In which I just remember some stuff I need to remember

I miss my blog.

            There is something about the regular reflection on an intense experience that becomes an important aspect of the experience, an aspect of its narrativizing I guess, that the blog served such an important function for. And while in past trips abroad – aside from a college-year in London, my longest exit before Indonesia had been a seven-week Central American jaunt in the late 1980s – I have been able to shape that experience in the telling, a little, after I return, it’s been harder to do that with a year abroad. I feel like I need an hour or two a week in which I schedule someone to come and listen to me, and my family too, talk about what happened over there. But it’s hard to suggest that, honestly.  And the result has become, now, that at the time when I finally want to talk about my year, I don’t really have a venue to talk about it. And by now, I assure you, our return to Bozeman is, for the most part, old news. (“Didn’t you go somewhere last year?” people might ask, when they see me – or – “I haven’t seen you forever – where have you been?”)

            So:

            There was a toddler – a little girl of about two – the daughter of the couple who ran our favorite sate stand, up the street from where we lived about a kilometer. Once a week or so we’d head up there to pick up a bunch of chicken sate, with lontong (rice compressed in banana leaves with coconut water) and an incredible peanut sauce. Every time I came there, this little girl would fall apart, weeping inconsolably. Her sweet older sister, who was not frightened of me, would do her best to calm her, but ultimately the toddler had to get moved from wherever she was stashed around the sidewalk stand – covered with tarp and canvas for the rain – and lodged on her mother’s hip. Usually I would arrive, place my order, and then disappear somewhere else for five minutes – the Alfamart up the street for a couple of cold Bintang, for example – in order to keep peace at the sate stand, but sometimes I stayed, the entire time striking abject fear into the heart of this young girl, her parents seeming, only to me perhaps, slightly annoyed, more at me than their daughter, more at the hulking bule who arrives unpredictably and upsets the relative order of their work.

            With the daughter perched on her hip, the mother would run through the steps of preparing the chicken for grilling – the marinating, the basting, and so forth (all the cutting and skewering had been done off-site, presumably somewhere with the most rigid sanitary standards assuring healthful meat – in any case, best not to create that image) – and then the preparing the finished sate for the customers – putting 10 sate sticks in a laminated paper wrapping with some hot peppers, the sliced lontong, and a scoopful of the sauce (this was a Madurese sate, which was somewhat distinctive and more spicy than the Javanese one). The father had a giant Hibachi-like sate grill, with an electric fan attached to keep the coals hot, and he’d be grilling, fanning, turning, moving, overseeing the process with 50 to 100 sates going at a time. The screaming infant was not a useful addition to their workload.

            At the place with the best nasi goreng (fried rice) down the road in the other direction, in a street stall attached to a small store, Graham became fairly good friends with the owner, and, as was his habit in kitchens throughout Indonesia, would perch himself by the cooking space and ask questions about the cooking, the food, and whatever. The couple who ran the place always greeted Graham with enthusiasm and had him, by the time we moved, cooking at the wok the batches of nasi and mei (noodles) that we the specialty there. The man – who became increasingly unhealthy over the time we visited the stand – took a shine to Graham, and together they would hold up ingredients – garlic, peanuts, various vegetables – and learn the Indonesian and English words for them, and he always remembered the English words Graham taught him, which he made sure to use the next time we returned. (He would make jokes to Graham like, “Tidak ada kacang, tapi kami punya peanuts” – which meant “There are no peanuts, but we have peanuts.”) Going to that stand for the 20-30 minutes it would take to get our dinner was always wonderful time spent, sipping a Coke while I watched Graham do his thing. Of course, Graham behind the counter was a great conversation piece in general, and we met a lot of interesting people at that stand.

            There was a mie ayam (chicken noodle soup) stand down the street that I finally stopped at about 6 weeks before our year ended there, part of my renewed enjoyment of street food as our trip came to an end. After my bout with some sort of outrageously painful intestinal virus somewhere around last October, I kind of held back on a lot of street food (the two above remained old stand-bys) but my visit from my friend Michael, in early May, turned me again. Michael would eat anything, all day. When he saw something for sale, on the street, he bought it, and ate it, unconcerned by the fact that the cook pulled a bowl out of a bucket of standing water stuck in a cabinet on the rolling soup stand. I think he did, in fact, get sick, but he also brought gin and bourbon from the duty-free in Singapore (inadvertently smuggling in one liter more than he was allowed) so perhaps our regular night-caps, many of them on a rooftop balcony overlooking the city center of Yogyakarta, helped fend off the worst of it. That mie ayam place was amazing, and I got a delicious meal, which I would now consider, in the United States, a small snack, for around 50 cents.

            These places became our routines, and the people our touchstones of stability. They were members of the community  who recognized us, who knew that our arrival would cause the baby to cry, or bring the sick owner out from the back to talk to Graham, or add extra spice to the soup because he knew I liked that.  Most of their names I never learned, but I will find those stands again someday, and say hello, and some of them will remember me (as the father of one of those two kids, I imagine). Something about the routine movements around our neighborhood – the walks to the small store up the street for gum or kecap manis (sweet soy sauce), the tire repair place where I took my motorcycle when it got a flat (this happened all the time, and it cost 50 cents, where ever I went, to get fixed, in an incredible process that involved a large tin can and kerosene – I loved getting flats, actually, because it always meant a good conversation), the place where I would buy the occasional pack of clove cigarettes (which are way better, and much worse for you, than the clove cigarettes you buy here – and I am glad, because I did learn to enjoy them, and I don’t really need them, and if I could buy them here, it’s not inconceivable that I would - but I would like one on occasion – I confess something about the nicotine spurred on many a blog entry…) – this was the mundane part of our life, and when we lived it, it seemed mundane, not the reason we were there, which I would have connected more to the grand adventures we had, or the teaching, or the road trips – but it was those mundane trips and all those people that are the heart of our year abroad. I miss everything about them.

            One more note, since I seem not to return here very often and I have been wondering about it. We were woefully unprepared to travel with kids, and there were so many times (as readers of this blog will recall) when I thought, as my son loudly abused me on a public bus, for example, that there was nothing pleasant about this experience, that the whole thing had been a grand mistake, and that I was frankly sorry we had gone to all the trouble and expense and hassle and disruption of doing this. I’ve become curious about the experience of families in situations like this, because the bonding I thought we would do, we did not do – that is, we didn’t become better at solving problems, or not being irritated by our irritating habits (I am told I have one or two as well), we didn’t learn to find our family as a self-contained unit that could face any hardship with goodwill and mutual reliance, full of appreciation for the fates that brought us together.  But we did all those things together – we saw so much, and met so many people, and engaged in loud arguments in the most unlikely of places (inside a royal palace, or a train station in Surabaya, or on a Hindu temple overlooking the most extraordinary Central Javanese valley) – and now, in ways I cannot understand, even those times that were genuinely miserable and unpleasant, the times where I wondered if I would ever really like being a father again, are part of a story that ends with me knowing my kids better, and myself better, and my family better. I’m not sure we’re any happier – I still can’t talk to Seamus very well about math, or sex – but I like the three of them a little more, anyway. I’ll have to write a little more about that too perhaps. I’d be curious to hear from other families who traveled abroad for so long like this, unless you had a Brady-Bunch-aren’t-we-special-and-team-like experience, in which case you can save it for someone else.

            I don’t know what that year meant, and I won’t know for a while, I suspect, if ever. But it matters that I figure it out more than I have, in part because it looms so large in my mind, a presence in my life that has changed who I am at home, even though I cannot, in any articulate way, say how.

            I could go on – but time does not permit, and I have reached the limits of a decent blog entry. I have missed you all, though, whoever you are (hi Roz!) – and I’m glad to say hello again.

            

Saya Kurang Tahu

            In Montana summers, locals wear these quaint things called sweaters to protect against what seems to me extremely frigid temperatures, the kind of temperatures that would send most of the people I know in Java into some sort of immediate hypothermia.  It’s colder today that it has been for me in over a year, and it’s the second day of September. Alas.

            I came home from Indonesia in somewhat of a state of shock, which confused me at the time. I think I stared a lot, and when people tried to engage me in conversation no doubt I gave off signals that I didn’t want to talk to them. I avoided doing an interview with a local journalist about my experience until it was too late, and then I was sorry, because by the time it was too late all I wanted to do was talk about my year in Indonesia.

            That transition, from something you are doing to something you did, was completely strange. Within 48 hours, I went from a frantic circumnavigation of Singapore seeking my stowed luggage, buying luggage straps in a packed six story emporium, cramming in a last meal in the Little India food court, to sitting on my porch in Montana, and people asking me, “How was it? How was your year?” I can’t think of anything else people would say to me upon my return, so I can’t fault the question, but “how was your year?” for most people under any circumstances is a hard question to grapple with.  But it was impossible to understand it, yet, as something that had happened and was no longer happening. I just couldn’t manage the past tense, for about a month, I think.

