Melly Clistmas
My Aunt Rose arrived last Friday, and Indonesia has already been permanently altered. Our last night in Yogya was Christmas Eve. After a jet-lagged Rose went to bed, I met-up with a twenty-two year-old college student named Naim whom I had met earlier that day. A devout Muslim, Naim, like the rest of Indonesia, was still excited to be celebrating the birth of Christ, as it is a national holiday and all government offices, schools, and universities are closed. Earlier in the evening, Rose and I had called my Grandma in Arizona to wish her a Merry Christmas. When we told her that the day was a national holiday in Indonesia, her response was, “Well, of course it is!”
“But, Mom,” replied Rose, “this is a Muslim nation!”
“Well, I don’t know much about that,” concluded Grams.
Naim picked me up on his motorcycle, and after donning one of the ubiquitous flimsy white plastic helmets that serve as the safety mainstay here, we roared off to a local nightclub. Inside TJ’s, which was offering the “Extreme College Christmas Eve Spectacular”, a few dozen young people sat talking and drinking in groups. As midnight came and went, the dimly lit dance floor began to fill, and a live top-40 band took the stage.
Waiters and waitresses wearing Santa Claus hats, nose rings, and bleach-dyed hair flitted behind the bar and from cluster to cluster. Naim, who had never had alcohol before, drank club sodas while I quaffed a Jack Daniels on the rocks. His abstinence began to crumble around 2AM though, when a very drunk and very happy Japanese businessman began buying the two of us round after round of beers. As Javanese custom dictates, to turn down a gift is a symbol of immense, almost unconscionable disrespect. Instead, Naim, hesitatingly at first, drank back glass after glass of Bintang, Indonesia’s most popular nationwide brew, as the Japanese became more and more animated. “MELLY CLISTMAS!” he would shout while smashing and sloshing his glass against ours. Naim became quite melly himself, and we ultimately left around 4AM after the Japanese had to be supported out from the bar. “Merry X-Mas!” and “Happy 2007!” posters hung from the second story balcony that surrounded the dance floor, framing the Santa Claus hat-clad transsexual prostitutes and horny college students mingling under pulsing neon lights.
While debates in the U.S. might be raging over how best (or not) to celebrate the Holiday Season, in Indonesia, the answer seems pretty clear. Christmas is a great time to pack even more people into malls, sell low quality quasi-velvet red and white hats, and celebrate the birth of one quarter of humanity’s savior by combining a reverence for Western culture and materialism with a genuine desire to enjoy the lighter moments of life.
I posit that the Asian (or at least Indonesian) propensity to adopt Western material standards and cultural norms directly correlates to the region and nation’s simultaneous economic and political development successes. Especially when compared to trends in the Middle East, where more religiously and socially conservative societies have erected barriers to Western cultural infiltration and dissemination, it seems that the open embrace of consumerism has (if only partially) led to a greater acceptance of wider geopolitical and economic change.
On Christmas Day, after a refreshing four hour nap, Rose and I visited a microfinance site with Akbar and two of his employees from KOMPIP, the Indonesian NGO that I work with. Pak Tom Cruise, called that for his ability to make any mission possible, drove us an hour from Yogyakarta in his black Kijang SUV. This would be my fourth visit in as many months to Sawit Village. Entering Sawit Village, we drove past the tell-tale signs that even six months after the May earthquake, the community was still in bad shape. Piles of bricks, barefoot children, gaggles of geese, smoldering trash, and discarded Red Crescent food boxes lined the narrow and tortuous streets. Over 95% of the houses in Sawit were either partially damaged or completely destroyed, and 35 people died. Most residents were still living under tarps or a mish-mash of salvaged tin roofing and bamboo.
Inside the Village Head’s house, his wife served us piping hot jasmine tea, soybean paste cake, and chips made from fried emping, a Javanese vegetable. Beyond a stitched wall hanging proclaiming “Assalamu alaikum”, the only other decoration in the house was a pair of eight-foot long traditional spears. Cracks from the earthquake criss-crossed the finger print stained cement walls and many of the green tiles on the floor were partially smashed or missing. The house was tidy and clean, but like the villagers’ clothes and general appearance, well worn.
