On making myself write again

I have hit something of a lull in my writing about Indonesia and our time here, at the halfway point of our year. Part of it came from the trip we took, the lengthy transport heavy crisscross of the country and the oceans that took me far from any internet and the desire to track it down in the small internet warungs ( called “warnets”) that appear all over the place here, in the smallest towns, where for about 30-60 cents an hour you can use a computer. Part of it, perhaps, is the normalcy of things now.

            We went to Semarang today, an hour bus ride from Salatiga, just for a trip. We had a delicious fish lunch in the Old City, where the Dutch influence resides in majestic and crumbling buildings and the ubiquitous canals, canals which must have been built by the Dutch purely out of nostalgia for home. Canals in tropical, very rainy, flood ridden-places are, quite simply, just a bad idea, and now the canals in Semarang, like the ones in Jakarta, are fetid and garbage strewn, very much not the sort of thing you might float down in a boat for a romantic tour of the city.  We saw a movie (“Unstoppable” – I loved it; I like movies more when I see them with my kids, but I would have liked this one anyway) and then went to Chinatown to check out the night market that is held there on weekends, and we wandered through the alleyways of Chinatown, stopping in the small Buddhist temples that appear from nowhere, festooned with red lanterns and offerings at the altars (crackers, coke, lots of incense, water, whatever people want to offer). We peered into shops, chatted with people on the street, bought stuff, ate delicious sate babi (pork sate – it was enak sekali). It didn’t feel foreign anymore, or exotic, or weird, and we didn’t feel that gut-level sense of dislocation that marked so much of our early visit. That’s what I mean by normalcy – the man fishing in the canal, the cat carrying intestines away from one of the vendors in the market, the fortune teller, the old Chinese men singing Karaoke under a tent, having to laughingly push off the becak drivers who always want to drive us everywhere, even the man we saw from the taxi, walking down the street, talking on his cell phone, and wearing exactly no clothes at all, none of it really seemed to mark the place as uncommon or unusual.  It starts to seem obvious, which is to say it becomes a little harder to write about.

            Perhaps part of it, too, is that the end point is suddenly real. We’re not planning our return home yet, or even really thinking about it, but at least for me it is a material reality in a way it wasn’t before. Laura is interested in a job in Bozeman, doing the ground work she needs to do for her applications, and my mind turns that way a little too. I am less driven about language learning than I was, even though I have so much more to learn, and I think that too has something to do with the move through the halfway mark. We live here, and now I see that we don’t live here, really, more clearly. It’s home, but not really.

            Even so, as I write this, it’s also the case that the time we’ve spent here puts us into positions to experience the place even more. I did a day long writing workshop with a group of people who work for The Nature Conservancy in Indonesia, protecting coral reefs and rain forests, working in partnership with local people and NGOs and the Indonesian government, trying to negotiate the complicated demands of such disparate audiences in all sorts of different texts. I was proud to help out an organization I admire deeply for its work in the United States, in doing desperately needed work in another country I have come to love as well. I attended a conference in Semarang where I met other people from all over Indonesia (and came to resent even further the intellectual colonization of Power Point). I can speak, which is glorious thing – not fluently, not about deep things, but I can talk to the taxi drivers and the people next to me on the bus and the guy at the banana crepe stand, and it’s like a key turning.  In small ways, the country is opening up to us – I say small, because the openings reveal mostly what we will never know about the place and people. Still, even that is progress.

            So I am writing this, and posting it, a blog mostly about nothing at all, because I have found the blog to be an amazing resource for clarity about the experience. Here are just a few of the things that I won’t have time to write about because I stopped writing for so long, but wish I would have explored more fully:

·      The illegal gold-mining and processing in the Southwest corner of Lombok where we spent several days, giant hand made rock-tumblers spinning everywhere all the time processing the gleanings from mines unsparingly exploited;

·      My first temper-tantrum all in Indonesian;

·      Being on the ocean for five days, where I determined finally that my next career with not be as a mariner;

·      Swilling arak (palm liquor, potent and delicious) during a ceremony in a “traditional” village in Flores, surrounded by children (one of them Graham) shooting off bamboo cannons, and dancers, who were simultaneously singing the 700 year history of their village;

·      Listening to the Belgian tourists on the boat describe how much better the “traditional” villages were in Sulawesi than in Flores;

·      The tirade given by the Hungarian man when we failed to see any Komodo dragons in the wild on Komodo Island (“Ve haf been traveling for three days to see the dragons”). We only saw the ones by the trash heap near the kitchen, bloated and immobile. (“Can you hit it with a stick to make it get and walk?”) He promised he would write a letter to the United Nations, complaining about their lousy World Heritage Site.

·      Our amazing tour guide in Flores, and our great driver there, and the five men who sang beautifully 60s rock anthems on the steps of our restaurant in Bajawa;

·      The keynote speaker at the conference from Bowling Green State University, an expert on jazz, who said he would improvise his paper in the spirit of jazz, and said nothing of interest for ½ hour, and annoyed me tremendously by his clumsy cover of laziness pretending to be creativity;

·      The tendency of Indonesian conference presenters to run out of time to discuss the topic of their paper because they are so comprehensive about the theoretical background and the methodology (all excruciatingly detailed on Power Point);

·      The incredible student performance, and the faculty follies (which I played in as well) that demonstrated a kind of department spirit and camaraderie that I envy, and that seems impossible to imagine among American students and faculty;

It’s like that, a list that reminds me why I need to write the blog, because it always helps me notice what I forget to notice, what passes me by like it’s just obvious. I so easily get tricked into seeing things as normal.