Ripples

I post this not to alarm anyone who might be reading this (hi Mom) - we are in no danger here, no threat, nothing. I simply want to make visible the ripples of a distant idiocy lapping upon the shores of our temporary island home. Here's a memo I got from the Jakarta headquarters of my organization:


U.S. EMBASSY JAKARTA NOTICE TO AMERICANS
U.S. Embassy Jakarta
U.S. Consulate General Surabaya
U.S. Consulate Medan
U.S. Consular Agency Bali
Warden Message:  POSSIBLE DEMONSTRATIONS SEPTEMBER 2010 DUE TO ANNOUNCED U.S. KORAN BURNING
SEPTEMBER 9, 2010
Americans are advised that there may be anti American, possibly disruptive, demonstrations to mark an announced Koran burning on September 11 in Florida.  We again remind Americans to exercise prudence and continue to take active, personal responsibility for their security.  We suggest that Americans monitor news reports, follow the instructions of Indonesian authorities and avoid demonstrations.  We remind Americans that even demonstrations intended to be peaceful can turn confrontational and possibly escalate into violence.  Americans are therefore urged to avoid the areas of demonstrations if possible, and to exercise caution if within the vicinity of any demonstrations.
Americans living and traveling in Indonesia are urged to register and update their contact information with the U.S. Embassy Jakarta, U.S. Consulate General Surabaya, U.S. Consulate Medan or U.S. Consular Agency Bali.  Registration facilitates the U.S. Mission’s contact with Americans in emergencies, and may be done on line and in advance of travel.  Information on registering can be found at the U.S. Department of State’s Consular Affairs website at http://travelregistration.state.gov and at the Embassy’s website at http://jakarta.usembassy.gov.  All Travel Warnings, Travel Alerts, Worldwide Cautions and recent messages are posted on the Embassy website.
For the latest security information, Americans living and traveling abroad should regularly monitor the Department of State’s Consular Affairs website at http://travel.state.gov, where the current Worldwide Caution, Travel Alerts, Travel Warnings and health-information resources can be found.  Up-to-date information on security can also be obtained by calling 1-888-407-4747 toll free in the U.S. and Canada, or, for callers outside the U.S. and Canada, a regular toll line at 1-202-501-4444.  These numbers are available from 8:00 a.m. to 8:00 p.m. Eastern Time, Monday through Friday (except U.S. federal holidays).
U.S. Embassy Jakarta is located at Jalan Medan Merdeka Selatan No. 4-5, Jakarta; the 24-hour switchboard telephone number is 62-21-3435-9000.  The telephone number of U.S. Consulate General Surabaya is 62-31-295-6400; U.S. Consulate Medan is 62-61-415-2200; U.S. Consular Agency Bali is 62-361-233-605.

SMS text:  Koran burning may cause demonstrations.  Avoid & stay abreast of news.

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That's it - please, as I said, don't take this as something to cause anxiety in anyone. There is nothing in Salatiga, nor anywhere else (save a couple of protests outside embassies and consulates - I promise all my readers I will not in my manic curiosity seek one out just for the experience), that can be construed as threatening to us. We're in no danger, and the Muslim neighbors that surround us are nothing but incredibly hospitable and generous. But insanity begets insanity, stupidity stupidity, bigotry bigotry. Eight thousand miles is very very close.

On not returning the same way

(September 10, 2010)

(Kirk)

            Yesterday, a holiday, S Stepping Into the Light with the other secondary students at a school retreat, Laura and I kicked around for things to do, wanting badly to get out of Salatiga and explore the immediate surroundings: the mountains at the edge of town, or maybe the Municipal Pool (hot springs), somewhere close, away from the hordes of holiday commuters, explore a little where we live. While I rode my bike up to the Pasar Sapi (the beef market) G rode down to his classmate’s house, where the family we could call closest to being our friends live. Also here on at the Mission Language School, this family – four kids, one a little baby - are headed out to Kalimantan in a few months where he will be a jungle pilot. Religious and devout, they don’t lead with that, don’t use it to assume things about the world or themselves or the people they meet, and I am grateful for that. G came home saying that the dad had offered to drive us up to the trail head that leads about 1,000 steps down to the base of the waterfall, perhaps 15 miles up the mountain outside our town. He would help us figure out how to get back, using motorcycle taxis (ojek) and local busses. We accepted eagerly.

