In which I sweat profusely

Day two of the workshop today – really day one – at the Islamic Boarding School, Pesantran Adduqayya, outside of Sumenep in Guluk-Guluk on Madura. Yesterday, our 7 AM ride arrived at 8:00 for the 20 minute drive that took 35 minutes to get to the 8:00 ceremony that actually began at 9. My friend Umi gets very frustrated when the schedule falls apart like this, which is funny, because it seems so very Indonesian to me and so doesn’t bother me.

The boarding school is quite a ways out of Sumenep, through a bunch of tobacco and corn farms, and it’s fairly large – about 5,000 students from kindergarten through first grade. When we arrived yesterday morning, the room was already full with students – boys in the front and girls in the back, separated by about six feet of empty space. It’s just as likely that they were happy to be there because it’s the only time that boys and girls at the school are allowed in the same space as that I was there, but that’s alright.

They had a big banner hanging behind me with my name printed on it just below a picture of the loudspeaker on a minaret of a mosque, and another one hanging above the road into the school. There was a table at the front of the room with about five chairs, only two of which were ever occupied, and

an opening ceremony that had four parts, according to the young man who was the master of ceremonies:

1.     Opening

2.     Reciting of the Koran

3.     Some words

4.     Closing of the opening ceremony

Fortunately it turned out not be the whole Koran, and it only took about 30 minutes, with a few speeches (my host again reiterated to them that the placement of the predicate in Indonesian was different from English, perhaps hoping I would get the hint and launch into a discourse about the predicate), and then they handed it over to me.

Someone – I think perhaps Umi – had optimistically named the two hour session (cut because of the late arrival to 90 minutes) with 100 students in it “How to be a Better Writer” – which seemed a tall order to me, and I told them so. True to old form upon my arrival in Indonesia years ago, I was a little nervous and speaking too quickly, but I slowed down. The room was hot, seriously hot, like they had just cleared out the boarding school steam bath because it was the only space large enough, and I am certain that I alarmed the people at the school, because halfway through a bunch of students came running in with fans and pointed them all at me and turned them on, which was a huge relief, though by that time my shirt was sticking to my body. “I thought you had spilled water on yourself,” one of the teachers told me to today. How dignified. The fans did work, though, and I did not actually pass out in front of them.

I really hadn’t prepared much for this session, since Umi told me it would be a question and answer session, but it wasn’t quite that, and so I had them do a few writing exercises – something about the difficulties of learning English and something about a scary experience (one of them, I think, had a grandmother who was a witch, and someone else told about the ghost that killed his neighbor) – which I used to emphasize that if they want to be better writers than what they need to do was to write more. As always, the giant concern is grammar and grammar and structure and grammar and vocabularies (my old favorite Indonesian-English word). They read their writing with microphones (one for the boys and one for the girls) and the noise of the blasts of air into the mike combined with the learning-English accents made it a sort of challenge for me to understand a lo of what they said. I can’t vouch that it was a vast success, but at the end I took about 20 pictures with different school English clubs (one club only had one student in it apparently).Most students I asked said they enjoyed it (this is actually not true: what they said was “yes” when I asked them if they enjoyed it), though one young woman whose notebook I had just signed (one of several) replied “I didn’t understand it.” It’s a very humbling hobby, this, though perhaps she was just distracted by my wet shirt.

crophones (one for the boys and one for the girls) and the noise of the blasts of air into the mike combined withe learning-English accents made it a sort of challenge for me to understand anything they said. I can’t vouch that it was a vast success, but at the end I took about 20 pictures with different school English clubs (one club only had one student in it apparently).

