Rooster

There is a very loud rooster outside the window of my current lodging.

Hiatus to Bali

We're off to Bali, leaving tomorrow for an overnight in Yogyakarta and then on to Bali on Saturday, three nights on the island of Nusa Lembongan, then up to Duna Batur for a night, then into Ubud for two nights, and the last night somewhere on the east coast. It will be my first time driving in Indonesia. Very exciting. Don't expect any posting, except perhaps a couple of notes punched in on my skimpy ipad keyboard.

Meditations on movement

October 11, 2010

In front of Borobudur after our tour

           The traditional way to visit Borobudur, the 8^th century Buddhist stupa (and the largest Buddhist structure in the world) in a valley in Central Java, is to start at the bottom and walk around each of the ten levels three times, moving up one at a time, around and around past carvings representing the material world and telling Buddha’s life story and carvings about Buddhism’s spread throughout Asia and into Indonesia, up through the top four levels of Nirvana, no more carvings, just large stupas spread out over the four levels.

Carved faces from level one

            I make it through level three on Saturday, about 1 ½ times around, before I have to rejoin the rest of my family who were exploring other parts of the grounds, around levels one and two each three times, studying the carvings, walking quietly. Although the place is crowded, a premier tourist attraction domestically and internationally, walking through it in this way is peaceful, because most of the visitors don’t visit it that way. They walk through the beginning of Buddha’s life, then head up to the second level to see the only complete statue of Buddha (of the 128 statues in the stupa, some missing fingers, or heads, victims of 12 centuries of vandalism, jungle rot, and volcanic eruptions), and then to the top level, up the steep tall stairs. I walk around the first level, ducking through the crowd of German tourists, and around again, this time through the Thais, and around again, strolling for a few minutes just behind and then just ahead an American couple, the man loudly arguing with the tour guide about the origins and history of Buddhism. Aside from that, all I hear is the sound of rain lightly on my umbrella, the afternoon call to prayer from the area mosques, and the abdominal rumble of incipient GI distress (taken together, this is my Indonesian soundtrack). The views over the valley are beautiful, surrounded as we are by volcanos and other mountains on all sides. I have too much of a monkey mind to ever make it is a Buddhist, my attention continually focused on the shiny things I see from the corner of my eye, but I did find it meditative in any case.

Headless Buddhas

            We’d made it to Borobudur that morning on the bis paling pelan di Indonesia, the slowest bus in Indonesia, ascending and then descending the pass outside our house at a pace that would have allowed shopping and perhaps some hiking on our part, during the drive. For a while, to pass the time, we played the game “You don’t see that in Bozeman”: chickens crossing the highway, tobacco drying by the side of the road, gasoline being sold in small glass bottles, women balancing bunches of stuff on their heads, the Hotel Hooker, a sign at a police station that had an advertisement for cigarettes printed on it below the word “Police,” until it became too hard, since there was really nothing familiar out the window, except that which had already become familiar in our seven weeks here.

These pictures describe the progression of the stupa, a design taken from the leaf of the bodhi tree, which Buddha sat under when he achieved enlightenment. Bodhi trees are supposed to be present at Buddhist temples (though my guess is Buddha is pretty lax about this requirement). The carvings of the leaf and the tree are taken from reliefs showing the life of Buddha, and the stupas at the top replicate the shape of the leaf.

We ended up, fortuitiously, on the same bus on the way home the next day, only this time it was profoundly more crowded, an elderly ibu nearly sitting in my lap and my family close but not next to one another, obscured by the humanity in the aisle way of the smallish bus. Outside a market in Magelang, the bus driver got out, bought a pack of cigarettes to smoke on the drive up (it doesn’t matter where you are here: people are smoking there, even on the top of Borobudur) and then got back in the bus, pressed his foot to the accelerator, and the engine quit. We sat there as the driver and his helper tinkered with things and inexplicably pounded on the floor of the bus, and suddenly, after about ten minutes sitting on the very crowded bus, my children increasingly impatient (“How do you say, ‘What’s the matter?” Seamus asked me. “I could tell you, but I wouldn’t know what he answered,” I told him.), everyone just got off the bus. We were done on that bus, and when the next bus came about ten minutes later, while we stood a little dazed in the middle of a busy market, it was as crowded as ours, and still managed to accommodate about 2/3 of the people from our original bus. We decided against it and watched it drive away, a man hanging from door with his baby tied around his waist.