            Brad (not his name) drove us up the mountain in a small van he had bought off a previous missionary family. Forced to reroute because of an Idul Fitri traffic barrier, he got lost for a bit, circling around some neighborhoods along the edge of the city, and then got us back to the road to Kopeng, near the top of the smaller mountain by town, and close to the trailhead. It was raining by then, a hard rain, and we hadn’t brought our rain gear, and the closer we got the trailhead the clearer it was that the short hike was off. In any case, Brad said, parked at the trailhead in the deluge, the steps were dangerous in the rain, and in a heavy downpour you risk the chance of a flash flood at the bottom of the waterfall. He thrummed on the steering wheel and then said (this is when I knew I’d like him), “I don’t really ever like driving back the same way I came, if I can help it. It seems like a waste,” which sentiment is as close to a motto for the way I wish to be in the world as any other. “Do you mind if I try the van on the back road I took on my motorcycle yesterday?” Of course we did not, and soon enough we were headed down a steep rocky road winding through fields full of vegetables for miles – crossplanted with corn and tomatoes and peas and cabbage and beans and bananas and everything, lush and orderly, terraced, mountain springs carefully diverted to irrigate everything. Brad told us the region was famous for its vegetables, that everything we ate in Salatiga likely came from here. It was beautiful, even if any views were shrouded by the dense fog and the rain. Brad showed us a couple of other trails too, a way to climb to the top of the mountain called the Sleeping Elephant, and then he drove us back into town through a back way to our house, and we arrived home refreshed and more excited about where we lived. We walked through the rain to the noodle and chicken stand on the corner, where we had a great lunch, all three of us for about $1.40.

            Brad told us that everything in the city would likely be closed for the next three days, so we took the bus downtown to the main store and stocked up on food and beer (the details of my search for beer here deserve another blog entry on its own, a semi-consuming process that has had me scouting the large and small markets everywhere in Salatiga, a carefully constructed mental map marked with x’s for the Bintang [the Indo made beer] hotspots – lowest price so far at 20,400 rupiah (a little over $2) for a large bottle – by Indonesian standards that’s very expensive – our maid [who is our amazing cook too] makes 500,000 rp / month, something like $60…another blog entry in itself). When we returned home, the Ibu from next door knocked with dinner for us, a delicious chicken dish, with little packets of rice cooked in small packages woven from banana leaves, perhaps a return gift from our visit earlier this week, when we toured the houses on our block with gifts of cookies and huckleberry jam. (My dictionary translates huckleberry as “a kind of small raspberry” which is how I explained it.) Whatever the reason, the gift of the meal was one of the most wonderful gifts I have ever received. My language simply failed me as we thanked her again and again (“Terima kasih banyak, terima kasih banyak.”)  We ate the dinner in gratitude for one of the best days.

Graham, and some banana chocolate from the mosque treats

            At sunset last night, the last air raid signal marking the last breaking of the fast Ramadan brought on a cascade of fireworks; the mosques opened up with song and prayer that would be broadcast over the loudspeakers until three or four in morning. Things got even a little noisier as G was getting into bed, and I said I thought I’d walk around and see if I could find the drumming that sounded close by, and G got up to join me, perhaps a 15 minute delay in his bedtime. We walked up the alley that we live on to the main road, where trucks full of people, mostly children, and drums and lights and loudspeakers were driving, singing, drumming, celebrating. We saw one procession following a small model of a mosque being carried, many people with torches, also singing, and decided to follow it, though at a discreet distance, unsure of ourselves and not wanting to interfere. Suddenly, though, we were not following any more, the procession was around us, and a kind man with a little English talked to us and explained that they were from a nearby village, that they had walked here, that of course we were welcome to be walking with them, and then we at a mosque, and everyone insisted that we come in the mosque, and we were handed food, and everyone came to shake our hands, and welcome us into the building, and make sure we comfortable, and then a young woman named Carmen came to us and asked us for our picture and asked would we like to join them in the back of the flatbed truck for a drive around the city. “We will make noise and play drums and it will be a fun time,” she said, her English quite good.

Our very enthusiastic song leader

            And so there we were, G and I, in the back of flatbed truck, standing among a group of mostly children (smoking, many of them) who were singing the same song broadcast over the loudspeakers from every mosque in town, and banging on drums, and cheering at the crowds on the side of the street. We wound our way through town into a traffic jam with other revelers on trucks, everyone trying to outshout each other, the kids on my truck wanting me to take their picture again and again as they posed for me. “Mister, mister, photo,” they kept saying, and of course I obliged, and we drove around, maybe for 90 minutes, all over town, and then out of town and I think through their village, and then some more around town, G sometimes pounding on the drum, sometimes holding the side of the truck and peering wide-eyed at the crowds lining the street. The two of us made quite a sight – you could see the surprise in people’s eyes when they saw us standing there. We drove and drove, finally, perhaps, a little longer than I wished we would – G was tired and getting a little overwhelmed and I didn’t have my phone, since I’d thought we were just stepping out for a quick look before bed, so Laura had no idea where we were – and then we were back at the mosque, and getting off, and Carmen said, “Was that fun, sir?” and I told her in broken Indonesian that we would never forget it, and she said, “It is such joy, sir, such happiness. We are ending the fast. It is such a special time. We are so glad you came with us,” and then we got a picture with all the kids, and they shook our hands and thanked us and we strolled into the darkness of the night as they waved and went back into the mosque.

