Still fine

November 6, 2010

I know that you're probably checking this after the latest terrible news today, two more villages incinerated in clouds of searing ash and lava - 750 degree celsius, reported today - and at least 122 dead now from the two weeks of eruptions. The one yesterday was the largest in over a century. These two villages were 14.2 kilometers from the crater, inside the evacuation area, but apparently many thought it would be safe to stay. I promise you that if a man in a uniform comes to our house and tells us we have to leave, we will leave, but that won't happen. We're close, but not at risk. But you have my word, of course.
     Before I read the news about this latest eruption, this morning Graham and I rode up Mount Merbabu and then climbed Mount Telemoyo on the motorcycle.I'd been planning a full day of exploration around the area, but not a good day for a motorcycle ride, and no view from the top of Telemoyo, blanketed as it was by an ash-coated cloud. It started raining a little on the way home, and by the time we returned we were covered in a layer of ash on our rain gear.  Ash is falling lightly here, like the slightest of snow storms, little flakes accumulating in a small dusting everywhere. We were wearing masks, so we didn't inhale anything, but it was sort of unpleasant anyway - ash kept creeping under my helmet and into my eyes, and I had to stop once to clean off the visor of my helmet. We were stopped on the road by a school group collecting money for the refugees, and of course we donated.  One of my students will be missing a couple of weeks because he is on the assessment team for the Indonesian Red Cross. He'll pass my class regardless of how much of the upcoming work he gets done, frankly, simply for possessing the knowledge and courage I referred to in my previous post.
   I'm getting a little bored with writing about the volcano, but of course it's the most pressing news here. Laura and Seamus return from their trip this afternoon, but rerouted because of the eruption - no telling how long and slow their trip will be. We were invited to a party tonight across the street, which we will go to, and then dinner at our friends' house (a British ex-pat and his Indonesian wife who have become our best friends here, and who are two of the most generous and welcoming people we've met period), so it will be a busy day. But we're stuck inside, it looks like, for the duration of this episode, and there is no telling what the duration will be. The evacuation zone is 20 kilometers today, which is getting very close to the city of Yogyakarta with over half a million people, an amazing place (we spent a night there recently, on our return from Bali), the cultural center of Java.  At this point, that has become the focal point of anxiety about any further eruptions. But please don't worry about us - we're just breathing a little ash and temporarily home-bound. How Indonesia will cope with an active volcano that has no signs of abating, of course, is anybody's guess. Send your positive mental energy, or your prayers, or whatever counts as psychic action in your worldview, to the homeless and the families of the dead, and to the people of Yogyakarta.

Volcano news with banana crepes on the side

November 4, 2010

            Merapi is on a deadly run this week, three more eruptions in the last two days, the latest, two this morning starting at around seven, the worst yet, killing at least 6 more people and forcing the evacuation zone, which authorities had said was perfectly safe at 10 kilometers, to get extended to 15 kilometers, moving three of the shelters in place for villagers from the mountain as well.  The number of displaced people has gone up to 75,000 (which tells you something about population density in Java: 75,000 people living in a 9 mile radius around the most active volcano in Indonesia).  There’s been ash billowing up to 20 kilometers in the sky, pyroclastic flows called in Javanese wedhus gembel, which translates as “shaggy sheep,” descriptive if perhaps a little too gentle under the circumstances.  Laura and Seamus passed through Magelang on their way to the south coast of Java today with a school trip, and she reported a great deal of ash there, much closer to Merapi than we are and without the shield of Mount Merbabu to block it. Even here, though, a thin coating of ash is appearing outside, and there’s a faint mineral smell in the air.

            As of today, there are 19 volcanoes in Indonesia on high alert status, out of the 125+ active volcanoes in the country. There’s some talk here about Merapi triggering this uptick in activity, because it’s all happening very quickly, but I have no idea if that is accurate. But when you read in the newspaper that Krakatoa is on high alert status, of course it gets your attention.

            In the meantime the pictures from the Mentawai Islands off the coast of Sumatra just get worse and worse. Storms and complete destructive chaos make getting in and out almost impossible. Desperate to do something, the government sent scores of volunteers to the island who apparently were completely unqualified to be of any assistance, and ran in fear at the rather large waves still pummeling the island. Now they are having to evacuate the volunteers because they are in the way. One Indonesian aid worker said it would be nice to have people with the requisite “knowledge and courage” to help out. Doctors can’t get the work done there because they can’t get the right supplies in, since the seas have been too high.

            It’s strange to be right on the edge of it, safe but still very present, and at the moment helpless as well, lacking the requisite knowledge and courage to do much but comment on it with my neighbors, eloquent observations translated to something like “Merapi erupt again today. Big. Scary.”

