After only two months of complaints and procrastination, I have finally enabled posting of comments on SaraAndLee.com. You will have to register a login name first though.
Now all you smart-aleck readers have no excuse not to keep in touch.
Yesterday I went to my new favorite spot to wait for the bus and found that someone had hacked the plant with the leaves that curl up to death. Coincidence? I think not! I can only hope that it will come back sometime in the next year. In the meantime, I have a new set of favorite plants, the ones in the middle of the sidewalk right in front of the mall I walk by to work each day. Their massive thorns are awesome. I love the way I get the choice of stepping in front of oncoming traffic to avoid them (I mean….admire them at a distance) or having specially tattered clothes each morning. They are great! I certainly hope nothing happens to THEM…..
Sometimes people here just catch me off guard with how nice they are. I think Americans could take some lessons….I know I have/am/will. Last night Lee and I were waiting by the side of a busy road in the dark for a taxi. It was actually fairly late by Indonesian standards, 9PM, but we were quite sure a taxi would come eventually. Had we been in a hurry we would have called one, (yes, you can do that here 
) A guy comes up to us on a motorbike and asks “Are you waiting for a taxi?” Us: “Yes, we wait here for a taxi.” Him “Ok” (this conversation took place in Indonesian, of course) and then he zooms off on his bike to a place across and down the street where a taxi is sitting by the side of the road (we had not seen it) and tells it to come pick us up. Which it does, immediately. Thank you, guy on motorbike! It may not have been far out of his way, but the fact that he thought of it was amazingly nice.
Much of my time here in Indonesia is spent not knowing what is going on. Part of that is cultural. It seems like Indonesians are not always forthcoming with details. A couple of weeks ago the staff at the pesantren mentioned there was a big celebration on “Saturday night” to commemorate some of the students successfully memorizing the whole Koran. When I learned about this, I thought to myself, “OK” Saturday night, I can keep that free.”
Come Saturday afternoon at 1:30PM, I get a phone call asking when I can come to the school. I find out the ceremony begins at 2:00PM. Sticking to my very American value of time management, I have pretty muched booked my entire afternoon. I apologize and feel bad for missing the ceremony, but I carry on. Skip ahead to 7:00PM. Sara and I havejust returned home with dinner, when I get a phone call asking if I will be ready to go to the ceremony in 15 minutes. What? No, I just bought dinner. I convince my co-teacher to give us 30 minutes. Dinner is obviously out. This put me in a grumpy mood. I think it showed when my co-teacher came to pick me up. I would make a very bad Indonesian. It amazes me how they never show anger or frustration.
Sometimes the details are laid out for me, but my not-so-stellar Bahasa Indonesia skills often fail me. A little over a week ago Mas Sigit, my Silat teacher in Yogya, explains how there will be something at the Kraton (big palace-like complex in the middle of Yogya) on Friday. This sounded great. Sara and I have done very little touristy stuff since arriving in Yogya, and this would be a good opportunity to see the Kraton.
It turns out I heard things incorrectly. Most, ok, every time I listen to someone speaking Indonesian, my approach consists of listening for key words and trying to interpolate the rest. For small talk with the bus driver this works well. For real plans and conversations, it does not.
Come Friday, I show up at Mas Sigit’s parent’s house and see everyone dressing and getting ready in Silat uniforms. I think, “oh they’re dressing up, possibly to perform, or possibly to take part in whatever is going on at the Kraton.” Then I’m told I should get dressed. “Huh? No, I didn’t bring my clothes, I uh, didn’t know.” Everyone here must think I’m unable
to follow instructions.
It turned out that there was indeed something big going on at the Kraton. A celebration of 250 years of the city of Yogya, and there was a big parade from the west side of town into the Kraton. And I was going to walk in it with the rest of the Silat troupe.
That sounded good, and I had nothing else to do. How long could it be anyway? Oh, 7+ kilometers. It actually was a great and memorable experience. I thought maybe since I was dressed as a Javanese farmer (complete with rice hat), people wouldn’t notice me as much. Nope. For pretty much the whole
parade, I heard an endless stream of “bule”s (literally albino), lando (javanese for belanda, i.e. Dutch), and “Hello Mister”s. There were also lots of people pointing out the foreigner dressed in Indonesian clothing to their children. What was I to do? The same thing I do every day here in Indonesia, I smile, wave, and say hello to the crowd. At a typical day at the pesantren, I will hear “Hello Mister” about 100 times. This parade had thousands of onlookers. I think I could multiply the “Hello Mister”s by a gajillion to get an accurate estimate.