            I was grateful to come home in the summer, not on contract at work, a few weeks to clear brush, get my dog on a fitness program, ride my bike around, spend time with my friends, read, and sleep. For the first three weeks I slept like I have never slept before. I overslept on several occasions, something I believed I was physically incapable of doing.  But by mid-August, my lack of a daily agenda seemed to compound the problem of adjustment, and by the time my unavoidable and fairly arduous duties began as the semester commenced – the first thing I had to do was run a week-long workshop for new Graduate Teaching Assistants – I found myself uncharacteristically grateful for the schedule. It was, actually, a turning point for me, a moment when my feet started feeling planted, and I could see my home again, and begin to gain perspective on the year in Indonesia.

            The blog, during all this time, was rather difficult to return to. I figured I might write about re-adjustment, but all I could muster were stoner observations along the lines of “Those clouds are amazing.”  The culture shock wasn’t organized around any critique of Western excess – I’ve been adept at that one for years now – but around an inability to articulate anything, an inability to describe what it was like being home, an inability to describe what it was like in Indonesia, and the blog seemed absurd then, another occasion to recoil from my sudden muteness.

            I had believed, I think, that the year in Indonesia was long enough that the experience would organize itself, on the ground in Java. I mean this: I am accustomed to travel experiences of several weeks at a time, experiences where what the trip meant only becomes clear in the telling, where the narrative finally overtakes the experience, which is really the only possible trajectory, I suppose. But it actually isn’t true.

            The other night in my graduate seminar I introduced my students to the phrase “Saya kurang tahu,” a phrase which reflects the Indonesian anxiety to actually use the word no, “tidak.” “Saya kurang tahu” translates literally to “I less know,” which Indonesians use, regularly, instead of “I don’t know.” It sounds less rude, less direct. It’s my favorite phrase in Indonesian, though, because I love the ground it covers. I am home from Indonesia after a year, and I am far from being any kind of authority on Indonesia. But it’s not fair for me to say that I don’t know Indonesia either. So: I less know. Saya kurang tahu.  It fits in so many situations, and I think it might be the best phrase to describe that false sense that I know, really, much of anything. Still, I think I might get by, for the most part, on less knowing.

            I am not sure if this is a blog sign-off, or if that idea is even a little bit optimistic, given that I perhaps have no readers remaining. But I have stories, and they are sliding back into my head, and I hope I will use this venue to piece through a few of them, to figure out what that thing I did means, in relation to anything, really.

            In the meantime, merdeka!

"Has your life changed?"

            At the Bozeman airport, we were met by my mother-in-law, naturally thrilled to have us return, and my neighbor, who had a pick-up truck that could handle our load of luggage. When I got into his car (my family went with her), he asked me, “So, did it change your life? Are you completely different?”

            I confess that the question stymied me a little. It fit into a narrative structure I couldn’t quite inhabit. I wanted to say yes – I am supposed to say yes – the answer to the question, probably, is yes. But I didn’t – jet-lagged and awestruck by the landscape I truly do love, I muttered something I cannot remember.

            But Laura hit it on the head the other day when she said that it is not leaving that changes you, it is coming home. I still can’t answer my neighbor’s question – I still don’t how I am changed – but I know that I could see nothing until I landed in Bozeman, until we started mustering the energy to re-engage with our lives, our friends, our work.

            I don’t want to trivialize an experience I cannot empathize with, but let me just say that the return has given me a new appreciation for the displacement and weirdness a veteran returning from war must experience. I have had nothing of the intensity of combat, so I don’t mean that, but every day – several times – I have these visceral images that pop into my head from my time in Indonesia. It’s like I am there again, and it is nothing profound or overwhelming, except in the directness of it. I remember the small door, on the third floor, where I would sit sometimes, while a deluge came on the balcony beyond. I remember the smell of the sate stand, or the sound of the chicken noodle soup seller, or the mountain, vivid and neatly outlined in the sunrise, or a conversation with Ibu Yani at the store down the street. It’s a deep physical memory, and I have never experienced anything like it. I never had this experience in Salatiga, about Bozeman, perhaps because Salatiga was so strange to me, such work to even negotiate, that I didn’t have time. But when I return to Bozeman, the normalcy of everything, the familiarity, gives license to the most vivid imagistic memories I have ever had.

            Today I spent my time banging on my back patio with a sledge hammer, breaking down the concrete so that we can put up a usable space back there, protected by the sun – hard work that I could have spent $5 to have someone do for a day in Indonesia. (I’m not bragging, or happy about it – it’s just the price there.) I’m also doing things like planning my fall class – like reading scholarly stuff – but I don’t know yet how returning has changed me. I just know that here I am, and it is the coming home that is more jarring than anything. I didn’t believe it when people told me this, but I think it’s true.

            I didn’t expect to write much more after we returned, since, after all, the experience is over. But I suspect I have a little bit more to say, and at the risk of being overindulgent, I will go ahead and say it. Perhaps it will be tedious, and mundane, and normal – but I am realizing that no matter how reflective I was while we were in Indonesia, it’s almost as if the story of our year began again, when we landed. And the worst thing would be if the year simply dissipated, like a dream you see only the smallest shape of. I hope I won’t let that happen. So bear with me, or stop reading. That would be okay too. 

Clearing Brush - or - Pirates of the Caribbean 2

            I’ve spent hours in our garden since we’ve returned, clearing brush, as George Bush used to call it, pulling out the giant weed plants that have sprung up since we left. (Note for the next year abroad: black plastic cover.) It’s about the most intellectual thing I can muster up right now, though I have a deal of work to get started on, and I have managed in quick spurts to do things in my office at school.

            Everything is very familiar here, almost as if I lived here for eight years already. I recognize people, and places, and I know my way around completely. But I haven’t remembered how to be here, quite. It’s slightly disorienting, because I have a routine I struggled to lose that I need to acquire again, even as I also work to hold on to some of the perspective I gained in Indonesia. I haven’t lost any ambition, I don’t think, but I hope I’ve lost some of the angst about it. Perhaps my reluctance to commit to re-entry has to do with a concern that the whole ocean of my previous life will surround me as soon as I dive in. So I’ve just been dangling my feet, sometimes pulling them out and retreating to the garden if the water gets too unwelcoming. There, I watch the weed free places grow, taking spatial satisfaction in doing work that I would have, two months ago, paid someone $2 a day to take care of, and my body is sore, from squatting and pulling and lifting and digging, those physical tasks I was protected from as an expatriate elite in a servant culture.

            Seamus the other day described return as like Pirates of the Caribbean 2 – “the first one was so great, and you get so excited about the second one, you build it up, and you think about it, and you rush out to see it, and it turns out it just isn’t as good. It’s a little disappointing.” I wouldn’t describe my return like that – I don’t feel disappointed, for example, in the same way Seamus is feeling, because Laura and I have been welcomed home by our friends with enthusiasm and curiosity, and I am glad to be here, but I understand the sensation of strangeness, when you return to a place that you know and it turns out things have shifted a little, but you can’t pin down how.  Those shifts must feel a lot larger for my kids.

            People talked about reverse culture shock as a phenomenon of return from a year like this, and I believed it, but I didn’t know what it meant. It took me far longer to get my sleep back to its neurotic normal rhythm this time, so that was part of it. There is nothing like a sense of disgust at American excess (unless I eat the whole meal) or disdain at how we do things here. It’s a more personal experience than culture shock in Indonesia was: there, it was simply a sense of exhilarating displacement, a lack of clarity about how to physically move around spaces I had to map from scratch in my head. There was discomfort and uncertainty, but of course there was, because nothing was familiar. Here, I am in a place I supposedly know how to be in, and where everything is familiar, and it feels like it should be normal to be home. And so far, it isn’t quite, though the sensations are becoming less strange and more pleasant as the days continue, two weeks after return, as the garden becomes cleaner, as the piles of garden waste grow, as friends aren’t surprised to see me again. I know this place, and to be honest I can’t pin down, quite, what makes it feel so weird. But I feel it in my body.

            I’ve connected a little with a group of Middle Eastern students who are part of a program at MSU I used to help organize – I delivered a lecture to them on Monday, and met with them on a couple of other occasions; they are smart driven students from parts of the world that will need them to be on, now, as sweeping changes move across the Middle East. A Bahraini student was expelled, just as her course of study was completing, because she protested against the royal family. An Egyptian student stood in Tahrir Square in Cairo, helping edge out Mubarak. A Yemeni student complains because no one is paying attention to the 5 month long revolution against a president who has been an ally to the United States in the “War on Terror,” a phrase I can only type in quotation marks.  And of course sitting in the middle of it all is the Palestinian-Israeli quagmire. Talking to them, in my bucolic, green, spacious, wealthy home city, reminds me of how deeply connected my life is to the lives of these students, to the lives of my former students in Indonesia. Perhaps that is the basis of my sense of displacement upon return; perhaps I brought those spaces with me, and I am trying to understand them, overlay them on this space, recognize them together, try to figure out what those connections are. That’s a long project, and it will happen again when I step into a classroom, or go to a conference, and at times and places I cannot even anticipate.