            Perhaps one of the reasons missionaries seem to thrive around here is the apparent proximity to the apocalypse, which they seem to be very excited to witness. At the moment, it’s just over that ridge there, blasting out shaggy sheep at an alarming rate, and over there off the coast of Sumatra, our own local remake of 2012 or The Day After Tomorrow.  I’m closer than I usually am to the on-going global apocalypses, no desire to get much closer, really. This time when I look in the newspaper, the old women getting loaded up into the back of squat black Mitsubishi, removed from their soon to be incinerated mountain village, look like my neighbor across the street. I imagine for my friends and family something similar is happening too; they are reading the news differently when they see about disasters in Indonesia, because Indonesia is suddenly a real place, with real people, four of whom you know pretty well.

            Observation off topic: there’s a guy on the corner outside the University where I work with a little stand on wheels. He makes little banana crepes, all day long, in two tiny cast iron woks heated over burning coals. He puts in the batter, and then sliced bananas, some sugar, a little chocolate, and some sweetened condensed milk. He covers that, switches the wok to the other burning coals, brings the already prepared one forward, folds it over and serves it. He does this all day long, every day, and his stand is often so crowded with orders that there is no point waiting. He’s famous in Salatiga; people come from all over the city to pick up batches of 20 or 30, and it takes about 2-3 minutes to get two finished. They cost 750 rupiah apiece, about 8 cents. They are extraordinarily delicious, the best dessert item I have had in Indonesia. It’s an amazing thing, to stand there, watching him prepare orders for the small crowd of people leaning against their motorbikes, his every move deft and easy, the intimate craft of a man who does this one thing with such aplomb and dexterity, preparing one after another. I have at least two every time there is no crowd and I am near him, regardless of what time of day it is and whether I am actually hungry, because I feel the need to stock up my internal reserve of Indonesian banana crepes, for that time when I am no longer able to eat them by walking 3 minutes from my office.  Sometimes I even fork out the forty cents and have five.

Rough week for Indonesia

  So the volcano keeps erupting, the third time yesterday, fairly gigantic eruptions with large pyroplastic flows and ash now over a good part of southern Central Java, but not here. It erupted again yesterday for 45 minutes, and the people evacuated from the mountain look to have a long time in the refugee camps around the area (none in Salatiga). There are about 50,000 people now evacuated from the mountain, though many of them appear to be sneaking back up during the day to feed their cattle and maintain whatever has survived the three large eruptions over the past week. The vulcanologists are even cagier than before, since their predictions haven't really been accurate, and things appear to be getting even more pressurized inside the volcano everyday. But as I have said, we appear to be in no danger here, shielded by Merbabu, gloriously inactive.
   Also, of course, the tsunami aftermath keeps getting worse, the death toll up to 450 as of this morning (Monday morning), with about 100 still missing. They've had severe storms on the western coast of Sumatra, which has meant supplies and food and volunteers have been almost impossible to get in, and those survivors in the most dire need of emergency treatment have been almost impossible to get out, or to medicate and treat properly.
    Jakarta has been flooding almost daily, as well, in some torrential downpours (downpours which steam up the inside of the volcano and make the pressure even stronger). There are two other volcanos, now, in Indonesia, that have reached a serious alert status.
    So of course be concerned, but not for us. There are massive emergencies occurring all over the Indonesian archipelago, with an infrastructure sorely unprepared for such things, even when they come singly. There are displaced people, struggling for resources and daily survival, whose villages and livelihoods and in some cases entire families have been killed. It's one of those moments when you see Indonesia caught in the crossroads of national development. On the one hand, it's the most powerful country in Southeast Asia in some ways, working to lead ASEAN (the organization of Southeast Asian Countries) and be a primary economic engine in the region. On the other hand, 12 years after the overthrow of a corrupt and hardline dictator (an overthrow led by Indonesian students), the country still struggles with massive corruption, a staggering gap between wealthy and poor, and a collapsing infrastructure. (Some of my readers might find that description hits rather close to home, but multiply it by 10 for a clearer picture.) The country, as a friend put it the other day, "lumbers along," creaky and under threat from its own geography, its extraordinary diversity, its size (2000 miles from Northwest Sumatra to Papua, 17,000 islands), the daily tensions around religion  and ethnicity ("the church burning center of the world," as one Christian leader put it the other day).
   In Bali, we saw a performance called a "kecak dance," that ended with a man in a trance doing a dance through burning coconut shells (a dance described to Seamus by one of his teachers, upon our return, as "demonic" - this part of our daily existence is now just downright silly and tedious). It was impressive and awesome, and it's not a bad metaphor for Indonesia as a country right now, dancing on burning coconut shells, scary and beautiful and otherworldly, not quite in control but alive and rich.  Whatever else, I can't take my eyes off it.

