Sara and Lee . com

I have to admit something. I used to watch professional wrestling – during two entirely different stages of life. The former is more forgivable.

As a ten year old I loved WWF wrestling. That was during the height of the 80′s WWF explosion when one could see Hulk Hogan as a Saturday morning cartoon and Andre the Giant in the Princess Bride. Like a 6-year old who refuses to believe there is no Santa Clause, I refused to believe that WWF was fake.

The second wrestling era is one I’m more ashamed of. It came during the summer after my sophomore year at Mines. My friend Ron Avila is the world’s most rabid wrestling fan. He once ditched our operating systems class to get his picture taken with Diamond Dallas Page. He put that photo on his webpage and called it the happiest day of his life. That summer he was also my field session partner, and he would intermittently check the wrestling boards during our code and documentation writing sessions. Living alone and with not much else to do that summer, I too became a wrestling addict. I would go to Ron’s house on Monday nights for a marathon of WWF and WCW. We would even sprinkle our weekly project presentations with a bit of wrestling flair. Sigh, and now I’ve just told the whole world.

I guess what I’m saying is that I can sort of understand wrestling fever. However, this knowledge has done nothing to diminish my surprise of how popular pro-wrestling (called Smack Down here) is with the male Indonesian populace. Before coming here I had visions of boys practicing Pencak-Silat in the street. I still have yet to see Silat anywhere but where I practice Silat, and even the Silat boys are into Smack Down.

The other day, while sitting on our front porch, Sara and I were watching the neighborhood boys playing. At first we thought they were play fighting like boys anywhere do. Then we saw one boy fling another boy by the arm. The flung boy ran toward a fence and then bounced off of it just like pro-wrestlers bounce off the ropes. They then did their share of fake punches (complete with foot stomps for effect). Overall it looked pretty innocent.

But the play isn’t always so gentle. Recently an elementary school boy died and others were hospitalized during Smack Down related play. It’s a major headline in all the papers and the TV news. Lativi, the station that plays Smack Down 4 hours a night six days a week pulled the shows last night to avoid fueling the controversy.  The Pesantren did its part by putting up copies of some articles on the bulletin boards to warn the students of its dangers. It reminds me of a similar uproar in the 80′s in the U.S. that eventually resulted in WWF stars going on Nightline to say the stuff is fake. This may curb the enthusiasm short term, but I don’t know about the long term.� Smack Down was the number one rated show, and there really aren’t any other shows for men here.

During my first days in Indonesia, Steven, another VIA vol, and I walked around the neighborhood near the VIA house in Jakarta. In typical fashion the children would yell “Hello Mister” and ask other things like “What is your name”. When Steven said his, they boys went crazy and started yelling, “Stone Cold Steve Austin. E-C-W!”. I didn’t know then that wrestling was so pervasive.� If you look at the photos from that excursion the boys are all posing with arms splayed and hands flashing the sign of the beast, not unlike a Smack Down character. For that matter, if you look at all my photos of Indonesian boys (boys being a loose term encompassing the ages from 4-25) they are often doing the same thing.

Did I mention my students love Smack Down? Let me clarify. THE BOY STUDENTS LOVE SMACK DOWN. Any chance they get, they spout the words “Smack Down”. If you encourage them they start yelling out the stars’ names “John Cena, King Booker, Undertaker!” Today I asked them why they like Smack Down so much. They said “it’s cool.” Fair enough, I’ve watched equally dumb things with much less reasoning. Of course I’m guilty of pandering. Last week I did a lesson on giving directions. I drew a map of a city and asked the students to help me name the streets. For the first half of the week, I could not get the students to give me creative names. They named the streets after cities, much like they are named here in Jogja. Finally, in one of the boys’ classes, I decided to name the city Smack Down city. That got the juices flowing, and soon enough we had a city complete with Smack Down street names, a casino, and a wrestling stadium. Smack Down is like the MSG of the lesson planning world. It’s not really good for you, but it makes things a lot more savory. I’m pretty sure Smack Down will be making its way into future lessons.

A couple of weeks ago Sara and I took the plunge and bought a TV for our little abode here in Indonesia. Our main motivation was not really any affinity for TV. We were more interested in it as a vehicle for practicing Indonesian listening skills.

The TV itself is a TCL brand TV. Surely you’ve heard of it. The salesman said it was China’s premier electronics brand.

