Vignettes

“Oh man, there’s a shitload of unreleased sexual tension here.” Over the weekend, I hung out with Erick Danzer, a PhD candidate from the University of Wisconsin and a Fulbrighter just wrapping-up his research. Erick was enlightening a few other Fulbrighters and me as to what he learned during his two years of research across the archipelago. Beyond the political economics of coffee, palm oil, and rubber, he had a funny anecdote for the women on our trip. “Ladies, when you meet an Indonesian man, he will think of you in only one of the following three ways. In his eyes, you are either A) a pristine virgin, B) a sex-crazed whore, or C) a wizened old Ibu (mom). It’s probably best if, even if you’re pretending, you opt for the last choice.” In the words of a wiser man than myself, the dude abides.

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I spent a few hours last night at Jaya Pub with a fellow Fulbrighter named Ethan. Ethan has a master’s degree in geology from the University of Texas at Austin, and has spent three months living in a tent with one woman in Antarctica. The dude’s cool.
He found Jaya Pub in the Lonely Planet, which calls the place a “Jakarta institution.” Which it most certainly was. The bartender was small and old enough to be a prune, and the barmaidens were dressed in classical Dutch garb, sans clogs. The night’s live music group was warming up in front of a projector screen featuring prerecorded Rolling Stones concerts. I can’t understand how all those guys are still living. Have you seen Keith Richards?
Our band at the pub was a motley crue, made up of an ex-Metallica roadie on rhythm guitar, a former male model on bass, a dude who they’d just pulled off a 24-hour Warcraft binge on the keyboards, and the former male model’s ugly older brother on drums. After waiting for the Stones to wrap-up, they introduced the bartender’s niece on vocals, and plugged right into a decent but unintelligible version of “Georgia on My Mind.”
Instead of clapping, the bar was strung with old-fashioned hand-operated bicycle horns, which the crowd was pumping with impressive alacrity. Were they just being friendly? The band wasn’t that good. It wasn’t until the song was over that I bent over to my neighbor and inquired. “Jogya, not Georgia,” he said. “Like the city in Java.”
“Ohhhhhhh,” I replied. I got it. This place was cool.

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Today we went on a fieldtrip out to Bogor, a suburb of Jakarta famous for its botanical garden and miniature deer. Our goal was to observe local teachers, and to see how we can improve on what they do. My job’s really not going to be that hard. Just showing up and saying hello will be more productive than any of the classes I saw today, which spent two hours reading about Australia’s blue tongued frogs. A little relevance, if you’d be so kind.
The classes are made up of around forty high school students, most of whom are fifteen years-old. The kids are great – really smart, enthusiastic, and motivated. Many had questions for me about AMERIKA and were excited to share their goals of going to fashion school and Harvard. They just can’t learn from teachers who are afraid to speak and from idiotic competency based curriculums which leave most of the students unchallenged and bored. I imagine that figuring out how to reconcile fun and relevance with test taking knowledge will be my main task.

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I’ve been meeting the most interesting and inspiring people here. On the ride home from Bogor, I chatted with a middle-aged woman named Patsy who came with us for the day. She is a professional English teacher, and she and her husband had spent their lives traveling to different countries, spending a few years in Peru, a few in Africa, and most recently, a decade between Sumatra and Papua in Indonesia. In the fall of 2002, she and her husband were traveling with a group of English teachers in rural Papua, when completely out of the blue, their bus was ambushed by rebels. They were shot at and hostages were taken. In the end, eleven unarmed Americans were dead, one of whom was Patsy’s husband. She suffered gunshot wounds to her leg and lower back, yet she still escorted her husband’s corpse to Australia.
Since then, Patsy has been on a vendetta of sorts. Starting with her local congressman, she has voiced her complaints up and up the ladder, until she was meeting with Ashcroft, Wolfowitz, Gonzales, and the President of Indonesia, Susilo Bambang Yudyhono, lobbying for an investigation into the murders of her husband the other teachers. She is responsible for stalling the current American attempt at reinstituting military ties with the Indonesian army, which were severed after the human rights atrocities of East Timor. She lectures, for free, at American high schools about the power of the individual in the American democratic process. She is awaiting her appearance before the Indonesian equivalent of the Supreme Court, where she will testify against a Papuan man who has pleaded guilty to participating in the 2002 ambush. I told her she should write a book.