My motorcycle

October 31 (some call it Halloween, but my children know that’s Satanic)

            Our friend Jane, an Australian who we met early after we moved here through a contact of Laura’s, just moved. “We should buy her motorcycle,” Laura told me, a few weeks ago, which struck me as crazy and a little bit stupid. Neither of us have ever driven a motorcycle before, and Laura thinks we should buy one in a country with the craziest traffic (outside of Cairo, maybe) in the world?

            Now, I can’t believe I’ve never owned or driven a motorcycle before. We’ve owned this motorcycle for four days, and I’ve driven over most of the area around our house in those four days, usually with one of my two kids clutching onto me, exploring little side streets, driving up the side of the mountain, cruising through rice fields, past little warungs (roadside shops) and through kampungs (villages) stopping at a soccer game or at a swimming pool or at a hotel to look around a little. Riding my bicycle for two months in traffic prepared for me the rhythm of vehicles here. It’s the most defensively minded driving I’ve ever done, not in terms of my mindset (for the most part, I’ve always been a defensive driver), but in terms of everyone on the road. They are always expecting a motorcycle to pull out of a side-street into moving traffic, or a bus to pull into oncoming traffic around a corner to get around the becak (the bicycle taxi) or for motorcycles to just weave their way, in groups of two or three or four, through and around cars and other motorcycles, and the amazing thing is, everyone does it with this great sort of fluidity. (The driver who brought us from Yogyakarta to Salatiga after our Bali trip, though, was the most insane driver I’ve ever ridden with, so crazy that Laura and I started telling Seamus and Graham stories of their infancy, I think because we were reviewing details of our lives every time he passed a bus – he was fast though, and cheap, and we’ll use him again.)

            I think of my brother Steve as I drive my motorcycle, because I think he’d immediately take to this flow of traffic. It’s intuitive, and everybody watches the vehicle ahead of them, and seems to trust the person behind to do the same. There’s a fair amount of honking, but it’s a sort of cheerful “by the way I’m here” kind of honk politely signaling that you shouldn’t move too much to the right (or the left, depending on where the flow of traffic is taking said vehicle). I still don’t pass on curves, on mountain highways, mostly because the busses do, and I am not really in a hurry, it turns out. It’s not really the speed, it’s just fun to suddenly be moving around the countryside on a motorcycle, seeing some guy herding his geese, or whatever amazing sight pops up at any given moment. My only fear is that I will stop riding my bicycle, because I like riding the motorcycle so much, though I suspect I won’t.

            Reading the blog, one wouldn’t know that my brain is about to explode from the workload I have been given here, no matter what the Fulbright people promised me about the ease of the work, or the purpose of the grant being to travel and see a country and not to recreate the conditions of an academic position. I have almost 80 students, teaching three classes that meet on three separate days for 3 hours each, one of them a writing class. All of the classes are taught in sort of clusters, which means we’re all supposed to be doing the same thing, a pretence I long since abandoned, but which is putting my students in my critical reading course at a disadvantage because they have to take the same tests that all the other students take, most of it over material that I don’t think has much to do with the task of reading critically (like identifying whether a paragraph fits the pattern of “exemplifying” or “cause and effect” or “space/order,” or taking five sentences that form a paragraph and mixing them up and then having students put them in the proper order). My students bombed the first test, as I predicated they would, to the dean, at the beginning of the semester. In the middle of it all I am in class myself six hours a week for Indonesian. I did leave for a week on a trip to Bali, but that had the consequence of making things even worse last week, after my return. School policy is that I am supposed to make those classes up, but there are some tangible benefits about my paycheck not coming from the institution I am working in, and scrapping that requirement is one of them.

            So I’m happy to have a chance to tool around this part of Central Java on a used motorcycle with a kid holding in the back, and next weekend, when Seamus and Laura go on a mission trip with the school (to teach English, thankfully, led by one of the teachers from Indonesia who is more focused on having the kids do something useful for the community they visit and not trying to convert the “non-believer” Muslims) Graham and I will likely pop on the back of the motorcycle and go somewhere we haven’t been, to spend a night and explore a little. And when I come back to Bozeman, I don’t think I will buy a motorcycle, since I can’t ride it year round there. But maybe I’ll sneak into my neighbor’s garage every now and then and “borrow” the Harley.

            Happy Halloween everybody. 