            G has been struggling at times, thrown into whirling dervish tantrums on occasion from the slightest thing going wrong or not as he wanted it, but in the last few days his experiences have opened him more and more up to this place. He cracked a coconut that fell from a tree on the school grounds and drank down the milk, announcing that now he had embraced Indonesia, and this morning, after he woke up, still shining from the magical truck ride, he sat out on the balcony wearing his batik shirt and calling out “Selamat pagi!” (Good morning) to all the people who strolled by in their Idul Fitri finery, and they looked up and greeted him back with large smiles, and his Indonesian language teacher picked him up this morning so that he could join her and her husband as they visited neighbors to celebrate Idul Fitri.  All night long the party continued, and it continues now, and it will through Sunday. 

The group from the truck, joining us for a picture after the two hour haul around town.

Syrup, and Grace, and Student Registration

September 9, 2010

(Kirk)

            Thursday morning, the beginning of a national holiday that runs through Monday, in honor of Idul Fitri. The whole country is on the move – 3.5 million of Jakarta’s 9 million people leaving the city, along with the rest of the island, driving, boating, bussing, training, biking home. Since Monday, the roads in Salatiga have been even crazier, and the main road from Solo to Semarang (two large cities that Salatiga sits between) more dense with vehicles than ever – for about ½ a mile every morning on my way to campus I pedal furiously down that two-line road conveying at least four lanes of traffic. I’m treated like a motorcycle, as long as I ride fast enough, and like an obstacle, when I can’t, and always like a pleasant diversion for the passengers who lean out the windows and wave at me. Yesterday, as I was preparing to turn right (from the left where they drive here) I merged behind a pick-up truck with a canvas top, and in the back were at least a dozen people who started gesturing and laughing with (it doesn’t ever feel like “at” – but it might be) me before I swung into the quiet road that leads me home.

            The newspaper leads with the stories of the five day mass migration. An editorial suggests that the government ban more than two people on a motorbike during these days, because the three or four to a bike that are a normal sight here inevitably lead to a marked increase in traffic fatalities. On trains, passengers are bribing officials to get placed into the cars designed for the elderly and disabled. The minister of transportation recommends that travelers be in top physical condition before making the trip, and warns that police are ordered to “shoot to kill” if situations on the road demand it. The stores are crowded with shoppers preparing for visits home and gift deliveries around the neighborhood – the most popular seems to be giant bottles of fruit-flavored sugar syrup – the kind added to espresso drinks- like the bottle of strawberry our neighbor brought us when we moved in. (She had 6 cases of syrup in the back of her car when she left for Semerang.)

            At night, the fireworks have increased – constant but still muted, like the US on July 2, distant explosions and circles of light through the dense palms and banana forests around our house. It’s the beginning of something, that much is obvious, and to be sure great celebrating seems in order after a month of fasting – I’ll be glad, too, when Ramadan is over, if only for the selfish reason that when I’m thirsty in public, I’ll be able to drink without appearing callous to the fasting people all around me.

At the devotional before the staff meeting yesterday (on record now as the most boring meeting I have ever sat through – they have TWO HOUR weekly meetings which include long debates over things that I have no stake in, like student registration procedures, though they also feature delightful Indonesian pastries and tea, which I will just go buy next week instead of attending the meeting) my Australian friend read from Paul’s First Letter to the Philippians, about the impossibility of doing enough to earn grace through works, no matter how accomplished or how moral. (I’ve never really liked Paul, who strikes me as the rule-giver determined to suck the joy out of the new religion and turn it into the hidebound, punishing-God dogma Jesus in the Gospels mostly seems to counter[except the parts where Jesus goes on about hell].) After he finished reading, he gave a short colloquy on grace.

            “I read this passage because it seems like an appropriate passage given the time of year. Here Paul talks about all his accomplishments, and how he could claim them as important, but they are not, they are as nothing, as like all other humans, he must rely on the sacrifice of our Lord for grace. C.S. Lewis, the famous English writer, once came into a room in Oxford where other scholars were debating what was unique about world religions. ‘Oh, Jack,’ they called to him when he came in – his friends called him Jack – ‘what’s unique about Christianity?’ ‘That’s easy,’ Lewis immediately replied, ‘it’s grace.’ During this time of the year,” my friend went on, “when others have been fasting to show their god how committed they are as a way of earning forgiveness, it is important to remember that our God gave us grace through the sacrifice of His Son upon the cross. We cannot earn grace through our works, through fasting or praying at the right times of the day. We are granted grace by the Lord through His incomprehensible love for us.” And then he prayed, and then the two hour Power Point about student registration procedures began.

