Cilacap

Despite our close proximity to Mt. Merapi, we remain relatively unaffected by the eruptions that have claimed the lives of almost 200 people now. The tall and very stalwart Mt. Merbabu which stands between Salatiga and Merapi has protected us from anything more serious than a couple of dustings of ash and some hazy skies – nothing more dramatic than you’d experience in a typical Bozeman fire season. When you get beyond Merbabu’s shadow however, things get nasty quick. On the drive to Cilacap where Seamus and I spent the weekend with his class, we were stunned by monochomatic views of the landscape -- every leaf, every blade of grass, every stalk of rice literally coated in ash. On the far side of Magelang which is out of the evacuation zone but in direct line with the volcano, ash was piled up 6 – 8 inches on the road. Trees and stands of bamboo collapsed under the weight of it, crashing into houses, bringing down power lines, and blocking roadways. By the end of the adreneline packed drive (all drives in Indonesia are adreneline packed to be honest), one of our drivers had to hang out the window in the dark while barreling down a mountain road, to splash water on the windshield, clearing the rain-soaked ash which blocked the driving driver’s view.


Drama aside, the trip to Cilacap was well worth it (I can say of course not having been the one hanging out the window). Mountainview School hosts an annual service trip for its students. Cilacap, located on the southern coast of central Java was selected as a site this year for the first time. Cilacap (pronounced chill-A-chop) is a pretty rough and tumble town. For those who can find work at one of the oil refineries, the Holcim plant or the sugar factory, life is pretty good, but for those who can’t, it’s a rough go. We arrived to a fabulously Javanese reception after seven junk-food fueled hours on a bus. Because of the ash and rain, we were at least two hours later than expected but that did not deter the crowd of well-wishers who waited at the Mayor’s house to welcome us with gamelan, traditional dance, lots of well-amplified speechifying, and an elaborate dinner that included fish-too-spicy-to- eat and stir-fried cow’s tongue. The Mayor was not there to greet us because he is in jail, a fact which remained cloudy throughout the weekend despite several attempts get the full-story. After dinner and an incredibly long presentation on the depletion of the mangroves which grow in the lagoon, the seventeen students and seven adults were split up among the crowd for our homestays.

I will say one thing about Cilacap, they know how to treat their guests. Javanese take an incredible pride in being good hosts and most are pretty good at it but the people we met in Cilacap took this to an entirely new level. We were fed pretty much non-stop, and not just bags of chips, we’re talking picnic boxes with yellow rice and fried noodles, huge platters of cakes and rolls, boiled bananas and boiled peanuts, ginger tea and fresh fruit juice. Whenever there was a pause in the conversation, here would come the ibus, arms laden with goodies. My host family was truly amazing, generous and kind. I complimented the grilled fish we ate for breakfast on the last morning, and arrived at the bus for our return trip to find an igloo cooler filled to the brim with fresh seafood to take home. The thing would have cost $400 in the US. Seamus’ host family was a bit more traditional in their diet but he claims that he pushed the cow brains to the side of his plate so delicately that no one noticed. The previous morning he was served chicken foot soup. We’re still laughing about that one.

After far too short a night’s sleep, the students reconvened at the harbor for a 90 - minute boat ride to the small island where the kids would be teaching English and helping with a construction project. A short distance through open water brought us to a gorgeous mangrove forest (I don’t know if that’s what you call a bunch of mangroves, maybe just mangroves). It may have been sheer exhaustion, but the students were very quiet making for a wonderfully peaceful ride. This of course came to a screeching halt when we got to Kampung Luat. Situated in a small fishing village, foreigners are a rare sight and great groups of kids came running to meet the boat when we arrived.

It was really interesting to watch the Mountainview students’ reaction to this new environment. Mountainview students by-in-large are a pretty well-heeled group. The two-room school house which was the site of the service project was about as basic as you can get -- no electricity, no playground, a hastily constructed bridge of two by fours connected the buildings when the water rose during rainy season. While I’m generally not one to brag on my kid, Seamus was a stand-out. The camp counselor in him kicked in and no sooner had he jumped off the boat was he surrounded by a herd of kids, shaking his hand and trying to say his name. While many of his fellow students checked their Blackberries, listened to their ipods and shuffled around nervously, Seamus was right in the thick of it, handing out goodie bags, gluing art projects, shoveling dirt. If one of the reasons to travel is to see the world through a different lens, it was a gift to watch Seamus come to life in this new, strange place.

The trip back was considerably more eventful. About half way through the construction project (the kids were helping to re-grade an area prone to flooding), the boat captain announced that we all needed to board the boat immediately because the boat was sinking which generated two results: 1. a wide-spread, very loud panic among the students and 2. a still baffling counter-intuitive rush to the board the sinking vessel. Turns out the boat was not actually sinking but the tide was going out and the state-of-the-art coast guard vessel on which we had arrived could not make the trip out with the weight of all of us on it. Half of the students were quickly unloaded onto a local fishing boat that was by far the least sea-worthy thing I have ever seen and off we went. Sure enough, not a quarter of the way back, our vessel ran aground, more teen-age panic despite the fact that we were in about 3 feet of water, and the rusted, ramshackle pop-eye boat held together with shoe strings and duct tape had to do a quick u-turn to tow us out.

This was where it got really amusing. Indonesians (I’m generalizing here) are very accustomed to dealing with things going wrong, much more so than Americans -- cars that break down, stoves that don’t work, frequent blackouts -- so when something does happen, they have absolutely no hesitation jumping in, regardless of their understanding or lack thereof of the task at hand. Ok, maybe it was just a guy thing. I can’t say. In any case, seconds later, every Indonesian man on both boats was on the bow of one or the stern of the other throwing ropes back and forth, yelling instructions, etc. We were yanked from our muck pretty quickly but without a motor, we had no steering capacity, and no one took this into consideration so every time we had to turn, which was quite frequent in the Heart of Darkness-esque mangrove forest through which we floated, the pop-eye boat would chug ahead, accelerate through the curve, and our vessel would crack the whip at top speed into the opposing bank. More teen-age panic, lots of squealing, and the first boat would have to stop, turn around, rearrange all of the ropes, and hit the throttle to release us from the muck, resulting in a facefull of big black blasts of exhaust. The 90-minute trip took 4 hours on the return. Oh, and did I mention, the entire time we were being rained on by a continuous stream of volcanic ash from Mt. Merapi?

The rest of the trip was far less eventful. A ‘friendly’ game of basketball was played between the schools, to the cheers of several hundred Cilacap students and after a quick nap, we returned to school for dinner (more food) and performances by the Cilacap students. Seamus and his class were asked to share a performance from their country for which they were woefully unprepared but two brave young women did a relatively inoffensive hip-hop routine (oh hot damn…this is my jam) and were joined by the rest of the class for a very entertaining if imprecise version of the wakka wakka dance. Not exactly a up to the standards of the choir singing traditional Indonesian folk-songs but well-intentioned. The next morning was spent at the high school in cross-cultural exchange which, for this generation, basically means exchanging Facebook information. All in all it was a terrific weekend and while Cilacap might not be a top vacation spot in central Java, Seamus and I will certainly remember it fondly.

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.