Sara and Lee . com

There are a lot of posts I’ve made about how things aren’t planned and about how I never know what’s going on.  Well, maybe that’s because I don’t understand things as well as I sometimes think I do.  Take today for instance.  I just had a great conversation with a coworker who works in Timor Leste (Indonesia’s far poorer and more conflicted “cousin” country).  He talked about the conflict in the region and the reasons for it.  One word that kept coming up was “anggur”.  Hey, I know that word, it means both grape and wine.  I was very proud of myself and kept listening to his story, which became less and less clear the more I heard “anggur”s thrown in .  Finally, I had to ask him to pause while I looked up anggur.  It made no sense, I mean ARE there even grapes in Timor Leste?  And if so, do they make people angry?  Maybe.  But it seems that in Indonesian, the root word anggur can have to do with grapes, wine, or….unemployment.  No language is simple.

Friday, 5:30PM, I call Lee and confirm our plans to attend that night’s massage class at his silat school.  Friday, 5:35PM, my coworker appears at the door of the office I share.  Though I didn’t realize it all day, it’s his birthday, and he wants to take everyone who’s still around out to dinner (this is the Indonesian tradition; instead of you getting a free meal on your birthday, you have to provide one for those you deem worthy).  Of course, this put me in an interesting bind.  I already had plans, and I didn’t want him to have to pay for my dinner.  But on the other hand, were it my birthday, I would think it was cool for the foreigner to come – the more the merrier!  My other coworkers encouraged me to come, evidentally we were going to a famous shrimp place.  My desire to be social and my extreme weakness for shrimp overcame my guilt about what was sure to be an expensive meal on someone else’s tab and I responded “Ok, aku bisa ikut” (ok, I can come)  After all, isn’t it really more important that LEE learn massage?

We all filed into the newest company car/van, plastic still covering the seats, headrests, and visors – perhaps so that everyone knows it’s new, even though it already has a few scuffs on the body.  Off we went, heading west, into the reddest sunset I have ever seen in my life.  As the sky grew dark, the houses sparse, the road dirt, I wondered where in the heck we were going.  When I asked “So where are we going again?”, even though it was in Indonesian, it somehow got translated into me being impatient to get there.  So for the next 20 minutes, I got regular updates. “Be patient, only X minutes to go!”   At some point the driver’s cell phone rang, and he started talking while he drove, which wouldn’t have been so bad except the shotgun passenger (aka Mr Birthday) decided it would be funny to crank up the music.  Rather than turn it down, the driver (aka Mr Crazyboss) decided to yell into his phone instead.  This is a perfect example of the daily humor here, and yes, I always find it hilarious.

Our destination was a grouping of raised huts over fish lake-ponds, surrounded by rice fields.  The tables were low; you sat around them on mats on the floor, the water gently lapping somewhere beneath you and the zillion frogs doing their best to drown it out.  As we were a rather large group (8?), the food took a rather long time coming.  In the meantime there was conversation and laughter, much of the former unfortunately in Javanese rather than Indonesian.  Unfortunately I only understand about a dozen words of Javanese, and since people aren’t always talking about hello, goodbye, eat, and drink – well, I get lost a lot.  There were also varying degrees of text messaging, book reading, sleeping, and nail painting.

Once the food came, things got very quiet.  The shrimp were whole (like, you know, with heads and legs), huge, and delicious.  I initially tried to peel them, but then realized nobody else was.  A quick question about the palatability of shells corrected my mistake – Of course you eat them, they have calcium!  I also stuffed myself on fresh BBQd fish and the occasional vegetable.   There were jokes, which I laughed at only if I understood them, leading coworkers to sometimes take pity on me and try to translate to English.  Something about Castro and American Presidents.  Something about drinking nail polish.  Something about an attack from the beady eyed shrimp.  Something about putting aluminium foil on your teeth, perhaps to make them shine but more likely just to be crazy.  Something about white skinned people not taking a bath because their skin didn’t look dirty.  Some—Hey!  I do TOO take baths.  Every week.  This was met by raucous laughter.  I hope they knew it was a joke.

I dozed the car ride back away, half listening to the radio’s music that sounded suspiciously like Mexican polka, but with the lyrics in Indonesian.  Stuffed, happy….yeah, it was just a dinner, but basic things here have a way of seeming more special than that.  Even “just a dinner” is funny and fascinating and wonderful.  So, Happy Birthday to ME.

