NickTarantoIndo

The Delegate Counter

2008-04-24T08:28:00.000-07:00

This is a very interesting metric provided by Slate.com

Basically, it says that Hillary now has a statistically insignificant chance of winning either the popular or pledged super delegate votes.

"Let's say she whittles Obama's lead in North Carolina down to 10 points and grabs a 10-point victory in every other state. This would leave her behind by 132 pledged delegates, give or take a few, depending on how the cards fall in Pennsylvania. Factoring in today's Obama endorsement by the governor of Oklahoma, Obama would need 340 of 794 total superdelegates to reach the majority needed for the nomination in our thought experiment. According to Democratic Convention Watch, 232 have already promised their support to Obama, so he would need 109 more supporters from the pool of 307 superdelegates who remain uncommitted—35.5 percent. Put another way, Clinton would still need to convince 63.5 percent of uncommitted superdelegates to go her way, even in this generous scenario."

In other words, Hillary is dragging out the inevitable, tearing down the Democratic Party's prospects while she rides on her own ego quest. It's just disgusting.

The Financial Crisis in Four Points

2008-04-06T16:47:00.000-07:00

Shorter version of The Economist's recent view of the credit crisis:

1. Thieves who get rich deserve the spoils of their thievery.

2. Rich thieves who stumble and drop the money they've stolen should not be punished, because the way they stole the money was innovative.

3. The state should not interfere in the market - unless it's to rescue rich, stumbled thieves.

4. Everyone else can go get stuffed.

And here I thought the American revolutionaries had conquered feudalism when we tossed you greedy Brits out on your petards - how little has changed.

Source

Project Better Place

2008-03-31T18:09:00.001-07:00

Shai Agassi and the folks at Project Better Place are going to change the world. Their mission is to create a transportation system that runs on zero emissions. They have developed a network for car-based transportation that is currently scaling in Israel. Their idea is to get Israel off of petroleum based fuels within the next five years, and they are well on the way to accomplishing their goals. Truly very inspiring, and worth reading more.

Read Shai's blog here.

The Latest Caucus Updates from Texas

2008-03-31T14:50:00.001-07:00

As this Burnt Orange Report Article makes clear, Obama has an 11% delegate lead in Texas with 71% of conventions reporting.

Obama traditionally does better in caucuses than in primaries, so these results are non too revolutionary. But still, it's surprising that this hasn't been picked-up more in the mainstream media...

The War Comes Home

2008-03-31T14:42:00.000-07:00

This is one of the more intense articles that I have read as of late.

As I prepare for Marines Officer Candidate School this summer, the major sticking point that I keep coming back to is not my objection to the Iraq War, or my reluctance to act violently, or the potential opportunity costs of a summer not spent pursuing an internship on Wall Street or with some prestigious firm. What I think about most is the impact that being a Marine would have on my family. This article drives home the implications of serving in a whole new way.

Sam Power on Colbert

2008-03-20T11:28:00.000-07:00

Samantha Power -- a Kennedy School professor and Obama adviser who recently left the campaign after publicly calling Clinton a "monster" -- talks with Stephen Colbert, who recommends that she could "positively spin" this by clarifying exactly what kind of monster she was referring to.

Only the best kind of course -- the Cookie Monster.

Colbert does have a point -- why not get rid of all the proxies and squabbling, and release the candidates into a no-holds-barred sandpit? Unfortunately, I think due to his waifish figure and boxable ears, our man might not fair so well. I am however open to taking bets...

Barack's plan to end the war and make America safer

2008-03-19T16:07:00.000-07:00

He is really on a roll now.

Please watch this, and sign-on to Barack's plan to end the War in Iraq -- which has now lasted longer than World War I, World War II, or the Civil War.

Pat Buchanan Gets Slapped Upside the Head

2008-03-19T10:00:00.000-07:00

It's always fun to watch GOP (Good Ol' Pat) get served.

Click Here

I can't believe this guy still has a following in the U.S.

Talk about divisiveness - what century is he living in?

Olbermann on Clinton and Ferraro

2008-03-15T14:08:00.000-07:00

An example of world class rhetoric:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q3jPlfc67SE

Olbermann for President 2016

Shenanigans in Texas Make Victory Unclear

2008-03-06T15:23:00.000-08:00

This thing ain't over yet.

Obama claims wins in caucuses, delegates

Hillary's trying to convince the country that she has won, but caucus ballyhoo, according to the Star Telegram, will push Brobama over the edge.

WOW.

Back from Texas

2008-03-05T17:09:00.001-08:00

I feel tired, depressed, disenchanted, deflated, elated, stoked and stunned.

I'm disgusted with the bickering and fighting.

I want to believe in this political system - but watching the meat grinding machine in action leaves little room for Obama's highly tauted hope.

What are we supposed to do with passion, drive, and capacity when the realities of making an impact are so painfully disembodied from the action on the ground? When the nightly news plays Hillary beaming over a cheering crowd, it is hard to imagine that behind that cheshire grin lie tens of thousands of Texans who insulted and assaulted their neighbors in the face of baldfaced political uncertainty.

It's easy to believe in change. The true challenge is in realizing that change when the system frowns on your optimism. The United States is not divided, but just ineffectually disparate.

As David Martinez said, "It was one of the saddest and most disgusting scenes of democracy I have seen anywhere around the world."

We should be ashamed and saddened. But we should also feel incensed to fight for something bigger and nobler. Democracy is not dead -- just dirtied in the eyes of this perpetual optimist.

The Torture Playlist

2008-02-28T19:48:00.000-08:00

"Music has been used in American military prisons and on bases to induce sleep deprivation, "prolong capture shock," disorient detainees during interrogations—and also drown out screams. Based on a leaked interrogation log, news reports, and the accounts of soldiers and detainees, here are some of the songs that guards and interrogators chose."

A Lunch of Reconciliation

2008-02-27T14:21:00.000-08:00

Today I had lunch with three of the Bridge Builders -- prominent leaders from up and coming NGOs in the developing world. Akbar, whom I worked with in Java, is here for the week representing his organization, KOMPIP. He has been sleeping on my spare blow-up bed and borrowing my XL jacket since Sunday!

At the lunch, I shared chicken parm and penne with Rahmatullah (from Afghanistan), Evariste (Rwanda), and Shanthi (Sri Lanka) as we discussed how to better their efforts at reconciliation in their respective countries. You couldn't ask for three more disparate and fascinating places, particularly with regards to inter-racial and -religious strife. Their main universal complaint was that peoples may live together, but there are no incentives to talk and work together, and that the latter are necessary for a society to function fully.

I had to leave early, but I was left optimistic that even in the world's most "dangerous" and "awful" places, we should never underestimate the capacity of people to work together to reconstruct hope and trust.

Great Photos of Spectacular Climbing

2008-02-27T14:07:00.000-08:00

Kevin Mahoney's website is filled with some amazing photos of the world's most spectacular climbing. The photo above is from Cannon (one of, if not THE, best places for alpine climbing in the North East) in Franconia Notch, New Hampshire -- just up the road! Plus, this dude is a totally bad mother. As my friend Barry has said, "Climbing is what these people DO."

Texas Hispanics Face a Tough Choice in Primary

2008-02-25T16:15:00.000-08:00

“The crowd was one-third white, one-third black and one-third Latino. I had never seen anything like it in San Antonio. And I knew right then he was the best candidate to defeat the Republicans in November.”

From: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/25/us/politics/25texas.html?_r=1&hp&nbsp&oref=slogin

I will be in San Antonio from Friday through the Primary on March 4th stumping for Obama. This is a historical election, and even though I'm a bit late to the party, I want to be there on the front lines doing my part to push Obama through.

Reality Mining

2008-02-23T08:25:00.000-08:00

The MIT Technology Review recently published its annual 10 Emerging Technologies of 2008.

One of the more interesting - and frightening - developments that I saw was the concept of Reality Mining, being developed by Sandy Pentland at MIT.

As Professor Pentland says, reality mining "is all about paying attention to patterns in life and using that information to help [with] things like setting privacy patterns, sharing things with people, notifying people--basically, to help you live your life."

"To create an accurate model of a person's social network, for example, Pentland's team combines a phone's call logs with information about its proximity to other people's devices, which is continuously collected by Bluetooth sensors. With the help of factor analysis, a statistical technique commonly used in the social sciences to explain correlations among multiple variables, the team identifies patterns in the data and translates them into maps of social relationships. Such maps could be used, for instance, to accurately categorize the people in your address book as friends, family members, acquaintances, or coworkers. In turn, this information could be used to automatically establish privacy settings--for instance, allowing only your family to view your schedule. With location data added in, the phone could predict when you would be near someone in your network. In a paper published last May, Pentland and his group showed that cell-phone data enabled them to accurately model the social networks of about 100 MIT students and professors. They could also precisely predict where subjects would meet with members of their networks on any given day of the week."

The fact that, unbeknown to me, my life could be digitally modeled, mapped, and replicated is a bit off-putting. Social networks are great, and I see the societal value that they add. But the implications of having unsecured analysis of my personal interactions, travel, conversation, and consumption are, to say the least, a serious reality check.

My Favorite Bushism

2008-02-23T08:21:00.000-08:00

Words of wisdom from our Glorious Leader:

"Too many good docs are getting out of the business. Too many OB/GYNs aren't able to practice their love with women all across the country."
-- Polar Bluff, Missouri, September 6, 2004

Philharmonic

2008-02-23T08:13:00.000-08:00

Last night I saw the Boston Philharmonic perform Shostakovich's Concerto No. 1 for Cello and Tchaikovsky's Pathetique (Symphony No. 6 in B Minor). Natalia Gutman played cello, and Benjamin Zander conducted. The Shostakovich piece was supposedly Stalin's favorite musical work. The Philharmonic was incredible, I'll definitely be back.

Podgy Posties

2008-02-19T15:09:00.001-08:00

Man, you gotta love the Aussies! Check out this great article on Oz's "podgy posties."

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/7252112.stm

I wonder what the economics of weight limits on U.S. postal workers - let alone average American consumers - would be? Has any country ever implemented fat limits for the general populace before?

Leapfrog Off the Grid

2008-02-18T14:04:00.000-08:00

NB: A component of "The Arts of Communication," a course that I am taking at the Harvard Kennedy School, is maintaining a blog. Since I already have this one up and running, I will continue to post here for the remainder of the Spring. Comments are welcomed!

Industrializing economies have presented us with the twenty-first century’s most pervasive technological challenge. While frightening in its scope, the quest for scaleable, sustainable and cheap energy offers this generation’s greatest opportunity to create positive change across the human spectrum – provided that we act soon.
The lives of hundreds of millions of people have already been enhanced by globalization and economic growth. However, without novel approaches to distributing energy within emerging markets, the unprecedented increases in energy consumption required to sustain and expand human improvement could place the world in jeopardy.
To wit: India is the world’s second most populous country and fourth largest economy, yet produces only one-fifth as many CO2 emissions as the U.S. India’s low carbon production is positively correlated to its limited access to electricity. The World Bank estimates that half of India’s villages are still off-grid. Read another way, four hundred million Indians lack access to electricity, and rural electrification rates in the most populous states such as Bihar (10 percent) and Uttar Pradesh (18 percent) are considerably below the African average (21 percent). This means that any Indian effort to give poor people greater access to electricity will have to be matched by a strategy of slowing the growth of CO2 emissions. Without clean, efficient, and widespread electrification schemes, industrializing economic giants like China and India will drive global warming beyond our worst fears.
It is the pollution created by energy consumption that will worsen the economic wound, not energy use itself. This distinction, however simple, is not trivial. Technologies exist that can solve the pollution problem at a small fraction of current energy expenditures. When the externalities of pollution abatement are internalized, economic output will actually increase.
While industrialized economies are by no means perfect, more than a century’s head start has created some clear energy advantages. In the U.S., Europe, and other industrialized countries, by allowing multiple power plants to be interconnected over a wide area, electricity production costs are reduced and efficiency is boosted. However, in developing economies like India, such complex energy infrastructure rarely exists, and when it does, it is unreliable. As a consequence, 600 million Indians still cook using biomass (wood, manure, and grass).
Yet, the times are quickly changing. “Leapfrogging” – the process whereby industrializing economies avoid the resource-intensive pattern of development by skipping to the most advanced technologies available, rather than following the same path of conventional energy development forged by the industrialized economies – has been touted as the holy grail of emerging markets innovation. As the argument goes, cell phones leapfrogged landlines throughout much of the developing world, so why not apply the same technological leap in the energy space?
Leapfrogging energy technologies offers hope for an electrified, low-carbon world. But in order to work at scale and in time to avert the repercussions of manifold global carbon increases, two stipulations must be achieved.
First, energy leapfrogging must be done in a profit-driven, decentralized, off-grid way. Developing world governments are too clumsy, corrupt, and slow-moving to accomplish the drastic overhauls and upgrades required. Cosmos Ignite Innovations, a New Delhi-based firm founded by three Stanford MBAs, has distributed 10,000 waterproof, portable lamps that run on solar-powered batteries. The United Nations Development Program has awarded $18 million in small grants to communities operating small-scale renewable energy projects. Both organizations are seeking profit-driven, sustainable methods of reaching scale.
Second, as Kelly Sims Gallagher and her colleagues at the Energy Technology Innovation Project here at Harvard have pointed-out, industrializing countries’ governments must induce leapfrogging by increasing incentives and reducing barriers to entry. The leapfrog transition is possible at lower GDP per capita – $1,000 for developing economies today versus $5,000 for the United States in the nineteenth century (measured in 1997 dollars) – because modern energy forms are more abundant and the costs of energy are much lower than they were when today’s industrialized countries were making the transition. However, without local governments requiring firms to transfer cleaner technologies through more aggressive regulations, local firms cannot access the new and improved technology. Since local firms do not have their own capability to design the cleaner technologies, they fall even further behind foreigners. Their ever-increasing backwardness makes it even more difficult for the local government to risk imposing more stringent standards, and the downward spiral continues.
The twenty-first century is the perfect time to think big. We are living through a unique point in history where a mutual empathy inspired by easy travel and instantaneous communication has emboldened big thinkers to tackle global issues. As co-chair of the Social Enterprise In Action group at the Harvard Kennedy School, each day I am exposed to the amazing breadth and audacity of the social entrepreneurs who are crafting tomorrow’s solutions to today’s intractable problems. Industrializing governments can make entrepreneurs’ lives easier by improving regulations and lowering barriers to entry. With the right mix of innovation, incentives, and funding, we can overcome this century’s greatest challenge.

Nicholas Taranto is a concurrent MBA/MPA candidate at the Harvard Business School and Harvard Kennedy School.

