Hari dalam bahasa Indonesia

The Indonesian term for mole, as in a mole on your skin, is tahi lalat, which translates directly into English as "fly shit."

In which the narrative conflict remains unresolved

            A young American woman I met at a conference in Semarang asked me over dinner, “Has this experience brought your family closer together?” I recognized the optimistic nature of her question, the belief that the answer must almost certainly be yes. We undertook the trip, to be sure, with the same optimism. But her question was a hard one, and not a new one for me this year. I’ve considered it when I’ve dodged a shoe aimed for my head (or another projectile, or another head), when I’ve been accosted loudly by (or have accosted, loudly) one of my children on a bus or a train or in a restaurant, when the bathroom in the hotel we cannot leave that night appears unusable, when the bus breaks down on the side of the road, when the food really is, as the direct translation from Indonesian goes, “less delicious.” Traveling inspires the most grandiose of expections, and ensures that many of them will not be realized. Unrealized expectations often turn into more unexpected and wonderful opportunities, but it’s safe to say that regular unrealized unexpectations do not immediately invoke an broad-minded appreciation for randomness and chance in most fourteen- and eleven-year-olds.

            Before we left, we told ourselves that living a year abroad in a completely foreign culture – new language, new climate, new people, new food, new house, new job (new no job, in Laura’s case), new new new – would require a level of family togetherness that was, in Montana, unprecedented. In fact, this has proven to be true. But it has struck me, quite clearly, on more than one occasion, that this piece of evidence easily leads to two completely opposed possibilities.  The trip has made us, at times, a louder family, a more surly family, a more irritable family, a less patient family, a skinnier family, a more familiar-with-variations-of-bowel-movements family, a more exhausted-by-your-constant-presence family. But a closer family? Tough to say, even when my kid's elbow has been in my kidney for the last 5 hours of the train ride.

            I can’t pull over and leave my kid at the side of the road, not from any unwillingness to do so (trust me) but because I am not the driver, or  because the car is a train (with doors that don’t open while the train is in motion). (Though ask me sometime about the time in Flores…) But traveling has, lately, become an increasingly vexing experience, especially regarding flare-ups between the kids, who feel strangely as though they might insult either loudly in whatever public place we happen to find ourselves. It is wearying, and sometimes depressing, and it tapping our resolve to take our children to new places, because they can be so annoying. (I of course am never annoying, always rational, level-headed, and deliberative – a kind of Solomon, only I might follow through and cut the kid in two.)

            “I don’t know,” I told her. “I hope so.”  Could we be any closer? God forbid.

In which I make my main point inspired by Indonesian language use

            A few weeks ago, with about three days notice, I was asked to help facilitate a writing workshop with some of the Indonesian staff of The Nature Conservancy. Actually, the conversation went something like this:

            “There’s a non-profit that is headquartered in the United States that wants wants its employees in Indonesia to improve their written communication with the office in Virginia, so they have contracted us to do a writing workshop for three days. Can you help?” This question from my Indonesian language teacher, and department colleague, and friend, who phrases such matters as questions grammatically but which she has already answered for you.

            So, “yes, of course I can help with that. What’s the name of the organization?”

            “TNC.”

            “TNC?” My ears perked a little bit. “What does that stand for?”

            And so I learned that The Nature Conservancy (‘The,’ not ‘the,’ as I learned when the welcome I’d written for the PowerPoint hello was helpfully edited for me while I was out of the room) worked in Indonesia, and I became very excited. They work on the coral reefs in Bali, where we had snorkeled, and forests in Borneo that we hope to visit, and I love the…er, The…Nature Conservancy for the work they do in the United States, already, so I was thrilled to have a chance to learn about the work here and to meet people committed to those enterprises in Indonesia.

            It takes about five minutes in Java, and everywhere else I’ve been in Indonesia, to get the fact that this is a country in environmental crisis. For one thing, littering is simply not a social concern here – I cannot count the number of times that I have watched people throw trash out the bus window, or out of the car, or just dropped things on the street. (Seamus now, in ways that I am not sure are helpful, has enough Indonesian now to lecture people when he sees them do this.) From the ferry’s arrival into Lombok from Bali, at about nine at night, I have an indelible image of seemingly hundreds of lit cigarette butts tracing their way into the ocean as people prepared to disembark. Rivers here are clogged with plastic debris, and there really is trash all over the place.