Then we went to lunch – I had rindang, my favorite Indonesian beef dish, for the second day in a row - and to the Kraton of Sumenep. (A Kraton is like a regional palace from when there was a king of Sumenep, which changed into a local colonial authority – a bupati – under the Dutch.) It was the dustiest Kraton I have ever visited, but nice, anyway. There was a pool there where you could drink water for good luck, different kinds of luck depending on the staircase you went down, and some locals were there sipping from the pool in hopes of virility or a better job. I told Umi that she should drink it first, and I’d come back in two days if she was still alive. The fish swimming around in it were giant. Our last stop was a beautiful beach – Pantai Slopeng – where I went swimming and watched the fishing boats heading out. It was completely deserted, though there was a lone fisherman in the water down the beach, and a coconut vendor outside the gate, who hacked open our coconuts for us neatly with a rusty machete.

Today, really, the workshop we’d gotten the grant for began, and it went well. We opened with a session where I asked them to interview a partner and then introduce their partner to the group. I got Pak Hazmi, who has been teaching English at the school for 3-4 years and before that was a local member of parliament and before that studied Islamic law in Yogyakarta. He loves Metallica, which he uses in his English lessons.

In the second session, I asked them to start by writing in response to the question “How do you use writing in your classes?” which threw them off a little bit, understandably. “What do you mean, use?” one teacher asked. “Just write about how you teach writing,” I said, but the more I thought about it, the more interesting the difference between “use” and “teach” became for me, and the distinction sort of became a miniature theme of the day. When they talked about writing in their classes, the conversations were all about teaching a variety of specificities with writing: one used writing primarily to teach tenses, another used writing to teach the various forms (which it turns out are different from and yet exactly the same as various forms of writing everywhere, and like everywhere, there are only four of them), and so forth. Teaching writing always came weighed down with all sorts of other jobs attached to it, and most of them were the especially boring jobs that no one wanted to do anyway. “Let me ask you a question,” I said after that conversation. “Do your students like writing?” They did not, the teachers told me, not surprisingly, because when they wrote they learned about all the mistakes they were making in the past tense or about how they didn’t know how to structure an opinion piece or about how they had a limited vocabulary.

I lost about 4 men after that session (one of whom told me that he didn’t waste time in class having students speak in English because they would never have to use English in speaking anyway), but the rest of them, and all the women, hung in there.  And we had a good day, and I got them to think about the work that writing could do for them as a teacher, the way it could help them learn about their students, engage them with each other directly, focus the learning away from the teacher, and teach them how to be more careful and focused readers and listeners. All that, and without ever having to tell their students that it is happening, they will become better writers anyway. What if, I asked them, you thought about writing not in terms of how it could make your students better writers, but how it could make you a more effective teachers, and then your students became better writers anyway?

We did a lot of other stuff today, but that was the most interesting and the most fun. At lunch one of the teachers insisted that Umi and I come to her house, which we got to by meandering through the grounds of the pesantran, which is really just a sort of village filled with children instead of families. She made us sit for ten minutes in her sitting room and brought in about 15 different kinds of snacks in round plastic containers and some delicious fresh melon juice with chunks of melon in it, and then we followed her back a new way, through the girls part of the school. When the girls saw us coming, they stood with their back to the wall and looked down at their feet, which the teacher told us they did out of respect. Umi had never seen students do this before, so it’s not an Indonesian habit, which would have surprised me anyway. I made a point of saying “Selamat siang” (good afternoon, more or less) to every group of head down girls we walked by.

It’s such a devout place here. The girls are kept strictly separate from the boys, and wearing full hijab from a very young age. The women are not allowed to teach the boys, and the men can teach the girls only after the men have married. “Do you think that makes a difference, Kirk?” Umi asked me, and I said that yes, married teachers in the United States and especially married men teachers never ever ever became romantically involved with their students, because they were married. Umi, whose husband is an Imam in East Java, thinks it’s all a bit over the top. “It’s not fair to the women,” Umi told the teacher who is escorting us during this visit. “It is only part of the religion and the culture,” he said. “We do not believe in treating women and girls differently, and we give them all equal opportunities.”

