Hari dalam bahasa Indonesia

     Wisata bencana is an Indonesian phrase for an Indonesian phenomenon: distaster tourism.

             Any description of our day on Saturday should by rights begin with an act of unwarranted voyeurism, with me standing on the steps to stranger’s kitchen, looking in at a stove and some dishes, presumably drying, me standing there for how long I do not know, staring in, transfixed by a vision of the mundane turned extraordinary.

            I knew it was a kitchen because there was a stove there, and those dishes, but aside from that there was little to distinguish it from the wasteland I stood in. Covered in ash, everything blasted or turned or leaning to the south from the force of pyroclastic flows carrying a heat cloud of 1100-1500 degrees Fahrenheit, moving at a speed of  around 150 miles per hour, the kitchen was part of a landscape in which familiar objects were monuments, a garage, or a siphon, or a clothesline, or the charred ruins of a mosque transformed into memorials of a lost normalcy.

            When we first drove onto the slopes of Mount Merapi, talking our way through one roadblock and bribing our way through another (my family and I were not involved in this talking or bribing, by the way, and none of the money donated by our friends and family was spent on said bribe), we passed through abandoned but otherwise normal seeming terrain, houses, small warungs (shops), farms, schools, in lush forests muted that day by a light fog. There were people around, allowed up for the day, in limited numbers, to attend to their property, though they would return to the refugees camps before it got dark. The emptiness, itself remarkable in this densely populated place, and the layer of ash along the road (washed off by the rain everywhere else) visible clues to the destruction wrought by the eruptions. Indeed, moving closer and closer on the 2 ½ hour drive, we saw a series of strange sights: the leaves of palm trees, broken and inverted by the weight of the ash; rivers torn by the flows of ash and mud carried by subsequent torrential rains; communities newly reoccupied, struggling to bring life back to the farms destroyed by the fallout. It was one of those drives that occasions increasing silence.

            Even so, nothing prepared any of us for the sudden and complete transformation, for what seemed like a crude and arbitrary line drawn, separating the dense green foliage and the colorful houses and the signs of daily upkeep from an apocalyptic landscape unlike anything I have ever imagined. There was a house, surrounded by bamboo, and trees, boarded up but otherwise apparently perfectly intact, and then twenty yards from it, the twisted and grey remains of trees and buildings stretching for miles, hills with the outline of roads winding through neighborhoods where no one will live again for years. There was a new graveyard for some of the first victims, and the smell of decay, and flies everywhere, in huge cloying swarms, that besieged us in the car as soon as we opened the windows to see better the surreal sight unfolding before us.

Graham, standing near a stand with a siphon on it, like stands everywhere in Indonesia that sell fuel in small glass bottles. "I could just imagine myself driving up on a motorcycle," he told me later, "buying some bensin, opening my gas tank and using that siphon to fill it up."

            I thought, after we stopped and I walked slowly through the debris, some still smoking, of power and of death, of the incredible force unleashed by that volcano that could turn this place into what we saw, a ripped skeleton of the earth, trees stripped and blackened, one wrapped in a piece of metal, and rows and rows of charred bamboo, lying on its side, all pointing the same direction, of the vast, and of the immediate, of the family whose broken dishes lied still neatly placed against each other.

            I don’t have the descriptive vocabulary to take this further. I need Cormac McCarthy or Dante to step in perhaps, to find the right Biblical syntax, or Shelley, maybe, to offer up the sublime with its terror and transcendence. I will never forget it, I cannot stop running the scene through my head. I just offer it, because it matters, it matters to the people who reached out over the distance of thousands of miles to offer a small but welcome helping hand. This is where the people you helped lived, until a month ago, until they moved to the cramped quarters of the schools and churches and mosques and dormitories and warehouses and whatever else that could be commandeered to take in the hundreds of thousands lucky enough to flee alive.

            Laura spent all of Friday in Semarang with Ibu Maria, shopping for the 300 individual bags we assembled (with ten people, total) on the ground floor of our house late into Friday night. Each bag had five packages of dried noodles, a can of sardines in tomatoes, a can of chocolate sweetened condensed milk, a bag of dried shredded beef, a container of kacip manis (sweet soy sauce, the Indonesian go-to condiment), three eggs boiled in a traditional Indonesian way, five small notepads, three pencils, and a package of feminine sanitary napkins. We also had several bags of diapers for families with babies. We passed these out in three locations – at two schools, where the teachers brought in students who were living in refugee camps and we gave a bag to each one, and at a refugee camp on the outskirts of Yogyakarta, in a school and a police station, with the army set up in a bivouac along the side and some aid workers in another canvas tent. There were 500 people in this refugee camp, some of them people whose homes were in the area we had visited earlier that afternoon, and the children and mothers (almost none of the fathers) lined up and took one bag at a time, along with three boxes of vitamins.