The Village Head explained how it would take nearly US$6,000 to rebuild a house of this size and quality from scratch – which many of the villagers will have to do – but that the government is only providing US$400 per family, and even that money is not guaranteed. The Village Head described how our microloans will enable many villagers to start new businesses so that their families can begin to amass new capital, but that, as always, our loans are “di cukup-cukupkan” – not enough. These people, farmers and laborers for millennia, are well-acquainted with using innovation, ingenuity, and a perpetual perseverance in the face of adversity. With no collateral, insurance, or official property rights, they will just have to keep on keeping on.
As we drove away from Sawit, Rose asked why the people don’t simply rebuild using bamboo and tin instead of the much more expensive cement and terracotta. Akbar told us a story by way of response. He had stayed in one of Sawit’s neighborhoods three days after the May earthquake. In that neighborhood alone, fifteen people had died. The day before he arrived, a thief had been caught breaking into a house, trying to steal a motorbike. The frustrated, angry, and outraged villagers, instead of handing him over to the police, convicted him on the spot. They stoned him until he was unconscious, revived him, and then buried him alive next to the fifteen others who had died in the quake. Akbar concluded, “People here build their houses out of cement because it is much safer that way.”
After spending three days in Yogyakarta, visiting Borobodur and Prambanan and touring around the city and its environs with Rose, we returned to Madiun via a leaking, creaking second class train. The rain that was falling outside in veritable sheets would pool on the window sill, and between bouts of fitful napping, several cups worth of water would intermittently dump onto my lap. Rose, being the trooper that she is, didn’t utter a peep, even when the mosquitoes growing in stagnant pools underneath our seats began to feast.
We arrived back at my house in Madiun, and lo and behold, there was no electricity. Fitfully trying to sleep with mosquitoes buzzing in my ears, I ultimately donned my headphones and wrapped myself in a hot, sweaty sheet in an attempt to fend off the little buggers. When I woke-up in the morning to go to school, I rubbed the sleep out of my bloodshot eyes, and found Rose sprawled on her mattress, covered in literally hundreds, if not thousands of bites. She had some sort of allergic reaction, and looked more like a leper than anything else. We went to a doctor here the other day, and now have her on hydrocortisone and a regimen of prescribed steroids. The itching is still very bad, I’m told. Melly Clistmas!
“But, Mom,” replied Rose, “this is a Muslim nation!”
“Well, I don’t know much about that,” concluded Grams.
Naim picked me up on his motorcycle, and after donning one of the ubiquitous flimsy white plastic helmets that serve as the safety mainstay here, we roared off to a local nightclub. Inside TJ’s, which was offering the “Extreme College Christmas Eve Spectacular”, a few dozen young people sat talking and drinking in groups. As midnight came and went, the dimly lit dance floor began to fill, and a live top-40 band took the stage.
Waiters and waitresses wearing Santa Claus hats, nose rings, and bleach-dyed hair flitted behind the bar and from cluster to cluster. Naim, who had never had alcohol before, drank club sodas while I quaffed a Jack Daniels on the rocks. His abstinence began to crumble around 2AM though, when a very drunk and very happy Japanese businessman began buying the two of us round after round of beers. As Javanese custom dictates, to turn down a gift is a symbol of immense, almost unconscionable disrespect. Instead, Naim, hesitatingly at first, drank back glass after glass of Bintang, Indonesia’s most popular nationwide brew, as the Japanese became more and more animated. “MELLY CLISTMAS!” he would shout while smashing and sloshing his glass against ours. Naim became quite melly himself, and we ultimately left around 4AM after the Japanese had to be supported out from the bar. “Merry X-Mas!” and “Happy 2007!” posters hung from the second story balcony that surrounded the dance floor, framing the Santa Claus hat-clad transsexual prostitutes and horny college students mingling under pulsing neon lights.
While debates in the U.S. might be raging over how best (or not) to celebrate the Holiday Season, in Indonesia, the answer seems pretty clear. Christmas is a great time to pack even more people into malls, sell low quality quasi-velvet red and white hats, and celebrate the birth of one quarter of humanity’s savior by combining a reverence for Western culture and materialism with a genuine desire to enjoy the lighter moments of life.