On the other hand, the women in the workshop, all of them of course in full hijab too, were the most active, energetic, funny, and engaged – not one was late after the breaks (almost all the men were, every time). They were open-minded and creative. Almost everyone there is from Madura, and most even from that same village, and it made me think it must take a particular kind of drive and personality to push yourself into a career as a teacher, or probably in any job in Madura, as a woman, and to succeed at it. They are an impressive group, I must say.

Driving back, through air thick with the smell of burning everything, past crowded warungs and blasting mosques and motorcycles with families of four on them and trucks stacked three times higher than the top of the truck with dried tobacco, on one lane roads that somehow accommodated two cars and a motorcycle, and sometimes a truck too, I was glad to be back. I can’t figure out why I like it here so much, but I do. Tomorrow, day two of the workshop…

This morning I went for just a short walk around the hotel area and stumbled upon a parade of child marching bands wearing a variety of brightly colored uniforms and absolutely out of unison – maybe age 8 or so – playing what I have google-learned since are called melodicas, little toy pianos that only operate when you blow into them through a tube, and also various sorts of xylophones, including ones shaped like a harp that you hold like a shield, and lots of drums. There were dozens of these bands marching down the city street, which was also, in the other two lanes, a regular city street in Surabaya, the second largest city in Indonesia, which is to say incredibly busy with cars and motorcycles and busses and, because it was Sunday in Surabaya, bicycle clubs, all of which were compressed now into two lanes instead of four to accommodate the children’s marching bands.  They were playing traditional Surabaya songs, which I knew because the police officer who came over to introduce himself to me while he waved the traffic along began singing loudly with them. It is the Muslim New Year this weekend, so there’s a lot going on. 

Ibu Umi found me in the hotel breakfast area later, and we met up with her contact, an English teacher from Sumenep, the city on the eastern tip of Madura Island where I am now. He had already driven about five hours with a driver, just to turn around and drive another five hours back with us.  Fortunately the road in Madura was very smooth, freshly paved, we learned, because the previous President, who went simply by the initial SBY, visited recently while he was still the president, and I was grateful.

You get to Madura by crossing a long bridge from Java, about five kilometers, and then strangely the climate becomes markedly different – still hot, of course, but now arid. It’s much less green and lush, though from the car in most other respects it looked a lot like rural Javanese cities. Madura has an odd reputation in Indonesia – it’s supposed to be sort of rough and rude, which after wandering around Sumenep this evening seems strange. It is one of the cleanest cities I’ve been to in Indonesia, and in the central park there are all these contraptions that are attached to motorcycles and will carry around passengers. There were dozens of them, and the outsides are hand made out of carved and painted foam into elaborate and really quite bizarre shapes. The park is filled with tightly pruned trees, and kids can rent miniature motorcycles and zoom around the place, which they do some quite quickly and with their baby brother sitting in the front often, and of course no one wears a helmet. And something completely unprecedented happened to me at that park, not only for Indonesia but for my travels anywhere: I bought some stickers from a woman – less than two dollars worth – and she gave me a discount, because I was a visitor. So far I haven’t seen the rough part.

That is my friend Umi standing next to a giant foam carved baby vehicle

It is very hot here, and humid, and quite devout as well, which means that I can’t buy a beer even in the Alfamart, which always can be counted on for beer.

Tomorrow Asadi from the school will pick us up – he said the ceremony begins at eight. Of course there is a ceremony, and there will be speeches and local dignitaries and snacks and handshakes and lots of pictures, and then I’ll meet with a group of students – about a hundred I am told. I asked Asadi today what they were expecting, and he began talking about how they need to learn the about where the predicate is in English, because they get it confused with Indonesian. “I hope it will be okay if I don’t talk about that,” I said. Tomorrow it’s just with students, and only for the morning. Tuesday and Wednesday are for teachers. Asadi asked me if I wanted to wear a sarong, which most other men and boys will be wearing, but I said no, because I imagined putting it on wrong and then having it fall off while I was talking, which there would be no way I could ever recover from. I do get to teach in bare feet again, which I never get to do in the United States…

Surabaya concerts

Had an afternoon in Surabaya, and stumbled upon two concerts in different venues. Who could forget all those Saturday mornings with Oggy and the Cockroaches?