Selamat Pagi, Vietnam

2007-04-11T07:05:00.000-07:00

During one sitting at a penthouse restaurant, observing a dispassionate grey Hanoi skyline while being bombarded by overly amped Vivaldi, my Mom spent nearly the equivalent of a Madiun-month’s worth of existence on cappuccinos and bruschetta. Having cleared my special visa for exit and reentry, I had blasted to Hanoi via Kuala Lumpur on AirAsia to meet my Mom and twin sisters. A lifelong obsession with Indochina and her sister’s multiple ailments sustained while in Indonesia combined to push my Mom towards a visit to mainland Southeast Asia instead of the archipelago. My week in Vietnam was a shock to my system, an influx of ephemeral four star living bookended by a mouse in the mandi and a poorly received lesson on the history of rock music at SMA2. They call it the good life for a reason.
Vietnam, while not suffering as badly as Indonesia did during the 1998 crisis, still took a major economic ass whooping. However, unlike Indonesia, the nation took the crash in stride, and since then has rebounded with nearly double digit annual increases in gross domestic product, nearing the skyrocketing rates of India and China. The country has capitalized on tourism, foreign direct investment, and homegrown educational policies, and is one of Asia’s most prominent leaders across the economic and political board.
The differences between Vietnam and Indonesia are striking. I arrived in Hanoi around 9PM, and after filing for my pre-arranged visa on-arrival, I was met outside the airport by a five foot tall, impossibly slim man named Tan. On the hour-long drive from the airport to central Hanoi, the Mercedes Sprinter van passed by sprawling miles of germinating rice paddies and dozens of cavernous boxes stamped with Yamaha, Canon, Samsung, and a host of other multinational brand names. “Tan,” I asked, screaming over the blare of Viet pop. “Do you Vietnamese feel resentment towards American tourists? I mean, it was only a generation ago that we practically destroyed your country.”
“Resentment, not my generation,” he drawled in his thickly accented English. “We have more important things to worry about, like making life and fashion. Some from older generation still mad, but Vietnamese people easy forgive.” It wasn’t the first time that I would wonder over the next week whether my kid would be holding a similar conversation in Tikrit or Basra some thirty years down the road.
After meeting my Mom and sisters for an Italian dinner at our four star hotel’s rooftop restaurant, I strolled around the old quarter, a cramped but elegant mish mash of French architecture, walkable sidewalks, and motorbike fumes. I found myself reflexively watching my every step, half-expecting the man eating holes of despair that I had become accustomed to in Jakarta, Surabaya, and any other Indonesian city of substantial size. But these were broad and clean sidewalks, albeit often blocked by crowds of Vietnamese eating pho, the national dish and pastime, or clogged by incredulously thick packs of silently snarling motorbikes. The newer more fashionable motorbikes were popular in Hanoi, and many of the seat cushions featured either punk rock style leather pleating or Louis Vuitton knock-off coverings. Multiplied by two million, those stylish seats and bikes contributed to the city’s unavoidable cosmopolitan and consumer conscious vibe.
Stumbling across the old quarter’s night market, only a stone’s throw from my hotel, I found myself transported down a conveyor belt of consumerism, pushed from behind by roving masses of teenagers, young couples, and middle-aged parents escorting one another down a half-mile long corridor of bags, sunglasses, fruit, electronics, and mountains of plastic knick-knacks. Most of the crap for sale was the same sort of Chinese manufactured garbage one finds anywhere in the world. But there were standouts amongst the piles that wouldn’t have graced the stalls and tables of a comparable Indonesian market. The broadly superior economic situation was evident in the MP3 players, advanced cell phones, massage rods, and scores of other medium-priced electronics not to be found on the street in Indonesia – perhaps within the confines of certain malls, but not at the markets. Markets in Indonesia are for the poor who can’t afford to shop at the malls, and the poor in Indonesia are in a different category from the urban poor in Vietnam.
I took a midnight lap around Hoan Kiem Lake, one of Hanoi’s most prominent landmarks, home to the magnificent Turtle Pagoda, floating in obscurity at that time of orange oxidized light. For a Friday night, the city of over five million was dead. The only sign of nightlife were a few stray motorbikes tearing around the broad tree-lined boulevard that surrounds the lake, where many Vietnamese gather daily for sunrise tai chi. I was making my way back along the water’s edge, when I spotted another late night stroller walking in my direction. I couldn’t make out his face in the moonlight spackled darkness, but the man was tall and heavyset, in at least his late fifties, with a salt and pepper ponytail, combat boots, camouflage pants, and an old Army issue backpack. Before I had left Indonesia for Vietnam, I spent two days with an American Vietnam veteran. He said he hadn’t been back yet, that he wasn’t sure if he ever wanted to go back. “I stopped reading about the war and the country years ago. No one’s experience was the same.” As the man shuffled by without greeting, I thought many thoughts, and let a tear fall while no one was watching.

My Mom and sisters left Hanoi early Saturday morning a week later, and I found myself with the rest of the day to wander about engaged in that solitary but surrounded headspace possible only amongst the crowds of the world’s great cities. We spent a fantastic week together, bouncing from an overnight boat tour of Ha Long Bay to the UNESCO heritage sites of Hue and Hoi An in the central coastal provinces. The country, while diminutive when compared to Indonesia, is still vast, spanning some two thousand miles of coast. A week being led by the hand constitutes the most basic old-school definition of tourism, but was only sufficient to cover the northern half of the country, and at a break neck pace at that. After a whirlwind of culture, cuisine, and ab cramping laughter, I was back alone in magnificent Hanoi.
The French may have royally screwed the Vietnamese for nearly two centuries, but they left behind food, architecture, and art that at the turn of the twenty-first century puts Hanoi on par with Paris, Krakow or Berlin, as opposed to the sprawling chaos of its less aesthetically endowed Southeast Asian neighbors. I bought a few loose Vinataba cigarettes, and proceeded to waste the rest of the day cruising along wide boulevards, skirting dreamy trees fighting through diesel fumes and haze, staring through wrought iron gates at balmy yellow ambassadorial palaces. I wandered, got lost, hired a motorbike taxi, and got lost again snaking through the intermittently tangled and tumultuous streets that criss-cross the remnants of France’s flirtation with Indochina. I found myself in front of the Hoa Loa Prison, also known as the Hanoi Hilton, where a twenty-something year old John McCain had spent six years after his bomber was shot down into a nearby lake. The city breathes a millennium and a half of bewilderingly accessible courage, doggedness, and irrepressible history.
Vietnamese families and crowds of friends were spending their Saturdays lazily chatting, perched on ankle high stools while slurping away at steaming cups of pho. It was chilly enough that most people were dressed in wool coats or down jackets, wrapped in scarves or trendy hats. It was Saturday, but most men were in button down shirts and suit jackets – a marked change from the flip flops, t-shirts, and sarongs that mark casual Indonesia. The women, skinny, refined, and effortlessly trendy, drooped themselves over their men’s shoulders while zipping around the crowded and horn filled streets on the year’s newest motorbike models.
I made my way through L’Espace Center Culturel Francais, which was holding a retrospective of French cartoonists, and on to the breathtaking opera house, a four storey colonnaded building surrounded by green gardens and the ceaseless bustle of the French Quarter’s epicenter. Navigating my way through the onslaught of grime covered buses, undaunted helmetless riders, and screaming lime green taxis, I crossed to the marble stairway of the cultural relic, still home to operas and ballets in a city of online gaming and burgers. Three separate wedding processions were arranging themselves on the stairs. Grouping together and sharing bouts of laughter, the marital entourages looked on as the brides and grooms, all in modern Western tuxedos and lacey white gowns, posed for posterity. The brides smiled radiantly, the grooms glowered, and friends giggled from their motorbike perches while shooting cell phone photos.
In this land where the American War was only the most recent rejection of unwelcome foreign invaders, I began to comprehend how the country could be so successful despite its recent history. Only thirty five years ago, the U.S. had dropped two million tons of munitions on Hanoi alone, destroying would-be guerilla outposts along with imperial palaces, urban infrastructure, and tens of thousands of innocent lives. On our drive to Ha Long Bay three hours east of Hanoi, my Mom, the girls, Tan, and I stopped at a roadside gift shop staffed by mentally and physically disabled twenty-somethings suffering the generational knock-on effects of Agent Orange. Inside the sprawling complex, while crafting marble statuettes and weaving silk shirts, these hunchbacked and deformed kids no older than me would look up and smile, exchanging glances daily with those responsible for their disabilities.
Sitting on the stairs of the opera house, watching newly married couples prepare to embark on their way through life, I couldn’t help but think how the U.S. had torn this place apart. And for what? Someday will I find myself and my family on a tour of the Tigris and Euphrates, listening to a post-adolescent Iraqi explain the harrowing significance of yet another opaque American war?
A pretty girl with fashionably dyed hair, couture jeans, and big trendy sunglasses smiled at me as I strolled away from the historically bewildering imagery of a nation at peace and in control of its future. I smiled back and said ‘Hi.’ She turned away giggling.

Waking Up in a Micro Kind of Way

2007-04-09T09:09:00.000-07:00

With Ibu Radinem and Mlese Village, Neigborhood #8 treasurer. Ibu's grant of US$20 let her rebuild her sundries shop, which now supplies her with $5 income per day.

In Indonesian, the root word bangun means “to wake up.” Pembangunan, the noun, means “development.” When I used this word around Indonesian friends my age, they didn’t really know what to make of it. In response to questions about what I studied in college, I often replied “pembagunan internasional,” international development. “You mean like sukarelawan, volunteerism?” Not quite. “Construction?” Nope. “Modernization.” Well, sort of.
Ben Anderson, the political scientist and master of Southeast Asian languages, wrote in 1990, “Pembangunan has no more than instrumental implications, and derives whatever moral thrust it has from the revolutionary ethos of the past…. [A phrase] that evoke[s] the memory of Sukarno’s historic 1945 [independence day] speech proclaiming the moral basis of an independent Indonesian state… icons attesting to the coherence of present and past, or the life of the past in the present, though they are experienced by many as their fundamental negation – military authoritarianism and an economy subjected to foreign capital.”[1]
Trained extensively in the study of languages, Anderson shied away from the use of the word pembangunan, loaded with nearly four centuries of linguistic colonial undertones. Yet, development, no matter how it is ultimately translated, cannot be disregarded as easily as Anderson would hope. Development was the stated reason for the original Dutch foray into the East Indies. The Liberal Party of the Netherlands, believing in the free market above all else, had instituted Eurocentric policies meant to expand the East Indies plantations and their lucrative agricultural exports. The Liberals had promised that, as the economy expanded, the lives of natives would be improved through the “trickle down” prosperity of local economic opportunities.[2] It was the failure of this system that in part led to Indonesia’s ultimate uprising and dismissal of the Dutch.
Where “Revolution” was the embodiment of Sukarno’s reign, pembangunan would come to symbolize Suharto’s New Order. Throughout the late 1970s and 1980s, newly discovered sources of state revenue melded nicely with vast amounts of international aid to spread Indonesian development far and wide.
Despite the corruption, collusion, and nepotism that ultimately came to symbolize the last years of Suharto’s reign, his New Order did achieve some significant strides towards pembangunan, the holy grail of his thirty-two year administration. For all the inconceivable graft, innocent deaths, and unconscionable plundering of the government coffers that took place under his watch, Suharto’s New Order did institute a host of national policies that were pro-poor. It was these policies, populist in many ways, that probably kept Suharto in power for the last two five-year terms of his three decade presidency, and beloved by the vast majority of Indonesians still ten years after his forced dethronement. During the New Order period, the average annual increase in GNP was a stupendous 6.7 percent, which on a per capita basis made Indonesia a leader amongst the fastest growing economies in the world.[3]
Friend writes, “Suharto had a peasant’s commonsense understanding that you must eat to live, that education helps you earn more money, and those with more money eat better and live longer. He showed great appetite for the burdens of state, demonstrated early aptitude, hired good advisors, and listened to them…”[4] Several projects in particular stand out as testaments to Suharto and his multiple cabinets’ development prowess. The channeling of oil revenue surpluses to economically backward areas detracted much criticism (with the exceptions of Aceh and Papua) from what otherwise would have created immense archipelagic rifts. The construction of massive infrastructure ranging from airports to harbors to bridges to dams, and a well-managed set of macro- and microeconomic policies (until the late 1990s), [5] generated the type of economic growth that central bankers and development economists from the North Atlantic Western world have wet dreams about.
Perhaps most significant though, was rice, nasi in Indonesian. Constituting in 1960s-era Jakarta nearly one-third of the average consumers’ yearly expenditures, under Suharto rice was subsidized and insulated to the point of national self-sufficiency.[6] In 1965, Sukarno had famously predicted the “year of living dangerously.” Shortly thereafter, rice prices soared an astonishing 900 percent, contributing to the social unrest that led to his ouster. Twenty years later, under Suharto, Java had increased its rice yield by 98 percent and its total production by 156 percent. The outer islands were even more successful.[7] Suharto’s focus on development led to undeniable economic success across all social strata, which in turn allowed him to remain one of most beloved and long-lived dictators in modern history.
However, the fact that it took until the late 1970s for pembangunan to really kick-in is indicative of larger problems within the New Order apparatus, namely corruption. While the economic improvements achieved under Suharto are undeniable, the long-term effects of New Order policies saw Indonesia lose its position in world trade, to the point where its share by the 1990s was almost one-third of the levels under the Dutch.[8]
Lieutenant General Ibnu Sutowo provides an illuminating example. Sutowo had been head of Pertamina, the state-owned oil company, since its nationalization in 1957. By 1974, Sutowo’s mismanagement had left the company US$15 billion in debt. Sutowo’s younger brother was a Communist. However, since Pertamina was an integral part of Suharto’s pyramid of power, the family connection that would have ruined others was ignored. As Vickers writes, “Through Pertamina, Suharto, and other members of the power group had ready access to an ongoing source of funding which meant that they were not accountable.” In the 1970s, Indonesia was one of the major world oil producers. Following the Middle East crisis in 1973, this meant an unfettered flow of income to the country’s military and political elite. Sutowo himself paid over US$1 million for his daughter’s wedding in 1973, and fitted pure gold rims around the license plates on his personal Rolls-Royce.
Sutowo was never held accountable for his negligence, mismanagement, and blatantly rampant vice. In fact, all fines and jail terms were passed along to deputies, and Sutowo was allowed to retire as head of the Indonesian Red Cross. Perhaps most shocking of all, during the early hours of New Year’s Day 2005, Sutowo’s youngest son was arrested in the bar of the Hilton Hotel, Jakarta, owned by his older brother – another concession to Sutowo for his “service” to the nation. When the woman whom he was partying with had her credit card declined by a young part-time waiter, Sutowo the Younger said, “Don’t you know who I am?” and then pulled a gun and shot the waiter to death. [9]
I have already talked about corruption at length, but this is just another example of how truly pervasive it was throughout Suharto’s house of cards. As Vickers adds, “The Sutowo story was typical of the way Indonesia’s vast wealth was used during the Suharto years – some deployed for projects to help the poor, but not before huge amounts were raked off for the benefit of the governing group.”[10] Personal and family greed should have been recognized early-on as the grim reaper it ultimately turned out to be. If KKN had been controlled and suppressed more effectively, the benefits of Suharto’s epic strides towards development might still be in effect today.
Two years after Suharto’s abdication in 1998, rice had fallen to five percent of GDP, from thirty percent in 1970. The revered nasi had lost its prominent role as the Indonesian engine of economic growth, replaced by more industrially and technologically advanced systems. But, as Friend recounts, “the politics of rice was again suddenly drawing debate. Rice was the largest single employer in the country, the provider of half the protein caloric intake of the population, a socio-cultural phenomenon.”[11] The rapid rise and fall of rice prices following Suharto’s departure alerted the world, the nation, and its 200 some-odd million citizens to the fact that an old pre-Suharto era problem was wrapping itself in a new hull.
Two questions followed that neither Harvard-trained economists nor Javanese rice farmers have yet been able to answer – How to achieve long-term economic growth to lift people out of poverty? [12] And, How much short-term suffering will those poor endure before latent tensions explode, as they have so many times in recent Indonesian history?