            I need to go clear some brush.            

Home

We've been home for week now, though I have been away again, four days in DC to help next year's Fulbrighters get ready for their year, something we didn't have last year.It was quite pleasant, with a coincidental overlap with my brother Duncan, who was in DC on Tuesday, and whom I hadn't seen for two years.
I got stuck in Denver last night, because my plane sustained hail damage, not a bad deal because my parents live in Denver, so I spent the night with them. Now I'm at the airport waiting to board.
We had the most marvelous spontaneous greeting after we arrived home last Thursday. Word got out that we were back, and within an hour Seamus was off with friends, Graham had a gaggle of friends going through his new treasures, and Laura and I were drinking one of the many beers that showed up with our greeters. It was great, even after 26 hours of travel and ridiculous jet lag.
On Tuesday I gave a 3 minute address at the Indonesian Embassy, during which I was actually heckled by the Indonesian Ambassador. (He yelled out, after I greeted the crowd in Indonesian and thanked him in particular, that he had no idea what I just said. It was quite funny). I realized, as I helped prep next year's grantees, that I had a lot to say, and a lot of ideas about the process and about getting around in the country. When I spoke at the Embassy, I plugged the work I hope to continue doing writing workshops in Yogyakarta, as well as just praised the program.
There is no doubt micro-diplomacy like this works, and works well. As I said n my talk, my children will be lifelong lovers of Indonesia, and I'll never see the world the same either. I'm wary of using words like 'transformative' - maybe I'm too cynical - but it's a different world for me in some ways. On a small level, when I am driving on a road where the speed limit is 25 miles an hour, and it's a wide road, and there are no other cars, I have to study the speedometer the whole time or soon I'm at 40 miles an hour, my instinct from Indonesia to make up for time I have already post or am about to lose. And everything engenders visual flackbacks: the water cascading down the side of the highway after a DC downpour brings up the road, outside our house, when it would become a river.
Last night I went to dinner with my parents and my brother, sister-in-law, and nephew, Cupcake, and I ate the entire plate I was served, a massive hamburger and French fries and onion rings, for reasons that are not clear to me, except for old habit. It was quite gross really, enough food for 2 or 3 people, at the portions I've become used to, and it helped explain the general girth of my fellow citizens, which is one of the first things you notice upon return. I felt sick for about 3 hours.
I'm so glad to be home though, I can say that much. And I think I'm over jet lag. But the reverse culture shock, I suspect, has only just begun. My plane, it appears, is boarding. Mari.

Fourth of July

We're in Siem Reap right now, the home base for Angkor Wat tourism. We got robbed on Saturday, at the main place, Angkor Wat, lost a pile of money, but recovered quickly because the atm card showed up, and because the place is spectacular, giant beautiful temple after giant beautiful temple, evocative and amazing even with the hordes of tourists everywhere, and the people hawking.
     We've been three weeks on the road now, after leaving Indonesia, two week in Vietnam and one in Cambodia. Funny thing about travelling like this, after a year in a community like Salatiga, is that it seems like a rock skipping across the surface of a very deep pond, only it never sinks. As soon as we arrived in Hanoi, it felt like we were on a tourist program, and everything felt a little pre-ordained. You have to work hard, in a place like Vietnam, to not get sucked into the program, but the program flattens everything. Or maybe it just seemed that way to me after living for a year in Salatiga, where there were no tourists, ever. I learned a lot about Vietnam, and now about Cambodia, but very little about Vietnamese or Cambodians. Of course I cannot speak Vietnamese or Cambodian (I could never speak Vietnamese, I am convinced. Impossible to hear those tonal distinctions), so that makes it harder. Still, it has been incredible to visit these places, and I am really glad that we had this opportunity.
    We leave here on Wednesday morning, fly through Singapore, pick up our bags and my machete there, and leave from Singapore at 6 AM Thursday morning, home home home. We'll be back by Thursday afternoon. It's a strange thing to write that, like I could make dinner plans in Bozeman for the weekend (this is not a hint, by the way. I don't know if I will be able to move when I get home). It's just so odd, so surreal, to think about home, about Bozeman, about our life there, about how things just get turning again, cycles, habits, frames of mind. I can't wait to see my friends again, and I'm even ready to get back to my job, but I also am not sure what any of that means.
     I will write more in this blog after I get home, more reflections about returning, about the year, about the things that I have learned taking my family away. As it has been before, I will write it mostly for myself, to process the experience. Only I have loved that people have read this too, and it has changed the way I write it, and I never thought I could sustain a blog, or enjoy writing one, and I loved it. So if you are one of those people who reads this when I write it, or check it every now and then, thank you. I have been grateful for the chance to share this year with you. I don't know what it looks like as a narrative arc, from this end. Maybe someday I'll read the whole thing again, and see. I don't know if anyone will care about what I have to say, once I get home. In any case, thanks for reading this far. It's a lot of pages, and if you'd seen it in book form I don't think you would have picked it up. So I am glad that I tricked you.
    Today, the fourth of July (they have the fourth of July here too, but they don't capitalize the F), we are taking a break from temple hopping, which we've been doing in the jungle heat for two days, and will do again tomorrow. We slept in, we'll do some laundry (i.e. have someone else do our cleaning), wander around Siem Reap a little, eat some more food (Cambodia does meat really well), ride bikes, maybe go to a silkworm farm, just stuff like that. I hope you have a lovely Fourth, or, if you're not in the US, a good fourth. See some of you soon. See the rest of you when I see you. If you're in Indonesia, I miss you already. If you're in the United States, I can't wait to bore you. Trust me, we will be insufferable companions for about three months, and if I were you, I would avoid me. Cross the street if you see me coming. Pretend not to be home when I stop by. Maybe this is old habit already. Soon, though, one of you will be saying, as I launch into another paragraph about Javanese neighborhoods, "Well, better let you go."
   I better let you go.

Genocide

Today I stood with my family in a school turned into a prison in Phnom Penh, where thousands of people from 1975-1979 were photographed, measured, weighed, imprisoned, tortured, and then killed. Seven of them survived. And I stood next to my 11 year old son, by a tree against which Khmer Rouge soldiers swung the heads of babies, so that they would not grow up to take revenge against their parents' murderers. Somewhere between 1.5 and 2.5 million dead, in 4 years.
Maybe a bad parenting moment. But how do you hide from this? We gawked our way through the Vietnam War museum in Saigon too, displays of Agent Orange birth defects and photographs that haunted my own childhood. We stood by a B-52 bomb crater that helped mostly destroy a 1000 year old Hindu temple site where the US Army mistakenly believed the NVA were hiding. How can you explain this? Why should you try? I don't kmow. I hope I didn't mess this one up...

Out of Indonesia

Ibu Kasum, our wonderful pembantu, sobbed early Monday as we loaded up the van with out giant load of suitcases for the drive to the Semarang airport. I'd been feeling like crying for about a week by then, every motorcycle ride around Salatiga through the cloudy lens of my tearing-up eyes. And now we're not there anymore - I'm writing this from Hanoi.
     We lost internet at home in the final week, or I would have certainly posted more. But then we had to scramble around town looking for places to do our emailing, and I never got the last week's musings up. It was a flurry of departure and last-minute purchases (like the machete I bought, which later caused an hour's worth of drama in the Singapore airport, though I am now a licensed machete carrier in Singapore.) Every morning Mount Merbabu looked glorious last week, shining and green and huge. The department had a farewell lunch. We packed and packed and distributed stuff. We ate our favorite sate and fried noodles. And then we left, suddenly gone from a place that had started to feel like home. Now, in Vietnam, again linguistically helpless, I speak to everyone in Indonesian, accidentally.
     It's a good thing we didn't come straight home, though. The transition would have been too abrupt. We would suddenly be in our house, still grieving about leaving, looking at our life there with outsider eyes. Plus we're in Vietnam now - so far we've just wandered around and bought food, which is miraculously delicious.We're on the road for three weeks, a last Asian hurrah (until the next one), in Vietnam and Cambodia, only tourists now, wide-eyed and lost. It will be wonderful.
       I will write more as I can, but probably not too much until we are home. But we have left a place I never expected to love as much as I do, and I know only that we will certainly return. 

Relativity

Upon seeing wild orangutans in the jungle of Borneo's Tangung Puting National Park:

The fifteen year-old: ...uh...yea, that's cool...can we go back to the boat now?

The eleven year-old: Oh my god, mom! Look at its butthole!!!