            It felt both very small, and very important – small because they are still where they are, and still without a sense of what the future will be, still, as one of the refugees I talked to put it, faced with “banyak kerja dan bukan uang” (“lots of work and no money”), with leveled houses and decimated farms. It was not a happy place, but the people were quietly grateful, and I was even more grateful, grateful that I could live in this place, at least, with a sense that I was a member of my community in a time of need, grateful even more for the community I was even more aware of from my home, who made our outreach possible, who supplied 300 families with goods and food to augment the rice most camps have in abundance.

            I was grateful, too, for my children, who took in the sight of the ruined landscape with silence and awe, who arrived at the camp with enthusiasm and compassion. Seamus ran across the street and bought bunches  of candy and two soccer balls, and went around to each person he could find, offering them candy, and passing off the balls to groups of eager children. Graham reached into some place deep, played a role he hasn’t played so much, that of the playful older kid, who swung small children in circles, threw kids over his back and ran around with hordes chasing him, put a box on his head and chased groups of laughing screaming kids.  And we spent a hour there, delivering the goods, playing with the children, greeting the soldiers, all of whom were from Salatiga (and who insisted, to my great embarrassment and reluctance, that I eat some rice and vegetables – I took as meager a portion as I politely could), talking to the refugees and the volunteers.

            Earlier that day, when I was addressing a group of teachers who had been displaced by the eruption (another amazing experience that I will write about next), I told them how glad I was to be there, what an honor it was to meet them. And I told them something like this: “I want you to know that my friends and my family in America know what happened, they are aware of your suffering, and they send their love, prayers, and money for you.  They know you are here, and they want you to know that.” After Ibu Maria finished translating that for me, the teachers applauded. They were applauding for all of you who reached out when we asked you, for all of you whose gift was not only the supplies a (large and grateful) handful of families got to help them through a part of their trials, but also to know that they have not been forgotten, ignored, passed over. Such is the looming plight of an on-going refugee crisis, and you lifted that, even if briefly, gently and with compassion that stretched from the other side of world, to a community of people whose world has been flattened, whose most intimate spaces are recognizable only by the destroyed detritus of their previous lives. I know they are grateful, and we are grateful too, and honored that we could be emissaries of a such a wonderful group. I thank you again and again.

Graham, playing games with the kids at the camp, who chased him and called him "Mas Graham" and who treated him, to his great delight and with his complete encouragement, as a human jungle gym.

An Indonesian Thanksgiving

   Last night, at our Indonesian neighbor Ibu Lala's house, with her family Pak Eko, Larissa, and Ezel, we had Thanksgiving dinner, with her sister's family and a Korean family who live down the block. We had written off Thanksgiving, with little grief, but when we got the invitation, we were of course delighted, and my pleasure at actually having a Thanksgiving reminded me of why I like this holiday so much. And it was a great Thanksgiving, a delicious dinner, and great company - Pak Eko is a television producer who develops Indonesian reality TV shows - he got written up recently in the New York Times for his reality TV productions - and he talked me through several of them: the hidden camera that sees if people volunteer to help strangers in pretend need on the street, the 12 hour version of Extreme Home Makeover, the I-almost-died true story reenactments. Though his house is 10 feet from my house, we had not yet met ("That is the American way," he said loudly - he lived in Tulsa for 6 years when we went to Oral Roberts, "but not the Indonesian way!" And he laughed, a big and very happy laugh).  He decided last night that he wants me to be the host of his new documentary feature, Garbage Nation, which deals with the unbelievable problem of trash in Asia. In any case, we'll go down to Semarang sometime soon, the four of us, to watch them filming and producing one of the several reality TV shows he develops. It was the first time I wished I had a TV here, since some of the shows sound very funny, and reality TV shows are actually programs you can understand with limited language skills.

    Turkey, stuffing (delicious from the wok), string bean casserole, mashed potatoes, salad, cranberries, all served elegantly from a table set up in the car port - we ate in the front hallway, since there was no table large enough for us all. Pak Eko's brother-in-law, a pastor, prayed in Indonesian, and then Pak Eko gave a wonderful prayer as well - that I might transform my students at the University, that our family will bring great things to Indonesia, that the Koreans will find a way out of their present conflict peacefully - and we ate, and talked, and ate some more, and talked. No wine (alas) and no pumpkin pie, but apart from that, it felt just like Thanksgiving, and we were so pleased for the invitation and the dinner and the new friends. It was one of those banner days.