On October 13, 2006, Muhammad Yunus and his Grameen Bank won the Nobel Peace Prize for their pioneering use of tiny, community backed loans to lift millions of people out of poverty. With the news, microfinance and its derivations – microlending, microcredit, and community savings programs – have shown that pembangunan internasional is on the cusp of change. While the microfinance revolution may just be starting, for those who care about defeating poverty and achieving realistic development goals, the path towards a more sustainable solution now seems clear. Much more than just a gift, Yunus’ work has provided the wealthy industrialized world with a brilliantly simple way to save the world while making a profit.
It will be a travesty of mankind if the twenty-first century is allowed to repeat the development blunders of the last. The international development strategy only really began with the end of World War II, when the United States issued low-interest loans to those European countries still suffering from the fighting. The Marshall Plan is the most famous example, granting billions of dollars for infrastructure reconstruction and the like to countries that would have otherwise been confined to a perpetual cycle of poverty. While walking the streets of London or Paris, it has struck me to think what would have become of these magnificent capitals had the billions of dollars in foreign funding not been available.
When I was still in college at Dartmouth, I would often take ice climbing or hiking trips to the ravines of New Hampshire’s tallest peak, Mount Washington. Driving across on route 5, one of the most beautiful scenes in all of New England is the snow creeping down the Maple-splattered flanks of Mount Washington, the cog railway closed and no longer puffing its cancerous black clouds, the magnificent Bretton Woods Hotel cradled at the mountain’s base. The agreement signed at Bretton Woods in 1945 paved the way for the establishment of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. The new system promised massive loans on the scale of tens of billions of dollars to nations that proscribed to the macroeconomic overhauls recommended by the new theoretically multinational institutions. With American bankers and diplomats at the helm, unprecedented loans were issued to pull Europe from its ship of shambles.
Over fifty years later, much of the international aid system remains virtually unchanged. Massive loans are made to build electricity grids, dams, roads, airports, and the other mainstays of developed, modernized society. Unfortunately, as the Dutch discovered in the Indies and as countless others have repeatedly pointed out, much of the funding supplied to help the world’s poorest rarely “trickles down” to where it is needed most. Instead, the money is siphoned-off by corrupt bureaucrats, or is assigned and used imprudently, leading to the construction of multibillion dollar “bridges to nowhere” and inoperative, unsafe hydroelectric dams, amongst other failed projects.
In Indonesia, the Suharto regime made the inefficiencies of macro-development painfully obvious. Government sanctioned Rolls-Royces, one billion dollar pay-offs, and scotch-free murder are uncomfortable bedfellows with the estimated sixty million people who continue to scrape by on less than a dollar a day. The Indonesian macro approach oftentimes generates more ire than admiration. Last October in Aceh, where nearly 200,000 people died in the 2004 tsunami, the manager of the US$2.4 billion BRR was taken hostage, and only released following the intervention of the provincial governor, 36 hours later. In November, I spent two weeks trekking in the Mentawai Islands off the west coast of Sumatra. In some parts, TVs, motorbikes, and cell phones are still as abstract as America. Jakarta bustles and hustles with the veneer of a modern city, but what sort of modernity permits un- and underemployment rates of near sixty percent?
While education, infrastructure development, and property law reform are all still pivotal in the effort to develop the poorest regions of the world’s developing countries, microfinance should be touted as a strikingly attractive and much needed boost from the bottom. I had to go out and experience this micro-revolution in the field before I could become a believer.
During weekends and days off from school, I worked as a liaison between the Los Angeles-based Real Medicine Foundation and the Central Java-based KOMPIP Foundation. Providing a measure of accountability for the U.S.-based operation, I worked with KOMPIP distributing very small loans to extremely poor Javanese villagers who could not qualify for loans from conventional banks. No collateral is needed and repayment is based on an honor system. Each community uses varying sets of rules, interest rates, and other stipulations, but the effects were similar wherever I went. Interest rates were similar to those offered at national banks, but did not require the nonexistent collateral required by the big Indonesian lenders. The equivalent of Indonesian loan sharks, to whom poor villagers would otherwise turn, oftentimes charge up to ten percent a day.
Sitting under his thatch roof and cement walled home, a Javanese villager named Pargito explained his community’s approach to me. The first time I visited him, four months after the earthquake, he, his wife, and their three children were still living in the wreckage of their home under a blue tarp supported by bamboo poles. Mlese, his village an hour’s drive north of Jogyakarta, was destroyed in the massive earthquake of May 2006. Using supplies donated by the Christian NGO World Vision and supplemental income generated through his micro-finance funded vegetable delivery business, he was able to rebuild his home seven months after the distribution of his fifty dollar loan.
“If we cannot pay the loan on time, we must go before the other community members to answer their questions. Maybe we will have to explain what we did with the money, why we cannot pay, why we are irresponsible people.” Wearing a clean but worn plaid shirt, sipping on jasmine tea and smoking a kretek cigarette, he laughed with lean cheek bones and sparkling eyes. “In Javanese culture, this would be the biggest shame imaginable, going in front of your friends for questioning. I would first go to a family or friend from another village to ask for help paying the interest. I would even sell my TV before community shame like that.”
Anyone, regardless of family history, can qualify for a loan, which means that generational cycles of poverty are broken across the board. In a country like Indonesia, oftentimes paralyzed by corruption or bureaucratic incompetence, it is obvious why independent businesses rather than the government are seen as a better way to solve social problems, first and foremost poverty. Whether villagers use their loan – the average is about US$15 – to buy a bicycle to deliver rice, invest in a year of school fees, or start a brick making facility, they go from subsistence level peasants to entrepreneurs literally overnight.
In Mlese, accompanied by Akbar, the CEO of KOMPIP, we visited one fifty year-old woman named Ibu Radinem. Indonesian rap blasted from a window-rattling stereo, chickens pecked at scraps of corn husks, naked bulbs hung from the exposed terracotta roof. Where there was rubble six months ago, there stood a tile roofed, brick-walled house with glass windows and a cement floor. Before the earthquake, Ibu Radinem owned and operated a sundries shop that was destroyed. For the six months before the loan dispersal, she had no steady income, and spent her days sleeping, chatting, and eating at friends’ houses. She borrowed the equivalent of about US$20 to rebuild her sundries shop. With two payment periods left, Mrs. Radinem has almost fully repaid her loans. She now makes nearly five dollars a day selling soft drinks, shampoo, soup, and chips.
Beyond the sheer economics, which are astounding, the self-help benefit is also compelling. People gain a new appreciation for the value of their lives, and realize that with just a little bit, a whole lot is possible. According to Akbar, “The most important thing we do is social preparation. Accountability, planning, and transparency. Making sure everyone who borrows understands their commitments.”
I was skeptical at first. My Dad always said that anything that sounds too good to be true, particularly with money, usually is. “Many of the problems in the world remain unresolved because we continue to interpret capitalism too narrowly,” Yunus told an audience at Oxford University in 2006. “We have remained so mesmerized by the success of the free market that we never dared to express any doubt about it.”[13] Yunus’ plan does not call for a Marxist style abolition of capitalism. As a former Fulbright scholar to Vanderbilt University with a PhD in economics, he knows that free market capitalism is the only way to achieve widespread increases in quality of life and standard of living. Yunus is not calling for the destruction of capitalism – he is calling for its enlightenment.
Lasting peace, real democracy, and advanced human rights cannot be achieved unless large population groups find ways to break out of poverty. The macro-aid system does not and will not guarantee such a conclusion by itself. “Yunus and Grameen Bank have shown that even the poorest of the poor can work to bring about their own development,” the Nobel citation said. Macro-aid is still needed to bring life saving clean water, electricity, and roads to the billions of people living without the perks of a modern life. Yet, microfinance is estimated to have already helped some 17 million people worldwide – estimates for Indonesia do not exist, yet. That help was delivered at a tiny fraction of what has been contributed to the macro-aid “trickle down” system. As Yunus said, “If you stay with the same old thing over and over, you don’t get anywhere.” If the world is serious about waking up those who are still economically, politically, and socially asleep, it is clear to me that we need to embrace the new micro way.
[1] Anderson, Benedict R. O’G. Language and Power: Exploring Political Cultures in Indonesia. Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1990. p. 188
[2] Vickers. A History of Modern Indonesia. P. 16
[3] Dick, Howard, et al. The Emergence of a National Economy: An Economic History of Indonesia, 1800-2000. Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 2001. p. 198
[4] Friend. Indonesian Destinies. P. 137
[5] Hill, Hal. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1996. pp. 198-9
[6] Friend. Indonesian Destinies. P. 139
[7] Hill. The Indonesian Economy Since 1966. Pp. 128-36
[8] Vickers. A History of Modern Indonesia. P. 186
[9] Vickers. A History of Modern Indonesia. P. 185
[10] Vickers. A History of Modern Indonesia. P. 186
[11] Friend. Indonesian Destinies. P. 142
[12] Timmer, Peter. “Tensions in Indonesia’s Food Policy.” USINDO Brief. November 17, 2000
[13] Prasso, Sheridan. “Saving the World with a Cup of Yogurt.” Fortune. February 5, 2007, pp. 44-9

Test

2007-04-06T21:12:00.000-07:00

I was unable to post for a while, this is a test to see if I now can.

Acehnese Dreams

2007-02-14T00:53:00.000-08:00

In front of the Baiturrahman Royal Mosque, Aceh’s most famous landmark.

At Sultan Iskandar Muda Airport in Banda Aceh, a swirling mist still clings to shrouded green hills as steam begins to burn off of wet runways and tiled roofs. Stepping off the plane and onto the gleaming tarmac, the air is heavy for me. Not due to relief from surviving yet another flight with Adam Air, the company responsible for the plane lost off of Sulawesi two weeks ago, garnering massive international media attention because of the three Americans onboard. Not due to the stifling humidity that rises from the slick ground and presses from overhead. Not due to the prospect of entering Indonesia’s most pious and strict Islamic province. And not due to the lingering destruction and pain that I know are still omnipresent outside the airport gates. The atmosphere of re-entering Aceh is heavy because in this place lie the memories and hopes of a people that I have come to love.
The staff at the Lonely Planet write, “Few travelers discover the delights of Indonesia’s northernmost province. Internal conflict and its image as homeland to a band of Islamic zealots have kept most people away for years.” Subjected to military occupation for the majority of the past century and a half, and at bloody civil war from 1976 onwards, much of the province had been reduced to little more than a widespread state of emergency. However, in late 2004, a bout of unimaginable violence and destruction would render the disputes between guerrillas and the central government moot. The Acehnese were crushed by the world’s most devastating tsunami and the massive 9.2 Richter earthquake that preceded it. More than 150,000 people (or close to five percent of Aceh’s population) were ultimately included in the death toll, and tens of billions of dollars worth of infrastructure and private holdings were washed away or pounded to smithereens. Imagine nearly forty times the number of deaths from September 11th, the ninety foot waves that traumatized millions of other survivors, and you can just begin to understand. As the preeminent scholar of Aceh, Anthony Reid, writes, “Acehnese have learned to be stoic in the face of suffering.”
I made my first trip to Aceh during the winter of my Junior year at Dartmouth. At that point, I was working around New England on a photo project dealing with the homeless and displaced. I had applied for several grants through Dartmouth, and had won funding to pursue my photographic work on displacement in China. Instead, I took the term off to visit the Southeast Asian tsunami zone and photograph the more pressing situation that I found there. After being turned around at gunpoint in Myanmar and then making my way overland from Bangkok to the peninsular west coast Malaysian port of Penang, I boarded a ferry crossing the Malacca Strait bound for Medan, Indonesia.
When I arrived in Medan, I was informed that I would need a specially authorized “blue book” from the Acehnese provincial government in order to enter the still fractious province. Not keen on the idea of kicking around Medan, Indonesia’s third largest (and arguably dirtiest) city waiting indefinitely for uncertain admission to Aceh, I instead bought a bus ticket and stowed away in the luggage compartment for the twelve hour ride. Passing through numerous check points, where soldiers in full battle gear took unceremonious turns observing the contents of the passenger compartment of the bus, I met an Acehnese man named David who was returning to Banda from his family palm oil plantation in North Sumatra. I would spend the next two weeks living with David’s family, touring the death and destruction. Dozens of body bags were still stacked on street corners, stagnant pools of oily black water leered menacingly around the city, and the vast majority of the people in the city, a mere five weeks after the waves had receded, were still too shocked to do anything but repeat their stories and look to Allah for answers.
After a stimulating and eye opening set of experiences, I returned to Dartmouth for the spring term, where I applied and won more funding to expand my study and return to Thailand and Aceh the following summer. I was given my senior year free of classes and a substantial budget to pursue my photographic work on displacement and development in the twenty-first century. This was, before the Fulbright, the biggest break of my academic life.
I spent June in Khao Lak, Thailand, and then returned to Indonesia for July and August, where I lived with David and his family. It turns out that David may be a drug addict, but I nevertheless spent an incredible month digging deeper into the issues of Aceh, interviewing dozens of people and shooting hundreds of rolls of black and white film. When I returned to the U.S. in late August, I was riding a wave of intellectual anticipation. I sought out the Fulbright as a means of returning to Indonesia, and in an ideal world, living in Aceh. The gods of bureaucracy favored East Java instead. A few weeks after the two year anniversary (if you can call it that) of the tsunami, I decided it was time to return.

As many scholars and journalists have lamented, Aceh is an understudied and underappreciated region of both Indonesia and the world. The intrepid Dutch colonialist Snouck Hurgronje wrote a comprehensive, albeit politically skewed, survey of Aceh that was published in 1895. At the time, the Dutch were more than twenty years deep in their battle to suppress the rebellious and unrelenting Aceh, the last hold out of non-colonized Indonesia. Unstable conditions since then have limited field work to a handful of committed academics and journalists. Among them, Billy Nessen spent several years living with GAM (Free Aceh Movement) rebels photographing and filming the atrocities that he saw. For the eighteen months leading up to the tsunami, when all foreign aid and development workers and journalists were expelled from Aceh, Nessen was the only non-Indonesian in the province. A few linguists and anthropologists have also done work in the region, but as Reid points out, “None of the potentially rich archaeological sites in Aceh has yet been systematically excavated.” Much of the English language early history of Aceh is still murky, at best.
This lack of an historical record partially accounts for the number of deaths sustained in Aceh, and ironically the peace that followed. Aceh lies on top of the Sumatran subduction zone, where the heavy crust of the Indian Ocean floor is absorbed beneath the lighter Sumatran Plate, which forms the basis of the Ring of Fire and makes Indonesia the world’s most volcanically and seismically active nation state. Over decades and centuries, the pressure built up through that subduction process must be released. Similar earthquakes and tsunamis must have, even in the past few thousand years, bombarded the Acehnese coast. With more than four centimeters of the Indo-Australian plate being consumed under the west coast of Aceh per year, it is surprising that there is no recorded sign of a large scale earthquake in British, Dutch, Japanese or independent Indonesian records of the province.
The lack of research being conducted in Aceh and the inability to maintain a historical database therefore account for the lack of foresight that Aceh was due for a massive show of seismic might. There is well documented evidence of quakes in more southern parts of Sumatra, where European colonists had successfully made progress. Earthquakes in Padang, Mentawai, and Bengkulen are recorded systematically from the late seventeenth century onwards. In Nias, off the west coast of Aceh, there is a record of an 8.5 Richter quake in 1861. Even in Simeulue, practically a stones’ throw from southern Aceh, a 1907 earthquake reportedly triggered a massive tsunami that claimed nearly 2,000 lives. Tales of the giant waves lived on in popular memory, but due to lack of a European presence, were not until recently recorded by historians or geologists.
Additionally, a moderating factor was the Acehnese style of building simple thatch houses on wooden poles, so that even very large earthquakes caused relatively little loss of life. That is, prior to the twentieth-century urban transition to building in brick and concrete. As modern concrete buildings subsumed the coastal landscape, earthquakes that had previously been “but little formidable to the natives” took on an increased potential threat. As Reid writes, “By contrast the century prior to 2004 does indeed appear to have been a quieter time, which should have given rise to some anxiety.”

“It was Sunday morning, early, you know, so my family and I just at home, wake up, watch TV, eating. It was beautiful day, too. The sun was shining, I now remember the birds sing too, but maybe I invent that part. Anyway, it was very normal, like any other Sunday in Banda Aceh. I was eighteen at the time, still live with my parents and my two brothers. My dad in Sabang, my mom in Banda. They don’t even live in the same house anymore. Whenever she in Banda, my father in Sabang, and whenever my father in Banda, she in Sabang. Is like they can’t stand each other. My mom wants to get divorce, she has for long time, but my brothers tell her she is a bitch. Can you imagine calling your mother bitch?”
I’m talking with Siti Balqis Natyasrah, who introduced herself to me as “Kiss, it’s easier for foreigners.” We are in front of a beachside warung in Sabang, Pulau Weh, a tropical paradise located an hour by ferry from Banda Aceh. Kiss was born in Sabang – home to Kilometer Zero, Indonesia’s westernmost point – and has lived in Aceh all her life. She is now twenty, flawlessly beautiful, and married to a thirty year-old Swiss engineer who works for the International Committee of the Red Cross. I met her on the ferry ride from Banda, and she volunteered to show me around “her island” for a few days.
Using money put-up by her Swiss father-in-law, she is developing a beachside bungalow resort on a quarter mile stretch of flawless sand that overlooks the setting sun. At the time of the tsunami, she had finished half her coursework for a degree in accounting at a local university in Banda Aceh. Her English is nearly perfect, minus the occasional split infinitive or forgotten pronoun. After the tsunami, her university closed temporarily, at which point she began working as a translator for the Australian army corps of engineers, a job that quickly catapulted her into the world of development work. Since then, she has worked for half a dozen humanitarian organizations, including UNICEF and the British Red Cross. When she can get away, she spends her weekends checking-up on the construction of her bungalows, recuperating from the stress of twelve hour work days.
“Anyway, at about eight in the morning, we feel the earthquake. I mean, the walls of the house move like rubber, cracks coming in the floors, lamps and photos and TVs and things falling from shelves. I was so scared, minqia” – her sentences are interjected with quips of Italian, the native language of her Swiss-born hubby – “My mother and me, we run out of the house to the street, and there are people everywhere. We very lucky, we were not hurt. Some people bleeding, other people just scream and cry. Many peoples’ houses were destroyed, just nothing left. It was like that for fifteen or twenty minutes. Then thousands and thousands of people just start run and drive cars and motorbikes, no one knows what was going on, just people everywhere. I didn’t know what was happening, so I put my mother on the motorbike with me and we start driving as fast as we can with the other people. God forgive me, I hit some man, maybe I break his leg, I don’t know. We were just trying to get away as fast as possible. Some people are screaming about the ocean, but I couldn’t hear.
“When we arrived at the hills, I helped my mother, and we walked for maybe an hour up to the top. You see the hills around Banda, they are very tall. We waited there, maybe six hours, then came back down to the city. Our house was OK, thank god. Only some cracks. It’s really incredible. It is like three miles from the ocean, so no water came, only the earthquake. My father was OK, my mother and me were OK, my brothers were OK. But, Nick, I’m telling you, I lost over one hundred friends and family that day.”