During my holiday, I spent more days than I care to admit watching Indonesian television. After extensive viewing, I can honestly say that I’m not missing much when the TV’s off.

The programming is very reminiscent of what I would see on Univision (Spanish language television) in the U.S. While there are many different shows the vast majority of the shows are either sinetron (soap operas) or music variety shows. Flip through any of the 15 or so channels and you will these two types of shows.

The music variety shows offer performances from either the latest Indonesian pop idols or dangdut musicians. As anyone who has travelled outside the U.S. the pop songs are all about love with titles that translate into things like “I’m falling in love”, “I’m still in love”, “Thanks for the love” or even just “Love”. Some are catchy, some are not. Then there is dangdut music. It borrows beats from Indian, Arab, and Malay music, and is reknowned for the female dancers gyrating their hips very suggestively (by Indonesian standards). Right now one of the popular hits is a remixed techno-dangdut ditty titled “Jawab SMS” and is about some sort of love affair transpiring via cell phone text messages. Most people will not admit to being Dangdut fans because it has a slightly cheesy, slightly trashy reputation. Conversely, almost everyone seems to know all the words whenever Dangdut comes on the radio.

Sinetron is a whole other beast. Like soap operas everywhere, the drama is completely over the top. Unlike everyone I’ve met here, Sinetron characters spend a lot of time yelling at each other. Fathers yell at wives. Mothers yell at children. Schoolgirls yell at other school girls. Wives yell at the housekeeper. Also the characters are often plotting to kill or harm each other. You can always tell when someone is thinking bad thoughts because the camera will do a zoom-in and highlight their eyes shifting left or right. The eye-shifting is typically accompanied with a characteristic Cinetron scowl. Sometimes there is the stereotypical evil person laugh.

I haven’t really watched enough to know it all, but there seem to be a few major types of Sinetron: typical soap opera/telenovela jealous couple sinetron, Saved by the Bell meets 90210 meets The OC style sinetron, and Muslim sinetron. As you would expect with soap operas much of the plot revolves around people vying for the affection of others. Usually someone will try to poison, drug, or frame someone. In one show I saw a woman put laxatives in a pregnant woman’s tea and then left soap all over the bathroom floor in an attempt to rub her out. It is shockingly violent, and there is an unhealthy amount of domestic abuse and wife slapping in these shows. The Muslim sinetron are very similar, but the person being persecuted often does lots of praying and I think the bad parties usually get their come-uppance.

Then there are the common, but way out there sinetron that deal with things like transvestites, black magic, and evil spirits. I haven’t seen it, but there was one sinetron about a Banci (transvestite). In the show everyone mocks his daughter by yelling “Anak banci, anak banci.” or “Banci’s child, banci’s child.” Sara watched this with a neighbor and her 2 year old daughter. The neighbor felt compelled to try to teach her daughter to follow along in the chanting. Later in the show, the banci has to turn to prostitution to support her family. Then for some unknown reason, the banci was persecuted by all the other bancis. Perhaps something is lost in translation.

Indonesians believe in ghosts with much greater frequency than Americans do. A sampling of TV shows reflects this belief. There are always shoes about bad people using “Ilmu Hitam” (Black Magic) to possess or attack people — usually to get money. Often there are people that possess good magic that fight these people. These shows offer a mix of soap opera sinetron, bad computer graphics, and martial arts fighting. I haven’t made these a guilty pleasure yet. We’ll see how long I last.

Professional wrestling is also very popular here. All of my male students are enamored with WWE Smackdown – I will talk about this in a later post.  Perhaps I’m being judgmental, but I told some of my students that wrestling is just “Sinetron for Boys.”

Now excuse me, I need to go watch some TV.
P.S. Don’t worry I’m not becoming a couch potato in Indonesia. It’s kind of hard when you don’t have a couch and potatoes are much less common than rice or cassavas. Maybe I’m becoming a floor cassava.

P.P.S. Really, just kidding about going to watch TV. I’m actually going to Silat practice in a few minutes.