Later, I walked a little more than a mile from my hotel to a park known for food courts and stumbled upon the Festival Musik Islam there, which was quite wonderful. I watched several acts, including these girls from Surabaya. This was a very Indonesian afternoon. Later I ate fried Indomie noodles with a fortune teller and spiritual advisor, Pak Fauzy, who stopped me as I was walking by and insisted I sit and that he pay for my dinner.

I meet my friend Ibu Umi this morning, and we'll drive to Madura. I'm ready to get to work tomorrow.

The red shirt, and Bu RIni's

I did leave the house yesterday, after the killer headache that I didn't mention in my posting yesterday but which kept me up half the night subsided, and I remembered how funny people thought it was, before, that I would just go walk places, and by myself. I found my way to campus, which is quite near where I am staying, and within minutes I'd run into a former colleague, now the chair of the English Department, and a former student who was just in town for the weekend from Surabaya. He was in my public speaking class, which I taught in my first semester here, one of the classes they told me not to worry about because the curriculum was already written. I wandered up into the Language Training Center where Laura and I spent three mornings a week learning Indonesian, and saw another former student and several of the staff members, and it was lovely. No one knew I would be there - I'm expected in two weeks for the conference.

The custodian there invited me back for coffee and we sat and visited, if that's what you can call a conversation where I can barely understand what he is saying because I have forgotten all my Indonesian and all I can say is "I remember you. You were nice and talked to us during every break when I had coffee" - or,  more accurately, probably "I remember. Nice man talk when I get coffee." I reiterated that point several times, in various syntax, with great enthusiasm. He used to have long conversations with me during our class breaks, and he speaks no English, and he was like another teacher there, speaking slowly, teaching me new words, but also just talking and expecting me to get the gist. I really liked him, and I had forgotten I liked him so much.

Then a couple of other staff members popped in and we chatted too, half Indonesian and half in English - Indonesian when they wanted to humor me and English when we had actual things to say to one. I asked after the family of one of the women, because I had attended her father's funeral when I was here, an esteemed local whom I unfortunately never met. I reminded her that I had committed one of my Indonesian faux-pas at the funeral because I wore a red batik shirt. (My Indonesian teacher and friend Ibu Frances whispered over to me when I sat down by her, "you shouldn't have worn red.") She laughed and said that she had been too busy to notice. "Of course," I said. "But several other people told me about later," she said. That made me laugh very hard for some reason.  She also said that in Indonesia, people usually wear dark colors to funerals, which of course is a crazy exotic Javanese tradition that no one could have expected this Westerner to comprehend in advance.

I walked from there to lunch at Bu Rini's, which might be, I remembered, one of my favorite restaurants in the world. It's delicious traditional Indonesia food - I had ayam bakar pedas (spicy grilled chicken) and a lime squash. It's a miracle of a place - feels like a haven, because it's right in the middle of the city, really, and yet you enter and sit out on the edge of a rice paddy with a view of the volcano and it's so incredibly pleasant. I ended up there again for dinner because Colin and Retno wanted to eat there again, and I had beef ribs, fried noodles, mixed vegetables, some tofu, and this head exploding samba (spicy condiment) that I accidentally ate too much of - even that sensation, the way the heat moves from inside your mouth and then encircles your entire head and makes the entire world revolve around the experience of your exploding and then imploding brain, even that was nostalgic. There is a notable absence while I am here in Salatiga, of my family, who shared that year with me and who I desperately wish could share this return with me too. I think of them every where I go here, and miss them not because we are separated, exactly, but because we had such an intense year here (as past readers of this blog will understand carries many meanings). Everyone asks about them, especially istri Anda (your wife) Ibu Laura.