            But the crisis of course goes far deeper than that. Indonesia is a country incredibly rich in natural resources, from fish to oil to lumber to minerals, and one with enough lack of government regulations or lack of attention to existing regulations to make it a very friendly place for foreign corporations. And it is a poor country, too, in which the matters of day-to-day survival simply make environmental issues seem less important. The overwhelming corruption of the government here make dealing with such matters seemingly impossible. And yet the country is becoming choked on itself, at least so it seems to me, in ways that are impossible to sustain. So I was pleased to meet some people working to address those issues in critical places.       

            The workshop was fairly standard stuff for the day I ran things, in part because I didn’t have so much time to prepare. Beginning, I asked them to write what they would tell somebody about why TNC’s work in Indonesia was important – why did it matter? Most interesting to me in their responses was the blend of environmental work with a focus on sustainable community economic development, reminding me that in Indonesia, as perhaps everywhere else, environmental work must also be human rights work. I wanted to remind them that improving work was the goal of this workshop too – it wasn’t to “make them better writers” or “improve their English” – it would matter, if it mattered, in service of those larger goals.  I asked the group of about 12 to make a list of all the types of texts they wrote during a typical week, and then I asked them to make a list of all the people they wrote to, and a list of the purposes they wrote various texts. From the perspective of my field, this is a pretty basic approach, designed to help them realize that there is no “one best way” to write something, that the text always must adapt to a variety of factors, and that they have to hold all those in mind, especially audience, when writing.

            They had sent along some writing samples, and I copied a couple of them to use as discussion pieces. They were, for the most part, perfectly capable writers of English, able to communicate complex ideas and concepts, deliver scientific data, report on progress in local community development, and so forth. The most interesting discussion came from the following writing sample, which I reproduced in that teacherly way, where you give a class something because you know it will get the semi-canned answer you want. My favorite moments as a teacher come when the answers I get vary wildly from the canned answer I had been planning my curriculum. I expected them to read it like I read it, with an eye to how convoluted it was in addressing the main point of the email:

Dear Deputy Director of Science,

With this e-mail, I would like to share an issue relate a plan to revise the Wakatobi National  Park (WNP) zoning system. As you knew before, the prior zoning which developed 2 years ago was not fully operate as well. And now District Government of WakatobiWakatobi had the spatial plan especially for the coastal and marine area with the national park zoning system. Why because of that promised budget they want to revise the zoning system of the park and create a spatial plan project to realize it?  There is no big deal to do that this time. Because the National Park zoning system was integrate coastal and land area. They must not act like that.

Firstly, revise the zoning is earlier than mentioned in the management plan document. This is mean break the agreement which had signed before. Secondly, from my point of view this plan was not reasonable. It was because the prior zoning system not evaluated yet then they were straight to revise it.  In my perspective, before decide to revise a zoning system need to measure and evaluate what have done so far with the prior zoning.  A further study to find out advantage and disadvantage of that zoning system is important. After knowing advantage and disadvantage of the prior zoning system, we can start decide to revise it or not. In this condition, biological, economical facts, would valuable to be used as basic to improve the prior system. For example from biological fact, we can map coral reef coverage in the National Park, existing locations of fish spawning aggregation, size of fish etc. This process will take time and is not easy to deal with local community about the zoning system in a short time. This is will give our organization extra work out of work plan and it is not yet budgeted in this fiscal year.

My opinion, this is not correct to support them revise the zoning system only because extra budget that promised by Central Government without consider any scientific reason or field facts behind the decision. That is all my issue that I want share with you and your attention please.

           

            I’m curious what other American readers made of this, if you had to read it several times to understand it, like I did. This was a draft, so I am leaving aside the errors in usage and mechanics  - I’m more interested in the structure and My point in showing it was to emphasize the lack of directness in the letter, how its main point was shelved until the second to last sentence of the email. I assumed that everyone would immediately point this out as well. But the group of participants was uniform in its praise of the email: clear, lucid, made its arguments well, and so forth. They really liked it.

            Of course at that point we had to stop and work through this. What became instantly clear to me, in a way I had understood intellectually but have rarely had the opportunity to grasp so clearly, was that we read this email differently based on cultural expectations about discourse. Indonesians, I have learned, are not comfortable about coming at something straight-on. To begin the email announcing that the zoning system should not be revised until further review would have sounded too direct, too abrupt. Instead, it remains at the end, and it too is couched in softer language – “not correct to support” – than I would have used.