Sembu, and off to Borneo

     I could call it Kalimantan, which is the name of the province in Indonesia where we'll be, but it's so much cooler to say that today we leave for a 6 day visit to Borneo (the name of the island itself, which also has a part of Malaysia and the entire country of Brunei on it), including 2 days up and back a river in a rain forest with all sorts of cool primates and malaria infected mosquitoes. Graham is healthy, our ride comes in 1/2 hour, and all is good. Likely silence for a few days, followed by another blog wholly inadequate as a recorder of the experience.
    Sembu means "better," as in "health recovered." Bye.

Ramayana on the Beach

Graham woke up with a small fever today, high enough to postpone, at least one day, the flight to Borneo and the boat up the river into the rain forest there. So we spent the day, again, arranging for departure, and travel in Vietnam and Cambodia, and packing, and running small errands. I zipped around on the motorcycle and marveled at the familiarity of everything.
        In the last month, my language has taken some kind of leap, which is a little frustrating, since we are about to leave for parts of Asia where I will be as an infant again, except perhaps not as innocent, or cute. (Perhaps?) It's also, of course, exhilarating, a little like the time I stood up for about 10 seconds on the surf board in Pacitan - I've seen a future in which I could actually be something approximating fluent in Indonesian. I'm learning bunches of new vocabulary words everyday now, and the miracle is that they stick in my brain, and when I see them again I know them.
        Last week we went camping at the coast with a family we've become close to. Paul is 16 and has become Seamus' closest friend here, and he's a great kid, a climber who has gone all over Java with his two older brothers and now his friends, rock climbing. (Yesterday he took Graham out climbing on cliffs that rise above the most beautiful rice paddies I have ever seen, the ones I've taken all our visitors on hikes through.) His parents run the MCC in Indonesia, which stands for the Mennonite [2 words beginning with C], and they are wonderful people. They are here as missionaries, I suppose, but Mennonites are forbidden to preach. Instead, they just do cool stuff. MCC has been a strong partner in developing interfaith organizations in Indonesia, and they are doing incredible work as well in Papua, where the local population yearns for independence from Indonesia (which they are unlikely to get, given how resource rich the area  is - the largest gold mine in the world, an American operation called Freeport, is there - and given how successful the policy of filling up the place with Javanese citizens has been over the years, a program called transmigrasi). They are progressives, educated in Indonesian history and culture and religions, and they have lived here for 10 years and know their way around. So they have been delightful acquaintances. I'm also grateful because they aren't interested in converting us; they just like doing things with us. (In his yearbook, Seamus had a schoolmate write a note that essentially said, "I've been so nice to you all year in the hopes that you would convert to Christianity," which is kind of depressing, really, and just seems strange to me.)
         We went to a place called Pantai Siung (Siung Beach) on the south coast near Yogyakarta, which they assured us was quiet and remote. We got stuck as night fell behind a full bus and a small van on the way there, and as we approached closer, and started to see more lights, and more cars, we realized this might not be a normal day on the beach. Indeed, we came around the corner into the parking lot to find hundreds of chairs under a tent, facing a stage on which there was a full gamelan orchestra and a screen for the wayang kulit. We had arrived for a special marathon shadow puppet performance, with the paling terbaik dalang (the most best puppet master) in Yogyakarta putting on, singlehandedly, an eight hour performance of the Ramayana Cycle in Javanese, with a cast of about 200, and full gamelan accompaniment. We arrived at about 6:30, while things were still getting set up for the 10 o'clock performance. So we set up tents and got our camp ready, in the early Javanese deep dark of quick night, to the sound of about 20 gamelan players warming up with several woman singing, a loud and rough surf crashing out an offbeat rhythm that somehow works with gamelan music.
         At about 9:30, I wandered back up to take some pictures and check out the scene. By that point, the place was packed. All the chairs were filled, the warungs selling food and cigarettes and countless energy drinks that everyone seemed to be sucking down - it was a scene, everyone decked out in their finest clothes, youth on motorcycles like teenagers everywhere hovering on the fringes, smoking, wandering into the jungle, families. In the front there was a row of seats covered in white seat covers, for the VIPs.
         "Om, Om," I heard (this is the Dutch word for uncle, something I am called about every day on the street or in the markets), as I was standing near the front taking pictures. "Silikan, duduk" (please, sit), spoken by one of three men in the VIP section. And so I ended up sitting in my ratty beach shorts and sweaty shirt in the front row, special seating, trying to understand the Indonesian being spoken to me over the increasing volume of the orchestra.
        Perhaps the eight hour Ramayana cycle wayang kulit in Javanese is a little more compelling in theory than in actual practice. I really want to be the kind of person who would sit in the front row and watch the entire performance, but there are several obstacles to this, recounted here in no particular order:

• Sri Lanka to go and rescue the princess. Plus everyone has a name that is both completely unfamiliar and seemingly the same as every other character. Everyone else in this audience knows the story deeply, and can come in and out as their favorite scenes appear.
• I do not speak any Javanese, though I can recognize a few words.
• It was 8 hours long, and I had not prepared myself for it, and I couldn't muster up the will to quaff the energy drinks I would need to support myself. I was very tired. One needs to get ready for a such a thing, and we had prepared only to sleep on the beach.
• Perhaps the most compelling obstacle, however, is that there really isn't a lot of action, or at least not a lot of movement. The dalang (who is amazing, by the way, adept at changing voices and remembering a story for eight hours, with full dialogue. I can do this with Monty Python and the Holy Grail, but no one celebrates me for it) would bring in the characters who were central to this particular episode, and he would line them up, 2-6 on each side of the screen facing each other, and they would have long involved conversations about Ramayana stuff in Javanese. If you were lucky, a character might move his arm, so that you knew who was talking. There was a moment when the two comic relief characters began hitting each other over the head with their sticks - needless to say that was my favorite part. Mostly they just stood there, with every now and then the static conversation punctuated by a burst of gamelan music and the singing of the women. 

I did make it the longest of any of our group (the only bules in the places), about 1 1/2 hours, and I enjoyed it a great deal. I've been to shorter wayang kulit performances on three other occasions, once in Bali and twice in Yogya, in which the point has been for tourists to go and get Culture. Getting Culture, when you are a tourist in Indonesia, is a Very Important Activity, certainly requiring great Seriousness and a recognition that you are seeing something Sacred and that you should be Reverent. However, watching wayang kulit in a public performance on a remote beach with a bunch of Javanese is not like that. People wander around, and chat, and smoke, and text, and drive back and forth through the parking lot on their motorcycles. The musicians and the dalang were smoking the entire time, and the choir of ladies was texting (how, I don't know, because we lost cell coverage). There were babies crying and people heckling the comic relief characters and at some point all the VIPs and the musicians had tea and a little snack box (this is super Indonesian - there is no event without a little snack box with some sweet cakes and fried things in it) delivered as the performance went on. People were sitting all around the stage, and some began sitting on the stage. I looked for it, but I saw no Reverence. 

         All that night, I would wake up on occasion and lie in my tent and listen to the ocean and the gamelan and the occasionally shrieking dalang, and when I got up to pee I could see from far away the shadow part of the screen, on which some character appeared to be quite angry about something (which anger I could discern because he was screaming very loudly and moving his arm a little). It was an amazing soundtrack, not one conducive to a super refreshing night of sleep, but a marvelous eight hour moment nonetheless. In the morning, when we awoke, the stage had been dismantled, and all that was left was a parking lot full of cardboard snack boxes and cigarette butts.

        Such a long entry. As always, I have to leave out more than I can include. My brain feels like it might soon explode. 

    

Official duties ended

     My official Fulbright duties end today, with the culmination of the series of faculty workshops I have been offering for members of various departments. As I have noted, these have been a highlight of my professional year here, and they have given me a unique window on the pressures and challenges facing academics in a developing country like Indonesia. Not only is success in the academic world increasingly dependent upon a knowledge of English - and not just any English, but that specialized kind of academic English that requires long-winded clauses and parenthetical references and densely packed syntactical structures - but academics in places like this have almost no ability to access current research. As my academic colleagues reading this know, to have access to academic journals requires access to several databases that keep electronic versions of those journals, and these are outrageously expensive, even for American universities. Plus academics here routinely teach 6-8 classes a semester, which of course makes research productivity prohibitive. It strikes me that the comparative advantage that US academics have over scholars in developing countries demands that we attend to this disparity. But don't be fooled by this veneer of altruism - I really just want to come back here, in whatever guise I can muster.

    Today we go on a 2 day camping trip on the south coast of Java with another family we have become friends with. I don't get to drive, sadly, but I will enjoy the ride. And on Monday we do our last Indonesian adventure out of Salatiga: a trip up a river in Borneo into one of the last refuges of the orangutan (which word comes from the Malay - or Indonesian - language, orang hutan, meaning literally forest person). Then we're back in Salatiga for a week, to panic our way through all the departure chaos.  Before we return to Bozeman, we will spend about three weeks in Vietnam and Cambodia. And then we are home, and present, if not fully accounted for. No one reading this will weep for us, I am sure, but this is a sad and exciting time in any case. I can't wait to see in person all the friends I have missed, but I don't want to leave Indonesia, either.