The view from my table at Bu Rini's 

The nostalgia ends today though. This morning Colin and Retno will drive me to Semarang (via the new toll road that I've never been in) and then I fly to Surabaya, a giant city in East Java, where I'll spend the night. My friend Ibu Umi, about whom I will undoubtedly have much to write, will meet me there tomorrow and we will drive about five hours to the island of Madura, where I'll meet with students for a day and then run a two-day workshop for English Language Teachers at an Islamic Boarding School there. I have never been to Madura - it's a renowned and even legendary island in Indonesia - so I am excited.

I saw this banner several times around Salatiga yesterday. It is in honor of the new president, and it translates more or less as "Good work my president. Democracy is heard and carried out by the wishes of the people." That's President Jokowi on the left with his vice-president. Before when people met us, they always mentioned Obama; now they say that their new president is just like Obama, which is to say, I think, that he is a man of the people, etc. etc. The symbol of unifying the nation on the banner is the outline of all the religious buildings.  The note at the bottom of the Magnum Blue banners that frame it says "Warning smoking kills." They really really love big banners here. 

Salatiga jet lag

View from the porch, with Mount Merbabu in the background and garden construction below

My ambition this morning - Friday morning in Salatiga - was to wake up, eat breakfast, and then go wander aimlessly through the streets of my old home, but I woke up after everyone at the house I stayed in had left, even though I went to bed early. Awake again at about midnight, for about three hours, and then finally, blissfully at that point, sleep again. I've got the fog of jet lag now, this Friday morning, but that's preferable to the restless wide awake jet lag in the middle of the night. Still, it's probably about 30 minutes walk from here to downtown, which doesn't seem that far except it's hot outside, and humid too. If I go walk downtown now, I will be dripping with sweat immediately, and look like that hulking wet bule of my former teaching days. I'll have other chances to wander around, and I've got several things I have to prepare for the next three weeks, so I might use work as an excuse to avoid the heat. I suspect, though, a desire for some delicious street food will pull me out the door, and I'll already procrastinating on my work by writing this blog entry.

Yesterday I flew from Jakarta to Solo - among the other recorded announcements they played before the flight, in two languages - no smoking, seat belts fasten like this, etc. etc. - they played this: "Dear passengers, we would like to remind you that trafficking or carrying drugs is a criminal offense that carries a maximum penalty of death." That really seems the most maximum they could get, and I was glad for my decision to leave the heroin at home.  When we landed in Solo, I was greeted with that traditional Javanese sound of seat belts unbuckling the instant the plane wheels hit the ground, though uncharacteristically no one got up before the plane stopped.

In ways I didn't expect, everything seems so normal here. I had in my head perhaps my first arrival, when as soon as we left the airport in Jakarta the whole swirling craziness seemed overwhelming. Now, though, it really did feel just like old times, right away, almost sedate, even as the taxi driver steered around buses and trucks on the shoulder or on the other side of the road (there were only motorcycles there, after all) - I suddenly wanted to drive myself again. I was quite pleased that it didn't take me aback in any sort of way - I feel no sort of culture shock here, which is a relief, even though I couldn't for the life of me remember what the word for "eight" was when I talked to the taxi driver (delapan, by the way).

The strangest thing I saw driving up from Solo was a highway not strewn with trash - or perhaps the strangest thing I saw that explained that a bit were trashcans on the city streets, at regular intervals, with two receptacles, even, one for organic waste. When I asked my students before, they couldn't come up with an Indonesian word for "litter." Later, when I strolled a bit after arrival, I walked by several unofficial, illegal, and very fragrant trash dumps, so I don't want to overstate the change, but it bordered on remarkable, and encouraging, that there seems to be a different attitude toward trash than when we were here only three years ago.

I am staying at our friends' house on the north edge of Salatiga - Colin and Retno used to be our neighbors, and they've moved into a new and very comfortable house. They are off working today, and I am alone in the house - alone in that Javanese way, since there are, around me working, several people, some as housekeepers and some still building the back garden, which remains unfinished. It's a very nice house, though, sunny and cool and a good place to recover my legs again for a bit.