            At one point, a biologist who studies the reefs in Bali became very frustrated, and asked, “Are you telling us we have to change the way we think if we want to communicate well in English?” To my mind, there is no more important question for teachers of the English language all over the globe. I comfortably answer with a fairly loud “no,” but that’s not enough of an answer, of course.  Language teachers typically think they are teaching grammar and vocabulary, but they are also teaching values around language use, of course. I used to become frustrated with the curriculum (written in advance and handed to me) in my Public Speaking course last semester, because it was based completely on modes of argument coming from English language academic venues, with no self-reflection about how argument and speaking occurred in Indonesia. To teach the structure without a careful analysis of the cultural values it promotes is to leave out the centrally most important aspect of the writing.

            

Out of many, bombs

Bhinnêka tunggal ika tan hana dharma mangrwa.

They are indeed different, but they are of the same kind, as there is no duality in Truth.

From a 14^th century Javanese poem, Katawan Sutasoma

Within the span of a few days last week, religious violence erupted in dramatic fashion in Java, first in the west and then, a few days ago, in Central Java, in a city about 40 miles from where we live.  There’s nothing unusual about such events in Indonesia – the newspaper regularly reports on them – but the magnitude of these reveals the deep divides coursing through this nation, religious, ethnic, linguistic. They celebrate their pluralism here, but they suffer from it too, that old story.

In West Java last week, six Ahmadis were killed in a outburst of violence from Muslims. Depending on who you listen to, Ahmadis are either an branch of Islam that follows a prophet who appeared in India in the 19^th century, or a apostates who follow a false prophet. They have been subject to persecution all over the world, particularly in places like Pakistan, where they are constitutionally forbidden from calling themselves Muslim, and more recently in Indonesia; following a series of violent demonstrations in 2008 by Muslims against the Ahmadis, the Indonesian government declared that proselytizing by Ahmadis was illegal, and Indonesia’s top Islamic body declared them to be “deviant.” Since then, things have been difficult for them in Indonesia. Last week, in a city called Pandelang, six were killed.

It’s become something of a crisis for the President here, known by his initials SBY.  He can’t seem to devise a way to curtail the violence, in part because he doesn’t want to antagonize the Muslim community. It’s fairly clear that authorities have done little to curtail the violence; last week a minister suggested it was up to God to take care of things.

In Temanggung, a city sort of near us (though one we haven’t visited – it’s the wrong way from us) last week a “Christian” man charged with blasphemy was sentenced to five years in prison, the maximum legal penalty for blasphemy. In October, he’d been distributing pictures of Mecca doctored in an extraordinarily offensive way – think the Indonesian equivalent of Fred Phelps, and you’ll get a sense of his utter tactlessness; I don’t want to describe them here because I don’t want to occasion a mob outside my house, but they were gross, and certainly blasphemous.  When the verdict of five years was announced, crowds inside and outside the courthouse were aghast: they wanted the death penalty.

They immediately went on a rampage, burning and completely destroying three churches in the immediate vicinity. It was sudden and terrible and overwhelming. Absurd too, from my eyes, and scary.

I come from a pluralistic society, of course, one where the strains on pluralism were tense enough last fall to make the national headlines in Indonesia. E pluribus unum is a nice sentiment, though that unum is pretty difficult to get to.  The national motto in Indonesia is Bhinneka Tunggal Ika, from the poem above, a Javanese phrase meaning “Unity in Diversity.” When our guard quit unexpectedly just after we moved here, our landlady told us we’d like the new one better, because he was Christian. The Chinese community in Indonesia (which has been here for hundreds of years – it’s a phrase not unlike “the African community in the United States” for African-Americans) regularly suffers from outbreaks of violence and destruction. And for years the Indonesian government implemented a policy called transmigrasi, which sent people from the staggeringly over-crowded island of Java – and other places too - off to other less populated parts of Indonesia, a move which not coincidentally served as a kind of on-going Javanese colonization as well.  Often, those moves engender tremendous tension as well.

            I believe in bhinneka tunggal ika, of course – not out of any sort of touchy-feely sentiment, because it’s the only real hope for anything positive in the world. Sometimes, though, it feels a little like believing in Santa Claus. But ho ho ho anyway.