A little more about traffic, about which I seem to be obsessed

“…whoso travels in Java for the first time, writes to his family that he has been in very dangerous situations. But whoso lives there, just laughs about that fear.”

            Max Havelaar, or The Coffee Auctions of the Dutch Trade Company, Multatuli, 1860

            At the Fulbright conference in Jakarta a couple of weeks ago, I had several great conversations with young Indonesians heading off to various universities in the United States to pursue a Masters or PhD degree. They were excited, animated, overwhelmed by the pending adventure, and very talkative. One of my favorite conversations was with a young civil engineer from the northern part of the island of Sulawesi, who was headed to the University of Maryland to study traffic engineering.

            He had practical reasons for it, of course (“I’m on the faculty of civil engineering, and I teach traffic engineering”) but when I pressed him on it, he said that he was interested in traffic engineering because it was, as he put it, much more “dynamic” than civil engineering. “If we need to build a bridge in Sulawesi,” he said, “we could get help from a civil engineer from the United States who could come over here and build a bridge. It’s the same to build a bridge there as in the United States, and he wouldn’t have to have any knowledge of the culture or geography to build a good bridge. But to do traffic engineering, a person has to be an engineer, but he also has to understand culture, and history, and the geography. You have to understand the place, or you won’t build traffic systems that will work in that context.”

He described a new bus system in the city of Manado on Sulawesi, one that had fixed bus stops on the principal that it would work faster because it would only stop at designated places. The problem, however, was that people in Manado didn’t want to walk to a bus stop. They wanted to do what everyone else in Indonesia does, which is walk to a corner, or in front of their house, or wherever they are, and wave for the bus to stop. So the new system, incredibly efficient, much faster, probably safer and probably better buses, had no riders, because no one wanted to walk to the bus stop. (Of course, a very common response to that here would be a precursor of “American indignant” – a kind of Frederick Taylor on holiday “American efficient”: “We need to train these people to do that more efficient thing because that is the smarter way to do it, and if they understand why it is smarter, they will start walking to the buses.” One time in Nepal I watched an American doctor become very frustrated, pointing his arms in the air and shouting, because the porters carrying the boxes of expensive medical equipment failed to understand the meaning of the words “This way up” with a large arrow pointing, at that moment, downward. Not efficient, which begets the American indignant.)

It was a great conversation because it highlighted the limitations of expert knowledge, limitations which are visibly present in Javanese cities like Jakarta and Semarang and Surabaya, where one recoils in horror at the odor and filth of the canals the Dutch installed to make the place feel more like Amsterdam, the stagnant brown tropical water a perfect incubator for all sorts of malicious microbes and insects. It’s also the case that traffic engineers should have a sustainable career path here, where 130 million people, in the case of Java, zip around the highways on every form of possible transportation (on major national highways, one will have, within sight at all times: bicycles, motorcycles, becaks [bicycle taxis], dokars [horse-drawn carriages], cars, small buses, slightly larger buses, giant buses, trucks of all sizes, pedestrians, and chickens.)

Talking to him made me understand one of the sensations I’ve had here in the last several months, as I’ve graduated from riding my bike to driving a motorcycle and finally to tooling around Java behind the wheel of a rented car (something I promised myself I would not do before I arrived here): as I have come to understand Javanese traffic, come to feel not just comfortable but at home in its chaos and swirling majesty, I have felt like I understood this place better. It sounds trivial, but as Multatuli wrote 150 years, about carriage travel in Java, when you first hit the highways here, there appears to be no logic, no sense, no pattern, just insanity, speed, and impending death, and then you just laugh about it. Several times on the road trip I took with Michael, we just began laughing spontaneously at the way that motorcycle weaved its way through already fast moving traffic, or whatever version of craziness we saw. There is no road rage here, no one yelling at you or flipping you off when you dart into traffic to merge in a lane where there is really no space for merging - they are expecting you. Courtesy is not an issue here – it is impossible to imagine a condition in which a slow-moving truck would pull over to let traffic pass – but it doesn’t matter because rudeness is not an issue either. When you pass, and try to merge, cars let you in. No one ever tries to block you out, and the honks on the road are polite announcements of the presence of something near you: “I’m over here.” The one rule of Javanese traffic appears to be: except at a traffic light, never ever stop. It’s a microcosm (with nothing micro about it, of course) of the wonder of this place, where the patterns of daily life, the way things happen, the energy and the excitement, require time to see, require that you let go of the American efficient that even I (recently voted the world’s most inefficient person, by a panel of me) found marking my cultural heritage when I arrived.

Now I just want to go drive around the place, and I hope, on one of my return visits, to do a trans-Java road trip, two weeks from tip to tip, with whomever needs a sustained adrenaline rush.

A couple of things I never wrote about, so as not to concern you

            I never wrote about the motorcycle accident, when I was just starting at the intersection, and my front tire went over a plastic bottle, and the bike slipped out from under me, and fell over, and while I was falling, the bottle of beer fell from my bag and broke, and I landed on it, and it cut my arm, though I only realized that my arm was cut about 100 yards later after I hastily picked up my motorcycle and departed from the intersection, surprised by the cascade of blood down my forearm. It was a big skin-splitting gash, resulting in one of my most cherished Indonesian souvenirs, from the four stitches I had to get that evening when I reluctantly went to the hospital emergency room at the insistence of Ibu Maria. After about a five minute wait in a large room with several suffering people on stretchers (emergency room suffering, like a sudden spike in blood sugar or a dangerous car accident – I was not suffering, I should emphasize), I got ushered to a private room and was taken care of quickly and efficiently, for a fee of about 6 dollars. I think they moved me faster because I was a bule. All of Ibu Maria’s family came to visit in that 10 minutes, shaking my hand and worrying over me.

            I never wrote about the time my right foot starting going numb, which I noticed first when my ankle started turning while I walked, for no apparent reason. Soon the whole foot was numb, and I walked with a sort of limp, and in my mind I imagined the emergency flight to Singapore where I would have my foot cut off in a clean hospital. I really didn’t know what to do, aside from the google search which gave me about 45 possibilities and no clear direction – in the United States I would have driven 2 minutes to my doctor. One day I was at a student fair on campus, and a man in medical attire asked me if I wanted to have a budget acupuncture session. “Will it make my foot feel better?” I asked, and he said yes, and soon I was sitting on a hospital stretcher in the middle of the student fair getting clean (recently unpackaged) needles stuck in my foot and calf by a doctor trained in medical acupuncture at the University of Indonesia. He seemed like a credible guy, and I was truly desperate at this point, my foot numb for about 3 weeks by then. He said it wouldn’t work right away, that I’d need a few more treatments, but when he was done, it actually felt better. It cost about $4.

            Since this doctor’s office was too far away, in another city, I found a Chinese doctor in town, recommended by Ibu Maria (again), who did acupuncture. He was a short enthusiastic man with a shock of pointy black hair who spoke no English, but was very excited, and he showed me charts and pictures of feet, and then stuck bunches of needles in my foot and calf. People always say that acupuncture doesn’t hurt but they are lying – after the needle goes in, itself relatively painless, the doctor has to find the nerve, which he does by gently wiggling the needle until it hits the nerve. He knows that it hits the nerve because my leg twitches crazily and I groan, and he is happy. Each time I visited him (about 3 times) he stuck about 12 needles in me, and then he hooked them all up to an electric generator that sent low shocks through the needles into my nerves for about five minutes, a wholly unpleasant sensation, but one you get sort of used to. After three sessions my foot was better. That whole thing cost me about $20.

            I learned the Indonesian word for “bloodcurdling” from him (mengerikan) because I was reading a book about the events in 1965, which eventually led to the massacre of ½ million to 1 million people in Indonesia. He was visibly shaken as we spoke about it – things were nasty in Central Java, and around the area where we live. I really liked that doctor.

            When you see me (on the ground in Bozeman in about 6 weeks), remember to ask about some of the things we couldn’t write about in the blog, for various reasons. Or if you see Michael, ask him about one of them (keyword: “street cred”). He’ll fill you in. 

In which I love even the most irritating mall

            I’m feeling nostalgia now for things that I have not left, a feeling I don’t like, because it means part of me is already gone, not present. Even in the mall in Semarang, a gleaming noisy place full of expensive shops and over-priced, for Indonesia, food, I look around with a wistfulness and affection that can easily overpower me. I hate that mall, and still I am missing it in the midst of my consumer animus. I drive the road from Semarang, between the kilometer-long bamboo huts selling woks (some tiny, some big enough to stir-fry a large toddler, whole) and I miss it already. How strange, this feeling, to miss in advance what you still have. It’s like that unpleasant sensation of worrying about the death of a loved one who is with you, and still healthy. Only we have to go in three weeks, on June 13, the date a bureaucratic arbitrary that makes staying in the country longer an impossibility.