Sunscreen - I forgot sunscreen. Did I mention that it looks really hot out there? That hazy tropical heat. I can see the extinct volcano, Merbabu, from the window stunning and formidable, as always.

Yesterday evening I walked for about an hour around the neighborhood Colin and Retno live in. We used to live in another neighborhood, and I wasn't so familiar with this one, and found myself after about 20 minutes in the tempat wisata karaoke - literally, the karaoke tourist district - which every sizable town in Java has, and which figuratively translates as "the red light district." I had buzzed through this part of town on my motorcycle before, but never on foot, so I suppose my motives for being there were an object of curiosity. There are, there, several bars with karaoke available in separate rooms, but, just to be clear, that's all the details I have of the inner-workings in the tempat wisata karaoke. It reminded me of the almost casual way Indonesia makes room for what is clearly a sort of social deviance - in a country where internet pornography is censored by law, and that is the most religious place I have ever lived, there are spaces carved out like a kind of moral overflow zone. There is something funny about walking through a red light district while the afternoon call to prayer is echoing throughout the hills from dozens of mosques. I turned around in the middle of a rubber plantation, where the trees were scored and cups were hanging to catch the rubber. So many familiar daily things I had already forgotten.

And so I am here, and it is wonderful even in the jet lag fog. When I left Montana, I was worried that I would be gone too long, that I should have scheduled a shorter trip. Now, here, I am already starkly aware of how brief this visit will be, and I suspect I will be glad for every day of the trip, bathed in sweat or in the wrong neighborhood or listening in wide awake jet lag to the sound of the Javanese nighttime. I'll be honest: it feels a bit like my home here, but the kind of home that still feels like home when you come back to it. So far it's very pleasant. 

Arrival, and again

Hello blog.

I arrived in Jakarta last night, my first return to Indonesia in over three years, at about 1 AM. I'd wondered what the first thing I might notice when I got here would be: it was the air freshener, that cloying chemical botanical that I whiffed as soon as I walked onto the jetway. Easy trip, mostly, Bozeman, Seattle, Seoul, Jakarta - delay in Seattle meant that I had to get bumped onto a later, Korean Air flight into Jakarta, but that was minor.

I have forgotten my Indonesian to an embarrassing degree. Last night, after my shuttle wasn't there to take me to the hotel I'd booked, I couldn't even summon the word for expensive (mahal) which meant that I couldn't bargain very well with the taxi driver, and consequently paid him quite handsomely for a very short ride that I knew should never cost that much. Basically it cost the same to get from the airport to my hotel 10 minutes away as it will cost for an hour long taxi ride from Solo today, when I head to Salatiga. I spent very little time concerned about the cost of the taxi, I might add, because I couldn't believe how little I remembered in Indonesian. The taxi driver was very nice, though, and he chatted with me - his English matched my Indonesian, almost - pleasantly for the duration.

The room is comfortable, near the airport, with a great Indo buffet for breakfast - I had bubur ayam, nasi goring, mie goring, and fruit. Lovely and delicious. I went out for a walk this morning, to find an ATM mostly, into the Jakarta heat and traffic, and lasted out there about 15 minutes. It's boiling here, and humid, and dirty, and busy - Jakarta, after all - and wonderful too, even. Motorcycles on the pedestrian overpass, makeshift outhouses over fetid ponds, food stalls every where, a makan padang resto (Indonesian fast food, basically, from Sumatra) around the corner. Everything is moving and honking politely and in action - now, I hear the call to prayer from my hotel room for the first time since arriving.  If it weren't all so familiar, even still, all the sensations would certainly be overwhelming.

All the news here is about the new president, inaugurated on Monday. He wears batik shirts when he meets with other presidents, looking sleek and comfortable when he met with John Kerry after the inauguration on Monday. He does interviews in his bare feet, and his favorite band is Megadeath. How can you not love this place?

Still, I have a dearth of things to say so far - still lagging from the jet. But I am back here, again, and it's strange and wonderful. No doubt the arrival in Salatiga, where I am staying with my old friends Colin and Retno, will spur me on with more to say - something more interesting to say - but until then, here I am, in Indonesia.