    That was yesterday - it's still Thanksgiving in the US as I write this, and we'll skype home to my parents in a few minutes, and then I have to teach (I presented yesterday at a conference - how could they hold a conference on Thanksgiving Day?) while Laura and the kids will go to Semerang. Seamus and Graham will go a movie, and Laura and our friend Ibu Maria will put together the supplies for the refugees we will visit tomorrow, outside of Yogyakarta.

     They will purchase these supplies with the $2,300 that our friends, family, and fellowship contributed for the Merapi refugees, from a request we put out last week. Laura has been working to process all the money, get it in cash one way or another (credit cards, with limited exception, are largely useless here) and working through all the details. We'll report on the visit next week, in detail, and we'll keep track of every rupiah we spend, in scanned documents, so that you can track them money you donated. But I want to tell you, here, how enormously moved we were by the incredible outpouring of support. With several villages incinerated, over 300 people now dead as a result of the eruptions, and communities that have barely begun to consider the process of rebuilding (or not rebuilding), and as the event falls from the attention of the media here, I promise you that this will be money well spent, and we have never felt so close to home, so far away, since we arrived here. Thank you thank you thank. That's my biggest Thanksgiving message - on Thanksgiving weekend we will deliver the gifts you so amazingly provided.

(I was sorry that the pass-through with Mountainview didn't work out, because it had the makings of a great joke set-up: "Did you hear the one about the lesbians, the Unitarians, and the Jew who gave money to the Fundamentalist Christian School?" I'll keep working on that one.)

Love, Gratitude, and Stuffing in a Wok

By the time we finish our turkey, family and friends back home will just be waking up, making coffee, trying to unstick the pages of Joy of Cooking and muttering, ‘is it 15 minutes per pound at 350 or 10 at 400 wait no 300?‘ Wonderful holiday tradition! Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday. I get to cook with my favorite people, the meal is all my favorite foods, and there is nothing overtly religious that I have to feel bad about. Every Thanksgiving, I re-live American football on the shores of Lake Washington, oysters at Pete & Jen’s, Bill Christmas’ cranberries, turkey on the picnic table, and Graham‘s first lost tooth. Devon’s dinner rolls, Cathy’s green beans, and my mom’s mashed potatoes. Oh! My mom makes good mashed potatoes. So today, just another day in Salatiga, I joyfully hopped on the number 9 and bought almonds at the pasar to go into the stuffing for the meal we will share at the home of our neighbor Ibu La La. And I remember all of those things for which I am so very thankful this year.

Note: If you are reading this and are not from the US, my apologies for the absurdly sentimental outpouring that is about to follow. It is tradition.

I am grateful for my family. For my kids who are being so game throughout this whole crazy adventure. My husband who is not afraid of anything, even when he should be. My mom holding down the fort and my dad who worries even though he has enough to worry about. My nephew Scotty whose enthusiasm for our trip knows no bounds, the list goes on. We are a fortunate lot.

My girlfriends, oh, my girlfriends! I would be nowhere with out them. They send me jokes, tell me the weather, share neighborhood gossip, and basically remind me that the world is really not that big a place and that everything is just fine. Kirk is grateful for them too but for different reasons.

Inextricably linked to this, I am grateful for the internet. For Skype and for Facebook and Yahoo. This would be a very different experience without it.

I am grateful for the deeply imbedded sense of hospitality that we have experienced throughout Indonesia. The offers of rides, of food, of furniture! The infinite patience I experience every time some poor Indonesian is subjected to my Bahasa. The sense of inclusion that we experience everywhere we go. A woman paid my bus fare the other day, just to be hospitable! We chose Indonesia, in part because we read the Indonesians were friendly, because they embraced foreigners and welcomed them. Really, we had no idea.

I’m grateful for so much this year. Mostly, I’m grateful for the crazy set of circumstances that brought us here and that I live in a time when I can crouch over my little two-burner, stirring my wok-full of Indonesian bread crumbs, Egyptian almonds, and California dates, in French butter with my coconut shell spoon (ok, truth be told, there were better implements for stirring but I loved the symbolism of it), laptop resting on my knees and celebrate with those thousands of miles away.

Love and gratitude, my friends. Happy Thanksgiving!

Hari dalam bahasa Indonesia

Diminutive, in Bahasa Indonesia, is mengkatapengantarkan pengecil.