While not as explicitly matriarchal as other Sumatran societies, like the Minangkabau culture that surrounds Padang in West Sumatra, Aceh is still home to an ironic blend of women’s power due to adat (kinship structures and customs) and a simultaneous suppression under strict Islamic commitments and interpretations. Houses are exclusively inherited by daughters, so the wife is the one who owns the house. Parents will give the family home to the eldest daughter at the time of her marriage, and build a new house nearby. With this deal come the ubiquitous rice fields, which formed the backbone of the Acehnese economy until the advent of trade six centuries ago. Thus, it is the mothers, and most often not the fathers, who bring home the proverbial bacon through the revenue of their rice-fields and other household activities. To this day, in rural Acehnese societies, once boys reach a certain age, they no longer sleep in their mother’s house, but in the communal hall of the village, biding their time until marriage. As Snouck Hurgronje, the famous Dutch scholar wrote, men feel like “guests in the houses of their wives.”
Reid writes, “The Islamic commitment, that all Acehnese feel is part of their identity, has never reduced the economic independence of women, and in turn their relative autonomy.” Based on my interviews and experiences with Kiss and other women in Aceh, while I observed the matrilineal system to be alive and well, it would take a stretch of the imagination to say that women are autonomous in Aceh, particularly post-tsunami. Aceh is by far and away Indonesia’s most pious Islamic province. The independently Muslim thread that runs throughout Acehnese history has contributed to the distinct and separate sense of identity and character that many Acehnese feel. Aceh’s resistance to incorporation into both the Netherlands Indies and the Indonesian nation state was promulgated in large part by an overriding sense of a distinct Islam-driven nationalism – one that many Acehnese insist has been in existence for nearly two centuries, if not more.
Nobody who has studied the region believes that the issue of contemporary Aceh is a recent development. The history here, as in so much of Indonesia, plays an integral part in shaping every facet of modern life. As Winston Churchill said, “The longer you look back, the farther you can look forward.” Most sane thinkers have come to realize that the multilayered obstacles at the heart of the “Aceh problem” will not be resolved through either military might or simple legislation. Understanding some of the underlying history helps to shed light on, what to me, is one of the most fascinating parts of Indonesia.
Following the tsunami, there was a province-wide backlash against the perceived graft and disregard for Islamic strictures that had been strongly in place since the sixteenth century. Many Acehnese saw the tsunami as a direct sign from Allah that their ways were wicked, and that drastic changes were needed in order to pacify the wrath of God. Many Acehnese in the first few years of the twenty-first century feared the province’s slide from “the gate of the Holy Land” (Serambi Mecca, a term that many Acehnese use to refer to the province) to nothing more than a second rate developing world bastion of corruption and low morals.
In the early period of Indonesian Islamic history, Aceh had played the crucial role in defining a new identity of faith throughout the archipelago. As Snouck Hurgronje recorded:

Before sailing ships were replaced by steamers as a means of conveyance for visitants to Mekka, Acheh formed a great halting-place for almost all the pilgrims from the Eastern Archipelago…. Many remained there a considerable time on their way to and fro, while some even settled in the country as traders or teachers for the remainder of their lives.

Nur al-Din al-Raniri, chief Acehnese religious authority and a native of Gujarat in modern day India, authored what would become the famous Bustan al-Salatin. He found the sultanate to be impressive in both its sumptuousness and religious grandeur. In 1641, in describing the funeral arrangements for the man who appointed him to his high position, the Acehnese Sultan Iskandar Thani, al-Raniri recorded:

In all the states we see both above and below the wind, in the palaces of all the great kings, there is no-one who is equal in righteous authority to our noble Lord the King, Duli Hadharat. Truly this state of Aceh Daru’s-Salam is the very verandah of God’s most honoured city of Mecca.

The first signs of Islam in Aceh (and by dent of that fact in the Indonesian archipelago) date to roughly the beginning of the twelfth century. The discovery of traces of medieval south Indian red pottery at the Kuta Lubhok archaeological site near Lhok Cut – one of the few in Aceh – point to the direct ties between Aceh and south and east India that were established long before the subsequent Islamization of what are today Malaysia and Indonesia. As McKinnon points out, “The influence of such communities who established themselves on the Aceh coast, with their westward-looking links, was eventually to have a profound influence on the fiercely independent but indigenous way in which the Acehnese saw themselves.”
While the prolific Javanese Majapahit dynasty appears to have fought and won battles as far north as southern Aceh, the cultural influences of the Javanese seems to have lacked the influence of the Indian traders. The Western-oriented commercial, cultural, and religious contacts strongly influenced the development of Acehnese identity, developing a much different perception of themselves from the Javanese, or even south Sumatran peoples. As the Acehnese Sultanate began to rise at the beginning of the sixteenth century, Aceh developed into a major entrepot where all major horizons of foreign interaction remained oriented towards, in the west, Sri Lanka, India, and the Middle East, and to China in the north – but rarely to Java in the southeast.
Under the great Sultan Iskandar Muda (ruled 1607-36), whom the Banda Aceh airport is named after, Aceh experienced nearly thirty years of military expansion. In 1614, the Acehnese even successfully defeated the Portuguese at Baning as part of their push to dominate what is today peninsular Malaysia. Iskandar Muda’s successor, Iskandar Thani, died prematurely after only five years of rule, much of which was characterized by religious turmoil. His death led to a nearly sixty year period of all female rule. To the dismay of the Acehnese and foreign Muslim backers alike, that sixty year period resulted in significant military and land losses that ultimately led to the dethronement of the Sultana Kamalat Shah. In 1699, the Sheriff of Mecca issued a fatwa ruling that it was unIslamic for a woman to serve as Sultan.
When conceptualizing Aceh’s development into a fractious, unsatisfied, and devoutly Muslim province – as it was for most of modern history – it is important to acknowledge that even – and maybe especially today – violence is often an effective means of catalyzing identity formation. From the fifteenth century on, the themes of violence and conflict were very prominent in Acehnese life. Between outward imperial expansion and inward religious struggle, there was more than sufficient fodder to feed the cannons of cultural and political conglomeration.
Prior to the sixteenth century, Aceh had embraced a regional approach to developing political and cultural identity. In envisioning Aceh as the imperial throne for both Sumatra and peninsular Malaysia, the Sultans adopted an “essentially inward-looking” approach, “with a vision for Malay hegemony overriding pan-Islamic notions.” However, as Aceh began to bump heads with the global superpowers of the era, especially the Portuguese, a wider purview became necessary. Reaching out for the support of a like-minded western-based superpower, under Sultan Alau’d-Din Ri’ayat Shah al-Kahar, the Ottoman Turkish were enlisted. From 1563 onwards, Aceh established close ties with Suleiman the Magnificent in Constantinople, requesting help against the Portuguese using overt pan-Islamic terms:

The Sultan [of Aceh] says that he is left alone to face the unbelievers. They have seized some islands, and have taken Muslims captive. Merchants and pilgrim ships going from these islands towards Mecca were captured one night [by the Portuguese] and the ships that were not captured were fired upon and sunk, causing many Muslims to drown.

The pan-Islamic approach is also obvious in the context of local religion and law issues. While Hukum Adat (customary law) continued to play an important role in everyday life, during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, what we in the West think of as the strict dogma of syariah or syariat law began to be integrated into the functioning of the criminal and penal courts.
Acehnese law was often much more severe than the Islamic variety. Where stoning was proscribed for adultery, the Acehnese used strangulation. The penalties for consuming alcohol included amputation of the hands and pouring molten lead down the throats of those judged guilty. It was not until much later that a strict interpretation of syariat law was adopted.
As more Muslims traveled between the east and Mecca making the obligatory hajj – one of the five Islamic life duties – more Islamic scholars paid visits to Aceh, thereby introducing Islamic sciences and law to everyday life. Additionally, many Acehnese began to make the hajj themselves, returning to the province with newfound Islamic scholarship and customs. As Riddell writes, “Aceh was a conduit for the dynamic processes of change taking place throughout the archipelago.” During the sixteenth and first half of the seventeenth centuries, both in terms of empire building and Islamization, Aceh was pushing the vanguard across the Indonesian archipelago.

“One day, like six days after the tsunami, a big Spanish ship came. It was right over there, around the bend at Iemuele beach, but you could see it from here. It was a big ship, you know, like the USS Abraham Lincoln, the American one that brought the fresh water to Aceh. You see, your government can treat Muslims right… sometimes!”
Kiss and I are standing on her beachfront property, watching half a dozen bare-chested Indonesian men chop down coconut trees and saw planks of wood. Kiss’s bungalow resort is supposed to open in less than four months, but the majority of the land has yet to be cleared, and only one bungalow is under construction. The land slopes up from pristine white sand to a steep hillside of lush vegetation. On the beach, crisscrossed coconut trees lean precariously out over the sand and lapping Indian Ocean. Located on the north side of the island, her property was spared any damage in the tsunami. The sun is just rising over the eastern horizon, but the sweat is already beginning to run down my back. Kiss wears a black bikini top and a pair of pink shorts that read “Von Dutch” across her bum. She has a large pink tropical flower pinioned between oversized Chanel sunglasses and her long black hair.
“It was a big Spanish ship, so they could not come to the land, but they sent a smaller boat, one of those rubber kinds for going to the shore. So twenty Spanish soldiers come in their boat and they don’t go to the harbor, but stop on the beach and come up to the big road here through the forest. And I was in town, in Sabang, help my friend at her store. The tsunami didn’t come to this part of the island so everything okay, but because so many people had no food or things, my friend was very very busy. So I helped her sell things and clean her shop.
“Then, all of a sudden, here come twenty foreigners, twenty Spanish who wear nothing but underwear. They don’t have uniforms or guns, they just come walking through town in their underwear. The Australians, they always wear their uniforms. You know I worked with the Australians, just me and one other girl from here and an Australian girl who could only speak very simple Indonesian. It’s funny, because they didn’t want men, even though men usually get hired for all the translating jobs. They only wanted women. They were very polite and nice the whole time. Just me and two other girls translating for five hundred Australians. Sometimes just about shopping, but most of the time for important stuff, like permission to make a building or permission to land an airplane or boat.
“The Aussies were not allowed to drink while they were here, and you know how much Australians like to drink. But they were OK. Sometimes the Chinese in town asked me to ask the Aussies if they wanted beer, but I told the Chinese to ask by themselves. The Australians never drank though, they were very polite.
“The Spanish though, oh my god! So they come walking into town, twenty of them, wearing nothing but their underwear, small little white underwear too, so their cocks and balls are all over the place when they walk down the street. I could see it, Nick, because they were sweaty and their underwear was clear. So I go up to one of them, and I say, ‘You know, sorry, I don’t want to be rude, but this is a very Muslim place, and people will be angry with you for walking like that in public. See that store there, you can buy a sarong to cover yourself for only three dollars.’ But he only said, oh yeah, and kept walking, maybe he didn’t speak English, I don’t know.
“So, at that point, I was being followed by like what you would call the FBI or CIA for several weeks, because I worked for the Australians, and they wanted to know secrets about Australia, you know? It was scary. Like every time I got in a car, these two guys in dark sun glasses and suits would follow me. It was like in the movies. After two weeks or so, they come over to me and start trying to get to know me, you know, like guys do. One of the guys was really aggressive, but the other was nice, so I talked with them and let them buy me dinner.
“And they took me out a few more times, to nice places. One time they even took me to an Indonesian navy boat. They would ask me questions about what the Aussies were doing and what special equipment they were using. But I signed a contract, so I wouldn’t tell. Even in Jakarta, they followed me there and called me and asked me to meet them at a nice restaurant, but I said I was leaving the next day.
“So that morning with the Spanish, I see the two guys watching me from across the street, and one of the guys goes out to the street, and I hear him saying that he will call the head of the navy. That’s when I know for sure that he was a spy. So, like twenty minutes later, I see the Spanish guy that I talked to and all the other Spanish being walked out of town by about twenty police officers. The Spanish guy looked at me, and I know he felt stupid, he should have bought a sarong!
“Then there were the Japanese too. One ship of Japanese, like one thousand of them, stopped here without permission. They just all got off the boat and followed their leader, who had a big white umbrella. It was like a tour group that you see in Europe, you know? They all had their cameras and were just taking photos saying, ‘Oh, there’s an Australian or there’s an Indonesian! I want a photo with you!’ It was very funny. I love the Japanese.”
Kiss, by any account, is not your typical Indonesian woman. Born in Sabang, her father works for the government trade and commerce office on Pulau Weh, and at one point dabbled in importing vehicles from Malaysia. The family, despite living off of the income of one government employee, currently owns both a Toyota Rav4 and a Subaru Outback. While Indonesian government officials are notoriously corrupt, I have no evidence to support any claim that Kiss’s father was skimming cream in order to pay for the family rides. When he dropped us off at the family house, he removed a large ball of twine, swamp waders, and an unsheathed machete from the trunk.
Kiss left the island to attend a pesantren (Islamic boarding school) on the mainland when she was twelve. Located near Sigli, in the Pidie region of Nanggroe Aceh Darussalam (Aceh province’s formal title), her school was often caught in the midst of gunfire exchanges between GAM (Free Aceh Movement) guerrillas and TNI (Indonesian Armed Forces) soldiers. At one point she told me, “Now that all the violence has stopped, sometimes it is hard to fall asleep. I became so used to hearing the gunfire in the middle of the night, it was like a lullaby.”

Buffered between the competing colonial powers of Britain and the Netherlands, up to the twentieth century – with the exception of Siam, which would eventually become Thailand – Aceh remained the only pre-colonial entity in Southeast Asia to elude European domination. The last Acehnese dynasty came to power in 1727. By 1873, the province had been invaded by the Dutch in a war that would last over three decades, ultimately ending in Aceh’s reluctant subjugation. Disgruntlement with occupation would become a long running theme in modern Acehnese history, one that would only increase in intensity up to the eve of the tsunami.
Following the geopolitical maneuverings of Aceh’s Sultan Alau’d-Din Ri’ayat Shah al-Kahar in the sixteenth century, Aceh grew in terms of both economic and political power. Of all the sultanates throughout the Malay Archipelago, Aceh maintained the most wide-ranging and frequent interactions with foreign, predominantly Western powers. From 1790 to 1860, American ships made an estimated 967 voyages to Sumatra. As a result of those trips, they carried away more than 370 million pounds of pepper worth about 17 million dollars.
However, Aceh was perceived by most Western powers as a “source of marauding pirates and encroaching settlers,” a territory with a flaccid leadership unable to reign-in rebellious uleebalang (Acehnese war bosses or territorial chiefs). While trade flourished and peace remained relatively stable, a fractured Aceh found its future charted predominantly by foreigners. Following the 1824 London Treaty, which formally divided the Malay Archipelago into British and Dutch spheres of influence, Aceh was in effect “traded” to the Dutch in exchange for Stamford Raffles’ newly founded international hub of commerce on a small island called Singapore.
The Dutch occupation of Aceh proved to be the European nation’s single largest colonial blunder. Throughout the rest of the Archipelago, the Dutch had pursued one of two policies: In extant monarchies and sultanates, a combination of economic and political accommodation punctuated by short spurts of war; and in lawless areas, an unprecedented harnessing of the rule of law, previously absent in many of the more isolated regions of Indonesia. Aceh experienced neither of these paths to subjugation. Instead, threatened by Aceh’s entitled sense of independence, unyielding commitment to Islam, and notorious reputation for stoicism and valor in battle, in February 1873, the Dutch attacked.
As Adrian Vickers writes:

For a Dutch soldier watching the lush green shore-line as he sailed towards Aceh it must have seemed as though the pending task was going to be very easy. Standing with him on the ship were troops from all over Europe whom the Dutch had signed up, men down on their luck or getting away from their pasts…. The colonial army had the latest repeating rifles and heavy artillery, while the Acehnese merely had spears and knives.

