The camp counselor in him kicked in and no sooner had he jumped off the boat was he surrounded by a herd of kids, shaking his hand and trying to say his name. While many of his fellow students checked their Blackberries, listened to their ipods and shuffled around nervously, Seamus was right in the thick of it, handing out goodie bags, gluing art projects, shoveling dirt. If one of the reasons to travel is to see the world through a different lens, it was a gift to watch Seamus come to life in this new, strange place.

The trip back was considerably more eventful. About half way through the construction project (the kids were helping to re-grade an area prone to flooding), the boat captain announced that we all needed to board the boat immediately because the boat was sinking which generated two results: 1. a wide-spread, very loud panic among the students and 2. a still baffling counter-intuitive rush to the board the sinking vessel. Turns out the boat was not actually sinking but the tide was going out and the state-of-the-art coast guard vessel on which we had arrived could not make the trip out with the weight of all of us on it. Half of the students were quickly unloaded onto a local fishing boat that was by far the least sea-worthy thing I have ever seen and off we went. Sure enough, not a quarter of the way back, our vessel ran aground, more teen-age panic despite the fact that we were in about 3 feet of water, and the rusted, ramshackle pop-eye boat held together with shoe strings and duct tape had to do a quick u-turn to tow us out.

This was where it got really amusing. Indonesians (I’m generalizing here) are very accustomed to dealing with things going wrong, much more so than Americans -- cars that break down, stoves that don’t work, frequent blackouts -- so when something does happen, they have absolutely no hesitation jumping in, regardless of their understanding or lack thereof of the task at hand. Ok, maybe it was just a guy thing. I can’t say. In any case, seconds later, every Indonesian man on both boats was on the bow of one or the stern of the other throwing ropes back and forth, yelling instructions, etc. We were yanked from our muck pretty quickly but without a motor, we had no steering capacity, and no one took this into consideration so every time we had to turn, which was quite frequent in the Heart of Darkness-esque mangrove forest through which we floated, the pop-eye boat would chug ahead, accelerate through the curve, and our vessel would crack the whip at top speed into the opposing bank. More teen-age panic, lots of squealing, and the first boat would have to stop, turn around, rearrange all of the ropes, and hit the throttle to release us from the muck, resulting in a facefull of big black blasts of exhaust. The 90-minute trip took 4 hours on the return. Oh, and did I mention, the entire time we were being rained on by a continuous stream of volcanic ash from Mt. Merapi?

The rest of the trip was far less eventful. A ‘friendly’ game of basketball was played between the schools, to the cheers of several hundred Cilacap students and after a quick nap, we returned to school for dinner (more food) and performances by the Cilacap students. Seamus and his class were asked to share a performance from their country for which they were woefully unprepared but two brave young women did a relatively inoffensive hip-hop routine (oh hot damn…this is my jam) and were joined by the rest of the class for a very entertaining if imprecise version of the wakka wakka dance. Not exactly a up to the standards of the choir singing traditional Indonesian folk-songs but well-intentioned. The next morning was spent at the high school in cross-cultural exchange which, for this generation, basically means exchanging Facebook information. All in all it was a terrific weekend and while Cilacap might not be a top vacation spot in central Java, Seamus and I will certainly remember it fondly.

Still fine

November 6, 2010

I know that you're probably checking this after the latest terrible news today, two more villages incinerated in clouds of searing ash and lava - 750 degree celsius, reported today - and at least 122 dead now from the two weeks of eruptions. The one yesterday was the largest in over a century. These two villages were 14.2 kilometers from the crater, inside the evacuation area, but apparently many thought it would be safe to stay. I promise you that if a man in a uniform comes to our house and tells us we have to leave, we will leave, but that won't happen. We're close, but not at risk. But you have my word, of course.
     Before I read the news about this latest eruption, this morning Graham and I rode up Mount Merbabu and then climbed Mount Telemoyo on the motorcycle.I'd been planning a full day of exploration around the area, but not a good day for a motorcycle ride, and no view from the top of Telemoyo, blanketed as it was by an ash-coated cloud. It started raining a little on the way home, and by the time we returned we were covered in a layer of ash on our rain gear.  Ash is falling lightly here, like the slightest of snow storms, little flakes accumulating in a small dusting everywhere. We were wearing masks, so we didn't inhale anything, but it was sort of unpleasant anyway - ash kept creeping under my helmet and into my eyes, and I had to stop once to clean off the visor of my helmet. We were stopped on the road by a school group collecting money for the refugees, and of course we donated.  One of my students will be missing a couple of weeks because he is on the assessment team for the Indonesian Red Cross. He'll pass my class regardless of how much of the upcoming work he gets done, frankly, simply for possessing the knowledge and courage I referred to in my previous post.
   I'm getting a little bored with writing about the volcano, but of course it's the most pressing news here. Laura and Seamus return from their trip this afternoon, but rerouted because of the eruption - no telling how long and slow their trip will be. We were invited to a party tonight across the street, which we will go to, and then dinner at our friends' house (a British ex-pat and his Indonesian wife who have become our best friends here, and who are two of the most generous and welcoming people we've met period), so it will be a busy day. But we're stuck inside, it looks like, for the duration of this episode, and there is no telling what the duration will be. The evacuation zone is 20 kilometers today, which is getting very close to the city of Yogyakarta with over half a million people, an amazing place (we spent a night there recently, on our return from Bali), the cultural center of Java.  At this point, that has become the focal point of anxiety about any further eruptions. But please don't worry about us - we're just breathing a little ash and temporarily home-bound. How Indonesia will cope with an active volcano that has no signs of abating, of course, is anybody's guess. Send your positive mental energy, or your prayers, or whatever counts as psychic action in your worldview, to the homeless and the families of the dead, and to the people of Yogyakarta.