            In the meantime, it’s finals week at the school now, for Seamus at least. I don’t want to write about this, because it is not pleasant. So I will not.

            Mount Merbabu – Gunung Merbabu – has been out in sharp relief this week, above the city, green and present. It’s huge, a presence more commanding than any of the mountains in Bozeman, and it slowly accumulates clouds over the course of a day, as the sky becomes overcast, though less inevitably now as we slip out of the rainy season.

            After we dropped Michael off at the airport today, Graham and I went to the Central Java Museum, which is the sort of museum you could only love if you’d live in Central Java for a while. We were followed around by a group of girls – probably about 12 – in full headdresses. They were trying to covertly take our picture with their cellphones. One time one of the girls hid behind a display and poked her phone around the corner to click a shot of us. They would wander around casually at the displays where we were and pretend to be interested in them, and set up a shot with their friends in the picture, and then turn the camera to us and quickly click. When I could, I suddenly posed, smiling, and they shuffled away, giggling nervously.  This is something that is simultaneously ridiculous  (“Why do they want to take our picture?” Michael asked me on a crowded beach in South Java, as we were hoarded by crowds of people doing their characteristic posing hand signals, perplexed that it was, simply, because we are white), irritating (one time, in the Java Man museum, another hilarious museum with about five buildings, one third of one of which has some replicas of artifacts that have been shipped elsewhere, Laura and Seamus had their breakdown, because it was literally impossible to move without a crowd of school children jostling to get a picture), and extremely charming. It’s hard for me to get mad about it, because for some reason, bules here can, in certain places, set off a flurry of excitement.

            I can’t see past the end of this trip right now (trip? That doesn’t seem like the right word), even though there are things in the United States looming, demanding my attention, popping up on my emails, reminders that people and institutions there know I am returning, that I in fact exist in that universe even so. When we left the United States, I remember feeling a sense of awe that we would be gone so long. “I won’t see this bench for a year,” I would say to myself. I was enthralled by that feeling, but not sad, not worried, not upset about it. But this is different. I am such an outsider here, the kind of freak that gets mobbed by fifth grade girls in headdresses only because my skin is a certain color. I mangle the language every time I open my mouth, and I cannot understand most of what people say to me. I get lost every time I leave Salatiga. I don’t understand Islam, and I haven’t even made the barest of dents in the Javanese language, which is what people really speak around here. It’s not my place, this country. I’ve seen about 1/20 of the country. I don’t belong here. I don’t understand it. I know next to nothing about it.  So how can it be that leaving it fills me with a sadness deeper than the sadness I felt when I left the home I love, the home I hope I never have to move permanently from, the home I am, on another level, incredibly excited to see again?

            When I am home, and sitting at a traffic light, and I am not surrounded by hordes of motorcycles jostling for position, filling in every space they can find, when none of those motorcycles have a family of four on them, the man driving and smoking with his two year old standing in front, hands relaxed on the handlebars – when I do not hear the fifteen dissynchronous call to prayers five times a day – when I go to a hotel, and everything works – when I fill up my car and it costs me more than my maid makes in a month – when there is a “no smoking” sign, and no one is smoking - this country will flood my brain, live in it in a way I could never have predicted.

            I hope I can write about something else besides this incipient sense of loss in the next three weeks. Perhaps that will be my task, to remember where I am even still, and love it the way I have learned to love it in the last several months.

Javenese road trip

So Michael came to Indonesia, and we are on the road trip now my kids won't let us take, who knows where we're going or where we'll stay or what we'll eat or if we'll find that thing we really wanted to see. Without planning it, we have found ourselves wading up to our chests in an underground river deep into a mountain, drinking shooters of cobra blood mixed with honey,sipping arak with some street kids in Yogya, making u-turn after u-turn ("that was where you were supposed to turn, dude"). We've zipped around the back roads of Yogyakarta and Central Java. The tour guide at Prambadan, who speaks 6 languages (he launched into French with some stray tourists during our visit) danced his way through the Ramayana story as we stood on a 1000 yr old hindu temple to Brahma. It was a 20 minute narrative, beautiful and funny and graceful. We watched a shadow puppet performance, which Michael thought needed a little more action. We sat in the living room of a puppet maker in rural Yogya while he tried to sell us a complete antique set of wayang kulit puppets and the giant wooden box they go in, and I really really wanted them.

When we first arrived in this country, we couldn't move. We couldn't function, we could barely eat, doing anything took a kind of energy and commitment that was exhausting. So when my parents came, and now Michael, our ability to maneuver around easily and get to places they never would have seen without us has been really fun, and to have people at home who we can share Indonesian memories with when we return will be wonderful too.

I can't think too hard about returning. I get very sad, though I miss so much about Bozeman. I love it here. Yesterday I got an article rejected from a journal in my field, and I felt that gnawing professional anxiety that I haven't felt for a year, and I had to check myself. I hope that some of the things that have lifted from us here, we can keep off our backs when we return. And I hope more than anything that before too long I have a chance to maneuver a car through the cultural wonder that is Indonesian traffic flow. It's almost as fun as climbing the ridge at Bridger.

And the panic sets in...

I am so predictable.

After nine pretty solid months of whining and complaining (I miss Bozeman I don’t have any friends I don’t have anything to do I’m sick of constant diarrhea Indonesian food all tastes the same my house is too big Bahasa is too hard it is hot there are bugs I can’t stand the rain I hate my landlady and why can’t Indonesians make an electric converter that doesn’t shock you every time you plug it in, etc. etc.) it finally dawned on me that we are leaving this place in less than a month. Less than a month. And the place that I have said time and time again is not my place, surely not my home, well the thought of leaving that very place fills me with a deep sadness.

Is it the leaving here or returning there that causes the heart to race? I’m not sure. Perhaps a combination of both. I have looked forward to this trip for such a long time. And it has so quickly come to an end. To share this year with my family has been an incredible gift. We have enjoyed each other in ways that could never have come about if it were not for this bizarre, random opportunity. I know that once we get back and camp starts and school starts and the kids see their friends that both Seamus and Graham, but particularly Seamus, that their gaze will turn outward again. And that is OK. That is how it should be. But I have so loved the starring role that our family unit has enjoyed in our own production this year.

And of course missing from my romantic longings for Bozeman all year have been all of the things that drive me crazy about it -- the lack of diversity, the sameness of it all, the goofy politics, funding cuts, annoying neighbors, committee meetings and never ending spring. All of those things, I have not missed. And when I cry over home, it is usually a sunny afternoon in my garden that I am imagining, not the $6 head of lettuce at the Farmer Market or the grant application that is due or my driveway getting plowed in.

But it is the leaving too. It is this place. It is Indonesia that I will miss. It is the wildness of it. Even in the civilized parts. The complete lack of order that some days seems more than just natural, it seems like the way it should be. It is the jungle and the mountains and the crashing waves. It is the idea of saying goodbye to friends, some of whom I truthfully may never see again. Ibu Kasum whose friendship and service have made such an enormous difference in our experience here. Ibu Viva, the hard drinking, chain smoking, pork eating, devout Muslim whose generosity knows no bounds, and trust me, Seamus and Graham have tested this one. Mas Yohannes, the registrar from Mountainview whose sensibility is so perfectly Western and totally Javanese at the same time. These are friends. But even more, I think I will miss people like Pak Smiley, the man who does maintenance on our house and laughs ALL the time. Pak Heni and Ibu Nina, the security guards at the kid’s school. Ibu Widi, the grocery delivery woman. Total chance encounters, but people who have graced our lives with kindness and generosity. And when we go, we will be replaced by another bule family and we may all blur in their memory but they will forever be etched in ours.

Last week, I had a really bad day. I can’t remember what the problem was but it was some goofy, totally typical Indonesian thing that sent me over the edge. Kirk agreed to give me a ride to town but we had to get petrol first. When we got to the warung, I got off the motorcycle and was waiting for him when Ibu Yani, the proprietor who has always unnerved me by her unwillingness to be satisfied with my lame Bahasa, walked up behind me and inadvertently startled me with a very sudden “Pagi bu!” I apologized because that’s what you do in Java even when whatever it is is not your fault but somehow Ibu Yani could tell that something was amiss. As Kirk fussed with the motorcycle, she put her arm around my back and began rubbing my shoulder. It was such a quiet gesture, I didn’t even notice it at first. But gradually I became aware of her touch and was struck by the gentleness of it. I nearly started to cry. Here was a woman from half way around the world, a devout Muslim (and not of the Ibu Viva variety) who frankly owes us nothing. She sells us gas and delivers our drinking water but she also makes certain that we are included in all of the neighborhood gatherings and always, always corrects my pronunciation. We have little in common. She will live in the back of her shop for the rest of her life and I will go home in a month and there, my life will be infinitely easier than she can ever imagine. And yet, in that moment, she had the grace to be not a shopkeeper or a Muslim or even an Indonesian, but a neighbor and a friend. And for that I am very grateful.