As it turned out, Sumatran warfare was a nightmare. Like so many examples of guerilla warfare that would follow in the twentieth century – and to this day – the Dutch confronted massive resistance from local warriors who easily blended back into the Acehnese population. Camouflaged pit traps lined with sharpened spears confronted the Dutch and their allies at every turn. Ambushes and surprise attacks made retaliation, let alone victory, nearly impossible. European foot soldiers lived in fear at every waking moment.
As history would repeat itself a full century later with the Acehnese pitted against the central Indonesian government, the Dutch were reduced to razing villages, occasionally slaughtering entire populations of women and children in an effort to turn the tide against an indistinguishable and elusive enemy. Within the first five years of the war, the Dutch suffered more than 7,000 deaths, although most were attributed to cholera and other tropical diseases. Shortly thereafter, Dutch orders were given to hold without retaliating beyond the advanced line reached in 1880.
The Acehenese had developed the world’s first successful guerrilla strategy against modern European warfare. During the latter part of the nineteenth century, the Acehnese launched weekly raids on the Dutch positions, driving the defenders’ morale to a muddy, bloody low. European soldiers defected to the Acehnese side by the dozen, oftentimes accepting conversion to Islam in exchange for an Acehnese wife. The ulama (Islamic scholar) Teungku Sheikh Saman di Tiro responded to the Dutch governor’s plea for peace by writing, “As soon as you accept Islam by pronouncing the two articles of faith, then we can conclude a treaty.”
After 1893, however, an eventual Dutch conquest of Aceh became possible due in large part to the work of Snouck Hurgronje, the Dutch scholar of Islam mentioned and quoted earlier. Snouck’s investigations showed that Aceh had become an international Mecca for Muslims opposed to European colonialism. In a brilliant move that would change the course of colonial history, instead of recommending increased military muscle, Snouck responded by looking for the social basis of Acehnese resistance. Snouck observed a growing divide between the uleebalang and the ulama – between the traditional Acehnese leaders and the more devout Islamic scholars. He found that it was the ulama who were spearheading the anti-colonial struggles. Snouck recommended that the Dutch initiate a new push to bring around the slighted yet still influential uleebalang to the colonial point of view.
Snouck advised, “When one wishes to rule a country, to have one’s will respected there, then one must establish oneself in that country.” Dutch military commanders adopted some of the Acehnese guerrilla tactics being used against the colonial forces, establishing elite but small units capable of moving quickly and lethally.
As the Dutch government in Europe hid behind bureaucratic banter and a fog of war propaganda, General JB van Heutsz, the commanding Dutch officer in Aceh, adopted Snouck’s novel approach to solving “the problem.” The respect of the uleebalang was garnered through a strengthening of their rule and a simultaneous push to isolate the ulama from their rural political base. Van Heutsz combined effective political segmentation with the use of his new elite units, equipped with state of the art repeating carbine rifles, and a take-no-prisoners campaign that left tens of thousands of Acehnese fleeing the province. By 1903, the local population had been declared “pacified”, and van Heutsz was proclaimed the new governor of Aceh.
However, some would argue that until the peace accords that followed the tsunami, Aceh had never been truly subjugated by any power but Allah. Ulama-led resistance remained very strong in the hinterlands, with annual Dutch death tolls not dropping below 100 until 1913. At least once per week until the 1930s, there were individual suicide attacks conducted by distraught Acehnese against the occupying Dutchmen. Some scholars estimate that all told, twenty percent of Aceh’s population lost their lives in the fight against the Dutch. The resentment and animosity of having nothing but death and defeat to show for such massive sacrifice undeniably led to the manufacture of a socially ingrained hostility that would surface again and again before the Acehnese population could truly be considered at peace.

Inside the Iskandar Muda Airport, while waiting for our checked luggage, my traveling companion Ethan aka The Wire pointed out a “Bintang Zero – 100% Bintang 0% Alkohol” advertisement. Riffing on Indonesia’s most popular beer brand, he mumbled to me, “I guess that detaches the stigma from drinking beer before noon, but then again, what’s the point?”
In late January 2007, it had been nearly eighteen months since I last visited Banda Aceh. While change was taking place, it was at a snail’s pace. After collecting our things from under the perpetual neon glow of the naked overhead bulbs, we hired a taxi to drive us the fifteen minutes to the center of the city. I chatted with the driver, Akbar, as he pointed out newly built houses and schools, or the bulldozed remains of unsalvageable ones. As we approached the city center, I began to recognize familiar landmarks that had benefited from improvements during my absence – a stretch of formerly cracked and broken road that had been repaved, a field formerly littered with trash that was now sprouting grass.
A Swiss BelHotel had recently opened in Banda, but the price tag limited most guests to the international monitoring and UN set. We checked into a dingy and overpriced hotel in the heart of Banda, and then went for a walk to explore. Directly in front of our building lay a now bustling marketplace that, the previous two times I was in Banda, had been crushed beneath a beached sixty foot fishing boat. We were some two miles from the coast, but the wave’s surge had pushed all manner of debris up the Aceh River, depositing detritus, human corpses and mammoth fishing boats as it receded.
After a stop for coffee to avoid a ten minute rain shower, we stumbled across the Aceh Tourism Office, a faded green 1960s era building flying a large Indonesian flag from its roof. Arabic lettering beneath the Indonesian and English meshed romantically, if not awkwardly, with the traditional archway and its peaked corners, representing the horns of the famous Acehnese bulls. This country would be a very different place if the ethnicities of Indonesia permitted themselves to be amalgamated as easily as its architecture.
Inside, after picking our way through a series of labyrinthine and dimly lit corridors, we were guided upstairs by a government employee who was on his way to lunch. Faisal, in his early thirties with the hint of an emerging paunch, found us some literature and a detailed map of the province, and invited us to join him for his meal. Over unfiltered Acehnese coffee and martabak – the Indonesian take on the omelet – Faisal spoke with us about his job, his seven week old first child, and adjusting to life during times of peace. Smoothing out his green government issue uniform, in Bahasa Indonesia he said, “After the Memorandum of Understanding, we just didn’t know. All we could do was hope and pray that peace would stay. Now, the GAM are gone, or in the government, and people are getting used to this new life. Now, it is only the old men who want to fight. The young people like and want this way of life.” We thanked Faisal for his time, and offered to pay, but he said it was already taken care of.
Throughout Banda, people no longer stare with the look of appreciative distress that I became acquainted with during my first two trips. Life, for the most part, has returned to a status of Indonesian-style normalcy. Everything from the way people interact to the style of driving reflects the return from crisis inspired trust and openness to the more reserved and pious traditional approach of the country’s most serious province.
Walking on, The Wire and I made our way to the Baiturrahman Royal Mosque, Aceh’s most famous landmark. Emerging from the low rise sprawl of the city’s grimy surroundings, the Moorish influenced domes and minarets of the massive structure were as awe inspiring as the first time I witnessed them. Entering the mosque grounds, which two years earlier had been scattered with human corpses and debris, I now shivered despite the afternoon sun and sweat trickling down my back. I stood in front of the reflecting pool, between the popularly photographed main minaret and the multi-domed mosque, considering how much change two years can bring. When I first arrived, Aceh was still at war, the military presence an ever tangible reality in a city that had lost one third of its residents to the tsunami. Now, all other sounds blasted out by the magrib – the evening call to prayer – young boys were playing with toy cars as the city hustled and bustled with the pious pulse of a place reborn.
As the call to prayer increased in intensity, fierce looking young men dressed in black from head to toe began to patrol the courtyard of the mosque, ensuring that all individuals were abiding by the dictums of syariat law. I watched as one such man – he couldn’t have been much older than me – stopped two teenage girls dressed in jeans, long sleeved shirts, and matching black jilbabs. Speaking loudly, he gesticulated at the girls with the yard-long wood staff that he carried at his side. After the man walked away and the girls made as if to leave, I approached them and asked what the problem was.
“We are wearing jeans,” they said in Bahasa Indonesia, without making eye contact.
“But so am I, and so are all those men.”
“Yes, but you are men.”
“Huh, well what do you think about that?”
“About what?”
“About not being allowed to enter.”
“Oh, but we are wearing jeans.”
“Right, but the men are also and they are allowed to enter.”
“Yes?”
One of the patrolmen began circulating with a bullhorn in one hand and a yard-long rattan wood cane in the other. While I couldn’t understand the mangled words coming from the horn, as crowds dispersed and men dressed in traditional Islamic prayer robes entered, I knew it was time to leave.
After arriving in Sabang and talking with Kiss, I would ask her about the black-clad men. “Oh yes, they are the WH” – pronounced wey-ha – “the wilayatul hizbah, like the Islamic police. They are all just impotent men who cannot get erections, so they are very angry, and they make their anger on young women, like me. But they have no power. They cannot take me to jail or give me ticket. They can only make threat.”
“But what about that Italian NGO worker and his Acehnese girlfriend?” I asked, referring to a news story about an “improper relationship” that reached the international media shortly after the tsunami. “Didn’t they give her lashings?”
“Yes, but they were stupid. They should have worked out their love in a hotel, or in Sabang, or in Medan, or somewhere else. Instead, they stay in Banda. Life is not normal in Aceh, Nick. You can come to Sabang, and people don’t care, but in mainland Aceh, people are very strict, especially the men. Of course, there is so much korupsi, no one with much power is ever in trouble – they pay lawyers and there is no problem.
“But I tell you, what is nice about marrying foreigner is freedom. I am married woman. They can do nothing. Before, I have to respect everything that my father and brothers say. I say I was going to work with UNICEF in Banda and live there, and they said no, not proper. Now, I am free. They tell me what I can do, and I say, no, you talk to my husband. He is Muslim, but he is European, he does not care. Now I am free.”
The Wire and I spent our days in Banda getting a feel for the progress of change. We walked through markets, alive with the sale of fish, fruits, and mountains of leafy greens and vegetables. The rivers flowed with traditional square-backed Acehnese fishing boats, many advertising the stenciled names of various international humanitarian aid groups. And dozens if not hundreds of government, NGO, and UN SUVs plied the roads, shuttling aid workers to and fro. At night, thousands of people, mostly men, hung out at cafes or in the marketplace, drinking coffee, smoking cigarettes, and living life.
Everywhere we went, construction was underway – the sound of nails being hammered or the smell of wet cement were constant. USAID, UNDP, CARE, and Islamic Relief placards were everywhere, often advertising the donation of a mosque or school or housing development.
Yet everyone in Aceh was not satisfied. In fact, most people were still reeling from their losses, and disgruntlement has reared its head across the tsunami zone. Just three months before my visit, Kuntoro Mangkusubroto, the chairman of the BRR – the Aceh and Nias Rehabilitation and Reconstruction Agency – was kidnapped. Responsible for managing over US$2 billion in funds for the province’s redevelopment, he had come under fire from Acehnese internally displaced peoples – international development speak for non-foreign refugees – due to the slow rate of progress. Taken to a temporary housing complex where he was held captive for nearly twenty-four hours, it took the Acehnese governor’s wrangling to have the man released. Pretending to be an aid worker bringing breakfast to the IDPs, the governor revealed himself and struck a deal with the disgruntled crowd. This news never made international headlines.
At Lhoknga village, on the outskirts of Banda proper, The Wire and I stopped to pay our respects to a mass grave only a stone’s throw from the ocean. A group of lean, dark men with surf boards tucked beneath their arms were walking slowly from the surf break, audible when caught by the wind, back towards a hamlet of newly constructed homes. A warm, gentle breeze came blowing through a handful of still standing pines, swaying tranquilly under bright sun and a few low lying clouds enshrouding the surrounding lush hills. A short and muscular man approached us, wearing nothing but a pair of white Capri pants, some knock-off Chanel shades, and a lanyard around his neck from a German NGO. The man, Sabari, talked with us about the site, where more than one thousand unidentified people were buried.
He talked of the twenty-five deaths in his family, and how now only he and his son are left to manage his sundries shop. He took a mobile phone out of his pocket, and told us how Bill Clinton had visited the grave and his home – only twenty yards away – when he had visited last year. Doubtful at first, I was impressed to see digital photos of President Clinton, Sabari, and his boy huddled together in front of the grave. “All we need now is a toilet for the visitors to the grave,” said Sabari in a mix of English and Indonesian. “When the visitors come, they must all use the toilet in my house because there is none here. When you return to America, can you please ask President Clinton for a toilet?”

Following their Acehnese “victory,” Dutch politicians and military commanders felt a renewed sense of justification in claiming that they had a “moral duty to free common people from oppression or backwardness…. [To] punish or modernize independent indigenous rulers who practiced slavery, ruled unjustly, and did not respect international law.” The 250 Dutch civil servants working for Queen Wilhelmina took their jobs seriously, and implemented a new archipelago-wide bureaucracy that strove for “peace and order,” protecting the peoples of the Dutch Indies from “the worst effects of modern life.”
The Dutch, to their credit, did work incredibly hard to fulfill the Queen’s “Ethical Policy” and its promises of trickle down prosperity and improved opportunities for the Acehnese. At its international trade apex before the onslaught of the Great Depression, the Dutch Indies was producing 37 percent of the world’s rubber, and an astonishing 86 percent of the world’s pepper. And while the reality of colonial life for the Acehnese was not ideal, it did come with certain improvements and benefits, education being one of the most significant.
Historically far behind in terms of widely available education, by 1935 Aceh had reached and exceeded the national average for school attendance. With the increased knowledge and progress of a formal education came the modernization of thought, desire, politics, and organizations – including Islam. In 1939, the first modern Achenese social movement, the all-Aceh Association of Ulama (PUSA), was founded by many of the activists who had championed the cause of Acehnese education. As would be expected, to the horror of the Dutch, the new ulama-led group quickly became an anti-uleebalang as well as an anti-colonial soapbox. Shortly thereafter, PUSA elected the charismatic forty year-old Daud Beureu’eh its first President.
When the Japanese invaded Sumatra in March 1942, it was PUSA that they turned to for support in kicking out the Dutch. The uleebalang maintained a measure of authority for some time, but when the Japanese suddenly surrendered in August 1945 following the nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, it was to PUSA whom went all the spoils. All but two of the twenty-five ruling uleebalang were murdered, along with most of their families.
On August 17, 1945, in the lull between colonial storms, Sukarno proclaimed Indonesian independence while “kidnapped” at his house in Jakarta. Now forced to choose between an Indonesian – albeit mostly Javanese – nation state and the reemergence of the Dutch colonial authority, the relatively modern-style PUSA sided with the baby-faced Republic. PUSA established itself as the ruling body of Aceh, ensuring that its leaders and supporters were “elected” throughout the province. Latter century historians would call the Acehnese political rearrangement “the most profound social revolution anywhere in the Archipelago.” As Reid writes:

The Acehnese revolution followed its own logic, and its own leadership, albeit in the name of Indonesia. Since Aceh was the only area the returning Dutch troops never sought to enter (save for the island and port of Sabang), it became the exemplary bastion of the struggle. The Republic needed Aceh far more than Aceh needed the Republic.

One afternoon, Kiss and I drove out to Kilometer Zero, Indonesia’s official westernmost land terminus – and beyond the SCUBA diving, Sabang’s main tourist attraction. Following sun drenched asphalt roads lined with bromeliad covered colonial era Dutch elm trees, we made our way from Sabang, a sleepy city of some 15,000 inhabitants, north through increasingly dense jungle. Every now and then, we would pass small dirt roads leading into the growth. The paths were usually framed between identical sets of upright bamboo poles sheared-off at the top. The poles’ red and white paint – the standard flag colors of Indonesia – gave the distinct impression of blood dripping from massive, gnarly spears. As I would learn later, the painted bamboo was meant not only to resemble the Indonesian flag, but also to commemorate the Acehnese resistance to the Dutch, when bamboo spears were used to fight machine guns.
We arrived at the one hundred foot tall shower tower that marks KM Zero just in time for sunset. Dog-sized monkeys prowled around, showcasing their manly accoutrements while screeching at the giant red orb dipping below the Indian Ocean to the west. We snapped some photos and got back into the Rav4 before the dozens of monkeys’ playful antics took a turn for the evolutionary worst.
On the drive back, we followed the same rutted track we had followed on the way out. More often than not, the cracked or non-existent asphalt was fighting an uphill battle against the encroaching vines and rainforest scrub. At one point, we passed a chain link fence with a large sign that read ARE YOU READY in red, bold faced English. “You are stupid,” chided Kiss while slapping me playfully, “following me out here in the middle of the jungle. I could take you to a GAM headquarters and have you killed!” I just laughed nervously.