Volcano update

You can imagine that the talk of the region is the eruption of Merapi. Laura and I went up on the roof the library on campus this morning, after our language class, to get a peek of the mountain, but it was mostly shrouded in clouds. Twenty-five people were killed so far, but the release of pressure is a lot more gradual than they initially predicted (with aforementioned God caveat). They still don't know if the worst is yet to come, but even if the mountain does explode in furious fashion, the worst we're likely to get is a bad ash cloud.

Hanya Tuhan yang tahu

   I see today that Indonesia is in the American news, for a rather large earthquake off the coast of Sumatra. Sumatra is a long way away from us - think California from Montana - and the earthquake was in the ocean, which triggered tsunami warnings in Sumatra but, as far as I know at the moment, no tsunami. So if you saw the phrase "earthquake in Indonesia" and wondered about us, we're fine.
    Almost certainly in the next couple of weeks you are going to see a big story about a volcano erupting in Central Java, Mount Merapi. Merapi is rather closer to us - maybe 70 miles or so - on the other side of an even larger mountain, which means we are protected. The mountain's been growing at an alarming rate - something like 20 centimeters a day since Friday, and the chief vulcanologist for Central Java has announced that an eruption is imminent - probably a big one, he said, but, he added, "hanya Tuhan yang tahu" (only God knows) -  this is my new trip slogan. There's lava now coming out at a pretty good clip too. About 20000 people have been evacuated from the mountain, reluctantly though, because they fear theft, especially of their livestock.
    I just put this up so that when you hear the news about Central Java, you won't become alarmed. Seamus is hoping there will be a cloud of ash from the explosion. I am frankly hoping it ends up being just a discharge of lava and nothing dramatic, but my hope, as the vulcanologist made clear, doesn't really enter into it.

Update: So there was a tsunami after the earthquake, with dozens killed and more missing. And Mount Merapi has started erupting, spewing ash and rocks. It just started about two hours ago, and there is little information about the extent. But we are all okay here, at least, and sure to remain so. Please direct your thoughts toward the people who remained on Merapi or whose villages were swept away in Sumatra by the tsunami.

A week in Bali

October 25, 2010 

            Mass tourism makes me cynical and a little depressed, and I confess that when we made plans to go to Bali – at the top of everyone’s list of travel destinations during our year here – I was a little unsure about it, thinking that perhaps we should have gone somewhere else. Tonight, after we have just arrived home from a week there, I’m suffering from that anti-climactic moment you get when you come home from a trip, and everything is back to normal (a feeling which in itself is remarkable, given the lack of normalcy about every aspect of my life right now). It was an amazing week, and Bali is a real place, even with the Starbucks and the Hard Rock Café and the troops of westerners everywhere putting on their best Elizabeth Gilbert outfit and riding around on tall bicycles with flowers in their hair, soaking in the culture though unable to say thank you in Balinese (matur sooksma) or Indonesian (terima kasih).

            Here’s one thing I learned, on a small scale in Borubordur and on a much larger scale in Bali: if you can speak coherently in a native language (even if it is the second language of the Balinese, they’ve known Indonesian since birth) it changes the experience dramatically. In places like Ubud, flush with tourists trying to go native (if going native is doing lots of yoga and wearing loose fitting clothing), being able to make sense, however ineptly (very, in my case) changes the dynamics. It makes bargaining easier, and more fun, and much less stressful, it means you can have a conversation with a taxi driver or a person giving you directions. Even though almost all of the Balinese I met spoke better English than I speak Indonesian, they were generous and seemed pleased to let me lumber along in Indo, patiently waiting for the sense to leak out of my ill-formed sentences.

            We arrived on Saturday morning and were met at the airport by a driver who took us to Sanur Beach, on the southern part of the island. We had initially planned to spend a night or two there, but were delighted that we hadn’t found a room, because Sanur Beach was rather tacky and dirty, a crowded tourist destination with little stands lining the beach selling overpriced food and cheap souvenirs – the Bali I feared when we booked the trip. But we got on a boat for a 30 minute ride to a tiny island off the coast, Nusa Lembongen, where we found ourselves staying in a lovely cottage just off Mushroom Bay, a beautiful beach with calm water and a Hindu temple that went into full ritual action on our last day there, complete with pig butchering with live gamelan accompaniment and processions of women with offerings on their head.

            We relaxed there, and swam, and walked around, and had a great meal on a backstreet with at Pak Augus’s resto, and the next day we hired a traditional Balinese boat – a kind of early version of the catamaran, wooden with bamboo ballasts attached about 4 feet from either side. Our driver, an old fisherman from Nusa Lembongan, took us to some coves on another island, and a point off the coast of Lembongan, for some of the best snorkeling I have ever done, rich with fish and coral, an incredible morning and the first time Graham had ever seen anything like it. He was astounded.