I don’t know what I will bring home with me from this experience (with the exception of about $500 worth of really cool batik). But what I do know is that our lives have been changed. And I hope that whatever it is that we have learned this year, we can hold onto it, that we can take a little bit of Indonesia with us and that it might blossom in Montana, despite the cold and the committee meetings.

Best Parent/Teacher Exchange of the Year

American Indignant

            I have been trying to understand the visceral way I reacted to last Tuesday night’s meeting with my landlady for about three days now. Over-reacted, I now think, though I was correct in the assumptions that drove my over-reaction.

            Though we never agreed to this when we entered the verbal agreement with our landlady, and though we have learned that it is not standard practice, Laura and I agreed with our landlady previously that we would pay for minor work on the house – mostly painting, because our children appear to enjoy rubbing their dirty hands and feet all over every wall in the house. We did so because it seemed the right thing to do, and because we knew that it wouldn’t be very expensive, given the price of labor in Indonesia (which runs about $5.50 a day for skilled work). Our landlady came over on Tuesday to discuss this with us.

            I haven’t written about our landlady, whom I will refer to by the name Ibu Ibu (that is what we called her when we didn’t know her name after we first moved here). She is the mother of one of my colleagues (a colleague I like very much) and the house we rented was the only house we were shown, taken here by the dean of the faculty on our first day in Salatiga. We ended up making an agreement to rent the house, convinced by the dean that the price was reasonable and that it would be difficult to find another house, even though the house was far too big for us. Even so, and even given the fact that we have since discovered it was rather over-priced, we have been happy in the house. (Over-priced here for rent is still so absurdly much lower than rent in the United States that it’s not worth complaining about.)  Later, Ibu Ibu wanted us to pay in rupiah instead of dollars (we’d agreed to pay in dollars), which would have added about $450 to the initial agreement, but we paid in dollars as we’d agreed (but not with new, unfolded $100 bills as she initially requested, as though I had stacks of Benjis handy in my desk upstairs).

            Anyway, it has become clear to us that Ibu Ibu is, first and foremost, a business person, which I cannot begrudge, and that she is making a fair, nice, if higher than necessary profit off of us for the house (which I also do not begrudge, honestly, though I did for a few days last September when I came to understand the price [which I came to understand because no one feels any compunction in Indonesia, on first meeting you, to ask you a question like, “How much are you paying for your house?”]). So perhaps I should not have been surprised when Tuesday evening, she said, after frowning about the walls and how damaged they were in the children’s room from the tape the kids had used to hang stuff up with, that we would pay $700 for painting. (I misheard her initially – hearing “dua” somehow instead of “tujuh” – as saying $200, which I thought seemed a little too expensive but which I immediately agreed to.) When I reacted to her number with the appropriate shock, she quickly lowered it to $500, which is still absurd (I direct you to the earlier figure of $5.50 per day for skilled labor; imagining, liberally, $100 for the cost of paint, she was budgeting for around 100 days of labor to paint the walls, perhaps about 70 at the $500 price).

            Of course I said we would not pay this price, and she agreed to come back later with her daughter, my colleague, so that we could have this conversation more directly (her granddaughter, who speaks fine but not fluent English, was there to help, and my Indonesian is fine, but far from fluent – still, I felt as though we understood each other pretty well). But the more I reflected on it, the more angry I became, because this was obviously seen by her as an opportunity to make an outrageous profit off what I had assumed would be just a simple payment for labor and supplies, one made in goodwill for the minor repairs to the house.

            It was in that spirit of anger and annoyance that I reacted a day later, Wednesday, sending an angry email to her daughter (who has been our main contact about the house since we arrived, because Ibu Ibu does not speak English) and to the dean. To her daughter I withdrew the offer to pay for damages, because the spirit of the offer had been wholly violated, and I made it clear how annoyed I was, and cancelled the meeting with Ibu Ibu. To the dean I wrote a letter complaining about the process of helping us find housing and suggested (stupidly, stupidly, so stupidly I hesitate to write a blog entry about it) that I would recommend that Fulbright not send scholars to this University anymore. By Friday, I had come to regret that, and before he even replied, I sent a letter withdrawing that, saying instead that I had some concerns about the process that I wanted to discuss with him before I wrote my final report to Fulbright. (I have been happy at this University, and this situation does not require such animus, frankly.) I was stupider in further exchanges with her daughter, suggesting that the process of finding us housing had been dishonest and somewhat nepotistic, and I know now that I offended her and, worse, hurt her feelings, because she has been kind to me. I also don’t think it’s fair, what I wrote. I have apologized to her as well, but I am not sure whether it is too late, and perhaps went too far already.

Some people have seen me react in this fashion before (hi, Linda) but it’s not my best feature, I admit. I have come to see it as partly a personal characteristic, but here I’ve also understood it as cultural too, what I have referred to in earlier entries as “American indignant.” I remain angry – now less than angry, just annoyed and irritated – by Ibu Ibu, because there is no doubt to me that her price is not even close to realistic, but I wish I had handled it far differently. Chances are we still won’t pay anything – if we do, I will demand, now, an itemized list carefully detailing each charge, and I may also get an estimate myself. All of this is reasonable under the circumstances.

Alas, I wish there a moral to this story. Perhaps it is like a Vietnamese fable, which a Vietnamese student in Seattle once told me doesn’t have a moral to it (I don’t know whether this is true, but I do prefer fables without morals). Perhaps I refrain from typing a moral here because the moral is so obviously very narrow and pointing only to me. In any case, it has been a darker moment for me here, a sad turn of events that I wish I could replay. I could have done the “American indignant” thing, I think, just in more directed and more fair fashion. 

Daily Life

for Chris

6:00 Alarm goes off. It’s already bright. One of the funny things about living on the equator is the light does not change from season to season. The sun comes up at 6:00 and the sun goes down at 6:00. Every day. That was an adjustment. You can’t mark the year by the light. I didn’t realize how much I was accustomed to that. While 6:00 for me is ungodly early, it is well into the day for many Indonesians. Morning call to prayer starts at about 4:30. Then the roosters get going. Most Indonesian kids start school at 7:00 am so they are up and around early and the motorcycles start buzzing. And you have the hawkers. They are out early as well so that they can beat the heat of the day/or the rain depending on the season. There are the regular hawkers, the vegetable guy and the orange lady, who walk up and down the streets with unimaginably large loads of goods. Then there are the carts. These include the bread cart, the mie ayam cart, the ice cream cart, the bakso cart, etc. Some are fixed on motor bikes but most are pushed by hand and every type of thing has its own call so that if you hear a yelp, it is vegetable guy, the bell is for bakso, the repeated whack on the wooden thing is noodles, and the callaliope music is for Swiss Bakery. How they decide on this I have no idea but it is pretty much city-wide and with everything else going on it makes for a very noisy morning.

The kids don’t have to be to school until 7:40 but we have to start getting them up early if there is any chance of them getting there on time. We have two showers but only enough power for one water heater so if both kids get in the shower at the same time, or you have too many lights on or try to make toast while someone is in the shower, it blows the fuse. So mornings are a little bit of a juggling act. Breakfast is usually toast and eggs. Cereal exists but comes only in two varieties, cornflakes and super sugar chocolate bombs. I did find a box of granola once at a store in Semerang but it was $9 so I didn’t buy it. Most everything comes with gobs and gobs of sugar in it. But, we are making due. Graham has gotten really into cooking this year and makes a pretty decent fried rice (nasi goreng) so he will do that now and again but he’s still working on the clean-up end of things.

7:15 The Selzer kids walk by the front window. They are like a human snooze button – when we see them, it means the kids have to move their butts, find socks, collect their homework and get to school. School is only a 5 minute walk but mine are pushing it every day to get there on time.

7:30 I take a shower and try to figure out what I am going to do that day. Several days of the week this means shopping. I have to go more than once because there is only so much you can carry on the back of a motorcycle or on the ankota. Those are the city busses. They are pale blue and are about the size of a Ford Econoline van with the seats ripped out. At rush hour, there can be up to 25 people smushed in the back. But during the day they are pretty empty. Besides the carrying limitations, we have no storage space here and frankly, I don’t know what you’d store that wouldn’t be rusty, rotten or moldy by the time you used it.
I have got the shopping thing down to a science now although it took me a while. Get off the bus at Raymayana, the department store, stop at the fruit lady for fruit. There is one that I always go to. I don’t bargain with her although I probably should. Frankly, I feel a little ridiculous arguing over a 40 cent mango. Sure, maybe I could get it for 30 cents, and I know it’s part of the game, but I still feel ridiculous so I just pay what she asks and she always gives me really good fruit. Down the street to Ada Baru for coffee, tea, and dry goods, to the pasar for vegetables, and pass Wonder Bakery on the way home for bread. Start to finish takes 2, 2 ½ hours although I am known to get distracted along the way. Love the flower lady, the snack shop, and there are these household good shops that are the Indonesian equivalent to Target I guess, lots of cool cooking utensils, strange tools, batik. I can waste a lot of time there.