            It struck me as an odd note at the end of Ramadan, a sort of spiritual one-up-mans-ship that I guess is a hallmark of religion. Other religions are an affront to Religion at their law-giving core, at the least because the laws are different (barbeque pork anyone?) and at the most because they worship the wrong sort of person manifested in the wrong body. It’s a tension that I have mostly evaded in my adult life in the United States, but that I viscerally remember from my childhood concerns with converting other people to believe the right thing that I believe in. Here, it’s back in spades, part of the national discourse, the political power struggles around religion that are central to this nation’s history.  My children are at a school where most of their peers are the children of missionaries, in Salatiga for a Mission Language School that will prepare them to head out to more remote parts of Indonesia – Sumatra, almost wholly Muslim island to the northwest of Java, seems the destination of choice. From morning until night the compelling cadences and ethereal sounds of mosques surround me – wherever I am – calling devotees to prayer. My students ask me what church I go to. The newspaper reports on mobs destroying a church in Jakarta, on Hindu devotees making a once every 35 year pilgrimage to a temple in Bali, on Christians protesting for equal rights in the main square of Jakarta (right nest to Sukarto’s last erection – see post 3). 

            Selamat Idul Fitri, everyone – on Thursday night here and around the world billions of people will celebrate the final breaking of the fast with all-night parades and fireworks (we’ve been warned that sleep is impossible on this night, which is a meaningful warning in a place where nighttime noises are the norm). They are done seeking forgiveness for the accumulated sins of the year, and they will gather as family and friends and eat and commune. We will join our maid and her family on Sunday for one part of her family’s three-day party, bearing syrup and snacks when we arrive to celebrate with them. And then on Monday, and Tuesday, and Wednesday, the cars and motorcycles and busses and trains and ferries will return tens of millions of people back to where they live, and I will drink my water in public during the day, and the arguments and righteousness on all sides will be present as we go about our “normal” lives, seeking whatever grace we can come by. on the move

            I taught my third class on Friday, and the first in my life barefoot. My Critical Reading Class (Monday, 12-2) and my Public Speaking Class (Thursday, 2-5) are in traditional classrooms, but the Academic Writing class (Friday, 11-2) is in a computer classroom in the library, stocked with an array of old Samsung PCs two to a table and three rows of tables across.  Before entering, my students and I removed our shoes and put them in a little cubby right by the door, I presume because the room is carpeted and rain here comes not as raindrops but apparently from endless faucets turned on full blast in the clouds and leaving on your shoes would ruin the carpet, much the way carpets quickly get ruined in the muddy springs of Bozeman. There was something delightful about teaching barefoot, I have to say, though I can’t quite figure out why I found it so pleasant.

            I also found the air-conditioning in the computer classroom enormously pleasant as well, because it staved off the cosmic outpouring of perspiration that joined me as I began my other two classes. It was like I had spent the previous 30 minutes sprinting in circles in a steam room, and then gone to teach. Some of this is the humidity – I’ve figured out that I need to wear a different shirt than I ride my bike to school in, and that I need to have a small towel at my desk to help me recover from said ride – and some of it was no doubt from the excited energy of my first classes in a brand new place, but it was a little ridiculous, my skin shiny, little beads of perspiration dripping down my face, a hulking hairy sweaty bule whose attempts to pronounce his students’ names were likely the comic highlight of their week. (That damn “e” sound – it kills me the way the sound at the beginning of “Adel” and “Abeer” struck me down when I worked with my students from the Middle East. The biggest laugh came when I pronounced as “wahoo” the name correctly pronounced “way-hugh”.)

            I had been warned by both teachers and students that my students would be incredibly resistant to speak, and that perhaps my expectations for a dynamic classroom with lively discussion were too high. I made it pretty clear that they’d have to talk, mostly because I didn’t come halfway across the world to hear my own voice some more, and they appeared no less willing to talk than my college students anywhere else – that is, they don’t expect to be asked to speak a lot, and when they are, they aren’t sure you really want them to, so it takes a little time. “You have this in common with my students from Montana,” I told them, about the apparently universal habit of immediately looking down and pretending to be busy when the teacher asks a question and no one wants to speak.

            There are more demands on my time as a teacher than I wanted there to be, and sometimes I get a little annoyed about that, but by the same token it’s not hard teaching, and I have two kids in school 5 days a week so it’s not like my classroom is keeping me from traveling. My university has no problem with me rescheduling classes when my kids have breaks, so we can go travel – we’re planning a trip to Bali in October. (This will be a very serious scholarly sort of Balinese junket, just so you don’t think I am being frivolous.) I was told by Tina, the woman in Jakarta who helps arrange all these things, that  this was not a job, it was a grant, but it’s feeling pretty joblike at the moment. However, I am also grateful to have extended contact with a group of young Indonesians because I know they will be a gateway for me into an incredible perspective on the place where we’re living, and I can already tell that it will be fun to teach, even with the frustrations. 