            Writing this, I realize I can’t walk through the trip, which included three destinations and lots of miles behind the wheel on the wrong side of car. But it was amazing, start to finish, and here are some of the highlights:

When we arrived in Ubud, driving from the north after a night in the caldera that has another volcano inside it (Danu Batur), we were suddenly in traffic, surrounded by other Western tourists, with Ralph Lauren stores and tour buses and busy. We got a little lost coming into town, mostly because the maps and the road signs are enormously difficult to correlate, and while we spun around the city trying to figure out where our hotel was, we drove by a Starbucks, which sent Seamus into paroxysms of hyperventilating anticipation and me into one of my regular and tedious-even-for-me rants about blah blah blah you know it without me telling it. For the next two days in Ubud, Seamus kept up a regular (not incessant) drumbeat about going to Starbucks, each time providing a cue for my aforementioned rant. My wife, who is much wiser than me, on a foray with just Seamus and Graham, finally agreed to take the kids to Starbucks, and they went in, and Laura engaged in a long conversation with the barista, who told her that the coffee there came from Costa Rica (Bali coffee, by the way, is amazing, and just down the road) and where she should go for really good coffee in town. They bought their drinks, drank them in the Starbucks, and then wandered around the corner to another coffee shop that Seamus had discovered on an earlier explore on his own, where he’d had a long conversation with the owner. That coffee shop was empty, and Seamus said his goodbyes to the woman, because we were leaving. Later he said to me, “Dad, that was the first time I’ve ever felt bulimic.” Amazed that the coffee at Starbucks is shipped across the ocean, he became depressed at the notion that the busy Starbucks might be a threat to the local operation of a woman from Ubud. It was like a 30 minute seminar on globalization, rather better than the eternal lecture I have tried to provide my son for most of his life.

            At Ibu Oka’s, a famous roasted suckling pig restaurant in Ubud, Graham did what he always does now, and got up to finagle his way into the kitchen. He was gone this time for about 20 minutes, and we really took no notice of his absence, until we looked up and saw him riding up on the back of a motorcycle with one of the restaurant employees. He’d wanted to see the roasting pig, but they don’t do it on site, so the employee had thrown him on the back of his bike, ridden him several blocks away to the kitchen, taken him back, and let him turn the spit and baste the whole pig with this coconut milk glaze. This was, by the way, extraordinarily delicious meat, with this thick skin of basted pork fat that you have to taste to believe. Graham came back ecstatic about the experience, which he shared with everyone in hearing distance. The night before he had gone out on Lake Batur with the owner of the hotel there to gather our dinner from the fish farm out on the lake – he’s definitely becoming the culinary student of our family year abroad.

            We rented two motorbikes on Nusa Lembongen and drove around the island. Laura had never driven a motorcycle before, and I have only driven one a few times, and the roads were what Laura referred to as goat tracks, and none of had helmets, and we rode over a creaky suspension bridge that led from one island to another, and rode out to the mangrove forest where we got a tour by boat through the dense grove along the coast, and Laura drove off the road once and crashed into a tree in an overcompensated attempt to not hit a cyclist who was coming down a steep hill that she was trying to get up. She got a dramatic bruise on her leg and a good story out of it, and endless ribbing from Graham, her passenger on the back of the bike. We had incredible tuna that day, though by the time we got back to the hotel Laura was wiped out from clenching the handlebars a little more tightly after the accident. She made me drive the bike over the bridge on the way home (though she had already done it once).

            We visited the most amazing Hindu temples, wearing our obligatory sarongs, purchased outside a restaurant in Padangbai. We went to 1500 year old temple ruins. We saw temple ceremonies, and a dance where a guy went into a trance and danced through burning coconut shells for about 15 minutes in bare feet. We were accosted by aggressive hawkers selling truly horrid crafts, and also some incredible crafts. We had a great dinner with another Fulbrighter who does research on Balinese temple ceremonies, with his wife and two year old, by our hotel pool, on a transcendent evening. We ate the best food we’ve eaten yet, and we swam in the Indian Ocean. This is Indonesia too, and it was a taste of how vibrant and varied this country is, and it gave all of us, the kids especially, a new sense about the country and the people (aside from a few aggressive hawkers, the people were wonderful: friendly and helpful and funny). It was a great trip, and today I went back to teaching, which was a little difficult, I have to admit.  

rebuttal: (from Laura) In my defense, the trip to Starbucks was part of a bargain. I agreed to take Seamus to Starbucks if he agreed never to ask to be taken to another American corporate chain for the remainder of our stay in Indonesia. It seems to have done the trick but for different reasons than I anticipated.