House

In Madiun, I only teach twenty hours per week. I consequently have one hundred twenty hours per week of free time on my hands. My first month and a half here, I found myself overcome by boredom more oftentimes than not, and I spent much of my days napping and reading books in the privacy of my house. I began to remind myself of the Peace Corps volunteer whom I spoke with in Thailand, who resorted to sleeping fourteen hours per day for lack of anything better to do while he was serving in a remote village in Kenya.
Oftentimes, I found myself craving the solitary haven of my room after a long day of teaching and being bombarded by “Hello Misters!” while waiting at red lights. When I returned from my month-long holiday to Sumatra and Lombok, I actually found myself turning down social invitations from would-be friends. My fundamental gregariousness was being subsumed beneath daily barrages of mentally attenuating cultural mayhem. I felt minimally compelled to reach out, locked in a catch twenty-two of moderate depression and a lack of desire to integrate with my new surroundings.
However, I was sent to Indonesia by the American government not only to teach English, but also to serve as a “Cultural Ambassador,” not to sequester myself in an air conditioned room with “A Clockwork Orange” and the bizarre thoughts that it brought. Something had to change, and after a week of commiserating with myself after my return from a month in paradise, I began to be proactive about reaching out into the community.
The best way I found to integrate myself into multifaceted everyday life in Madiun was through sports. Indonesians may not look like athletes – at least not the American model of bulging biceps and palpable intensity – but the vast majority of them secretly are. Take for example Pak David, the vice principal of the school where I teach. I eat lunch at his house everyday, and for my first few months in Madiun, I was struck only by how ridiculously silly he was. With his family and me cloistered around the dining room table, he would randomly break into girlish squeals of awkward laughter, prompting uncomfortable glances from everyone present. Was this guy serious? In the U.S., if any fifty year old man laughed like that – let alone a fifty year-old man in a position of relatively high authority and respect – he would instantaneously be met with a verbal can of whoop ass, if not something more physically painful. Yet in Indonesia, he gets away with it. His peals of adolescent merriment actually started to become a private source of animosity for me. I began to dread visiting his house for lunch, despite the unrelentingly delicious spreads that his wife served everyday, solely because his laugh was so disconcertingly bizarre.
Well, it turns out that Pak David is actually a karate black belt dan three, which puts him only two notches away from the venerable likes of Chuck Norris and Jean Claude van Damme. To boot, he’s also a renegade ping pong player with an unbeatable backspin serve – if you’ve never played competitive ping pong before, don’t scoff – under a midday tropical sun, it can be a daunting cardio workout. One day over lunch, between rounds of his rice flecked jollity, I expressed interest in learning Pencak Silat, the traditional Javanese martial art that resembles a combination of karate and capoeira. “Oh, have at SMA Dua every afternoon Friday. Can come, but usually you not here on Friday. You like go Bali!” Which was followed by a self-amused squeal. He continued, “You like karate?” It was an interesting proposition. Despite my prior track record of failure at Judo as a pudgy, squat-legged fifth-grader, the idea of practicing the world’s most well-known martial art was appealing. “Yeah, sure, Pak. When?” “Tomorrow.”
The next evening, we left his house at 6:30, a full half hour behind schedule. After three months in country, I had grown accustomed to jam karet, rubber time, and was no longer perturbed by the everyday ad hoc scheduling changes and delays that are an intrinsic part of the social fabric. We zipped off on his bike, looking like two misplaced members of the Village People, he still adorned in the regalia of his school uniform, and me in his karate togs, which went only as far as my knees.
When we arrived at the session, I let out an audible groan of dismay, and immediately acknowledged that I had stumbled into a Monty Python, Da Ali G Show, or Mr. Bean segment. Wednesday evening karate practice was apparently for children ages fourteen and under – and me, the lone foreigner and student of any stature over five foot three. “Pak, are you serious?” He squealed, “Oh, YES! Is all children, YES?! You will be so funny!” This was not the way I envisioned starting my meteoric rise to Stefan Segal-dome. “Pak, I’m sorry, bro, but this is not going to work.” Before we even dismounted from his motor bike, gaggles of children in billowing white uniforms were beginning to point, stare and laugh. There must have been a hundred and fifty of them, and I imagined them all gearing up to laugh at the giant of a white dude who had somehow stumbled into their weekly session, clad in a comically mis-sized uniform, with no idea of what he was doing.