            Also, all of the classes are taught in sort of blocks, five or six teachers doing different sections, and all of the students have the same textbooks and are supposed to be on the same schedule and do the same assignments, in a much more rigid way that any writing program I have ever worked for or run. Anyone who reads this and who knows me as a teacher will likely find that funny, since I cannot even keep to syllabi and schedules that I create for myself as a teacher, but it does make it easy to prepare for class, and it looks like there won’t be an inordinate amount of time commenting on things. Truthfully, in these regards I am feeling like a glorified lecturer and like free labor for the University, but (another but) the same University paid for my family lodging for the first two weeks while our house was in final preparation, and they hired cars for us twice to Semarang and three times for errands around town and lent us a bunch of furniture and found two magnificent student translators to accompany us and bought us meals and paid our entrance fees to tourist sites and on and on with their generosity, all of which makes me feel a little petty about complaining because I am teaching three classes. The dean is teaching three classes. I have said, politely, that I wanted to talk about this more fully for the spring semester, but I might be as effectual in that as I was trying to bargain down the batik merchant in Solo (who laughed and rattled off a long bemused refusal, the only part of which I understood being “No, bule”).

            We’ve also moved into the house, which is a little ridiculous. There seemed to be some pressure to take the house we were offered the first go around, and we kind of gave into it; in retrospect we should have waited a little bit, because we ended up with a giant unfurnished house (three stories tall, brand new, much larger than the typical Javanese house), and now it’s a giant unfurnished house with three beds and a bunch of loaner furniture and a guard we don’t need. That part is a little frustrating – the gate closes at night and it feels a little like a bunker, and there are echoes when you speak. I’ll get used to it, I suppose, but I wish we had held out a little longer and looked for something smaller and furnished. My mission, now, is to not be the bunkered in ex-pat who lives in the rumah besar baru (giant new house) and yesterday afternoon we went as a family to a couple of the neighbors with some cookies and introduced ourselves and they invited us in and politely tried to make the limited conversation we are capable of making. Still, we learned their names, and they ours, and it felt less isolated already. Graham and I rode our bikes yesterday in the back alleys around our house – they go way back into the country forever, and we ended up outside our maid’s house because she lives next door to one of Graham’s friends from school. Her husband, Pak Jono (Pak is the honorific for men) invited us in an chatted with us and Ibu Kasom (Ibu, for women) came out and greeted us as well and the neighbors (Americans we met through the school who are here, like most of the ex-pats in the ‘hood, on mission work) came over and helped us translate. Pak Jono invited us over for an Idul Fitri celebration to mark the end of Ramadan next Sunday, which was a wonderful invitation and we of course accepted. I know enough Indonesian to ask “What can we bring?” which I learned was not the question to ask, though not in an uncomfortable way. Brian, the American man from next door, explained that they were embarrassed to answer the question, because they would of course say we should bring nothing, but that we should of course bring something, snack foods, perhaps a pound of sugar, things that would help them entertain the guests that would stop by during Idul Fitri.

            Also marking the end of Ramadan is a steady increase in noise. It seems like the calls to prayer have gotten louder and longer, and last night, at 3 AM, a procession went down the alleyway banging a loud drum and playing some sort of chimey thing and singing. It sounded like they were storming the compound, a little, but according to Ibu Kasom, they were just celebrating the end of an even longer fast, and we can expect it tonight and tomorrow night as well. I think this means that when Ramadan is officially over – not sure if it’s Wednesday or Thursday night – the noise will be even crazier: fireworks for hours, endless loud processions, great celebration which of course makes sense because after a month of fasting the return to normal daily life is a reason to party. We’ll see how that goes. Seamus will be off at a retreat to the school (This year’s theme: “Step Into the Light”)  for a couple of days at the end of the week, and I hope he enjoys that. He’s doing well at the school, making friends, keeping his head down, only saying a couple of controversial things (radical comments such as “I like Ellen Degeneres”), and generally doing well. Graham is a little nuts right now, either wholly embracing the experience, as yesterday when we cruised around on some single tracks through the jungle, or collapsing completely at the smallest of upsets, like he did this morning when we didn’t have the right tabs for his notebook, which took us 45 minutes to back him out of, a long depressing fit that is more about his disorientation than about school, I think.

            I have to get ready for class, my last for 10 days because of the Idul Fitri break, although we can’t really travel because there are so many millions of people traveling. Even the streets of Salatiga this morning seemed vastly more crazy than they have been, which will be the state of things for the next week. We’ll be able to explore the back roads outside of Salatiga, I hope, over the next week, and perhaps hike up some of the mountains (the one next to us hits 10,000 feet, which seems extraordinary to me, given that we’re 30 miles from the ocean here).

