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.