            This too was one of those wonderful travel moments, standing where you hadn’t planned to be with no real sense of how we would pull ourselves out of it. There was never any sense that we were in any trouble – at the very worst, our friends in Salatiga could have called for a car to come get us, for minimal cost, so it was a chance for small talk with strangers and some musing about how to solve the problem. I was delighted when a bus driver approached me and asked me if he could drive us home, and I accepted the 1^st price he offered (Rp. 100,000, a little over 10 bucks – my readers [hi mom] will think this is not very much money, and they are right, and wrong). So, on the tattered seats of an angkot backfiring so badly on the descent that I thought we might incur another casuality, we got home, and I tipped him an extra 10,000, because we were so glad to have arrived with so little incident.

            The weekend also saw Seamus come into his own as a bargainer at the market (his best line: Saya tinggal di Salatiga. Saya tidak orang gila – I live in Salatiga. I’m not a stupid person – which won him the deal, even though it should have been the negator bukan instead of tidak.) He offered Rp. 10,000 for a small statue of a stupa, with the initial asking price being Rp. 60,000, and he got it for Rp. 10,000! The guy who sold it was delighted, it seemed, by the bule kid who wouldn’t budge – he waved us down in the parking lot of the temple the next day to say hello and laugh about it again. 

            So, a weekend trip of 120 kilometers that saw transport in five busses, two becaks (bicycle taxis), two elephants, two motorcycles, and a tandem bicycle, during which we saw the most extraordinary ruins I’ve seen since I visited Tikal in Guatemala. I learned the enormously useful word sepentar. My kids were visibly astounded in a positive way by something uniquely Indonesian. And my children are learning, as they recount their frustration and amusement at watching the man pointlessly whack the floor of the bus with a wrench, to delighted listeners, that the narrative ends up becoming the most important part of any experience.

Light at the Middle of the Tunnel

I’ve always loved that part of a trip where you finally get to where you are going after weeks and months of planning and waiting and build-up, and the instant you lay your eyes on the place, the landscape that was so vivid in your imagination suddenly disappears. No matter how hard you try to recall what you thought the place was going to look like, it is simply gone.

I’ve already experienced this more than once on this trip. Upon leaving the airport in Semerang for the 40 K drive up to Salatiga, I looked forward to twisting and turning our way through village and jungle, maybe in an old model Land Rover. But this vision was quickly replaced by two full hours of Central Java’s answer to Seattle’s North Aurora -- used car dealers, gas stations, hardware stores, mom and pops of every variety -- seen through the back of a minivan. Salatiga didn’t look anything like the Disney set I‘d hoped for, although in Salatiga’s defense, it has quieted down considerably now that Ramadan is over, and our house, Rhuma Besar, is as far from traditional Javanese as you can get.

There has been sort of a parallel experience with Kirk and the kids. While planning this trip, Kirk and I talked at length about the goals and expectations we would bring with us: things like instilling in our children a sense of adventure and an appreciation for the standard of living they enjoy in the western world, building closer bonds among the four of us and learning to rely on ourselves and each other. When we hit the ground, and saw where we were an how we would be living for the next 10 months, all of those lofty ideals flew right out the window! Like those imaginings of the physical place, I knew they were there. I had meditated on them and written about them and talked about them until I was blue in the face, but at that moment, I couldn’t recall a single one. The sheer force of our new reality took over.