The parade consisted of about three hours of walking in the hot sun. In the U.S., I would probably wear nice athletic shoes for such an endeavor. In Indonesia I wear sandals worth
roughly $5 US. I guess it could be worse. My Silat brethren were wearing flip-flops worth about $0.60 US.
Another difference: unlike parades in the U.S., parades in Indonesia do not shut down streets. Traffic still attempts to get around. The roads are still pretty full with motorbikes. At one point there was a fleet of motorbikes behind me, waiting for a tiny little portion of road to open up. Really impatient motorbikes just go through the paradeers. While this probably added to the pollution, and kind of distracted from the parade itself, it also allowed our friends to drive up by motorbike and bring us water and snacks. Yes, I ate and paraded at the same time.
After an exhausting 7 kilometers, we relax and hang out for a bit. Then we head out to Bantul, to “visit Mas Sigit’s friend”. I think to myself about how it’s not uncommon for people to drop in like this. Then I think, maybe this friend will feed us dinner. It is after dark after all. We arrive at this old man’s house. Shortly after meeting we are directed to a large pile of sand. Now at 6:30 in the evening after a long day of walking in the sun, we are in for some gotong royong (Javanese for helping one another out). I was actually excited to be finally doing my part to help the post-earthquake rebuilding effort.
I don’t really know how to close this post. I was hoping for some sort of proverb or saying, but all that is coming to me right now is “Life is a box of chocolates.” – I’m so lame.
Some things here really stress me out, like, I don’t know, finding that the mold has already grown back in our house and it’s not even the rainy season yet and I don’t know what to do. It seems kinda managable now, but will it get worse? Should we move to a new place, causing the owners to think we are just spoiled Americans (even though we have already paid for the whole year here….)? Argh! It is a huge dilemma! But so far, when things seem less-than-managable, Indonesia seems to take pity on me and throw me little bright spots of reasons to like it.
1.) A week or two ago, a little boy came biking by me on my way walking home and asked me my name. I told him and asked him his and he biked away laughing. Cute, but I forgot all about him. A couple mornings ago I was walking to work and someone came up beside me and said “Hello Sara”. Not “Hello mister” Not “Hello Miiiiiissss!” Not my personal least favorite “Hello sexy” (WHO taught them that???) I was so shocked all I could say back was a weak hello. It was that little boy….he remembered! If I ever see him again, I have to figure out his name….maybe next time he will be bold enough to tell me.
2.) There’s a place I stop for breakfast, where this woman bakes all sorts of traditional javanese breakfasty foods herself. I know this because I asked, and she is proud (I think) of the fact that I like her food. The other day I got there late and she was out of my favorite thing. I was all set to just try something else BUT….lo and behold….there was one hidden in back (I don’t know why but think maybe she was planning on eating it) and she let me have it without me even saying what I wanted to eat.
3.) When I was in middle school (I think) we went to a botanical-type place in Michigan with girl scouts and were introduced to these plants with feathery leaves that curled up when you touch them (a defense mechanism of sorts). I have been searching for these plants ever since then, touching likely-looking plants in the US in the hopes that they would curl up but they never do. Yesterday while waiting by a clump of plants for the bus I brushed up against them and the leaves curled up! They were the plant I have been looking for for years! I let several buses pass while I played with the plants. People were probably laughing, but I don’t care, I will probably do it again. Sometimes it’s nice to be a foreigner, you can get away with a lot.
Last Wednesday my supervisor informed me that there would be an external evaluation of the programs that our organization was working on, in the small village of Tambi. It was to go from Thursday morning to sometime on Saturday. I was to attend It is incredibly amusing the lack of planning that people have here, really this sort of thing just doesn’t seem to phase them at all, even though for me it was a big deal because a.) What if I already had plans with Lee? And B.) I wasn’t sure if I had enough clothes and had to spend part of the afternoon at the mall buying new ones as I would need them THE NEXT DAY.
Upon being told that there was an external program evaluation in a small village, I assumed it would be somewhere primitive. What I hadn’t been told, and what I found out when I got there, was that it was actually a team building retreat (with a small amount of time to be spent on evaluation), and that it would take place at a resort with ***western toilets and hot showers****. Bliss! Everyone was incredibly friendly and very patient with my continuing lack of language skills. The setting was beautiful, up in the hills surrounded by tea and vegetable farms, with these amazing wisps of fog all over the place. It was actually chilly, so it was a good thing I had stocked up on an extra pair of pants and long sleeve shirt at the mall.
Here are a few of the highlights, or at the very least things that made me laugh:
1.) There was an outdoor bonding course (aka Outbond). Before we started on it, there was a powerpoint presentation. I understood parts of it, but did not understand why there were slides of somewhat scantily clad white women sprinkled throughout. One of them was just dressed in lingerie! Unfortunately I was quite able to understand when each time one of these slides came up people would say things like “Oh Sara, that is your friend” Or “Sara, is that your sister?”.