I posit that the Asian (or at least Indonesian) propensity to adopt Western material standards and cultural norms directly correlates to the region and nation’s simultaneous economic and political development successes. Especially when compared to trends in the Middle East, where more religiously and socially conservative societies have erected barriers to Western cultural infiltration and dissemination, it seems that the open embrace of consumerism has (if only partially) led to a greater acceptance of wider geopolitical and economic change.
On Christmas Day, after a refreshing four hour nap, Rose and I visited a microfinance site with Akbar and two of his employees from KOMPIP, the Indonesian NGO that I work with. Pak Tom Cruise, called that for his ability to make any mission possible, drove us an hour from Yogyakarta in his black Kijang SUV. This would be my fourth visit in as many months to Sawit Village. Entering Sawit Village, we drove past the tell-tale signs that even six months after the May earthquake, the community was still in bad shape. Piles of bricks, barefoot children, gaggles of geese, smoldering trash, and discarded Red Crescent food boxes lined the narrow and tortuous streets. Over 95% of the houses in Sawit were either partially damaged or completely destroyed, and 35 people died. Most residents were still living under tarps or a mish-mash of salvaged tin roofing and bamboo.
Inside the Village Head’s house, his wife served us piping hot jasmine tea, soybean paste cake, and chips made from fried emping, a Javanese vegetable. Beyond a stitched wall hanging proclaiming “Assalamu alaikum”, the only other decoration in the house was a pair of eight-foot long traditional spears. Cracks from the earthquake criss-crossed the finger print stained cement walls and many of the green tiles on the floor were partially smashed or missing. The house was tidy and clean, but like the villagers’ clothes and general appearance, well worn.
The Village Head explained how it would take nearly US$6,000 to rebuild a house of this size and quality from scratch – which many of the villagers will have to do – but that the government is only providing US$400 per family, and even that money is not guaranteed. The Village Head described how our microloans will enable many villagers to start new businesses so that their families can begin to amass new capital, but that, as always, our loans are “di cukup-cukupkan” – not enough. These people, farmers and laborers for millennia, are well-acquainted with using innovation, ingenuity, and a perpetual perseverance in the face of adversity. With no collateral, insurance, or official property rights, they will just have to keep on keeping on.
As we drove away from Sawit, Rose asked why the people don’t simply rebuild using bamboo and tin instead of the much more expensive cement and terracotta. Akbar told us a story by way of response. He had stayed in one of Sawit’s neighborhoods three days after the May earthquake. In that neighborhood alone, fifteen people had died. The day before he arrived, a thief had been caught breaking into a house, trying to steal a motorbike. The frustrated, angry, and outraged villagers, instead of handing him over to the police, convicted him on the spot. They stoned him until he was unconscious, revived him, and then buried him alive next to the fifteen others who had died in the quake. Akbar concluded, “People here build their houses out of cement because it is much safer that way.”
After spending three days in Yogyakarta, visiting Borobodur and Prambanan and touring around the city and its environs with Rose, we returned to Madiun via a leaking, creaking second class train. The rain that was falling outside in veritable sheets would pool on the window sill, and between bouts of fitful napping, several cups worth of water would intermittently dump onto my lap. Rose, being the trooper that she is, didn’t utter a peep, even when the mosquitoes growing in stagnant pools underneath our seats began to feast.
We arrived back at my house in Madiun, and lo and behold, there was no electricity. Fitfully trying to sleep with mosquitoes buzzing in my ears, I ultimately donned my headphones and wrapped myself in a hot, sweaty sheet in an attempt to fend off the little buggers. When I woke-up in the morning to go to school, I rubbed the sleep out of my bloodshot eyes, and found Rose sprawled on her mattress, covered in literally hundreds, if not thousands of bites. She had some sort of allergic reaction, and looked more like a leper than anything else. We went to a doctor here the other day, and now have her on hydrocortisone and a regimen of prescribed steroids. The itching is still very bad, I’m told. Melly Clistmas!
posted by Nick Taranto | 7:22 AM
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