For instance, what if we didn’t know where to eat? Where our next meal would be? No problem! I imagined. We are westerners, we have cash, we will come together and find a solution and be cheerful adventurers! Turns out, not knowing where your family’s next meal is coming from really sucks. Its incredibly stressful and frankly, hungry kids do not make good team members. It is especially challenging when you can’t speak the language and everyone you ask gives you a good five to seven minutes of frenzied pantomime and dictionary fumbling before they throw up their hands and walk off. I imagined that this would be such a learning experience for my kids, but what I forgot to figure into the equation was that with learning experiences often comes pain, and confusion, and difficulty! It is hard enough to see your kids struggle under normal circumstances but when you see them struggling under circumstances that you put them into willingly and with intention, it’s awful. Imagine poor G, who has never complained about school once in five years suddenly having stomach aches every morning so that he doesn’t have to go. Imagine S struggling to find friends that he feels he can be his true self with. Imagine S trying to be someone other than his true self!

This weekend however I got a glimpse, a brief but very needed reminder of why we wanted to do this in the first place. We spent the weekend at Borobodur, a 9th century Buddhist temple and one of the largest in the world. It is truly an awesome sight. Borobodur is only about 60K from where we live but without a car, we simply hadn’t figured out how to get there. So on Saturday morning, in quite good spirits everyone, we marched over to Pasar Sapi with our backpacks, flagged down a bus for Magelang and headed out. It took us nearly 3 hours to get there on public transport but was so worth it. The kids were totally amazed by the temple -- neither them have ever seen anything remotely like it and they were appropriately awed. Elaborate carvings wrap the entire structure, telling the story of Buddha and the spread of Buddhism across Asia. It is mind-boggling to image it being built in the 9th century but no less so to learn that, in the 1980’s, it was completely dismantled like legos and reassembled to prevent further damage. In 1996 Mt. Merapi blew up and knocked half of the stupas over. It has been stripped by vandals, blown up by revolutionaries, and there it sits, like it has for centuries, as if nothing ever happened.

We walked clear to the top which offers extraordinary views of the valley and surrounding volcanoes. It wasn’t exactly the contemplative experience that one would imagine from the brochure but was great fun nonetheless. Get to the top and it is packed with hundreds of Indonesians -- families on holiday, snacking, laughing, smoking, having picnics. I have been in train stations during rush hour that were less hectic, but at the same time, there was a decidedly festive atmosphere about the place. We were pretty much the only bules in the place so everyone wanted their picture taken with S and G who were incredibly good sports about the endless photo shoot. I don’t know if there is a Muslim equivalent to the Christmas photo, but if there is, my smiling family will be on countless refrigerators throughout SE Asia.

The weekend was not without its problems to be sure, but for some reason, they started to seem, well. . . manageable. G only threw one huge public fit which may not sound like the makings of a successful weekend but honestly, it was a huge step forward. The kids slept in the same bed with only about five minutes of whining, complaining and kicking each other. S started to come out of his shell, in this case urged on by the ibus in the market with whom he loves to bargain. He would argue any price with anyone, even if he didn’t want the merchandise. We finally had to ask him to stop speaking Indonesian which was definitely a first because we didn’t want any more knick-knacks. G, who is having such difficulty making friends at school, can start conversation with anyone, and did! By the time I unpacked the bags, he had befriended a couple from Sweden and sweet-talked the guest house manager into a ride on his motorcycle.

On the way home, the ancient, overcrowded bus we were riding on died and, despite the approximately 20 guys underneath the bus with large tools that bang, it would not start. Two weeks ago this would have literally plunged our family into a state of complete panic. There would have been lots of crying and yelling and frustration all around. This time, I distracted the kids with some popsicles from the local warung while Kirk negotiated with an ankot driver who took us over the pass for about $10. (Ankots are city busses which are about the size of a Ford Econoline van only with the seats ripped out. During rush hour you can fit about 20 Indonesians in one.) It was a gorgeous drive -- we had the ankot all to ourselves and it was one of the clearest days since we arrived. Magelang and Kopeng are big agricultural areas and the terraced hillsides were so beautiful. Four white people in a city bus whizzing down the hillside is a pretty unusual sight and we were greeted with waves and hollers the entire way. It may not have been what Spalding Gray dubbed ‘the perfect moment‘, but it was one of the first times since I arrived that I got the sense that we were headed in the right direction.

