Small drama

     It's been raining all the time here, or at least it feels like all the time when it's raining. Mostly it comes in the afternoon, downpours like you can't imagine. Umbrella, raincoat, poncho, sometimes even house, won't keep you dry. (1) It gets a little old, because you either give into it, or stay inside. Supposedly the dry season will come soon, but it is not here yet, and everybody thinks it's all screwed up anyway because of climate change, which is going to hit Indonesia like a slow-moving tsunami.
    Today, walking from one building to another, in the morning, sky cloudy but no rain, I walked by the soccer field which is smack in the middle of campus, a grass and mud expanse that is usually clear of people, but occasionally, like today, has a game going on, with spectators, and cheering, and people on the side selling things.
  Today it was two shades of yellow going at it, bright yellow and striped yellow, and I watched for about three minutes as striped yellow made a run for it, stealing the ball at mid-field and passing it deftly down the left side to a player who trapped it easily. Everyone was covered in mud, and the ball splashed and sloshed its way down the field, but nothing else seemed to slow from the condition of the field, and as always, the soccer playing was something magnificent to behold.(2) So I stopped, and watched, watched the players maneuver the ball around in front the goal, some stops, some passes, some missed shots, and finally a hard shot on goal, fielded handily by the keeper.
  I am grateful for these small dramas, these little bits of street theater, that happen all the time here - and everywhere, if my eyes are open. The bus and motorcycle jostling for position, the haggling over prices at the vegetable stand, the conversation about politics in the tiny city bus, the counterfeit 50,000 rupiah note we have to deal with, the students practicing dance in the hallway outside my office. (3) For three minutes I watched a little play, entranced by the performance on the rian-soaked field, distracted by the looming lateness to another engagement where even late I would be earlier than anyone else.


(1) We had a massive flood at our house a few weeks ago. I was reading comfortably on the couch during a torrential rainstorm - so loud on our hard plastic roof that you can't have a conversation at dinner - home alone, relaxed, and the rain kept getting louder, or at least closer, and when I looked up it was dripping through the light fixtures from the 3rd to the second floor, and I leaped up, and ran upstairs, through a lovely cascade of water coming down the stairs, and out onto the 3rd floor balcony, where a drained was clogged and a very large balcony had filled up with several inches of water which then proceeded to empty into our house and down the two flights of stairs so that every flat surface in the house was wet by the time I cleared the drain. It took several hours to recover from the flood, but our neighbor helped tremendously. She said, "In Java, when there is a crisis, everybody pitches in and helps clean up from it. It is the Javanese tradition." And she sent over her maids to help.

(2) Even with children, this is true. Graham played briefly for an Indonesian soccer club, and enjoyed it, though it was a little difficult for him, both in terms of language and skills. These kids were amazing, at age 10 with a clear sense of the field, incredible passing skills, fast and aggressive. I spoke with one father on the sideline, asking him why Indonesia didn't have a soccer team usually in the World Cup. "We have the skills," he said in Indonesian, "but we don't have the mental toughness."  Most Indonesians are much tougher than me, for what it's worth, but I am not very tough.

(3) Seamus and Graham went out to lunch the other day - they had to take a bus, and before they went they bought some root beer at the store around the corner, because they didn't have root beer at the restaurant. When they tried to pay for their lunch at the restaurant with the change from the store, they wouldn't accept the 50,000 rupiah note (about $5) because it was counterfeit (they can tell by shining a black light on it) and so Graham had to take the bus home by himself (they didn't have a phone) and tell us, and I rode up to the restaurant on the motorcycle, paid for Seamus's lunch, and then went to the store. I was ready, stupidly I think, to get all American-indignant on them, but I didn't have to. They happily replaced the counterfeit bill.