Yesterday was an Indonesian national holiday.  Some sort of Hindu holiday if I am not mistaken.  Possibly the kind people look forward to for months in advance, though for me and Lee, we only had hours’ notice.
On Friday night, after a dinner celebrating the birthday of a coworker (there may be another post about this, who knows?), I said my goodbyes.  And got back “See you Tuesday!” In English.  I said “Don’t you mean, see you Monday?”  Laughter erupts….What?  You mean you don’t know Monday is a holiday?  Um…no.  I guess I should have noticed that it was red on the calendar, but other than that, nobody had said a thing about it.  I figured working at a Christian organization I would only get Christian holidays, and have been duly focusing all my attentions on the approach of Easter.
After I got home, I told Lee about this extra vacation boon.  He said “Lucky you, the Pesantren doesn’t get national holidays”  Sensing my confusion, he showed me the official schedule he had been given at the beginning of the semester.  Indeed, there were no holidays in March.

On Sunday, we went to a poetry competition at the Pesantren.  As a side note, it was great fun, and everyone there was incredibly friendly as always (even those girls who conned me into promising to sing next time I am there….little do they know it is only they who will suffer).  Anyone out there who thinks all followers of Islam are terrorists is a bonafide ignoramous.  There, I’ve said it.

Anyway, one of the teachers asked me if I have Saturdays off from work (not entirely common here), and I replied that indeed, I was lucky enough to have 2 day weekends.  Then I said (in English, as we were practicing our english at that point) “I also have tomorrow for vacation; it is a national holiday”  This was met with a quiet nod, and I assumed that the silence meant Lee was right, no national holidays for pesantren teachers.

It was only later, when Lee explicitly mentioned his plans to come to the school the next day, that the telltale laughter erupted yet again.  “Of course there is no class on Monday, it is a holiday!”  Lee pulled his fellow teacher over to the official schedule and showed him, no holiday mentioned.  Said teacher pulled Lee to different room off to the side and showed him….calendar.  With March 19 in bright red.

Just as paper mysteriously defeats rock, I guess calendar reigns supreme over official semester schedule.  Good thing most national holidays fall on Saturdays this year; we only have a few left to make idiots of ourselves.

During Idul Adha (a Muslim holiday celebrating the near-sacrificing of Abraham’s son), the pesantren sacrificed one cow and one goat, and the teachers and students worked together to prepare the meat for a giant celebratory feast.  Despite initial reservations about the sacrifice of animals, I’ve come to the conclusion that this sacrifice isn’t all that bad (assuming you’re not a vegetarian or vegan).  Idul Adha provides a special treat for the students who go most of the school year meat-free.

Typically the Idul Adha meat is made into either sate (meat on skewers slathered in a wonderful peanut sauce) or tongseng.  I’ve had a love affair with sate since I first had it in Singapore at age 7.  Tongseng is… is not sate.  In theory I should like tongseng.  What’s not to like about beef cooked in coconut milk with chilies, garlic, and other spices?  One of my culinary mottoes is that you can never have enough coconut milk.  Sadly, the magic of coconut is quickly countered by the abundance of liver in the dish.  I’ve never been keen on liver.  My mom claims that I loved it as a child, but I usually counter that I was too young to know how disgusting it is.  Not to get too tangential here, but early on in my tenure here in Indonesia I made the mistake of ordering fried rice with “ati” before I realized that “ati” was an alternate spelling for the word “hati” which means liver.  I have not made that mistake again.

This distaste for “ati” often puts me into awkward situations.  Being the foreigner, I am always urged to eat more.  The practice of rationing portions does not provide adequate defense for these situations.  There’s not much to do but to politely swallow down what’s given to you. Sometimes the generosity goes further.  I was given several bags full of Idul Adha tongseng to share with Sara.  This is going to sound horrible (especially Muslims), but I think we gave the liver to the street dogs.

After the glut of tongseng during Idul Adha, I was happy to go tongseng free for a little over a month.  Then one night at Mas Sigit (my silat teacher)’s house there were several helping of tongseng laid out.  As always I gratefully accepted the food, and then I struggled to swallow the chunks of liver.  After I was finished my friend Hendri urged me to “tambah lagi” (get some more).  Knowing that I would be victim to repeated offers to “tambah lagi” I opted to help myself to a small second portion.