I’m not naïve enough to think that we are all done with the learning experiences or the temper tantrums. Far from it. But I am increasingly aware that a certain degree of naiveté, or maybe just some dumb, unfounded optimism, is not really a bad thing on a trip like this. Now that I know where to buy bread and peanut butter, I can start trying to reconstruct some of that internal landscape that I had originally envisioned for myself and my family, the part that disappeared when reality hit, the part with the adventure, and the exploration, and self-discovery, and try to remember what it was supposed to look like.

Top Ten

A rising tide of ‘why are we doing this again mom?’ has resulted in good amount of insecurity (on my part at least) prompting me compile a list of my favorite things about Indonesia thus far. Its an old trick but generally, as my therapist always said, a pretty effective one.

1. Ibu Kasom, our pembantu, who does all of the shopping, cooking, makes amazing sambal, does the cleaning and the laundry, brings the kids lunch to them at school every day, and still has energy to teach me Indonesian. She is super patient, very kind, and a fabulous cook even if the kids are a little sick of chicken & rice. Ibu Kasom is a very wonderful addition to our world.

2. Clothes dried in the sun. I really do love the smell of clothes that have been dried in the sunshine, especially bed sheets! When I get back to Bozeman, I plan to start the Fir Crest Court Outdoor Drying Revolution.

3. Banana trees. Not sure why, I just think they are super cool. I have to do a little reading on banana trees. I’m pretty sure there is a Zone 4 article in here somewhere.

4. My flower lady at the pasar who never fails to be so happy to see me blundering down the alley despite the fact I only buy one bunch at a time and I am sure she never makes any money off of me because the bunches are a buck a piece.

5. Watching my kids exceed expectations I didn’t even realize I had. If these were in order, this would be number one.

6. Belum. Indonesians don’t like to be negative so instead of saying you don’t do something or you can’t do something they say belum which literally means ‘not yet‘. It doesn’t matter what it is -- you could say you have never been to the moon and they would smile at you and say most sincerely, ‘Not yet anyway!’

7. Those wonderful, little stainless steel stacking lunch boxes. I love those things although this might be a tie with the bamboo hula hoops. I have to give this one a little more thought.

8. Snack food. These people love their snacks. Why they are all not 10,000 pounds I have no idea because around every corner are freshly cooked cassava chips, banana crepes, sate of all varieties, and what S. and I call, Miscellaneous Fried Bits. There are several street vendors that sell MFB in our neighborhood. S. and I were taking the bus downtown the other day and the driver pulled right over at one, put the bus in park and hopped across the road to fill up his lunch box with MFB which he proceeded to eat as he drove.

9. Misprinted t-shirts. S. and I have started a list of favorite t-shirts seen around town, silk-screened with English expressions that are just a tinee-tiny bit off of which there are so many in Indonesia. His favorite thus far was a young woman wearing a shirt that boasted: Smexy Girl.

10. Torrential rain storms. The rain storms here are great. They get storms like this in Montana sometimes but they are usually accompanied by hail. The ones here come on all of a sudden, one or two drops than the entire sky seems to fall on you. God forbid you should be caught out in one without an umbrella because there is no escape. And, really an umbrella won’t do you any good anyway, you just have to wait it out. Within minutes, the streets are nearly flooded. Fortunately, it is a warm rain, so you might look a sodden mess when you get where you are going, but it feels great.

Tehserah saja (just whatever)

October 5, 2010

            I’m writing about the history of the literacy test, as an obstacle for voting, at the childhood desk that we borrowed from my colleague, the daughter of the women from whom we are renting our house, the outline of her girlhood stickers all that remain from the scrubbing. It’s a heavy desk, tall, with drawers and crannies; it can be folded closed. I sit in a old chair on loan from the English Department here, the only other things in the room a couple of suitcases packed with books we brought, somewhat randomly. We finish them and then pass them along to an eager bunch of expats starved for new reading material. I’m not sure they share my tastes – Suttree as Southern gothic as they get – but they can have the books. We’re not bringing them back home.