Ibu Kasum does most of the shopping for dinners. She is our pembantu. Pembantu is the Indonesian word for ‘helper’ which is really pretty absurd because the pembantus do pretty much all the work in people’s homes. They should be called ‘doers’ but that would leave the mistress of the home with no identity whatsoever so ‘helper’ it is. In addition to shopping for dinners, she does all the cleaning and the laundry. She usually cooks one big meal per day, some of which she brings up to the boys for lunch and the rest we will eat for dinner with whatever else I have. Her specialty is chicken and rice. I will augment it with a vegetable or salad of some sort. Seamus and Graham would argue that ‘specialty’ is a stretch since that’s all she cooks. But it is GOOD chicken and rice and I am grateful to here for making it because I sure as hell couldn’t.

Cooking here is a challenge. My kitchen is about 10-square feet with a tiny table on which we have all of our dry goods stored and dishes stacked so work space is non-existent. The stove is a two-burner propane stovetop with two settings: barely warm and good-bye eye-lashes furnace blasting hot. Because it is constructed for Javanese, the stove top comes to my knees. And shopping is tough. Western ingredients are hard to come by although I am getting pretty good at making things that taste familiar out of Indonesian ingredients. Shopping for meat poses particular challenges. Meat is sold in the pasar on the second floor and it is hard to miss because when you enter the second floor you see rows upon rows of carcasses hanging from hooks. Now I’m not usually squeamish, but the butcher shop area at the pasar gets me every time, especially if it’s hot and later in the day. Note to the wise, if you are homesick at all, do not go the the pasar after 11:00 on a warm day. And my Indonesian is still pretty rudimentary. Negotiating and describing meat cuts with Javanese ladies at the pasar is definitely pushing my linguistic envelope.

11:45 That brings us to about lunch time. Ibu Kasum brings the boys their lunch at school in these cute little divided containers. All of the pembantus in the neighborhood do this and you can tell when it is 11:45 because you begin to hear the jingling of gates and one by one this parade of pembantus start walking up the street towards school with their baskets of goodies. Its social hour for most of the pembantus and they chatter on in Javanese while they amble up to school. One of my favorite parts of the day.

Filling the days was a bit easier before Spring Break. Kirk and I were taking language classes three times a week with the incomparable Ibu Frances. Ibu Frances is from Ambon and runs the Language Training Center on campus. She is young, beautiful, amazingly bright and a great instructor. Unfortunately, since spring break our schedules have not meshed well so we have pretty much abandoned our classes. Kirk is still doing workshops, etc. at the University which keep him busy but I have struggled to find opportunities for me here. Volunteer gigs have not worked out well and socially, Salatiga is hard.

Part of it is the language thing. Many people speak rudimentary English but my bahasa really sucks. It’s hard to figure a way in when you can’t really talk. That is tough. Most of it though, is cultural. The non-profit sector here is about as different from the one in the US as, well, as everything else. Why I did not anticipate that, I’m not sure. I did try to get my foot in the door of a couple of non-profits but to no avail. Part of it is the way they work here is so dramatically different than the way we work in the -US, I couldn’t get traction. I literally could not recognize where to insert myself. 20 years of experience in non-profits and I could not figure out what to do with these guys. I think there is a really interesting dissertation in here but I’m not in the place to do it. The people I did manage to connect with wanted one of two things: English lessons or money.

While I speak very good English, I am not a teacher of English. This doesn’t seem to bother anyone. I agreed to sit in on a number of conversation classes at the University but don’t know that I was much help. Regardless of how clear I was in my intention, each time I entered a new classroom, the instructor would ask what I wished to lecture on. When I replied that I was happy to assist in whatever way they needed me but was not a teacher of English and hence did not lecture on the subject, polite exasperation is how I would describe the response. In the classes in which I did participate, l served as a cultural ambassador of sorts answering questions like: In America, everyone is rich, ya? Why do you force people to leave home when they finish high school? and my personal favorite reoccurring theme, Is it true that in America all the people have the free sex?

As for the money end of things, well that was just as baffling. Philanthropy, understandably, does not exist here in the same way in which it does in the states. Most foundations appear to be covers for incredibly wealthy movie stars or corrupt politicians. Actual funding for non-profit organizations comes mostly through international aid organizations and embassies of which I have no understanding whatsoever despite my best efforts. And since I could barely understand how most of these organizations functioned on a daily basis anyway, it made helping to create a pitch pretty tough. Early on I was asked to do a workshop on fundraising for a group of artists which I gladly did. (I did confess upfront that my only experience was in American non-profits and had not been in Indonesia long enough to understand how much of it would transfer.) My audience was very polite and asked some thoughtful questions but I could tell that something was amiss. Only later did I realize just how ridiculous I must have sounded talking about things like transparency and sound management when corruption is so rampant that the president’s own mother is in jail for it!

Social structures as well are difficult to negotiate. Javanese socialize in very different ways. First off, most of them work pretty dang hard so hanging around drinking coffee or leisurely walks are pretty much out of the question. They also (generally) live in pretty tight quarters, often with multiple generations. I think the need for socialization is often covered before they leave the house in the morning. And cross-gender socializing is nearly unheard of. That is not to say that the Javanese are not social because they very much are but most of the socializing occurs and neighborhood meetings (where they are don’t even speak Indonesian – they speak Javanese) and special events, weddings, funerals, circumcisions and the like. You’d never casually ask a Javanese family over for a potluck. They wouldn’t know what to do with you.

And then, or course, we have the cultural challenges of the kid’s school. I assumed this would be a good place to meet people as I have spent many an hour in the kid’s classroom in Bozeman. And while I have made some very nice friends at the school, it would be a stretch to say that we have been embraced by the community. I have spent an hour in the classroom each week which I have enjoyed but that’s about it. Outside the classroom is not much different. At first, the paranoid in me thought that it was because we were the ‘non-believer’ family on campus but as time has passed I think the reason is far less nefarious. Most of the families are on the same tract as it were. They go to the same language school, go to church together, the women attend the same bible studies, etc. They are here for the same reason – it is a missionary school after all. And socializing naturally happens in and around those activities. Since we don’t participate in these activities, we don’t socialize with them. Which maybe is OK in the long run, but I still find it weird.

I don’t mean to make everything sound completely dire. I have made some very nice friends who I am really enjoying. Ibu Maria is the Indonesian teacher at the kid’s school. She and her family have become good friends. Rebecca is an activist and volunteer from Australia which whom I have become close. She is married to a Javanese man and has, in all likelihood, the cutest baby on the planet. Laura, the principal of the elementary school is my walk buddy. She is from Boise and has a very western sensibility. Ginger another mom from the school is a great partner for adventuring. She and her husband are leaving Indonesia after many years with there 3 kids and she’s trying to cram in as much as she can. She also has flawless Indonesian making her a terrific partner in crime.

But that said, I have been homesick a lot. I miss Montana. I miss my house and my dog and my garden and dry air and cold. Mostly I have missed being a part of a community. I have missed having a place and something to do. I have not been able to find that here. I have been able to fill up the days. I have done lots of reading, some good writing. I have bought lots of batik. Taken some great photos. But it is different. I am not and never have been a very good person of leisure. If I had to do it again, would I? Of course, in a minute. The kids have learned a ton, it has brought us closer as a family, I have seen and experiences things that before this trip were completely beyond my imagination. But if I were to do this again, I would approach it very differently.

3:00 The kids get out of school and it is the familiar routine of swim practice, soccer practice, homework, dinner, etc. We did not buy a television but don’t seem to have difficulty finding ways to pass the time and our lovely neighbor Ibu Retno is very generous with hers. So Seamus has been able to keep up on American Idol and yes, I did watch the royal wedding.

On the weekends, we try to leave town, both to see more Java but also because, as noted before, there is not much to do here. Semerang is a favorite day trip, boasting several malls and an American movie theater. Yogya in the other direction is a favorite as well. A bigger city with several universities, it has a really cool vibe, lots or great art and fun shopping. We can always seem to fill up a weekend in Yogya. I think the hardest adjustment next year is going to sitting still. We have had the kids on the move so much, trying to pack in as much Indonesian culture and territory as possible, they both are a little lost when there is not a clear agenda. It will be interesting to see how that works itself out.