After I sat down, Hendri asked “How’s the tongseng?”
I replied, “Good.”
Then Hendri asked, “Do you know what it’s made of?”
Uh oh.  People in all parts of the world don’t ask that anywhere unless they’re hiding something.  I hestitantly answered “Beef?”
“Try again.”
I thought “Oh crap.” and promptly hung my head in shame.
“It’s dog isn’t it?”
“Correct.”

Unlike the folks at the pesantren my silat brethren are Catholic (i.e. absolutely not Muslim) and huge fans of dog meat.  They are always telling me about how “delicious” it is.  Before I came to Indonesia Daniel, my silat teacher back home, told me that Mas Sigit knows where to buy good dog meat.  I’m not positive if they really like the taste of dog meat, or they are just excited to eat it because it’s so forbidden in the rest of Indonesian society.  In any event, they had been hounding me if for months to try dog.  I always told them that dogs are my friends and that I couldn’t bare to bring myself to do that.

Any hint of the tongseng’s palatteablity quickly dissipated.  Now it was a matter of choking it down so that I would not let this poor dog die in vain.  I told Hendri it didn’t taste as good anymore.  He said it was just in my head.  Of course it was in my head, I just ate dog.

Upon learning this, I yelled to Sara in the other room, “You’re not going to want to eat the food tonight.” and then I explained how I had been duped, and now was faced with a plateful of dog meat to gag down.

Sara responded “I can’t believe you tambah lagi-ed on dog!”

Yes, I tambah lagi-ed on dog.  I’m a horrible person.  Now I’m worried about having to eat tongseng again.  I can’t really explain to most people here that I’ve been totally ruined on tongseng because I’ve been served dog-laced tongseng.  I’m probably going to have to gag down another plate or two in the weeks to come.

The worst part of this whole ordeal isn’t the prospect of eating tongseng, or even the fact that I ate dog.  The worst part is that whenever I get angry at Sara, she can simply reply “at least I haven’t eaten dog.”  This is going to be a long 50+ years.

I haven’t kept count of the natural and man-made disasters that have hit Indonesia since I got here. They happen every single day. Landslides. Floods. Earthquakes. Fires. Cars and motorbikes crash, buses overturn and burn, ferries sink, and planes….planes can be lost at sea for days or weeks at a time. Or they can crash on landing at the airport in Yogyakarta, skid into a breathtakingly green rice field, and burst into flames.

The video, borrowed from Australian channel 7, starts soon after the crash, before the emergency vehicles even arrive. In the background, there’s a fireball of a plane, belching black smoke. From the plane emerges a line of people, not running or screaming, but staggering, shuffling, silent with blank bewildered eyes. Here and there someone is half carried, half dragged. Some people’s faces are masked in blood, and they absentmindedly dab at their mouths, or noses, or foreheads. The camera shakes, twitches, pans from place to place to place, no real purpose, sometimes pointing to the ground as though the cameraman is too exhausted or overwhelmed to even look up.

Small explosions, the cameraman takes cover behind a tree, but keeps a watchful lens pointed toward the plane where the flames have gotten larger, the smoke blacker. People are dying there, but some are still walking away.

Emergency vehicles arrive, and the air fills with shrill siren shrieks. Moving quickly, finally a purpose! There are stretchers, bodies in awkward positions, one with clothing that looks decidedly charred. Hoses train on the plane, but with little effect; it is obvious that by the end there will not be much left, maybe the tail.

And then we head back to the news anchor, to the field correspondents, to the hospitals, where yellow and white bags, securely zipped around what are said to be unrecognizable charred remains, are carried through doors and out of sight.

That journalistic treat was my lunch hour. It could have been worse – in the past there was coverage of the ferry crash on the TV by the eating table. This was around the time when the victims started showing up on the shore, and there were close-ups of the faces of the blackened, bloated corpses. I couldn’t eat. It was hard enough to eat this time, even sans carnage, because the video was so real and so close. I was tempted to cry or barf, but figured neither would be appropriate. Later I learned that our “host mother”, the mother at the house we stayed at for our first 3 weeks in Indonesia, was on the plane. She got out ok, just cut up a bit, but it’s still scary.