Special Request

Several people have asked how they might help support the relief effort for those affected by the recent eruption of Mt. Merapi here in Central Java. For a time, we were as confused as everyone else! The relief effort was hampered by wild media coverage, news of conflicting (and competing) NGO’s, and lack of government direction and oversight, even our local friends were confused. Meanwhile, over 200 people have died and thousands remain homeless. The eruptions have died down considerably. From where we sit, Mt. Merapi looks once again like the picture postcard volcano with charming but harmless little puffs of smoke rising from the crater but frankly no one, local or otherwise, can say if the current crisis is over. And, the people in the camps, who were living pretty hand-to-mouth to begin with, have nothing to return to -- no houses, no schools, no livestock, no crops, no mosques, no churches. Everything has been incinerated.

Graham’s Indonesian teacher, Ibu Maria Teguh, who has become a good friend, is organizing a delivery of supplies to one of the refugee camps in which she has a colleague. The Indonesian government has, from all reports, flooded the camps with rice and pop mie (instant noodles of marginal nutritional value) but little else. Our hope to provide some badly needed supplies to one of the camps outside of Yogyacarta. These supplies -- protein in the form of salted eggs, dried beef and tinned fish, diapers and powdered milk, vitamins and school supplies -- will be purchased in Salatiga and driven over to the camps on Sunday, November 26, by Ibu Maria, a couple of other teachers, and ourselves.

To be frank, American dollars go a long way in this part of the world. Ibu Maria gave me a list of the supplies they wanted included in each family packet: a weeks worth of eggs, milk, diapers and supplies came to about 65,000 Rupea. At 9,000 Rupea to the dollar, that’s a little over seven bucks. It’s not enough to live on, but it will make a HUGE difference!

Please consider helping us with this effort. I know that there are many important causes competing for your attention at home, but for the time being, this is our home, and we feel obliged to do what we can to help the neighbors and friends who have made us so welcome in it.

If you're still interested in helping with Merapi relief, please make your check payable to:

Laura Prindiville
Account: 10043487
In the memo line, please write "Merapi Relief".


Then mail it to:

First Security Bank
208 E. Main Street
Bozeman, MT 59715


As the timeline on this is pretty tight, please do email me at prindylou@yahoo.com and let me know how much you are sending. That way, Kirk and I can cover any gifts that don't clear before the weekend. I promise to keep all donations confidential.

Laura, Kirk, Seamus and Graham Patrick

The Teacher is the Ruling Class

November 18, 2010

            A student who helped usher us through the hullaballoo and confusion of arrival smiled politely at me, before the semester started, when I told her I was determined to have a discussion-based class, and told me I would have a difficult time doing it in Indonesia. “Students don’t want to talk in Indonesia. They are very reluctant to participate.” It is not as if my students are competing for the floor in my classes in the United States, so I didn’t let her prediction concern me too much. I told her it didn’t really matter, that I wasn’t really able to teach in another way, and that my students were out of luck if they hoped for me to just pop in and lecture. “I didn’t travel to Indonesia to hear myself talk,” which might not be true given that I have also started writing a blog.

            So I was slightly prepared in my first week of classes when my students really didn’t want to speak at all. It made quite a bit of sense to me actually. I’m not a small person, and I am very white, and very American, and I speak loudly, and I learned later very quickly, and I was sweating profusely, the way someone who lives in Montana sweats when he moves to the tropics and then is a little amped up on coffee and nervous energy and has ridden his bicycle in busy traffic to a stuffy room on a sunny day. I think I might have looked somewhat alarming, and perhaps they thought I would pass out, and hurt one of them in the process.  So their silence, in that first day in my critical reading class, was not terribly hard to understand.

            After my first week, teaching my two other classes that were likewise perspiry and quiet, I of course asked my students what was going on. I intentionally had them do a very simple free-write in my critical reading course,  something along the lines of “what was a word that you saw in the reading last week, and why did you see it?” My plan was then to ask for someone to tell me the one thing that they wrote down, in the knowledge that everyone in the room would have that one thing written down and they would certainly read it for me off their paper. When they did not, no matter how politely I phrased the question, I said, “Listen, you need to tell me why no one is speaking,” a question which, somewhat more predictably, got no response.

            I am a patient person in the classroom, however, and determined, and I waited, until Severine nervously raised her hand and said, “you do speak a little fast, sir.” (There appears to be nothing I can do to not be addressed as ‘sir’ several times a day.) This was a breakthrough moment, because of course while it might occur to most thoughtful people to speak slowly to a group of non-native speakers in a classroom where learning to read in English is a central focus, I had not considered the possibility.