Volcano news with banana crepes on the side

November 4, 2010

            Merapi is on a deadly run this week, three more eruptions in the last two days, the latest, two this morning starting at around seven, the worst yet, killing at least 6 more people and forcing the evacuation zone, which authorities had said was perfectly safe at 10 kilometers, to get extended to 15 kilometers, moving three of the shelters in place for villagers from the mountain as well.  The number of displaced people has gone up to 75,000 (which tells you something about population density in Java: 75,000 people living in a 9 mile radius around the most active volcano in Indonesia).  There’s been ash billowing up to 20 kilometers in the sky, pyroclastic flows called in Javanese wedhus gembel, which translates as “shaggy sheep,” descriptive if perhaps a little too gentle under the circumstances.  Laura and Seamus passed through Magelang on their way to the south coast of Java today with a school trip, and she reported a great deal of ash there, much closer to Merapi than we are and without the shield of Mount Merbabu to block it. Even here, though, a thin coating of ash is appearing outside, and there’s a faint mineral smell in the air.

            As of today, there are 19 volcanoes in Indonesia on high alert status, out of the 125+ active volcanoes in the country. There’s some talk here about Merapi triggering this uptick in activity, because it’s all happening very quickly, but I have no idea if that is accurate. But when you read in the newspaper that Krakatoa is on high alert status, of course it gets your attention.

            In the meantime the pictures from the Mentawai Islands off the coast of Sumatra just get worse and worse. Storms and complete destructive chaos make getting in and out almost impossible. Desperate to do something, the government sent scores of volunteers to the island who apparently were completely unqualified to be of any assistance, and ran in fear at the rather large waves still pummeling the island. Now they are having to evacuate the volunteers because they are in the way. One Indonesian aid worker said it would be nice to have people with the requisite “knowledge and courage” to help out. Doctors can’t get the work done there because they can’t get the right supplies in, since the seas have been too high.

            It’s strange to be right on the edge of it, safe but still very present, and at the moment helpless as well, lacking the requisite knowledge and courage to do much but comment on it with my neighbors, eloquent observations translated to something like “Merapi erupt again today. Big. Scary.”

            Perhaps one of the reasons missionaries seem to thrive around here is the apparent proximity to the apocalypse, which they seem to be very excited to witness. At the moment, it’s just over that ridge there, blasting out shaggy sheep at an alarming rate, and over there off the coast of Sumatra, our own local remake of 2012 or The Day After Tomorrow.  I’m closer than I usually am to the on-going global apocalypses, no desire to get much closer, really. This time when I look in the newspaper, the old women getting loaded up into the back of squat black Mitsubishi, removed from their soon to be incinerated mountain village, look like my neighbor across the street. I imagine for my friends and family something similar is happening too; they are reading the news differently when they see about disasters in Indonesia, because Indonesia is suddenly a real place, with real people, four of whom you know pretty well.

            Observation off topic: there’s a guy on the corner outside the University where I work with a little stand on wheels. He makes little banana crepes, all day long, in two tiny cast iron woks heated over burning coals. He puts in the batter, and then sliced bananas, some sugar, a little chocolate, and some sweetened condensed milk. He covers that, switches the wok to the other burning coals, brings the already prepared one forward, folds it over and serves it. He does this all day long, every day, and his stand is often so crowded with orders that there is no point waiting. He’s famous in Salatiga; people come from all over the city to pick up batches of 20 or 30, and it takes about 2-3 minutes to get two finished. They cost 750 rupiah apiece, about 8 cents. They are extraordinarily delicious, the best dessert item I have had in Indonesia. It’s an amazing thing, to stand there, watching him prepare orders for the small crowd of people leaning against their motorbikes, his every move deft and easy, the intimate craft of a man who does this one thing with such aplomb and dexterity, preparing one after another. I have at least two every time there is no crowd and I am near him, regardless of what time of day it is and whether I am actually hungry, because I feel the need to stock up my internal reserve of Indonesian banana crepes, for that time when I am no longer able to eat them by walking 3 minutes from my office.  Sometimes I even fork out the forty cents and have five.