One of the karate masters – if you hadn’t noticed already, I really have no idea what I’m talking about, with regards to most things, but specifically when it comes to anything involving Japanese and highly coordinated kicking and chopping motions – approached us and gave Pak David a hearty handshake and a big smile. The guy was a house. He was wearing 1980s-era spackled jeans and a ridiculously tight black t-shirt, his gargantuan biceps popping out like slabs of raw meat. My first question for him, in prototypical jock fashion, was “How much can you bench?” Bear in mind that lacking the vocabulary for any fitness related pursuit, I pantomimed the action, which brought chortles of laughter from both Pak David and the hordes of karate chopping children that had surrounded us. “150 kilos,” he responded, with a big goofy grin on his close-cropped head. Krikey, I did a quick conversion. That’s like 330 pounds! (Note: He’s still the biggest house of an Indonesian that I’ve seen in person, although it’s reputed that the female body building circuit may be coming to Madiun in the spring. Keep your fingers crossed!)
After some deliberating and handshaking with more karate master bros, it was decided that attending tonight’s session was, thankfully, actually too ridiculous a proposition, even for Indonesia. Just as I was letting out a sigh of relief and thanking the gods of syndicated programming, I was told to come to practice on Friday – with the military. Oh shit, was my first reaction. Although, after I turned around to confront the writhing mass of crazy-eyed youths that was my alternative, it actually didn’t seem too bad. “I will pick you up at 8:00 in the morning,” one of the karate master bros told me in Bahasa Indonesia. “And don’t forget, this is the military. Be on time.”
“Ha ha, right,” I responded meekly, “no jam karet.”
“Right,” his smile lines could cut diamonds.

I had set my alarm for 7:40AM the night before, but decided to snooze through to 7:50. At 7:48, still in my boxers lying half conscious in bed, I heard the padlocked gate to my house rattling. I sprang out of bed and leaped into my karate kit before my eyes were even open. This guy wasn’t kidding.
It was a ten minute drive to the Polisi Militer facility, and the whole way, despite the sun not even being fully up yet, I was sweating bullets under my red, white and blue motorcycle helmet. These dudes are going to destroy me, I thought to myself. Indonesians may be some of the silliest people to have ever graced this good Earth, I carried on, but military folk are different. I began repeating “Shoulda stuck with the kids” like some deranged mantra under the drone of 125cc’s. Shouldastuckwiththekids, shouldastuckwiththekids.
The minute we pulled into the facility, my apprehension immediately began to melt away. While the sentries at the gate were all dressed in full fatigues and blue UN style berets, M-16s at the ready, they all greeted us with big smiles and resounding HOUSE’s barked in deep baritones. House, right, I thought to myself. I was too relieved to have not been interrogated to even bother thinking what that could mean. As we drove through the compound, a meandering set of streets and large cement parade grounds surrounded by palm trees and camouflaged Jeeps, anyone we passed greeted us with a full throated “HOUSE!” There were groups of uniformed men doing push-ups and pull-ups, some drinking coffee in front of tidy office buildings, and others sprawled underneath trucks tinkering with lordonlyknows what.
Pak Sor Sampai, the chief karate bro master, parked his bike and indicated that I should go meet the others while he changed into his kit. The first guy in a karate uniform that I saw was cleaning his teeth with his white belt. “Selamat pagi,” good morning, I said.
“HOUSE!” he responded, and bowed awkwardly with a silly grin on his face. “Pagi.” As I would learn later, house is not some secret military salutation, but merely a form of respect and deference paid to your opponent within the karate world. The tooth-cleaning soldier proceeded to utter a string of words that I couldn’t understand, and per usual, I nodded my head in agreement, interjected a few “YA’s” here and there, and smiled.
As the other karate students filed out of the barracks, I became more and more comfortable. I was the youngest man there – no women – by at least ten years. Most of the guys had their uniform tops flapping open, revealing more kegs than six packs, with belts draped around their necks and cigarettes lodged in the corners of their mouths. Most everyone came over and said a hello of some sort to the new bule karate trainee. By the time the session started, I was at ease.
The session was painless, minus the knuckle push-ups on a cement-lined driveway. I now have thirty or so new friends, and my apprehensions about the Indonesian military have been diminished a bit - maybe undeservedly so, as you’ll read in the next blog entry. In any case, fitness has become key to my existence here, and between two karate sessions, two basketball games, four gym sessions, and time in the pool each week, I’m turning into quite a bit of a house myself.