Once the Dutch had established some measure of authority over Aceh, starting in 1908, palm and rubber plantations became lucrative sources of revenue in the province. However, rarely, if ever, was it the Acehnese who benefited. The East Sumatra-based Belgian company Socfin had contributed to the development and expansion of industrial agriculture in the province, and by the end of the colonial period, there were approximately 150 commercially owned estates. Before independence, about twelve percent of the province’s population was composed of migrants, most seeking opportunities on plantations or in mines.
Yet, it was not until the 1930s and 40s that the true wealth of Aceh was revealed with the discovery of vast oil reserves. After independence, oilfields and refineries previously owned by the Japanese were transferred to TMSU (the North Sumatra State Oilfield Enterprise) without compensating the local or provincial governments. Again, the Acehnese lost out in 1957 when TMSU became Permina (the State Oilfield Enterprise), and again in 1968 when Permina became the nationalized energy conglomerate Pertamina, active to this day. While foreign industrialists and a small percentage of Indonesians – mostly Javanese – reaped rewards, thousands of rural Acehnese farmers were forced off their land, driving already poor villages into a state of previously unknown destitution and misery. With the discovery of natural gas in North Aceh in the early 1970s, and Pertamina’s cooperation with Mobil Oil that followed, by the 1990s, the gas export alone from Aceh had reached in excess of US$2 billion per year.
Misguided central, top down economic policies resulted in Aceh becoming a large scale producer and exporter of raw materials for national and global markets, while it was only the entrepreneurs, industrialists, and corrupt government officials from outside the province who benefited. Local customs, economics, and politics were shunted aside in search of the holy grail of nationwide economic growth. One comparative analysis found that in the late 1980s, consumption per person per year in Aceh was US$168, while the provincial GDP per person was US$1,021. The Acehnese were being robbed blind, and they were pissed off.
Thus enters Hasan di Tiro. Great-grandson of Teungku Sheikh Saman di Tiro, the rebellious ulama who led the Acehnese crusade against the Dutch in the late nineteenth century, he would lead his own generation and the next’s charge for Acehnese autonomy. At age twenty-seven, he negotiated with the national leadership in Jakarta, and was given permission to decree the Province of Aceh as separate from the Province of North Sumatra. Shortly thereafter, he left Indonesia to study at Columbia University in New York, where he would work at the United Nations and spearhead the international effort to galvanize attention for the Acehnese cause.
While in New York, Tiro reflected on the future of Indonesia and how to incorporate its disparate peoples, places, and histories. Among other problems, he thought that the “one man one vote” policy did not satisfy the political and judicial needs of minorities, including the Acehnese. Additionally, the only answer he saw to the question of how to build an effective Indonesian nationalism out of the archipelago’s thousands of different ethnic and linguistic groups was by following the road to a nation state founded on Islam.
Indonesian President Sukarno and his New Order government were also obsessed with national integration. The Pancasila, or Five Principles, emphasized the homogenization and centralization of planning and administration, oftentimes in favor of Javanese culture. Particularly for Aceh, where regional cultural traditions constituted the fundamental basis of life, the new policies redoubled many people’s anger and subordination.
Tiro retooled his objectives, and began portraying the Acehnese cause as one that had existed since before the Dutch had arrived. He argued that because the Dutch never had a claim to Aceh, it was not theirs to give to “neo-colonialist” independent Indonesia when they transferred power in 1949. When he founded GAM (the Free Aceh Movement) in 1976, he did not publicly announce Islam as the core of his sought after nation state – he feared the animosity of an already anti-Islamic West. Yet, within GAM and Aceh, he did promote Islam as one of pillars of Acehnese pride.
Much of Tiro’s platform rested on a concept of Acehnese nationalism and honor that many observers have found intimidating and undemocratic. However, as Isa Sulaiman explains, because national politics were dominated by the Javanese and because Javanese militias were employed by the Indonesian military, “the ‘anti-Java attitude’ which surrounded the movement was caused more by political-economic factors than racial/ethnic ones… In general, the ambition of the Aceh nationalists was shared by elites whose needs were not met by the government or who lost their jobs or agricultural lands as a result of development.” Tiro’s ethno-regional approach was a means of galvanizing support for a movement that far fewer Acehnese would have rallied behind if it were construed according to non-ideological lines.
Tiro spread his ideology through several secret visits to Aceh in the 1970s. As the Acehnese, particularly young men, became more frustrated with Javanese rule, they began to act as Tiro’s mouthpiece, spreading the word of rebellion through personal connections and underground networks. By combining guerrilla warfare with international negotiations orchestrated from his sanctuary in Sweden, Tiro engineered his quest for a free Aceh. By the mid-1980s, he had recruited 300 rebel youths, and had sent them to be trained in Libya. From 1989 to 1998, the Suharto regime imposed DOM (Military Operations Zone) in Aceh, leading to hundreds of casualties and thousands of reports of human rights abuses. As Geoffrey Robinson posits, “Far from being the last bastion against national disunity and instability all these years, the New Order regime itself was largely responsible for the serious and protracted violence in Aceh.”
Following the collapse of the Suharto regime in 1998, increased civil freedoms were embraced across the Indonesian archipelago. GAM was able to bolster its propaganda campaign, attracting over five thousand armed men. Additionally, the notion of Acehnese nationalism attracted support from both the newly revived NGO and student activist realms. For a few years, GAM garnered increasing visibility and growth, to the point that Acehnese independence became a tangible reality supported by such popular groups as the Islamic Students Association.
However, by 2000, the tides had turned. With Timor Leste battling for a hard fought independence in 1999, Indonesian nationalists of all stripes began to fear that Aceh could promulgate a national disintegration, with parts of Sulawesi, the Moluccas, and Papua waiting in the wings. Once GAM was seen as posing a threat to the Indonesian nation state, public debate shifted from demonstrations of approval to demands for anti-separatist action.
By 2003, there was popular apathy towards human rights abuses in Aceh, extensive support for the resumption of military operations, and a marked downturn in international support for GAM. In April 2003, roughly seventy percent of Acehnese society was using GAM civil government offices as opposed to Indonesian ones, and 4,750 out of 5,947 Acehnese villages did not have a functional local government. The next month, martial law was re-imposed, Indonesian special forces were air dropped into the province, and another 40,000 TNI soldiers were on the way. This was the state of affairs eighteen months later, on December 26, 2004, when the wrath of God was wrought on a province that had already been drowning for a century and a half.

The Wire and I were back on the road, winding our way from Banda Aceh to Medan via East, Central and South Aceh. We decided to forego the return flight in favor of what is touted as one of Asia’s most scenic drives. The road had been virtually closed to foreigners until after the tsunami. Kiss had told us to watch out for GAM.
After being nearly deafened by the pulse of cheap Bon Jovi knock-off techno inside the microbus, we took the driver up on his offer to ride on top. He told us that not many foreigners passed through these parts, but those that did always liked to sit on top. Clinging to the metal bars beneath us as we careened around hairpin turns, I still had the wherewithal to notice that this ten hour leg from the coast to the center of the province was taking us through by far the poorest villages I had seen in Indonesia. The scenery was beautiful – rolling hills, precipitous cliffs, raging rivers – but where we saw people, they were desperately poor. At one point, we stopped at a shack by the side of the rutted and overgrown road – Aceh’s main transit route from coast to coast – where three bare-chested elementary age boys sold the driver an enormous red fish that was almost as big as them.

The Wire and I didn't ride with the sheep, but we did cling to the roof through some of Indonesia's poorest and most beautiful countryside.

Driving through small hamlets, some that might not have even had electricity, we were often stopped at makeshift gates and made to pay a “mosque tax.” I was amazed at the pristine condition of most of the mosques, many with unblemished aluminum domes that reflected the surrounding mountains and hills like a mirror towards God. Hobbled old women collected coins from the driver in fishing nets, and then screamed commands to open the gate. Too poor to afford shoes or electricity, but still committed to keeping the community mosque looking flawless.
In Blangkejeren, the halfway point on our journey, the microbus let us off at the station, where the driver informed us that he would pick us up in an hour after he went home for lunch. It was a fantastic day, and due to the higher elevation, much cooler despite the cloudless sky. I took a walk out to a local soccer field, and imagined this place two and a half years ago, maybe soldiers exchanging machine gun fire with insurgents right in front of these goal posts. I ran a few laps to loosen up after the six hour haul, and waved to an amused group of boys who had stopped whipping their goat to stare and laugh.
“Hey! Where are you from? Come here, sit down here and wait.” A middle-aged man sitting at the station ticket booth flagged me over as I walked back.
“Thank you, good afternoon. How are you gentlemen doing? Where are you gentlemen from?” I asked in Bahasa Indonesia.
“Fine, fine. Good afternoon. From here of course! I have been here since the day I was born,” replied the man. A handful of the other middle-aged men gathered around the ticket table nodded vigorously and mumbled their support.
“Wow, good. So you all must be GAM then, right?” I half-joked.
“Haha! Ya, almost, but not anymore. You know our new governor is GAM.”
“Ya, I read that in the newspaper. So is this the man who won?” I pointed to the dozens of political photos pasted to the walls, tables, and any free space available. All of the posters featured the same dour looking man in a conservative blue suit and peci, the Muslim prayer hat.
“No, that is the loser. The winner is GAM.”
“Ya, the winner is GAM,” mumbled a few of the other men
“You know, there used to be a lot of violence in Aceh,” continued the ring leader.
“I know, but now there is peace.”
“That is true, allah-ul-akbar.” The others repeated his supplication. He paused to light an unfiltered cigarette. “So then, where are you coming from?”
“Banda.”
“Oh! Banda. Your first time there?”
“No, I was there one month after the tsunami. This is my first time returning to Aceh in over one year.”
“OK, that is very good. You came to help, ya, the first time?”
“Ya, it was crazy, very bad.”
“Ya, many many people died. You know, before, we were at war here too. Many people died. No peace for a long time.”
“Was there much violence here, in Blangkejeren?”
“Here, only fifty dead from the fighting. But in the North, Sigli, Bireun – adu! – a lot.” Another pause, staring off into space. “So where are you from, Germany, right?”
“No, America.”
“AH! AMERICA! He is from America,” he leaned and shouted to the others, they all nodded, I hoped approvingly. “George Bush was here some time ago.”
“Ya, he was, in Bogor, near Jakarta,” I responded. You would have had to have had your head in the sand to have missed his visit.
“Ya, that’s correct. So now we have peace in Aceh,” the man gesticulated with his cigarette, swooping over the surrounding hills in a nicotine laced arc, “and Bush makes a war on the world. Do you like to fight? Do you like shooting guns?”
“I like shooting guns, but war is very bad. I do not like Bush’s war. It is not good for anybody.”
“That is true.” They all nodded, smoked their cigarettes and stared into space, or at me. The coffee they ordered me arrived, brought on a plastic tray by a teenage girl in a jilbab and jeans.
“That is my daughter,” said one of the other men. “I have six children, two wives.”
“That’s good, like Aa Gym,” I said, referencing the popular Muslim cleric who was recently shunned by the female Muslim community for taking a second wife. They all laughed. I asked if I could take their photo, and started shooting.
“You see this man,” the man with two wives was pointing to the man sitting at the ticket table who, up until the wives comment, had been responsible for all of the conversation. “He is a terrorist. Like Taliban. Like Osama Bin Laden.” All the men laughed and slapped each other on the back.
“That’s funny!” I replied, and shot some portraits of the would-be Bin Laden. He cracked a goofy grin and gave me a big thumbs up.
“So what do you study? You are still in college, ya?”
I explained my situation, and began telling them about my life, when our minibus roared back into the station with the Bon Jovi techno still on full blast. “OK, gentlemen, see you next time. Thank you for the coffee. May the peace here last, I hope and pray for you.”
“Oh, do not worry about us,” said the man with two wives, “you should worry more about Bush’s war.”
I didn’t know how to respond. I could only smile. He was probably right.

Aceh, Gili, and Bali Oh My

2007-02-07T06:36:00.000-08:00

Welcome to Aceh, where the realities of shariah law confront you at every turn.
Balqis and me on Pulau Weh - paradise found
Another paradise, Gili Trawangan. Good diving, plenty of sun, and trios of all white festooned bules to make your night.
The Lumba-Lumba dive boat on Pulau Weh
And you thought American bureaucracy was a headache...

My brother Oz came and visited. Some quality time with the keluarga in Madiun.

"HI MOM!" On the rim of Mount Bromo.

On our way from Banda Aceh to Medan (~16 hours), The Wire and I stopped for the scenery - and heinous sweaters - in the resort town of Brastagi.
Lake Bator on Bali. The Australian marathon swimmer Monte was granted special permission to swim across the holy lake in honor of world peace two days after our visit.
Those who know her, know IT well.

At Prambanan, slightly damaged in the earthquake last May

"Melly Clistmas"

Six months after the earthquake, Ibu Sami from a village near Jogyakarta finally had X-rays taken after Dr. Kevin from the Real Medicine Foundation in Los Angeles paid for her transportation to the local orthopedic clinic. A diagnosed tibial compound fracture, a metal plate, and seven screws later, Ibu Sami is almost back up on her feet.

Yeah, this one doesn't really need an explanation now, does it?

Bali

2007-02-04T07:21:00.000-08:00

For the majority of the world, the tropical scented name of Bali conjures one of five images: unspoiled beaches, a tantalizingly unfathomable depth of art and culture, picture perfect surf breaks, scantily clad exotic women, or plastique explosive tinged remnants of one of the world’s most horrific and tragic terrorist bombings.
Bali has been an internationally acclaimed tourism destination since the Dutch colonialists began marketing it as such between the two world wars. During that time, European advertising firms grafted images of topless, buxom Balinese women onto posters and billboards, in turn triggering what would become a veritable tsunami of foreign visitors by the end of the century.
Attracted by images of paradise and the island’s unique religious blend (Bali is a bastion of relaxed and cheerful Hinduism in the midst of an otherwise devout and conservatively Muslim string of some 15,000 islands), tourism now accounts for some two thirds of Bali’s annual GDP. Following the terrorist bombings of 2002, there was a major downturn in the tourism market. After some 200 people, many of them Indonesians, were killed, visitors were given the impression that even the fearsome visages of Shiva and Ganesh were not enough to keep out the radical Islamist scum. But despite continued threats from Jemaah Islamiyah (the Southeast Asian branch of Al Qaeda) and the recent repeal of the organization’s spiritual leader’s two-year jail sentence, around the holiday and New Year season, the party and life in general carry on in Bali just as they have for the past six decades.
Rose and I left Madiun on December 27th and met my brother Oz in Denpasar, Bali’s capital city, the following evening. Denpasar is a typical Indonesian city – crowded, dirty, noisy, busy – infused with omnipresent Hindu temples, offerings, and stray dogs. (In Islam, dogs are seen as being dirty and unholy, and are consequently, unlike the vast majority of the developing world, not found throughout most Indonesian cities and towns. I shudder to think about how local dog populations are monitored and maintained.) North from the heart of Denpasar lie the most popular beaches in Asia for which Bali has in recent times become globally famous. Kuta, Legian, and Seminyak span northwards from the international airport, increasing in luxury, cleanliness, price, and general peace of mind the farther one goes.
Rose and I spent the first night at my regular haunt in Legian, the Sayang Maha Mertha hotel. My buddy John, a Fulbrighter stationed in South Sumatra, was also in Bali, so we split a room, leaving Rose in peace to grapple with her jetlag. The next morning I awoke to her knocking on the door, still suffering from hundreds of bites and a newly contracted ear infection. She looked truly miserable. I hadn’t yet made a visit to an Indonesian medical facility, but Rose’s condition certainly warranted more than just the “wait it out” approach I had adopted to deal with gastrointestinal ailments and minor infections.
After wandering through the labyrinthine markets, stalls, and backstreets of early morning Legian and Kuta, fending off touts offering everything from cologne to watches to foot massages, we eventually found the Legian Medical Clinic, tucked into a small, nondescript alleyway still dripping from last night’s rain. Once inside, the clinic was clean and spacious, although it suffered from the Terrible Neon Lighting Complex that seems to affect every office, building, and house in Indonesia regardless of status or style. The on-call doctor was free, and was able to meet with Rose after only a ten minute wait. In the interim, Rose sat scratching, sweating, and looking generally miserable as the two on-duty nurses watched a prototypical Indonesian teledrama being broadcast on the muted TV over head. There looked like there were a lot of crying pretty girls, grade-C ghosts and spirits, and vats worth of ketchup-style blood. Classic.
The doctor invited Rose and me into his office. There was an examination table, a bookcase full of large and imposing medical journals, and a host of framed degrees displayed over a matching green marble cabinet and desk. A pretty young nurse stood at the ready staring over our heads at the back of the room. Despite its cramped nature, the room and furniture were clean and new, and the doctor seemed well put together and attentive. After asking us to sit down, in pretty good English the doctor asked what the problem was. Rose began showing off her bites. The doctor investigated for thirty seconds. The nurse averted her eyes.
“Usually we would use predisone for this,” the doctor said after finishing his mock examination, referencing a high powered oral steroid, “but that prescription requires a special visit to a dermatologist. We can use a topical corticosteroid instead.” Alright! I thought to myself. Even if this dude is a hack, at least he knows how to properly pronounce these drugs. “Okay, just give me whatever works fastest,” begged Rose. The doctor wrote out a prescription, had the nurse assemble the proper drugs, and several minutes later handed Rose a package alongside a bill for the equivalent of US$140. Several days later, after talking to a young Brit who visited the same clinic only a few hours after us, we realized that if we had taken the prescription and gone around the corner to the non-Western apothecary, we could have bought the same host of medications for one tenth the price.