There’s really not a funny spin to put on this. My coworkers laugh a bit at those who have to fly soon, but it’s not funny today, not really. I told one of them who is flying tomorrow that he should sit by the emergency exit — which could have been taken as a joke, but I really meant it. Last month floods, yesterday earthquakes, today a plane crash….maybe it just plain doesn’t end. Sometimes I wish I cared less.

What do you do when you’re missing Colorado?  Well, if you’re lucky, you have friends who invite you to go whitewater rafting.  Of course, when I first came to Indonesia, I quickly made a mental note that I would never, ever do anything so stupid as to go rafting here.  Really, that exact thought occurred to me.  But after over half a year here, everything has started to look a little safer. 

I was pleased to see that our caravan of cars to the river site included a pickup truck with a couple of deflated boats, oars (some plastic, some wooden – canoe style), and yes!  Lifejackets and helmets!  Said jackets and helmets were a bit on the tattered side, like you would never, ever use them in the US and in fact you would probably sue the company that provided them, but they were functional. 

After our safety spiel (luckily I’ve heard this enough times in Colorado so not being able to understand every single word didn’t really matter), it was time to….  Hit the water?  Not exactly.  It was time to have a smoking break.  And talk about when we would get to eat.  And inflate the rafts, using a hand-operated pump.  And shore up the sandals of those who were wearing flip-flops to raft.  Who knew that flip flops could be made into teva-like sandals with a few knots of a piece of plastic-rope?  We didn’t start on our class 3 whitewater extreme adventure for half an hour, _after_ it had started to rain a little.  

Unlike in Colorado, there were many little waterfalls lining the river.  Sometime vines or bamboo branches from above would “gently caress” us.  (It was a dang good thing we were wearing helmets).  I got very good at blinking at the right times to avoid seeing the rather frequent piles of trash lining the river.  There were huge white flowers, as big as dinner plates.  It was beautiful, in its tropical way.

Like in Colorado, there were people fishing in the river.  Some used traditional poles, though I did not see any reels – the line was controlled much as you would a kite.  Some people were using electricity and nets to fish.  Cheaters!

Unlike in Colorado, our guides did not really exert much control over the boat.  We were occasionally told to paddle, but otherwise it was pretty much a free for all.  We frequently got stuck on big rocks.  At one point, our guide stood up in the boat and started peering intently ahead, then announced “Paddle, paddle, paddle!”  He turned the boat around so we were heading upstream and I paddled as though my life depended on it, not sure what was going on.  Turns out there had been a landslide ahead, but we were able to navigate around it, after docking our boat so the guide could scope it out first. 

Like in Colorado, we sometimes chanted in unison to get our paddling synchronized.  The chant was DJI….SAM…..SOE. 1,2,3?  I think not!  Dji Sam Soe happens to be one of the premier makers of clove cigarettes in Indonesia.  Did I mention that one of the lead paddlers in our raft occasionally smoked as we went down the river?  Of course, he smoked Marlboros….it’s sort of a status symbol here to smoke those.  However, cigarettes from the US are way more expensive, so he tends to mix the packs so that he has half American cigarettes and half Indonesian.  I guess that’s the best way to make a good thing last.

Unlike in Colorado, along the river there were people using it as a toilet, or a bathtub, or a washing machine.  Sometimes our guide would tell us “You don’t want to look around too much in this next part, it is very popular for bathing”  or “This smells terrible.  Paddle!  Paddle!” as we fled the olfactory assault of human feces.   Sometimes the bathing people would say hello to us, with the water covering them to appropriate depths.  I saw many women scrubbing clothes, and then some men doing what looked like the same.  Wrong!  They were washing freshly-slaughtered cow skin (I’m not sure of it’s intended use).

Like in Colorado, when we stopped at the halfway point for a snack, many of the raft riders decided to take a refreshing dip in the calm part of the river.  A refreshing dip.  Did you read what I wrote above?  I stayed as far on shore as possible at all times.  Of course, on the rapids I still managed to get some of the water in my mouth, and I’m still alive, so maybe I’m still just too germophobic.

Alright, so maybe it wasn’t totally extreme.  But you know what we did the weekend before that?  We went to a cat show.  And watched a turtle race.  So you see……