In which I just remember some stuff I need to remember

I miss my blog.

            There is something about the regular reflection on an intense experience that becomes an important aspect of the experience, an aspect of its narrativizing I guess, that the blog served such an important function for. And while in past trips abroad – aside from a college-year in London, my longest exit before Indonesia had been a seven-week Central American jaunt in the late 1980s – I have been able to shape that experience in the telling, a little, after I return, it’s been harder to do that with a year abroad. I feel like I need an hour or two a week in which I schedule someone to come and listen to me, and my family too, talk about what happened over there. But it’s hard to suggest that, honestly.  And the result has become, now, that at the time when I finally want to talk about my year, I don’t really have a venue to talk about it. And by now, I assure you, our return to Bozeman is, for the most part, old news. (“Didn’t you go somewhere last year?” people might ask, when they see me – or – “I haven’t seen you forever – where have you been?”)

            So:

            There was a toddler – a little girl of about two – the daughter of the couple who ran our favorite sate stand, up the street from where we lived about a kilometer. Once a week or so we’d head up there to pick up a bunch of chicken sate, with lontong (rice compressed in banana leaves with coconut water) and an incredible peanut sauce. Every time I came there, this little girl would fall apart, weeping inconsolably. Her sweet older sister, who was not frightened of me, would do her best to calm her, but ultimately the toddler had to get moved from wherever she was stashed around the sidewalk stand – covered with tarp and canvas for the rain – and lodged on her mother’s hip. Usually I would arrive, place my order, and then disappear somewhere else for five minutes – the Alfamart up the street for a couple of cold Bintang, for example – in order to keep peace at the sate stand, but sometimes I stayed, the entire time striking abject fear into the heart of this young girl, her parents seeming, only to me perhaps, slightly annoyed, more at me than their daughter, more at the hulking bule who arrives unpredictably and upsets the relative order of their work.

            With the daughter perched on her hip, the mother would run through the steps of preparing the chicken for grilling – the marinating, the basting, and so forth (all the cutting and skewering had been done off-site, presumably somewhere with the most rigid sanitary standards assuring healthful meat – in any case, best not to create that image) – and then the preparing the finished sate for the customers – putting 10 sate sticks in a laminated paper wrapping with some hot peppers, the sliced lontong, and a scoopful of the sauce (this was a Madurese sate, which was somewhat distinctive and more spicy than the Javanese one). The father had a giant Hibachi-like sate grill, with an electric fan attached to keep the coals hot, and he’d be grilling, fanning, turning, moving, overseeing the process with 50 to 100 sates going at a time. The screaming infant was not a useful addition to their workload.

            At the place with the best nasi goreng (fried rice) down the road in the other direction, in a street stall attached to a small store, Graham became fairly good friends with the owner, and, as was his habit in kitchens throughout Indonesia, would perch himself by the cooking space and ask questions about the cooking, the food, and whatever. The couple who ran the place always greeted Graham with enthusiasm and had him, by the time we moved, cooking at the wok the batches of nasi and mei (noodles) that we the specialty there. The man – who became increasingly unhealthy over the time we visited the stand – took a shine to Graham, and together they would hold up ingredients – garlic, peanuts, various vegetables – and learn the Indonesian and English words for them, and he always remembered the English words Graham taught him, which he made sure to use the next time we returned. (He would make jokes to Graham like, “Tidak ada kacang, tapi kami punya peanuts” – which meant “There are no peanuts, but we have peanuts.”) Going to that stand for the 20-30 minutes it would take to get our dinner was always wonderful time spent, sipping a Coke while I watched Graham do his thing. Of course, Graham behind the counter was a great conversation piece in general, and we met a lot of interesting people at that stand.