An open letter to my friends at home

            Javanese houses have, as part of their standard architecture, a small room in the front the house right after the front door. It’s usually filled with chairs and perhaps a small table, and other decorations, separated from the rest of the house by a doorway or some other marker. It’s there because in Java, it is customary to just drop by people’s houses and say hello, and when you do, people invite you in and ask you sit and offer you tea and several different types of extremely sweet and/or deep-fried snacks. And you sit in that room for as long as you like, making small conversation, drinking your tea, in my case butchering the language, and then you say, “Permisi dulu” – which literally means “excuse me once” but means in this context – “Okay, that’s enough. I’m leaving.”

            For the record, I love this part of Javanese culture. I love the idea that you just show up, and people invite you in whether they expected you or not, and chat with you as long as you like. We have a few Javanese friends now who do the same with us, though not as many as I’d like, and I’ve come to be quite fond of their appearances at our back door, where we sit them (in a very unJavanese way) at our dining table and serve them tea and whatever we have, which is not the bounty of aforementioned snacks.  I have always wished that people would stop by my house more, and I have wished for more friends who welcome me stopping by unannounced (shout out to Michael). I like it – it feels communal to me, and friendly, and focuses on hospitality. But, with one exception, we’ve never made it past that entryway.  That’s what it’s there for, and the rest of the house is private.

            The flip side of this visiting custom is that inviting people over to dinner is not at all an Indonesian custom. People find it weird and uncomfortable and will only come to your house if you are having a large party of some sort. I hadn’t expected this – certainly, I figured we’d meet lots of Indonesian people and invite them to dinner as a way of engendering a friendship, as of course we love to do in the United States. But you don’t do this, and however much I like the custom of stopping by people’s houses unannounced, I’m just too damn American to do it very often. I read too many Dear Abby columns, perhaps, though it didn’t rub off well enough with thank you notes.  And so trying to figure out a way to foster and develop friendships, well, it’s just difficult.  It’s happening, a little more all the time, but slowly.

            We’ve met wonderful people here, and been welcomed into several houses graciously and open-heartedly, and we have several people that we’ve become very fond of. But for whatever reason – my limited language skills, my cultural ignorance, my lack of persistence (I’m personalizing this, because I don’t want it to come across as a judgment about Javanese people or Indonesia – it’s not) – we haven’t made very many deep friendships. This is augmented somewhat because the community of ex-pats here are all missionary people, some of them quite nice and wonderful, but, sadly for me, not really our people. (When we visited Bandung a few weeks ago, a big city in West Java, we went to an ex-pat party there, and we realized that if we lived there [which we are glad we do not], we would have more ex-pat friends than we have here.)

            Which is to say: as great as this year continues to be, as amazing and crazy and unpredictable, I miss my friends, and I miss those places in those houses, and with those people, that I can’t get to in Indonesia – the kitchen where we polished off our friend’s expensive bourbon last year, the backyard where I play croquet and poker, the basements where I’ve watched the football games. We’ll be sad when we leave here, but we’ll have something back too, something that is missing here. So hello. I remember all of you.

On not eating dog anytime soon

      This morning, on a jalan-jalan (a perambulation) around the alleyways of Salatiga, we came across a man taking the fur off a teeth-baring charred dog corpse with a blow torch, while his counterpart butchered another dog nearby. It was a chance encounter, in an alley we hadn't walked before, my first sight of a dog butcher. There was something amazing for me about those bared teeth, so doglike and so grotesque. He was casually lifting one of the dog's legs, perhaps to get at an errant piece of fur on the underbelly.
        I can't pin down why I won't eat dog, or what it is that so repulses me from the concept. One of our friends invited me the other day to a restaurant where they serve dog, here in Salatiga. "Enak sekali," she said (very delicious), even smacking her lips at the idea. I was non-committal, imagining at the moment that perhaps I would eat dog, and I imagined that for about 48 hours, enough even to mention the idea in my last entry, until I saw the dog butcher this morning, slicing up canine cutlets and taking off fur with a blow torch. Laura says our utter distaste is because we anthropomorphize our pets in the United States, and maybe that's right, but I eat bunny sate after all, and I don't reckon I'd be as put off by grilled cat for that matter.
       Part of me thinks I should go eat dog, as part of a statement about how culturally accepting I am, about how open I am to experiencing normal things in a place I have grown to love a great deal. Why not? I eat meat anyway, and I'm not a great lover of dogs. Part of me thinks I should eat dog because to not eat dog, to feel so repelled by the idea, feels like making a culturally negative judgement about my friend, who sometimes eats dog on special occasions and wanted to share the culinary delight with the American visitors. I tried to think of something equivalent if she came to the United States ("yeah, well I bet you wouldn't eat...") but I couldn't really. Bull testicle soup is a potluck dish here, not a western restaurant novelty item.
      It triggers some reflections on those cultural Waterloos, which are not rational moments, really, but a deeper corporal sensation. I've watched my children work through these all year long, move from a kind of disdain for cultural difference, and sometimes disgust, to acceptance and sometimes even to an embrace. My reaction to a meal of dog reminds me, in sharp and vivid ways, of who I am. It's a strange experience.