            My head is full of the racist policy proposals of old Southerners like Edward McCrady and Ben Tillman, frantic to reclaim the South from the sudden hands of freed slaves. In the afternoon I scour The Jakarta Post, the strange English language newspaper full of stories of graft and terrorists and religious zealots and political infighting. Today I read on a political website that Senator Jim DeMint from South Carolina thinks sexually active single women and all gay men should be banned from teaching. Yesterday I read about an official in Sumatra who wants only girls who are virgins to be allowed to receive a free education.

            On Sunday I went with S to a community center in the center of the city to a youth theater workshop run by a man Laura met doing some other projects. It was an open, dark, hall, two old fans spinning slowly from the low ceiling, opening onto a quiet lane. When we arrived, on one side, there were a group of high school age students with guitars and drums, singing, reciting poetry, laughing. D, Laura’s friend, a lithe Javanese man, led another group of teenagers in an intensely physical warm-up routine, collaborative and grueling, with the most hilarious stretches that made my body ache just from watching. S watched quietly and curiously, interested but wary – he’s been invited to join the group, and I think he wants to, but doing so would be about the most courageous thing he’s ever done. He hasn’t decided yet.

            They rehearsed a piece written by D, as far as I can tell a deeply political piece that deals with the lies of politicians and a population hungry for equity. D’s wife sat next to me, holding their extraordinarily cute 9 month old baby. She is Australian but lives permanently in Indonesia, and she speaks Indonesian and Javanese, and she explained various bits to me, mostly about the kids performing, where they come from. They were wonderful, enthusiastic, committed. It was dance, and theater, and poetry, demanding intellectually and physically,  accompanied skillfully by the musicians. As far as I could see, they pulled it off with youthful aplomb.  D spoke to them in Javanese, their first language (and the 8^th largest language group in the world); the language of the play – sparse – was Indonesian.

            “Three of the kids aren’t here today. They were in a big street fight. They fight a lot here,” she told me. “It’s the way of poor youth in a lot of places, a habit made worse by the dictatorship” – this ended in 1998 after a dramatic series of student protests led from Bandung in West Java – “the officials here open this hall whenever it’s free for events like this, so there is some productive place for them to go.” All of the kids were happy to meet us and invited S graciously to join them. He was quiet, curious, open-minded.

            After six weeks here, it’s easy to feel like there is a routine, though fragile. Things feel a little normal. We talk to the neighbors on our walks by the house, and my bike ride to school is second-nature (with occasional merging challenges). Being here isn’t a daily trial, though it isn’t without its headaches. (Or gut aches; the demon in my intestinal tract is persistent and demanding and pops up at the most unfortunate moments – today I had to cancel a some student conferences and make my way home to bed).  We have a marvelous maid, who delights in our language problems and cooks the most amazing food (with delicious homemade sambal, the Indonesian chili paste that goes on everything). I like my students. The school our kids go to is not any less strange, but by now they know who we are, and so far we haven’t been forced out, even though G argued back with his fifth grade teacher about evolution and S told some teachers that Satan sounded like an interesting person, and who would want to spend eternity praising God anyway – how boring. S would leave today for Bozeman if we gave him the option, but we’re not going to, and in two weeks we will spend one week touring around Bali in a rented car.

            But everything isn’t routine of course. We still know nothing about this place, and however good my Indonesian will be by the time we leave, I will know nearly nothing about the native language of my neighbors, aside from the fact that it is a lot harder to learn, and that it has four grammatically different levels, depending on the status level of the person you’re addressing. We are clearly welcome here in Salatiga, and people are eager to help us learn about what we want to learn. And it’s extraordinary anyway, just out of our grasp but part of our daily lives. I cannot know what my kids will think of it, even tonight, much less in their lives in Bozeman, or what I will think of it. But in the hall, watching a group of Javanese youth hold hands in a circle and fall back in an impressive warm-up stretch to a live soundtrack performed by their peers to the side, I saw it again for the gift that it is, the wonder that it is. Here I am, in a small city in Central Java, at the girlhood desk of my colleague, writing about the trials of plurality in America while watching a young nation live out the trials of plurality in its day-to-day existence, in reality and on stage. How unlikely, how impossible. How wonderful that something so strange, for fleeting gracious moments, can feel like my life.