2.) As part of the outdoor bonding course (aka Outbond), we had to stand in two rows, males facing females (side note, unlike at Intel the gender split here was about 50-50). Then you and your partner would support a beam between you at about waist level and each person would walk along the row of beams. I didn’t think this would be possible, and in fact it was hard, but what made it particularly difficult was that any time an even slightly larger person’s turn would come, people would start putting down their boards and yelling “gemuk, berat!” (fat! heavy!). And everyone would laugh, even those who were being called these things. People here have none of the sensitivity and PC issues that we do in the US.
3.) Also as part of Outbond, we did rafting, complete with life jackets and helmets. In a pond. The helmets were mostly for taking off and using to shovel water at people in the opposing raft. When someone fell out, I realized that the water was only about chest-deep. Later, when I was thrown in to the pond by coworkers, I confirmed this. The water smelled horrible; the clothes I was wearing when thrown in have already been washed once and still smell horrible. Everyone got thrown in though, there was no escaping it, even my boss was dragged by his arms and legs and tossed in.
4.) My roommate had to go home early, so I spent the first night sleeping alone. Blessedly alone, in a huge room with a TV! This however was worrisome for the Indonesians, who believed that I must be too lonely, and probably imagined that I was crying myself to sleep. As a result, the second night a girl was nice enough to move into my room, just to keep me company while sleeping; in the morning she went back to her room to shower and get dressed.
5.) On the last night they brought in a band and had them play and had a bonfire. There was crazy singing and dancing. Never before have I danced with coworkers around a bonfire! The singer in the band noticed that I was foreign (real hard….) and proceeded to dedicate most of the songs to me, saying things like “This song is so that you will not feel alone” or “This song is to tell you that we are family”. It was nice. Would have been even nicer if I didn’t keep getting asked to sing and dance!
Every morning on my walks to and from the bus, many people say hello to me. Many, MANY people. Well, unless they’re talking to an invisible man next to me, because they do often use “mister” to address me. This morning, I decided to try and say hello to everyone first, just for fun. This went pretty well in our neighborhood; anyone who even glanced my way got a “selamat pagi!” (good morning) and they all seemed to like it, or at least they smiled and replied for the most part. What I hadn’t counted on was that it’s not just the people in their yards or walking on the street who say hello. Even though I said good morning to 20-30 people (not exaggerating) I STILL did not manage to out-hello people, because……even the people on/in their bikes, motorbikes, and cars were yelling hello to me! I can’t manage to say hello to every single person on the street, plus everyone in a moving vehicle. I just can’t do it! I give up!
Last week, during the height of our mold crisis, I woke up and began to get ready to teach for the day. Bath? Check. Shirt, tie, pants? Check. Shoes?, ummm, shoes? Where are my shoes? I swore I put them on the shoe rack. Where the heck are my shoes. Hey my sandals are missing. My comfy, comfy Teva Hamners are gone. This was like getting kicked in the groin after getting kicked in the stomach after getting knocked to the ground.
This all happened at our friend Sierra’s (a 2nd year VIA vol) house. We were house sitting while she was taking a vacation to Vietnam. She lives in a relatively new neighborhood. The problem is that there is no front gate, and we were the only white people in the area. I also made the mistake of leaving my sandals on the front porch. The shoes were more of a violation. I left them on a shoe rack visible through a window. My guess is that they were stolen the evening before while I was napping and Sara and our friend Lisa (another first year vol), had gone to get dinner for the evening.
At work that day, I said to one of my co-teachers, “Seseorang dicuri sepatu saya” – “Someone stole my shoes”. It was met with an Indonesian laugh. I’m still having a hard time deciphering the many Indonesian laughs. They laugh at everything. If something is funny they laugh. If something is awkward, they laugh. My guess it was it was more the funny laugh, but I have little to substantiate that claim.
For the next week my only shoes were my hiking shoes. Not only are they inappropriate for my teaching, they are bulky and hot in the humid, tropical environment. I have now gone to Bata (the payless of Indonesia) and found suitable replacements. They are nowhere near as comfortable, but they are somewhat more replaceable.
I also do not leave anything out anymore. Even though our new house has a big gate and a big padlock, I’m not taking my chances again.
Sara’s co-workers said that most stolen shoes end up on the black market a week or two after being stolen. Maybe if I’m strolling through Pasar Beringharjo one evening, I’ll see a dusty pair of Teva Hamners and a pair of Rockports in an American size 10.5. Hopefully they sell them for a reasonable price.