            Here’s the Jakarta Post reporting on protests about some buffoons in Florida:

Quran burners

Islamophobic insanity

(Kirk)


It's enormously surreal, and more than a little depressing, to watch my country descend even further into the basest and most ignorant Islamophobia that I can imagine. Here I am in the most Muslim country in the world, during Ramadan, and all the people I have met have been so welcoming and patient and generous. It's appalling the level of idiocy that passes for reasoned discussion about this in the United States, and it's clearly inciting violence and hatred in the worst traditions of my country. So far the most visible religious intolerance I have seen comes from the American Christians at the school here, most of whom appear to be here in order to convert everyone around them (one had the gall the other day to mention to Laura how many "unbelievers" there were in Sumatra - the fact is, more than anywhere I have ever lived, as far as I can tell, almost no one appears to be an "unbeliever." I've never seen so many committed believers. But of course "unbelievers" are people who believe the wrong belief). 

So, I can say it here, loudly, based on my experience here and my experience the last two summers with Middle Eastern students visiting Bozeman:  at moments like these, from abroad, the United States looks like a miserable small-minded country full of petulant religious baiters. To be sure, Indonesia has a history of religious violence as well, sometimes in the most extreme ways, but where I live, in Salatiga, a more Christian town than most, and where I teach, at a Christian University where we have prayers to begin and end our staff meetings, people from a variety of religious perspectives intermingle with respect and communal feeling. Restaurants that are open during Ramadan shade themselves from the street to respect those who are fasting, and clearly Muslim servers at the restaurants (Muslim women who work the KFC have KFC uniform headdresses) serve non-Muslims comfortably during fasting periods. We have mosques everywhere here - at least 10 in a mile radius from our house, always crowded at important times of the day and getting busier as Ramadan winds down and the most important Muslim family holiday of the year begins (Idul Fitri, which starts next week, and which will see 3.6 million motorcycles and 1.5 million cars hitting the highways to visit home - this on an island 1/3 the size of Montana...we'll be staying home). It's as obvious to most people that we aren't Muslim as it is that we aren't Indonesian, and we've never felt anything like disdain or pettiness toward us in our daily interactions with the people. One of Indonesia's national struggles, in fact, in its 65 years of nationhood, has been to come to terms with the religious diversity in the country, and the struggles flare up here now and then in more local ways (in the last week, on another island in the archipelago, several restaurants were closed by the local govt. because they served food during fasting time, and there are clearly anti-Christian actions happening all over the country on a fairly regular basis). But where I am living, where Christians are very visible and the largest church in the city is right across the street from the largest mosque, I have not seen evidence of such acrimony at all. 

It's infuriating, and sad, to listen to the usual crowd of buffoons make self-righteous noises about God and family and etc. all in the name of hating other people's beliefs, and I hope it ends soon, because people all over the world are watching.

I would like to buy an artery

September 1, 2010

(Kirk)

            The hardest thing about this for me is the complete linguistic infantilization this trip brings on. I have at least 20 situations a day that are like my visit to the bicycle store on Monday. I spent 15 minutes in rigorous preparation, memorizing words for things like “pump” and “repair kit” and “tube.” Of course there are many kinds of tubes, and I had to make sure that I was not asking for an “artery” or a “pipe for smoking” or a “tunnel” (all various words I got for translating “tube”), things that would make no sense to the person at the bike store; once I get that down, writing it out in a notebook, repeating it, trying to pronounce everything (I say all the vowels like I am speaking spanish, which doesn’t make me intelligible most of the time. I feel like Inspector Clouseau: “Do you have room?” “A what?” “A room.” “A what?” “For sleeping me.” [this last after frantic consultation of my electronic dictionary] “Oh a room!”). After I carefully prepared my one or two questions, I entered the store and asked “Good afternoon, I would like to buy a repair kit”, I think even semi-grammatically. 

       However, preparing for the question is no help in preparing for the answer, when I am lucky if I catch one word that I even recognize as an individual word, and even luckier if it’s one of the .00001% of Indonesian words that I can actually understand if spoken very slowly. The only phrase I know I’m saying right (after finally getting the “e” sound down for this word only) is “Ma’af, saya tidak mengerti” (the vowel way in the back of the mouth, hovering really at the top of the throat), “I’m sorry, I don’t understand,” which is usually the first thing I say after someone answers my carefully prepared question.  Helpless, in other words. As a curious and gregarious person by nature, I find this the most exhausting aspect of this experience so far. I’m working extremely hard at learning – Laura and I have started language classes, and I’m spending a hour or more a day translating a “Lucky Luke” comic book from Indonesian (I can get through about ½ a page an hour…) and then memorizing all the words I’ve learned in class and from reading (I might be the only new speaker of Indonesian who knows the word for “hangman” and “gallows” – from the Lucky Luke book.) It's difficult to know, though, that no matter how much time I spend working at this, it will be such an incredibly slow process. Apparently it will help stave off Alzheimer's, so I'll take some comfort from that, at least.