If I were a rich man

October 1, 2010

            For $55 a person, you can get a three hour tour of the slums of Jakarta, suddenly a destination after the popularity of Slumdog Millionaire – it’s apparently the latest trend in adventure tourism. I confess a desire, one that predates that movie, to visit such places, voyeuristic no matter what else it is, but reading that called up the deep sense one has as an economic entity as a westerner living in Indonesia. Fifty-five dollars is about what we pay our maid, per month, here – she works 35 hours a week for us and cooks all our food. She would have to work two months to buy one of the pairs of shoes I bought before we left Bozeman.

Playing in the gamelan orchestra. Graham is about to make an ear-splitting hit on the gong in the background.

            Last weekend we visited the Tlogo Plantation Resort, just south of us, and spent a night in a comfortable (but for the amazing cloud of mosquitoes) cottage that slept four. We had a giant breakfast, cooked for us by the inimitable Ibu Viva, and played with a gamelan orchestra (truly one of the highlights of the trip so far for me, hypnotizing and otherworldly, a musical practice that approximated deep meditation  – repetitive, metallic, mesmerizing – except for the parts when G or S were playing the gong, hitting it like Animal on the Muppet Show willy-nilly). We got a tour of the rubber plantation, and the rubber processing plant. The staff picked us up at home and took us back the next day. We had a great dinner and an amazing lunch, and the whole thing cost us just over $100.

In the processing plant.

            At the rubber plantation, we watched the laborers walking in with buckets full of sap, drained from the rubber tree that morning, to pour in a vat which would be processed into slabs, pressed, dried, and smoked, the highest grade rubber you can have, such a high grade that during the tour we had to take a brief time out to explain to Graham what a condom was. Every stage of the labor is intensive – the collection (requiring scoring a line down the side of the rubber tree to open it up for sap), the carrying (walking sometimes for several kilometers with a bucket of rubber sap over their shoulders), the processing (hot, and very stinky, and certainly not terribly healthy). Our guide said that they earned less than 20,000 rupiah per day, maybe about $2.

            I read an interview with an Indonesian labor activist; he mentioned the difficult times facing workers right now, and used as an example that a good lunch in Yogyakarta used to cost 2,000 rupiah but now it is about 4,500 rupiah. It has gone up, that is, from about twenty cents to about forty-five cents. (And to think that I pay between fifty cents and a dollar for lunch everyday.) I cannot order textbooks for my classes next semester, because my students simply cannot afford to buy them.  There are cut-rate factory outlet stores in Semarang, at the sweatshops that produce American clothes.

The house we rent costs $4,500 for 10 months, and it is giant, ridiculously large really, even by my standards in the United States, three stories tall and screaming wealth. The first thing our neighbors asked when we met them was “how much do you pay for your house?” (These kinds of questions are very Indonesian – the standard greeting here is “where are you going?” or “where have you been?”). They were shocked at the price, and we have since learned that we are paying much more than we should at that price (which is absurdly low by our standards of course). Whatever house we lived in, white people in Indonesia, for the most part correctly, are assumed to be made of money, and while I wouldn’t use the phrase “made of money” to describe us, the words do speak to the way economic issues feel so physical here.

            To live here as an American paid an American salary is to be exorbitantly wealthy, capable of the most extraordinary feats of economic prowess. I have never considered myself poor by any means (Bozeman is weird this way; Seamus can come home from his rather well-off middle school and complain about how poor we are, which has always rankled me. This trip will likely cure him of that silliness), but I have never felt my wealth so viscerally, never felt like economies circulated through – maybe more accurately even via - my skin quite so obviously. One can feel lucky about this – I am glad, I can honestly say, not to be a laborer on a rubber plantation making $2 a day – but to call it lucky is to dodge the depth of it all, and is to suggest that these workers are somehow just “unlucky.” Nor do I feel guilty. But I am present within it, whether I stand as a paying tourist photographing workers processing rubber or whether I never stepped foot in Indonesia, and it reminds me that I need to live that presence more fully, when I return to my home.