The Indonesians (and particularly the Javanese) are very much a community oriented people. Unlike Americans, everything in Indonesia must be shared and fair. This plays into many aspects of life. Most recently it played into my quest to get a teaching schedule.
Before actually starting, I was told by the VIA Indonesia program director and the VIA field coordinator that I would be helping with listening in many classes as well have a class of my own suited to students with strong aptitudes and/or interests in learning English. I don’t know if my current situation could be any farther.
While trying to sit down and arrange my schedule, the principle and English teachers thought it would be best to share me equally with all the students at the school. Problem is there are nearly 1000 of them. I tried to push back and say that this would not allow anyone to learn effectively. That did not go over well. It was more important to share; it also is not fair to say some students are much better than others.
Already weary from other cultural difficulties, I have given up that battle for now. I am now on a 2 week rotation. One week is junior high, the next is senior high. Over a two week span I cycle through each and every English class in the school. I am still at a loss for what the best way to go about lesson planning should be.
On the bright side, my colleagues at the pesantren may just be making it tough to begin with. A couple days after setting the schedule, they said there might be room to adjust after Ramadan (which starts in a week or so).
More as news develops.
In Colorado, the problem of trash was supremely easy. As needed, it was taken in Safeway or Target plastic bags out of the house and into the garage. Each week it was rolled to the curb, from whence it would disappear. The only snafu came one windy day when our recycling bin blew away, but it was quickly replaced free of charge by the trash company.
In Indonesia, in Sierra’s neighborhood, it was only slightly more complicated. Trash was taken to curb where it would sit, sometimes for a couple days, as we didn’t actually know when the trash service came. Usually during this time it would be picked through a bit, with all things of value (namely plastic water bottles) would be removed, with no hassle to us.
In Indonesia in OUR neighborhood, things are still up in the air. We have heard that some neighborhoods (especially newer ones) havce trash pickup, but ours seems not to. Two preferred options among our neighbors are burning (right next to one’s home) and simply throwing it in the nearby river. Out of sight, out of mind! For me, a one-foot-out-of-the-closet environmentalist, neither of these are acceptable. So, when “my turn” to take out the trash came yesterday, I loaded it into my backpack and headed out toward the bus, confident that I would find a good place for it. The following are options I had in mind:
I lost my nerve on both Hyatt options, as we would like to keep relations with them cordial, in the hopes that we can pretend to be guests sometime and use their health club facilities and bathroom facilities free of charge. Didn’t see any neighbors with trash cans (maybe they keep them inside just to foil people like me). So, my trash travelled with me. Turns out, the bus was packed, as the buses were running in bunches rather than spread apart reasonably. This is one of the problems in Yogya, the buses run on no sort of schedule, so there are times where you can wait 30 minutes for a bus, only to see another of same bus 2 minutes behind the first. And of course, since people (ourselves included) are waiting so long, they will PILE into the first one, while the second one will be empty. Anyway, we rode in one of Lee’s bus vans that he described previously. The people inside were nice enough to carve out a space for me (crouched on the floor by the door), while Lee became the fourth person hanging out the side, with one foot and one hand in the bus. It was fun, but a bit embarrassing, as people were squashed against my trash-filled backpack, that after 30 minutes of waiting in the sun was starting to smell a little like, well, trash.
The second bus we took had fewer people, enough that Lee and I could each have a seat, or rather, an 8 inch space on a bench on which to park as much of our rears as possible. My bulky backpack had to be hugged tightly to my chest, right next to my nose. It was less than pleasant, though at least the trash had recently had orange peels added and was mildly citrus-y. That’s about the nicest thing I can say for it
Eventually we got off the bus and I saw a miracle, a public trash can! Unfortunately, closer inspection revealed a man sitting next to it eating his lunch. I don’t understand why any sane person would choose to sit so close to the trash can when there are plenty of other places to sit on the ground, but there he was. I couldn’t very well put the mangled bag of trash into the can next to him while he was eating, so our trash accompanied me to get keys. Right by the key place was a nice restaurant for lunch, so it also went to lunch with us. Then finally, FINALLY, we went back to get avocado floats (the best thing here! I love them! But we will save that for a non-trash-related post) and lo and behold, the public trash can was empty and the area devoid of Indonesians! A good 4 hours after we set out, I was able to dispose of the trash “properly”, in a trash can. It will disappear from the can just like it does in America and I will be happy. I will not think of the distinct probability that right now, in a field somewhere nearby, there is a large fire fueled by the content of public trash cans……
side note to members of my family: as I wrote this, I experienced a certain sense of deja vu. I wonder why?