            There was a mie ayam (chicken noodle soup) stand down the street that I finally stopped at about 6 weeks before our year ended there, part of my renewed enjoyment of street food as our trip came to an end. After my bout with some sort of outrageously painful intestinal virus somewhere around last October, I kind of held back on a lot of street food (the two above remained old stand-bys) but my visit from my friend Michael, in early May, turned me again. Michael would eat anything, all day. When he saw something for sale, on the street, he bought it, and ate it, unconcerned by the fact that the cook pulled a bowl out of a bucket of standing water stuck in a cabinet on the rolling soup stand. I think he did, in fact, get sick, but he also brought gin and bourbon from the duty-free in Singapore (inadvertently smuggling in one liter more than he was allowed) so perhaps our regular night-caps, many of them on a rooftop balcony overlooking the city center of Yogyakarta, helped fend off the worst of it. That mie ayam place was amazing, and I got a delicious meal, which I would now consider, in the United States, a small snack, for around 50 cents.

            These places became our routines, and the people our touchstones of stability. They were members of the community  who recognized us, who knew that our arrival would cause the baby to cry, or bring the sick owner out from the back to talk to Graham, or add extra spice to the soup because he knew I liked that.  Most of their names I never learned, but I will find those stands again someday, and say hello, and some of them will remember me (as the father of one of those two kids, I imagine). Something about the routine movements around our neighborhood – the walks to the small store up the street for gum or kecap manis (sweet soy sauce), the tire repair place where I took my motorcycle when it got a flat (this happened all the time, and it cost 50 cents, where ever I went, to get fixed, in an incredible process that involved a large tin can and kerosene – I loved getting flats, actually, because it always meant a good conversation), the place where I would buy the occasional pack of clove cigarettes (which are way better, and much worse for you, than the clove cigarettes you buy here – and I am glad, because I did learn to enjoy them, and I don’t really need them, and if I could buy them here, it’s not inconceivable that I would - but I would like one on occasion – I confess something about the nicotine spurred on many a blog entry…) – this was the mundane part of our life, and when we lived it, it seemed mundane, not the reason we were there, which I would have connected more to the grand adventures we had, or the teaching, or the road trips – but it was those mundane trips and all those people that are the heart of our year abroad. I miss everything about them.

            One more note, since I seem not to return here very often and I have been wondering about it. We were woefully unprepared to travel with kids, and there were so many times (as readers of this blog will recall) when I thought, as my son loudly abused me on a public bus, for example, that there was nothing pleasant about this experience, that the whole thing had been a grand mistake, and that I was frankly sorry we had gone to all the trouble and expense and hassle and disruption of doing this. I’ve become curious about the experience of families in situations like this, because the bonding I thought we would do, we did not do – that is, we didn’t become better at solving problems, or not being irritated by our irritating habits (I am told I have one or two as well), we didn’t learn to find our family as a self-contained unit that could face any hardship with goodwill and mutual reliance, full of appreciation for the fates that brought us together.  But we did all those things together – we saw so much, and met so many people, and engaged in loud arguments in the most unlikely of places (inside a royal palace, or a train station in Surabaya, or on a Hindu temple overlooking the most extraordinary Central Javanese valley) – and now, in ways I cannot understand, even those times that were genuinely miserable and unpleasant, the times where I wondered if I would ever really like being a father again, are part of a story that ends with me knowing my kids better, and myself better, and my family better. I’m not sure we’re any happier – I still can’t talk to Seamus very well about math, or sex – but I like the three of them a little more, anyway. I’ll have to write a little more about that too perhaps. I’d be curious to hear from other families who traveled abroad for so long like this, unless you had a Brady-Bunch-aren’t-we-special-and-team-like experience, in which case you can save it for someone else.

            I don’t know what that year meant, and I won’t know for a while, I suspect, if ever. But it matters that I figure it out more than I have, in part because it looms so large in my mind, a presence in my life that has changed who I am at home, even though I cannot, in any articulate way, say how.

            I could go on – but time does not permit, and I have reached the limits of a decent blog entry. I have missed you all, though, whoever you are (hi Roz!) – and I’m glad to say hello again.