The heat, congestion, and general seediness of Kuta and South Legian finally got to Rose, and mid-morning she took-off for the cooler climes of Ubud, an hour to the north, where she had reserved a hotel for her, Simon and me for the next three days. I would wait for Simon to arrive – his plane was slated to touch down in Denpasar via Jakarta, Seoul, San Francisco, and New York in the early evening – and then we would hire a taxi to take us to Ubud.
With a few hours to kill, I headed down to the beach to visit some friends I had made on my previous visits. The five minute walk from the hotel to the sand was not a relaxing or pleasant one, being bombarded by touts selling phallus shaped ashtrays and bottle openers and children begging and pushing two dollar knock-off Oakley and Gucci sunglasses. The roads were narrow and twisted, and when combined with the mobile knockoff marketplace and the perpetually inattentive and inexperienced Aussies on their surfboard laden motorbikes, made for a harrowing stroll.
On a good surf day, you can hear the cannon like rumble of the waves from three or four blocks away. With the rainy season though, tides were in flux and often not conducive to the big swell and multiple left and right hand breaks that make the beaches of Kuta and Legian ideal for surfers of all stripes. As my surfing is limited for the most part to talking and writing about it, I was not upset to find the normal head high tubes replaced with gentle and intermittent three foot rollers.
I approached the surf board rental cum waterside restaurant that served as my hangout and lunch spot on past trips, and asked for my buddies Arip and Dana, but was told that they had returned to their villages in Java for the New Year. During my last trip, John and I had surfed with Arip and Dana all day every day for a week. For five dollars a day, they rented us longboards and took us from the uninitiated start (where we first mistakenly attached the ankle leashes to our wrists – Fulbright scholars?) to the point where we could catch waves and even occasionally made it look like we knew what we were doing. After two hour long sessions in the water, we would retreat to the shade of the warung (low key restaurant) where we would quaff beers and gorge ourselves on what must be the best nasi goreng in all of Indonesia. At night, we would reconvene on the beach under the palm trees and breezy stars, and for four dollars, between the four of us split a liter of arak, a potent Balinese rice liquor.
One night, Arip and Dana convinced us to explore the Kuta nightlife scene, renowned for drunk and obnoxious Australian surfers and the legions of bimbos that follow them around. At the Bounty, a discotheque with a roof shaped like a pirate ship, the bouncers allowed John and me to pass unobstructed, but Dana and Arif were stopped. The two guys had warned us that this might happen – while foreigners, particularly bule foreigners, are allowed to enter free of charge, locals must pay a fifty thousand Rupiah cover charge, equivalent to the same amount of money that we were paying for a full day of lessons and board rentals. John and I nearly threw a shitfit, sounding off about modern day apartheid and blatant racism, to which the local bouncers looked at us with blank and uninterested stares. After several minutes of watching scantily clad blonde girls walk by while we stood outside making ethically valid yet unsuccessful arguments, we ultimately paid for the guys to enter, proving that when forced to choose between miniskirts and morals, it’s usually the latter that unravel first.
Once inside, John was drop kicked in the back and Dana was nearly beat-up in the bathroom within the first ten minutes of stepping onto the dance floor. We declared perpetual war on Australian surfers, and vowed never to return to the Bounty again.
Now, three months later, despite the ominous sky and nearly placid water, the beach was more crowded, the Australian surfer contingent having been equalized by the vacationing European and expat family set. I rented a board, donned a surf shirt, and sprinted for the water through fine grained sand. Beyond the breakers, as a few decent waves rolled by, I watched black clouds growing closer over the tops of the surf shops and palms back on the beach. Thunder began rumbling, and within minutes a torrential downpour set in, forcing the hundreds of sun worshipping families and non-water bound Aussies to run for the cover of their hotels.
I stayed out on the waves alongside a dozen locals and a handful of my sworn enemies. The waves picked up in intensity, the thunder continued to boom overhead, and the monsoon rain reached a crescendo, bombarding the mirror-like troughs between waves with an orgiastic intensity. I exchanged knowing smiles with dark, long haired men covered in tattoos and scars, the shoreline barely visible through the roar of rain, the waves breaking in ordered sets of right-handed harmony. Rainwater dripping off my nose mixed with the waves’ breaking spray, and I sat on my board rising and falling gently with the surf, watching, breathing, reveling in one iteration of Balinese perfection.

The earliest stone inscriptions recounting the stories of Indian traders bringing Hinduism to the Indonesian archipelago date from around the ninth century AD. While the history surrounding that period is relatively opaque, it is widely recognized that by that time, the complex rice irrigation process known as subak was already well established. Throughout Bali, over twelve centuries later, those same irrigation systems, minus the twentieth century addition of diesel powered pumps and rubberized tubing, have remained virtually unchanged. Postcard quality terraced rice paddies grace the sides of nearly every square inch of arable land, and hobbled old men and women, still outfitted in the traditional garb of rural agriculturalists, rub shoulders with the millions of camera wielding tourists who visit the island each year. With direct connections from Singapore, Hong Kong, Tokyo, and even the occasional European destination, Bali is a hub of juxtapositions that are simultaneously proto- and atypical of the Indonesian archipelago as a whole. While the culture of rice in Bali (as throughout Indonesia) has changed very little over the past millennium, the island’s religion, politics, culture and economy have shifted dramatically in response to some of the world’s first geopolitical sea changes.
Simon arrived in Bali the night of the 28th. After a ten dollar dinner of gourmet Greek along Seminyak’s Jalan Oberoi, we left the environs of Denpasar the next morning for the more tranquil, natural, and culturally prescient Ubud, where Rose was waiting.
The drive from Denpasar to Ubud is a simple hour long affair. Simon and I hired a taxi the next morning, and by ten AM were standing on the terrace of our four-star hotel, overlooking the unspoiled hills and valleys that surround the outskirts of the city. Rose’s drugs had begun to kick-in, and she seemed to be in a much better mood when we found her sipping on unfiltered Balinese coffee, watching a gentle rain fall while leafing through her naturalist’s guide to Bali.
In the late thirteenth century, Ubud rose to prominence after the Javanese Singasari dynasty collapsed, thereby losing its control over the subjugated Balinese kingdom. Shortly thereafter, the center of power for the Balinese Pejeng dynasty was established near modern day Ubud. Autonomy only lasted half a century though. In 1343, the notorious Gajah Mada, of the Javanese Majapahit dynasty, defeated the Pejeng and brought Bali back under Javanese influence, where it would remain until the Dutch subjugated the island in 1906, after three centuries of bitter fighting.
The three days that Rose, Simon and I spent in Bali were relaxed and agreeable to the extreme. We spent our first night at an open air Kecak dance. The Kecak tells the tale of Ramayana, the quest of Prince Rama to rescue his wife Sita after she was kidnapped by Rawana, the King of Lanka. In the Ramayana, Rama journeys to Lanka accompanied by the king of monkeys and his monkey army. Throughout the dance, a circle of men, varying in number from a dozen to several thousand, all bare-chested and dressed in traditional checker-patterned sarong, provide a haunting accompaniment to the play as Rama and his legions of monkeys quest and fight.
My first time in Bali, it just so happened that I was able to witness a “Celebration of Life” to honor the second anniversary since Bali II, the second bombing in Kuta that took place in October 2004. The Celebration took place at Tanah Lot, a spectacular Hindu temple perched on a rocky islet silhouetted by the setting sun. That evening, five thousand Kecak dancers performed their art, chanting the unforgettable “chak-a-chak” in unison, the deep tones reverberating off the surrounding cliffs as the rising tide broke over their feet.
With Rose and Simon, the Kecak we saw was a more low-key performance, but still impressive nonetheless. Afterwards, a traditional fire dancer went into a trance and strut around through flaming coconut husks, kicking embers into the faces of surprised front row tourists, soliciting sadistically entertaining screams and shouts from adolescent Japanese girls. After he finished, a Hindu priest came forward and splashed holy water on the wide eyed dancer’s face and body, thereby bringing him back to the present reality. Afterwards, I approached the heavily breathing man, and translated a few questions for him put forth by a young British girl and her mother. “What do you think about when you dance?” “No, I do not think at all.” “Are your feet hurt?” “It does not hurt. See… my leg hair is all here still. There is no problem.” “How long have you been doing this?” “I started when I was young, but now I am old!”

After a few very nice and relaxing days, the three of us headed back to Southern Bali for New Year’s Eve. John had purchased US$85 tickets to a party at a local resort where one of his friends was playing in the band. The price seemed ridiculously high, but was said to include a gourmet buffet, a fashion show and live entertainment.
The event was terrible. Hundreds of Indonesian nouveau riche packed into the resort with their extended families, per usual, showing off their newfound success by spending exorbitant sums on unnecessarily gaudy and expensive goods and services. The one redeeming feature of the evening was that it exposed Rose and Simon to a different side of Indonesia, which as a normal tourist, one does not have the (dis)pleasure of seeing.
We left the event before midnight. Simon and Rose headed back to their hotel, John and I spent the countdown on the back of motorcycles in heavy downtown traffic making our way to the discos on the beach. We stayed out until sunrise, and I brought in the first day of 2007 making resolutions to the waves breaking on the beach.

Rose, my Mom’s sister, spent a year in the Philippines after she graduated from college in the late 1970s. Despite having traveled to over sixty countries in the interim – including an amorous traipse about Timbuktu, Bamako, and the rest of Mali with a Tuareg salt trader – this was her first time in Asia in almost thirty years.
Rose’s expectations of what she would find in Asia contrasted starkly with the hypermodern realities of the present day. While in Jogyakarta, we shared a dinner together at a restaurant called “Dixie” – as in both the twelve ounce keg party drinking cup and the Confederate American South. I indulged in a fried egg covered cheddar bacon cheeseburger and Rose had a mayonnaise drenched house salad. The view from our second story table was of congested streets and neon billboards advertising film processing, semen (cement), and facial whitening products. The family of four sitting at the booth next to ours was sharing a meal in silence, the father intermittently switching between two text messaging devices, the son with both ears plugged into a portable MP3 player, the daughter fiddling with video games on her cell phone, and the mother sullenly picking at her calamari.
The last time Rose was on this continent, electricity was not yet widely available, sewage still ran through open pits, the United States was just beginning to extricate itself from Vietnam, there were more bicycles than cars, the Communist threat was being suppressed by covert CIA operations in Jakarta, Suharto was at the peak of his power, and terrorist suicide bombing was several years away from its inception in Iran. While a lot has changed in the world since the late 1970s, perhaps that change is nowhere more pronounced than in Asia. Rose came to Asia expecting to find the world that she left behind. Instead, she found a place that is disturbingly familiar, where “local” culture still exists, but in a shiny, oftentimes prepackaged variety. She didn’t like what she found.

New Year’s night, while Oz and Rose recovered from their rain soaked traipse around Uluwatu and Tanah Lot Temples, John and I had dinner with some friends from Jakarta. Jenny, an attractive woman in her early thirties, works for the Indonesian equivalent of the fine people that bring you the SAT in the U.S. She and some friends from Jakarta had rented a bungalow near the beach in one of the nicer parts of Seminyak, and they had invited us to join a dozen or so of their friends for a catered dinner.
Arriving by taxi, John and I were escorted through Mediterranean-style white washed open-air hallways lined with perfectly symmetrical black pebbles. At a door numbered with a simple but sophisticated number “5”, we were ushered into a space filled with orchids, falling water, and moonlit night, lounge music wafting through the air over the murmur of a handful of guests. We were greeted with European style kisses and were told to gorge ourselves. Grilled Balinese chicken, lamb, and vegetables lay sprawled in a cornucopia of deliciousness, begging forth the appetite that never quite seems sated in these tropical climes.
Over Australian Shiraz and Coca Cola for the Muslims present, the conversation bounded from the Indonesian medical industry to the mining in Papua to the price of beach front real estate. One particularly sharp and well-informed woman in her late forties spoke with me about her doctorate at UC Davis and at length about the alternative energy industry in Indonesia. Upon inquiry, she elaborated how the government will invest up to US$22 billion in the sector over the next decade, in turn, if all goes well, pushing Indonesia towards the noble position as the first Muslim nation to be independent of fossil fuels.
At one point, John and I were cajoled into swimming in the spectacularly lit gunnite pool despite our protests of not having proper swim kit. Lounging about in our dripping boxer briefs, we were only then informed that the smart and well put together woman in her late forties or early fifties (a bit old relative to the rest of the crowd) was in fact Mari Elka Pangestu, the Indonesian Minister of Trade. Mrs. Pangestu is the first female Chinese to hold a cabinet position in Indonesia, is on the board of several international economics journals, is co-coordinator of the Task Force on Poverty and Development for the United Nations Millennium Project, and has a Wikipedia page devoted to her. We apologized profusely for our indecency, and in true style, she laughed off the matter, saying that she would have joined us had her husband not been there. Bali, like the rest of Indonesia, is certainly a very special place.

Melly Clistmas

2007-01-14T07:22:00.000-08:00

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!

Images

2006-12-22T08:47:00.000-08:00

An elderly Ibu catching some shut-eye before the crush of the morning market.

Seriously.

The Kid brings you another Grand Conclusion - dudes are the same everywhere.

The bride and groom at a traditional Javanese wedding.

The view from my roof. The sunsets after the rain are surreal.

This dude is the bane of my existence. Unfailingly, he and his stupid kiddie cart come by my house at 7:00AM every time I have a day off. He plays this seven note jangle on repeat until I am forced to either start my day or go insane from grade-J Disney wannabe aural torture. Alas, the trials and tribulations of a Fulbright scholar.

A prototypical Ibu manning her station in the market. Ibu Nana, who cooks me lunch five times a week, buys all of our food fresh each day.

A very bad photograph of a very good motorcyle. I haven't officially named it yet, but I'm leaning towards "Screaming Eagle Thou Shalt Bestoweth Olde Glory." I'm open to suggestions. Note the bomb marking the entrance to this RT (neighborhood) in Madiun.

Floss, anyone?

It's in the eyes.

A typical scene from a not-so-typical Javanese village. Mlese was crushed by the earthquake in May. 95% of the village's houses were either partially or completely destroyed.

The last time I visited earthquake-affected Mlese Village near Jogyakarta, I went with my normal team from KOMPIP, a local NGO, as well as with Kevin and Jenni, two representatives from our American sponsor, the Real Medicine Foundation. We met with the 19 village heads who will be responsible for distributing the $12,000 grant that RMF has made possible. We fielded questions from the 18 men and 1 woman, explaining how microfinance works and what the obligations of the community and indivudals are.

The Kid with Weedy. We broadcast a weekly show called "English Eve" where we field calls and take SMSs (text messages) from people who want to practice their English. See my entry, "Stress".

Madiun at the start of musim hujan (the rainy season), only some three kilometers from the center of the city. I don't know the numbers, but a large percentage of the city's residents are still predominantly farmers. A ten minute drive outside the city, and you're in the middle of infinite rice paddies and sugar fields.

The Kid finally got a uniform. Now I'm a guru asli (real teacher). Some local middle school girls came and interviewed me about English one day. They had absolutely no idea what they were saying or how to interview, but Ibu Irvi (third from right) nonetheless insisted that we take this really bad photo in front of the school's coat of arms.

Downtown Madiun. One dude selling gas (bensin) by the liter, another passed out in his becak. The Pasar Besar (Big Market) is visible in the background.

The Kid, John "Sea Foam" Pederson (sans beard), Deanna, and Ethan "The Wire" Perry yucking it up in Surabaya after the TEFLIN conference.

A gorgeous photograph (that I found on the Xinhua China news website) of Mount Merapi erupting in August. Located some thirty kilometers from Yogyakarta, where I will be meeting my Aunt Rose this weekend, Merapi is still considered one of the world's most active and dangerous volcanoes. Welcome to Indo, Roscha!

I was a model in a fashion show this past Friday. Yes - I can now officially include the title "Male Model" on all future resumes. Here I am in front of a cathedral backdrop (notice it's edge on the right) to keep in line with the wedding themed show. This is NOT a joke. My, um, co-models - Sandi; his 15 year-old girlfriend (who just so happens to be one of my tenth grade students at SMA2); and Nina. If you didn't believe me already, hopefully this will convince you - this country is RIDICULOUS.