A reason to consider eating dog

            Roosters, it turns out, do not crow only at the break of day. They crow pretty much whenever they feel like it, and they feel like it all the time.  Sometimes roosters appear to spontaneously erupt into crowing competitions, avian versions of John Jacob Jingleheimer Schmidt, louder and louder, crowing into the midnight darkness.

            They are part of the cacophony that is Indonesia. Salatiga is relatively quiet, but even so, sounds here are constant and varied. At night I’ll hear the wooden alert of the Pos Ronda, our neighborhood guard booth (where I do my weekly duty), pounding out some sort of code – although my neighbor said everybody has forgotten what the codes are for things like “somebody died” or “watch out for the pyroplastic cloud from the volcano” so I think they are just striking it to make noise. During the day the bread guy drives by on his motorcycle, with one song, and then the ice cream guy, he’s got another song, and they are the same bread and ice cream songs everywhere in Indonesia– four or five notes, maddeningly the beginning of a song that never even gets properly started before it repeats itself. In Bandung, or Bali, or Flores, you know it’s ice cream coming down the street. Of course the call to prayer, which is simply background music for life here; on certain holidays this is non-stop. During Ramadan, at about four every morning, a group of men with drums and whistles would come walking around the neighborhood waking everyone up so they could eat before the sun came up; they were astoundingly loud, like a drum corps in your living room, and the first time I heard them I shot out of bed in a kind of panic. In the morning our guard Jefri sweeps the driveway with a stiff straw broom – loud and meticulous, resulting in a very clean driveway. Motorcycles, bus horns, music from the three-day-long weddings that are always held in the street in front of the house, loudspeakers on trucks offering goods and services - it's a noisy place to live.

            Our neighbors, whom we love and who have been so kind to us, used to have a dog at their house (Fritsom, readers will remember) who barked a lot, but they have moved him to another house they have somewhere.  We were so happy about that, but then our guard, Pak Jefri, showed up one day with a dog. He told us it was his dog, and we thought he was just bringing it by for a visit, but the dog moved in, sleeping in a room in the utility building behind our yard, cute, sort of, but as he grew he got louder and louder and louder. Every morning, about five o’clock or so, the dog would come out and bark for a while, or whine for a while, and then the room was too small, so the dog slept outside at night, chained up somewhere, whining and barking at all hours of the night.

            I pretend to myself that I am a patient and laid-back person, but it’s an unsustainable ruse for me in the presence of a constantly barking dog.  Though I can find the Indonesian wall of sound charming and even comforting (I know I’ll wake up in Bozeman at 4:45, wondering where the call to prayer is), the dog added no ambiance to the soundtrack. As I had with Fritsom, I became increasingly irritable, and would go out to talk to Jefri in the morning, always polite (you lead everything confrontational here with a “Maaf,” which means “I’m sorry.” Even the signs say, “I’m sorry, please don’t throw your trash in the river.”), though I got increasingly more visibly angry as the days turned into weeks and then into a couple of months. I like Jefri, and I didn’t want to get him in trouble, so I put off complaining to the landlady (I have to complain through her daughter, who is my colleague and friend at the University, because our landlady doesn’t speak English, which makes it a little more awkward). Finally, though, I contacted her and asked if they could make Jefri move the dog.