            Now

            I

            speak

            more

              like

               this.

            (Really. I picture my words leaving my mouth in a sort of vertical descent, rather than horizontally, at least when I am concentrating on speaking slowly enough and with the right sort of not-patronizing-but-not-obfuscatory English language.)

            After that, the students started speaking, no torrent, certainly, but a small spring of discourse that cheered me no end. I learned all sorts of interesting things that first week, when variations of this discussion occurred in all of my classes. I learned, for example, that Indonesian students are conditioned to extreme deference toward the teacher, and that this included a rather deep anxiety, magnified by my being an American teacher who couldn’t speak any Indonesian at that point, of making mistakes in English pronunciation and grammar. In my writing class, I learned that this regularly translates into a paper that is full of marks of grammatical errors, and that one of the points of many of their English classes appears to be learning that they are not native speakers of the language and thus make errors in pronunciation every time they speak and in grammar every time they write. (I comforted them by showing them some research done on multi-national speakers of other languages who communicate in English for business and other transactions, situations in which, quite literally, error does not exist, because no one is marking it, everyone is focused on making sense, and the goal is understanding one another. There’s a lot of miscommunication, and a lot of round-about face-saving discussion to help discover the actual gist of the conversation, but no error, because error only exists in language, I told them, when someone is looking for it. I’m not much of an error-seeker, but their other teachers are, and my lack of attention to error worries them a little.) Essentially, they learn quite a bit about how poorly they speak and write the English language, at least as they told about their classes. They have a sympathetic ear in me, to be sure, because the thing I know better than I have known anything else in my life, and the lesson that is reaffirmed to me anytime I am within earshot of Indonesian language, is that I speak and listen to Indonesian very poorly.

            I was instructed by students in my public speaking class to do something that I have never liked to do as a teacher, which is to ask a question and then call randomly on students to answer it. I’ve always found this to be a failing strategy in my classrooms in the United States. It kind of irritates my students there, like I am somehow over-stepping my bounds. But in my classrooms here it actually relieves the mounting pressure. All teachers are familiar with the ways silence in the classroom creates tension, and one of the secrets, of course, of getting students to speak is to let them become more nervous by the silence than it makes you (a very hard thing to do, as any new teacher will tell you). But in Indonesia, it’s comically extended, and my students here are actually capable of out-waiting me, of not responding to the most basic questions so resolutely that I give up. (I now preface my solicitations from students with the phrase “I know I am not supposed to ask questions like this, but does anyone have any comment about….?”) Almost always, though, when I call on them randomly (“Agam, what do you think?”),  my students have an answer ready, usually a pretty good one, and they seem perfectly happy to tell it, and even sort of glad sometimes when I asked.

            I was doing this in my writing course during the second week of the semester, making my students read things they had written during their freewrite (another violation of my teaching code, but if I didn’t do this I tell you nothing would happen, and then I would have to listen to myself talk, which I am perhaps protesting too much about not enjoying). “Does this bother you, to just ask you like this?” I asked one of them, as I was going around. “Oh no,” she replied.
“We are used to it. In Indonesia, the teacher is the ruling class.”

            In a place like Indonesia, a carnival of post-colonialism, that comment continues to resonate with me. There are ruling classes everywhere, of course (tax cuts for the top 2% anyone?), but for most of Indonesia’s history, the entire point of everything that happened was (at least from the Dutch and then Japanese perspective) justifying and increasing the visibility of the ruling class. Two rather long-lived and slightly unhinged president/dictators powerfully and often quite brutally dominated their “independence” up until the end of the 20^th century. Indonesia is no slouch at colonial power itself, having fought a long and failed war in East Timor and struggling still in places like Papua and northern Sumatra with pesky freedom fighters/unpatriotic insurgents. To mention, in such a delightfully offhand way, that “the teacher is the ruling class,” well, there is something almost resistant about its comfortable transparency. The teacher is not the ruling class here in the way that if you assign something, the students will go and do it – not even close, actually, sometimes to my great frustration. Here, the teacher is the ruling class in the sense that no one wants to tell the teacher that what he is saying doesn’t make sense, or that he might be talking too fast, or that they don’t like the assignment, or that they don’t know why you’re asking them to do this assignment in the first place, or that they didn’t think the test was fair. The teacher is the ruling class in the sense that the teacher’s presence engenders not cooperation, but complicity and silence. I’m still learning how to cope with this, and I am certainly going to write more about it, but I am finding it one of the most fascinating aspects of learning to teach in this new place.