Bule from the blue

August 30, 2010

(Kirk)

            We took our first away trip, unsupervised as it were, this weekend, bussing it the 1 ½ hours southeast to Solo, one of the three larger cities in Central Java (Semarang and Yogyakarta are the other two). We wanted a place that would be relatively easy to get to (it only required one bus ride as opposed to having to switch in Solo to get to Yogya), a short trip, and interesting. After being in the cramped guest house for almost two weeks, we also wanted to stay somewhere comfortable and roomy, so I found a small hotel that met the bill – the Hotel Romoekho – and booked a room through a travel agent Wemmy introduced us to in Salatiga.

            We started the morning later than we wanted to, because Wemmy had arranged to have a bunch of the furniture that she has found to loan to us to be delivered to our house (we bought beds, but she has managed to find tables, desks, wardrobes, chairs, kitchen equipment, etc. etc. so that we haven’t had buy all that). G and S got to ride around in the back of a pick-up truck for a while, picking up and bringing furniture to the house – G, always excited by manifest violations of his normal safety protocol, was thrilled that he got to stand in the back when it was packed with furniture. By the time we’d finished that, gotten back to the hotel and packed and to the bus stop on the main street, it was about 11 or so.

            The bus came right away, the Pasat, air-conditioned, to Solo for 10,000 rp each (a little more than $1). It was packed, and at the beginning, we had to stand, though enough seats came open that we all got to eventually sit. It was an enormous relief for me not be on an excursion engineered by someone else – no private car hired to drive us around, no local guide found to chaperone, and for the start of trip, the rest of my family ensconced in seats near the back of the bus, I stood near the front and just looked out at the landscape, which for the first time since we’d arrived we could get a clear view of. Here at least the road wasn’t lined with stores and stands and etc. for the entire way, and we cruised by rice fields and corn fields and cultivated forests and smaller towns, the bus passing everything in the Indonesian oncoming-traffic-beware fashion. An uneventful ride, capped with a pleasant conversation with a man of 66 from Solo after I finally got a seat about 2/3 of the way there.

From where we were dropped, a fast and cheap taxi ride (all the taxi rides in Solo that weekend came under $2 each, which was good, because the temperature and humidity were not so benign). The hotel was extraordinary, the refurbished house of a 1920s batik merchant, art-deco, with a central lobby surrounded by fountains with koi ponds and an amazing collection of contemporary Javanese art and old photographs of Dutch soldiers performing various acts of occupation of the city during the Revolution in the late 1940s. The rooms were beautiful, comfortable, roomy, and we relaxed for a few minutes until we left at 2, heading by taxi first to an antiques market and then to walk the next block over to one of the two palaces in town.

In case you are planning a trip to Indonesia, I should throw in here that “leaving at 2” to go somewhere is not the soundest of travel – it means leaving when it is absurdly hot.  Fortunately, I resisted the impulse I always have when I travel, which is to just walk, no matter the distance – we simply took a taxi, everywhere, easy and pleasant, and I saved myself a good deal of grief. The antiques market was great and packed with all sorts of things, from shadow puppets to drawer handles to statues to old keys and posters, a sort of high end flea market. We didn’t buy anything, finding ourselves once again in a situation that we are too slowly learning to avoid: being in a place where the main goal is buying things at the hottest part of the day with two people (four, really) who all want to buy just about everything they see and can’t. It’s the same reason I don’t go shopping for breakfast cereals with my kids, and by the time we had pulled together, left the market and managed to get across the street to the palace (which we inadvertently snuck into, only after wandering outside the walls wondering how to get in and taking the first entrance), it was closed, and my entire family had a very locally focused “fight the patriarchy” moment.

Perhaps you know these sorts of travel breakdowns: they happen because complete cultural and geographic ignorance can quickly move from exciting to tedious, especially when its 95 degrees, super humid, in a busy city with giant blocks during a religious holiday when 90% of the people who live in the city are fasting so restaurants aren’t open. I tried – not wholly successfully – to just keep my head down and move forward, find a taxi, and mutter the name of the market we wanted to go to, Pasar Klewer, the batik market the had been recommended. I think the conversation, translated went something like this, me with my guide book open in stumbling (that’s a generous adjective here) Indonesian:

“We want to go to Pasar Klewer.”

“Pasar Kliwon?” asked the driver whose thumbnail on his left hand was at least four inches long, eliciting a startled and loud gasp from S when he saw it.

“Yes, thank you.”