            It turned out, I learned after several emails, that the dog was the landlady’s idea, there for security, because apparently the night guard and the locked gate are not secure enough.  And they were very keen on keeping the dog, which led to an empty threat of us moving out of the rumah besar that is the landmark in the neighborhood. (When we meet new people, we can just say, “We live in that really big house” and point vaguely in the direction of the house – people say “oh, ya” and smile and nod because they know the house.) And they moved the dog, and I had to go back out to Jefri, this time leading with a sincere “maaf” because I had been directing my frustration to him, thinking the dog was his. It turns out he’s just as happy as we are to see the dog go, and I assured him that we felt safe enough with just him, and the gate (and the nine to midnight volunteer guard booth down the street).  For almost a week now, no dog.

            For a while, I was becoming open to the idea of eating dog, which is served in particular places here, but now that the one I had my eye on has left, I’m not so sure anymore. 

Free-sex and vodka

            Our friend Ibu Viva, who runs a coffee plantation/tourist resort south of Salatiga, the chain-smoking-low-cut-dress-wearing-bacon-eating Muslim woman that we have become very fond of, clearly saw it as her opportunity, when we told her were Unitarian Universalists in the United States, to ask the question that had been burning in her mind for a long time:

            “What’s the difference between an atheist and a heathen?”

            In Indonesia, where your identity card includes one of the five sanctioned religions (Catholic and Protestant are separate; Jews need not apply), it’s all about the religious identity. Of course one can imagine that on an archipelago with thousands of islands and hundreds of languages, five religions doesn’t quite cut it, but that’s what they’ve got to work with.

            In Flores, our tour guide Johannes around the city of Bajawa came from what the tourist brochures for Flores call a “traditional village,” and he took us around several “traditional villages” that we trekked into through amazing jungles (cinnamon trees – it’s the bark). He told us about baptism ceremonies. Flores is primarily Catholic, because the Portuguese colonized it in the 16^th century (cinnamon trees – it’s the bark), so all the children are baptized with a Catholic baptismal ceremony, and given a Catholic name. But the first baptism ceremony is the traditional one, and it’s the one where the baby picks its own name.

            It goes something like this: the mother or father picks up the baby and carries it around and repeats names that come from the family history, working backwards from the parent to the grandparent and so on. At some point, the baby sneezes or farts or poops or waves her arms a little frantically and there it is, the name of the baby. He told us of situations where the parents got too impatient and just named the baby because the baby refused to choose a name. This was a mistake, because the baby cried and cried until they went through the process again and chose the right name.

            It’s like that here; Johannes was certainly, and deeply Catholic, but he and all his children, before they ever stepped into the church, were named this way, and the villages he took us to, all Catholic too, had pits where they buried animals in certain arrangements and aligned buildings in certain directions with religious meanings that would not pass muster in the Vatican.  Islam here, in general, is something people from the Middle East offer consider not real Islam, a silly claim about the largest Islamic country in the world. And there are syncretic blends all over the place, sacred caves and holy rocks and magical mountains that exist in perfect comfort with the religious affiliations on the official identity cards.

            Here, in ways that I have not experienced since childhood, we breathe religion. We say a prayer before every staff meeting at my Christian University, with a call to prayer from several mosques sounding in the background. People ask where you are from, and what religion you are (and how much your house costs, and whether you use family planning – boundaries are a little different here). You must have a religion, and it’s not exactly illegal to marry someone from a different religious background, but it’s not easy either, and requires the approval of people from several different religious and secular offices.

            And of course there is our kids’ school, holding the banner aloft. Today we got a survey from them asking us to rate the spiritual qualities of the school, on scales of 1-5 (i.e.” Please indicate the overall spiritual atmosphere of the Elementary school”). The potential for snarkiness is high on this survey, especially for an atheistic heathen (or is that redundant?) but I’ll pass on the survey I think.  1 is “poor/unhealthy” and 5 is “excellent/healthy” – “stifling,” unfortunately, likely is a 5. 

            When I did neighborhood guard duty last week, one of the guards started grilling me about American sexual habits. Did everybody just have sex all the time? Could married people have sex with whomever they wanted to after they were married? Were young people allowed to have sex before they were married? (It’s not illegal here, so I’m not sure the genesis of that question.) Then he went on to alcohol. Do I drink beer? Do I drink vodka? Does everybody in the United States drink vodka all the time? My answers disappointed him, but they were titillating enough for one of the other guards to cluck a little about non-Muslim ways of being in the world.

            Soon enough I will return to my free-sex, vodka-swilling heathen oasis, but in the meantime,  I send another dispatch from the believingest place on earth…