This morning was one of those where I just didn’t feel like leaving the house.  Not that I’m depressed or anything, it’s just that sometimes you don’t feel like going to work, sometimes you don’t feel up to the challenge of being stared at and called to all day, sometimes you don’t want to have to think carefully just to be able to speak, sometimes the idea of spending a day translating power point presentations is slightly nauseating.  The alarm went off at 6.  I got up at 6:45.  I left the house at 8 and plodded toward the road with the bus.  For the past couple of days I have been almost to the road when I have seen the bus go by, so close that I can even count the number of passengers inside.  There are other buses of course, but it’s frustrating to miss the bus by mere seconds.   Today?  Same thing.  What are the odds?  I got to the road and looked down it and instead of seeing a yellow speck of a bus speeding away from me I saw….a yellow blob of a bus speeding towards me.  Backwards.  The people on the bus and/or the driver recognized me and decided to come back, backwards, on a high traffic main road in a city of hundreds of thousands of people.   Maybe this should have been a sign to me NOT to get on that bus, as the driver was one of the more aggressive ones in town – consistently taking on motorbikes head-on and expecting them to back down, using his horn to indicate to all the other buses on the road that he was going to cut them off, driving so fast that folks had to ask him to stop a block before their actual stops, at one point removing his seat belt because evidently it was cramping his style….  But it was a fun ride and I got to work on time and alive, and I think that actually, this is probably going to be a good day.

The people we were staying with this past weekend had some fruit trees in their yard of a type I had never seen before.  A good topic for small talk here is food (good because it is semi-interesting to people and also because I actually know relevant words), so I started asking about different fruit seasons.  Right now we are in the middle of “Musim mangga” or mango season.  Later will be “Musim durian” (Durian…my nose wrinkles in response), and we just recently missed “Musim Alpokat” (dangit, but I love avocados).  And then someone mentioned “Musim coklat”.  I laughed thinking it was a joke, but no, it’s not.  The fruit on the trees in the front yard were…..chocolate fruit!  Well, or the fruit around the cocoa beans, ie seeds.  They weren’t ripe yet but we still ate some.  The fruit actually tasted good, though the seeds are, you know, bitter.  Chocolate grows on trees!  Yes, the world is a wonderful place……

Lee and I spent the past weekend in a village in the mountains west of Yogyakarta with his silat instructor and silat school members.  Normally I would let him write about this, but as he is busy applying for grad schools and as I have internet access at work, I’m going to give it a stab.  His silat school here is Catholic, but they tend to mix a lot of Javanese religion into it, so there is a definite animistic side as well.  The instructor specializes in alternative healing methods and we got to accompany him to some houses in the village to watch him do his work. 

In one, there was a woman in a bed who has been sick for 11 years, seemingly unable to walk or even sit up for most of this time, and she cannot afford medical help.  (note that this is all just what I gleaned from the little Indonesian that I know….I could be completely wrong here).   He (Mr. S, the instructor) did some sort of chanting/praying over her, and also put his hands in various places, and then she was able to sit up, though she still looked to be in a lot of pain.  I, ever the skeptic….er, scientific thinker, don’t know quite what to think of this, but it was good to see that she seemed to be helped.  It will be nice when my language progresses to the point where I can actually ask what is going on in situations like this, what it is that he is doing or seeing or feeling.

In another house, Mr. S massaged a woman’s legs in order to get rid of her arthritis and also sucked some blood out of one of her toes and spit it out to help rid her of disease.  The odd part about this is that her toe was not bleeding!  And neither was Mr. S’s mouth…..strange…..  At this house I was asked to hold a baby and pose for pictures with the family.  All was well until the baby’s toddler-aged brother started crying.  Apparently he thought I was going to take his little brother away!  Maybe that’s what they tell him to keep him from being naughty…..be good or the bule will come for you…..

The part I found most interesting though was that many of the silat students can do this thing where they go into a trance and can channel the spirit of an animal.  When they do this they move like the animal they are trying to channel, usually in a rather out of control manner, even including growling.  It’s kind of scary, actually, and I kept my distance when they were doing it, but it’s still interesting.  Lee can’t do it yet, probably because like me, he thinks too much.  

There were about 30 people total I think staying at this house in the village, me and the other women in one room, and all the guys sleeping together on the floor in the other.  The night was punctuated frequently by people talking in their sleep and then at 3:30AM, a scream, followed by a small scuffle.  I immediately thought “Oh no, earthquake!”  but what really happened is one of the students had a bad dream and BIT THE GUY NEXT TO HIM!  I’ve had bad dreams before but…..biting?  Maybe that’s what happens when you can channel animal spirits…..

After much delay, I’ve finally uploaded pictures from our trip to East Java’s Bromo-Tengger-Semeru National Park.

Pictures are organized into two flickr sets and can be seen
here and here.