And so we got dropped not at Pasar Klewer but at Pasar Kliwon, where there was no batik. It was a market, primarily I think a food market, but not a yummy-let’s-try-some-of-that-food-market, not a market that had much tourist traffic at all, really. It was dark, not as clean as we’ve become accustomed to (I’m trying to be nice about this, because I am a guest in this country), and certainly not as welcoming, with dogs and cats and chickens abundant and people I’m sure justifiably curious about why a family of bule who can say a few words in the language but can’t understand them spoken back appeared from the blue. Precisely, one can say, the place you would not want to take your family in a taxi if they were already annoyed with you and wanted to go someplace cool and interesting. Fortunately, after a little bit of confusion, a man led us in the right direction and then pointed us the rest of the way, and another man helpfully gave us a short mini-bus ride (for 4,000 rp – about 40 cents) to Pasar Klewer, which was an extraordinary, giant, and completely amazing batik market.  We got a little overwhelmed, but we left with a beautiful shirt for G, some cool pajama pants for S, and exactly the bag Laura was looking for, and we will go back another time, I am sure, I hope sans kids at least once, to purchase with more intention. It’s too easy at markets like these to get caught up in bargaining (which is of course very fun) or in worrying that you’re getting ripped off, and missing the fact that the distinctions that matter so clearly in the narrow fabric and people crowded aisles will not be the same when we return home and think “was that beautiful shirt really only $3, even getting ripped off?” It’s one reason I’m glad we’re here for a while, because I freeze up at moments like that and always return home thinking I should have brought a lot more with me.

We were recovered when we left, and went back to the hotel, where they served us tea and fried bananas with sugar and chocolate on them, and G tinkered with the beautiful array of gamelan instruments, and we were tired and a little crabby and Laura and I questioned the wisdom of trying to enjoy an amazing hotel with two overwrought children, but again we rallied, and soon headed out to the Galabo, a magnificent outdoor traffic free food stall with about 90 food stalls serving delicious and enticing food – satay, various kinds of local dishes I had ayam gudeg, which is chicken and rice with unripe jackfruit, amazing  (I don’t even know what a jackfruit looks like or is), G had a whole fish, fried, and managed to charm his way behind the stall (again) to help prepare it and some food perhaps delicious but not so enticing - in particular the stall that had a tank full of live cobras that you pick out like lobster in a restaurant and have prepared – fried or grilled – right there on the spot. G wanted to have some fried cobra, but it was a little much for me to gnaw on, frankly. There were also a variety of pills and tinctures made from cobra oil that were advertised as cure-alls – we skipped those too. The owner did , however, take a cobra out of the tank, put it roughly on the cobblestone surface, slap its back as it writhed around until it rose and frilled its hood and hissed. Let me know if you want some cobra jerky, maybe for the holiday season.

From there to the Sriwardi Amusement Park, where we went on the “Rumah Hantu” (haunted house) that featured lots of flashing lights, recorded screams, shaking skeletons, and a baby doll in an aquarium, on the Boom-boom cars (which were like bumper cars, only with less bumper and more car, vicious in a head-on collision, of which there were several, one between S and another car that gave a very little girl a rather jarring and ride-ending jolt), the mini-coaster, which was launched by the two attendants giving it a running push start, and the balloon-tower. Behind the amusement park was the Wayang Orang theater – we stopped in there for a performance from the Ramayana, super-stylized dance with full gamelan orchestra and loads of sexual innuendo (visual, and I’m sure verbal too though we couldn’t understand it) some great fight sequences (one of the warriors had really long thumbnails), and lots of moments when the characters didn’t do much, except chat and occasionally laugh diabolically. There were some very funny trickster characters, accomplished male dancers who were the highlight of the show – we’d seen their hilarious statues in several places at the antiques market earlier in the day – even when the merchants there tried to explain who they were they couldn’t help giggling the whole time (though I think we are pretty funny, right now, too.) What had been a rough night turned into a transcendent night, and the next day – tours of two palaces (one had male and female chastity belts from the 16^th century that were locked not with a key but with a magic spell that only the husband or wife know) and a lunch at the Grand Mall, which had an amazing food court that was packed with people eating midday even in the middle of Ramadan (which was why we went there – we wanted to eat in a place where we wouldn’t look rude eating).

A successful first trip: we learned how to get out of Solo on public transit, visited an amazing city, learned more about the history and culture of Java, ate (and did not eat) some wonderful food, all with a minimum of family stress. Like every entry, I find myself editing and editing, since there is too much to write about. The worst part of the weekend, in fact, was getting on the bus going the wrong direction when we got home (home?), and ending up way up outside of Salatiga, and then having to negotiate our way home with a bus driver who was clearly (and for the first time, really, since we got here) trying to gouge us. We ended up walking home after I finally shoved some money into his hand and we all got off the bus.

S and G are at 50% now, in terms of embracing this experience, which seems pretty good to me. This is extraordinarily exhausting, I can say, often overwhelming, especially for them uncomfortable (we haven’t seen too many westerners anywhere we’ve been, and S and G garner a lot of attention – G did in particularly wandering around the very crowded Grand Mall Solo wearing his new traditional batik hat.) They miss their friends and are at a school that is still as bizarre to us as anything else we’ve seen on Java (perhaps my new catch phrase: “It’s weirder than fried cobra”), our quarters are cramped and the food unpredictable. So we relish those moments when they get excited, by a traditional toy, or hat, or food, or a taxi ride, or anything. Let’s hope we keep finding those moments.