The Infidel

2006-12-22T08:27:00.000-08:00

I finally broke through. For the past few days, I have been hanging out with a beautiful woman named Nina. Once again helping me out in a pinch, Klub Bali, my fitness center/pool/social nexus, was the scene for our introduction. Last week, after finishing some meatheadish activity like benchpressing or deadlifting, I approached Nina, with whom I had been playing eye tag for the past few days. In a hybrid English-Indonesian conversation, we made small talk and she introduced herself. She is a twenty-five year-old of mixed Javanese-Chinese and Dutch descent originally from Madiun. After graduating from Jatmaiah University with a degree in economics, she stayed in Jogyakarta, Java’s throbbing center of culture, art, and youth, where she worked as a model and waitress for two years. Following her parents’ wishes, she returned to Madiun this past June after the May 26th earthquake in Jogya. She was uninjured, but she and her family were severely spooked.
In any case, Nina has been teaching me Bahasa Indonesia and Javanese while I help her with her English. We meet after our workouts at Klub Bali and share dinner or iced tea while laughing off people’s slack-jawed stares. She is absolutely gorgeous, and together with my recent drinking session in the back of the rice delivery Fukuda, has ignited within me a newfound enthusiasm for Madiun.
Over the past two weeks at Klub Bali, I also met a rather beefy individual. I didn’t learn his name, so I’ll call him Pak Meathead here. Through our garbled conversation between squats, he told me that he is in the military. Pak Meathead is only five foot six or so, but he has the physique of a professional bodybuilder. He wears military fatigues, a see-through camo-green mesh tank top, a Nike baseball hat, a black pleather fanny pack, and a pair of Ferrari-themed Pumas every day when he works out. He obviously likes to be the center of attention, and it seems like he makes a concerted effort to slam down the weights whenever he finishes with a set. He also grunts. A lot.
This evening, when I arrived at the fitness center, Nina greeted me with a hug and requested a peck on the cheek, which I obliged. I am leery of public displays of affection here, which I have not seen anywhere. However, I had often witnessed Nina giving European-style double cheek kisses to both men and women. After all, she did spend two years living and working in a very progressive and culturally hip city. As the request came from an Indonesian, and a very attractive one at that, I felt that the innocent kiss was perfectly within bounds. Apparently Pak Meathead thought differently.
While Pak Meathead didn’t say anything directly to me – I wear a tank top when I work out, and between my height, girth, and voluminous amount of sweat, I reckon that I have him as equally intimidated of me as I am of him – he did harass Nina, and start making trouble with others.
I failed to notice at first, but Nina approached me with a very concerned look on her face. “Nick, I’m worried. He’s talking about fighting you and calling you an orang kafir,” an infidel. “I know he’s just jealous, but be careful, OK?”
I took a look in Pak Meathead’s direction, and saw him chest bumping and grunting with an even more massive beef steak friend of his. “Hey, tidak apa apa, don’t worry about him,” I told her. I didn’t think that Pak Meathead would be dumb enough to make a move in the gym, but I picked up a two pound dumbbell and carried it with me around the gym for the rest of the workout. I wasn’t taking chances with a military man, and a very scary one at that.
At one point I asked him if he was using a barbell and bench, and despite not having touched the equipment for ten minutes, he replied brusquely, “Saya pakai,” I’m using it. For the remainder of the evening, Pak Meathead made exceptionally loud grunts, and slammed weights around the gym like they were pillows. I avoided all eye contact, and he did the same, especially when in close proximity.
I didn’t really mind his testosterone driven animosity. After all, I had, in a way, invited it by kissing Nina’s cheek. I played rugby for three years in college, and hung out in fraternities, and am well acquainted with the type of guys like Pak Meathead who need to prove their virility by intimidating the world. He is obviously the type of man, if you can call him that, who gets his kicks by proving to everyone else how tough he is. He started harassing Nina as well, grabbing her arm and blocking her path when she was trying to move around the gym. I asked her if she needed help, but she said she could handle it.
What really gets me though is the fact that he called me orang kafir, an infidel. Pak Meathead was not defending Islam, and I was not posing a threat to his religion. I had seen him on past days trying to hold Nina’s hand. She had always rebuffed his attempts, or played along awkwardly if the situation was unavoidable. The fact that he used my non-belief in Islam as a pretext for his hostility is one hundred percent unacceptable, and is what angers me almost as much as his abuse of Nina.
Throughout this blog, I am trying to limit the breadth of my extrapolations. But then again, that is how sociology, cultural anthropology, and many other social sciences are conducted – by using instances and anecdotes from the day-to-day to paint a larger picture of a culture and society. I was trained as a geographer, and university level human geography courses are often focused around scalability and deduction.
I want to take Pak Meathead and draw some – admittedly generalized – conclusions from his actions. If Pak Meathead is a viable indicator, it can be deduced that the largest underlying rationales that drive individuals to turn to radical Islamism are jealousy and fear.
Fundamentally, Islam did not play into the situation at all. Yes, it is possible that his religious sensibilities were inflamed by my and Nina’s greeting. However, if his past actions are any gauge, it is much more likely that his hostile response was a reaction to his having failed to succeed. (I mean no offense here to women, and I hope that readers understand that by defining Nina as an “objective” of sorts, I am not being macho chauvinistic, but simply making a parallel.) Just as Pak Meathead looked around the gym and saw me cavorting with what he takes to be “his woman,” I posit that a large number of radical Islamists are driven towards hatred when they look around their surroundings, and then compare them to what they see on TV and in advertisements. They see Westerners, and particularly white Westerners, occupying their world.
This discussion requires much more space, and may become the backbone for future research and work that I pursue. I would like to hear your comments.
Also, rest assured, I will keep a cool head, be careful, and if Pak Meathead’s rage cannot be mollified, be the first one to find a new health club.

House

2006-12-19T08:57:00.000-08:00

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.

The Fukuda and the Faith

2006-12-17T01:25:00.000-08:00

Just when I was starting to totally lose faith in the fair city of Madiun, last night my friends rallied, and completely reinvigorated my positive attitude towards this place, its people, and the second half of my year-long stay in Indonesia. It was 8PM, and I was making my way from a wedding ceremony at the local banquet hall to the self-proclaimed “AcousticGavanza” night at Klub Bali, my fitness center/swimming pool/nexus of social life in Madiun. The “Gavanza” turned out to be a group of high school boys wailing shitty covers of Indonesian pop songs, accompanied by poorly played guitars and even more poorly syncopated techno keyboard lines. Welcome to Madiun on a Saturday night.
I sat around and chatted with some acquaintances, nodding at the Klub Bali regulars as they sauntered into the outdoor patio area next to the pool, some arm-in-arm with would-be lovers and spouses, others looking awkwardly for a group to sit with. Lea, a local six-foot-tall model whom I did some work with in order to promote the upcoming Klub Bali New Year’s Bash, was there, but her conversation was limited to talk about watches and tennis. Her friend Enga, a militant looking twenty year-old girl with cropped hair and big horned rimmed glasses, was also there. When Enga started talking about hunting wild pigs, I sensed it was time to change venues.
Saying goodbyes to the assorted people on the patio, I made my way out of the Klub, shot the shit with the parking attendants in my very limited Boso Jowo (Javanese) for a few minutes, and then roared off for home on my motorcycle. It was just shy of 9PM. Before heading back, I took a spin around the alun-alun, town square. By day a tranquil spot to sit and watch the ebb and flow of the city’s traffic, on a Saturday night, the alun-alun bursts to life with food, t-shirt, and toy vendors, picnicking families, clusters of adolescents, and ad-hoc musical and theatrical performances. I remained on my bike, maneuvering through the bumper to bumper traffic and the clouds of smog that the thousands of motorbikes present produced. After coughing up a lung and just barely avoiding half a dozen dismemberments, I broke away from the axis of Madiun social life and headed for the tranquility of the rice paddies and my house.
When I arrived home, an SMS (text message) from my buddy Niko was waiting for me. “Bro. Where are you now? Let’s hang out 2gether. My friend come to my house. What about if i go to your house later? Lets having wishkey?” Whisky and Niko?! What an excellent proposal. Niko is originally from Madiun, but goes to school and lives in Jogyakarta at present. I replied to his text, “Aku pulang kini. Ikut ke rumahku ya? I’m home already. Come on over.”
Twenty minutes later, an already hammered Niko and his three friends showed up. A photographer, part-time student, and full-time goofball, Niko has an unkempt head of rarely washed black hair that hangs down to his mid-back. His teeth and gums are more intimidating than Steven Tyler’s, and his propensity for drink and merriment make him the center of attention no matter whether he’s leading his rock band on the slopes of a disruptive Mount Merapi, or in the pool halls of a slumbering Madiun. “HAI, BRO! What’s up?” He proclaimed loudly while unsheathing his mane of hair from beneath a yellow and gold football helmet, a la Jack Nicholson in “Easy Rider.”
“Not much, bro. Apa rencanamu? What’s your plan?”
“Oh, you know, get drunks, maybe whisky. Can watch the TV?”
We spent the next hour and half mesmerized by “The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers”, horsing around during commercial breaks, consuming the vile three-dollar vodka that Niko and his buddies like to mix with Sprite and onion flavored rice crackers. At one point, when his buddies had left to restock on liquor, mixers, and snacks, Niko leaned over to me and said, “Bro, have you ever had your heart brokens? What does I do”
He had recently split-up with his girlfriend of three years, after she found amorous SMSs from him to a fifteen year-old high school student in a neighboring city. “Well, bro, it just takes time. That and some flowers.”
“YAAAAA,” he lamented remorsefully.
Niko’s buddies returned, and proceeded to finish three bottles of Redbull, another thunderbird of cheap vodka, and enough onion rice crackers to feed a small village. When the movie was nearing its end, Niko stood-up and announced, “OKAY, I go drive my daddy’s Fukuda, wait here for me, ya?”
“Right, bro, whatever you say.”
Half of what Niko says is unintelligible, or at least not meant for public digestion. I knew Niko would be back soon, and that was all that mattered.
Ten minutes later, I heard an atrocious roaring noise coming from out on the street. “What the f^*k?” The other guys followed me and we went outside to take a look. There on the street, wearing a worn leather jacket with the golden helmet and his long hair spilling out every which way, sat Niko on a remarkable contraption. As explained to me – and later confirmed when I met the man – Niko’s dad is a polio survivor who delivers rice from farmers to wholesalers around Madiun. The machine that Niko was sitting on was a motorbike with a mini-pick-up bed on top of a double axle in place of the rear wheel. The name “Fukuda” came from the name that was stenciled onto the tailgate in bright orange letters. “OKAY, BRO. Ayo, let’s go.”
After I turned off the TV and locked up the house, the other four of us hopped into the three foot by five foot pick-up bed, scrunched together like mismatched rice crackers. While passing around the thunderbird and a shot glass found somewhere, we hollered at the top of our lungs and listened to the ridiculous dingdonging of the Fukuda’s fire engine-like horn. Niko meanwhile would turn around while driving and begin to holler incoherently at us until someone screamed that he was driving straight towards a tree, at which point he would quickly turn back around and release a long, drawn out “YAAAAAA!”
Our first stop was back at the alun-alun. Where three hours earlier thousands, if not tens of thousands of people, lay sprawled around the open grass area, by this point (midnight) the town square was almost entirely empty. A few couples sat around the perimeter holding one another, and a handful of food and trinkets vendors sat chatting silently amongst themselves. The five of us sat on a cement wall and continued to take swigs of the vodka, shelling peanuts and hollering at passing motorbikes. “AYO, let’s go!” proclaimed Niko in Javanese. “Let’s take Nick to the underground market!” Well now didn’t that sound exciting!
The underground market was quite literally underground. In the middle of Madiun proper, about two hundred meters from the alun-alun, there is a large complex called the “Pasar Besar”, the Grand Market. We drove into the normal entrance, and then down a steep ramp, which resulted in a chorus of cries of pain as the four of us in the back had our coccyx bones compounded as the Fukuda bottomed out. Niko pulled into a small, dimly lit alcove where four shirtless men sat around plates of rice and fried noodles, drinking tea and Extra Joss, an Indonesian take on the powdered energy beverage, while another half naked man lay sleeping on a pile of rags and bamboo slats. The four guys I was with ordered plates of eggs, rice, chilis, and chicken, and iced teas for everyone. I picked-up a copy of the Jawa Post sitting on one of the bamboo benches, and read in Bahasa Indonesia about the latest soccer news from the English F.A. Premier League while trying to ignore the squawking chickens and snoring man only an arms’ breadth away.
Once the fellows had sated themselves, my buddy Shendi took me for a walk through the market. It was almost 1:30AM now, and villagers were bringing their goods and wares to sell at the Sunday Morning Market some five hours from now. Ancient Ibus lay sprawled amongst green and purple eggplants, inexplicably long sprouts, and grotesque jackfruits. Bare-chested and tawny old men transferred mountains of bamboo wrapped fish from still-running trucks to the dirt and fly encrusted cement floor. Other Ibus in crusty and faded batik sarongs huddled in small groups chatting, while some daring individuals balanced precariously on the seats of their bikes, sleeping in the most remarkable and incomprehensible positions. We passed veritable geological formations of red and yellow chilies, the unprocessed source of all my gustatory pleasure, and all my gastrointestinal pain. To no one in particular, I stated, “I wonder what makes these people maintain this lifestyle? Why not move to the city?”
“Being farmer is very difficult life,” remarked Shendi, “Must wake up early, do work at house, do work in field. But they have much maksud. How means in English?” And after I shrugged my shoulders, he continued, “Purpose.”
We returned to the food stall, where one of the guys had passed out in the back of the pick-up. Niko was poking him and laughing. The four men at the food stall sat impassively watching their teas. Their friend still snored and the chickens still squawked. We piled back into the Fukuda – “FUCK YOU DA!” Niko had proclaimed earlier in the evening – and rumbled and dingdonged back to our respective homes.

Intercultural (Mis)understanding

2006-12-16T02:28:00.000-08:00

Intercultural understanding. What a bizarre concept. During my days off here in Madiun (of which there are many), a few times a month I accept invitations to speak at local private and public high schools and colleges. What, might you ask, do I, a newly minted college graduate, have to offer? It turns out, in the eyes of Indonesians anyway, a lot. Early last week, Pak Suprianto, my favorite teacher at SMA2, informed me that should I wish, I had an engagement lined-up at SMA1 in Ponoroggo, an hour’s drive from Madiun. The night before the talk was to take place, I received an SMS (text message) from Pak Pri. “nick, my friend will pick up u in mdn tomorrow at 8 o’oclock at school. but I want to contact first, i’ll contact u later. u prepare cross culture understanding amrca and indonsia and education.” Okay, I thought to myself, and promptly fell asleep.
In the car the next morning, despite the eagerness of my escorts to talk with me, I couldn’t help from falling asleep. It had been so long since I had been in a car with seat belts, or at least one not packed full of Indonesians, that I relished the thought of unencumbered leg room, the uninhibited ability to drool at will, not having to wear a cumbersome helmet, and the undeserved feeling of security that comes with riding in a car after spending months on motorbikes, rickety buses, and vomit lined ferry boats. I think they took my silence as haughtiness. In reality, the pair of middle-aged men just didn’t understand what I meant when I had said that I really needed coffee.
There we have a perfect example of intercultural misunderstanding. Coffee drinking here is seen as a social activity, where it can take hours to consume a single cup while bercakap cakap (chit chatting) over cigarettes and flip flops. In the U.S., coffee drinking is serious business. Yeah, people might get together to talk over a cup of joe, but more oftentimes than not, it’s the consumption of caffeine that really drives the conversation. I’ve weaned myself down to a cup or two a day here. Maybe the inverse proportion of lethargy-to-caffeine-consumption has helped me chill out a bit, but still, in a land whose namesake appears over Starbucks counters around the world, you would expect coffee on demand 24/7. Unfortunately, my pining after the black gold usually just ends in snickers from my hosts, who admire my intestinal fortitude, but look down on my perpetual quest for caffeine nonetheless. In any case, by means of a long-winded explanation, my sleepy demeanor should not be attributed to self-perceived cultural arrogance, but rather a lack of chemically induced vim and vigor. But I digress.
We arrived at the high school to an eruption of cheers. Two hundred students dressed in tan blouses and chocolate brown slacks and ankle-length skirts were waiting in the musholla, or prayer room, where I would be speaking. Unlike my school in Madiun, where only one in ten girls wears the female headscarf (the jilbab) in Ponoroggo, over half the young women were covered.
Before addressing the crowd of students, I met with the headmaster and a handful of English teachers, who spoke to me in Bahasa Indonesia for ten minutes. They wanted to know how they could get a “native English speaker” like me to come to their school, and how they could send their students to America to study. I gave them the AMINEF web address, and wished them luck, not sugarcoating the fact that competition was fierce.
I was ushered out to the musholla, where after saying “Good morning” I was met with rounds of applause. Every day in class, I receive the same treatment – cheering, yelling, clapping. There is no doubt in my mind that such veneration is contributing in large part to the inflated sense of self-worth that I have been accumulating here. Imagine what a different world this would be if inner-city teachers in New York, LA, and Chicago were cheered before starting their every class.
Sitting on the floor in front of a divan and two hundred wide-eyed students, I was brought bottles of ice tea and Fanta, bananas, salak and rambutan fruits, and after half an hour, a box filled with Indonesian deep-fried snacks and sweet cakes. I was introduced by Pak Hasim, an English teacher who, as he explained to me, had already made the hajj to Mecca, fulfilling one of the five fundamental pillars of Islam. At one point, he asked my religion, and as recommended by Fulbright, I replied “Kristen, Christian” not wanting to spark some sort of problem. Instead, he went on to give me a lecture about Abraham, Isaac, and Ishmael – the normal spiel that I give people who return blanks stares when I state that I am yahudi, Jewish – and he informed me that he had done a master’s thesis on Christian-Muslim relations. As he began enumerating passages from the New Testament, I quickly changed the conversation, not wanting to be called out for being a “bad Christian.”
After Pak Hasim’s introduction, two students gave opening remarks in English, thanking me for coming and wishing me a pleasant rest of my stay in Indonesia. “Oh, and yes Mister Nick,” continued Rosa, a pretty girl in the eleventh grade with glasses and long black hair, “before I allow the other students to ask you questions, may I ask you a question?”
“I don’t see why not, Rosa,” I said smiling, expecting some sort of question about Hollywood, New York City, American education policy, George W. Bush, or my opinions on Indonesia more broadly – the traditional Top Five Questions asked by groups of students. “Well, Mister Nick, what do you think of Indonesian girls? Is their skin too black?”
“Ummmmmmmm,” taken off guard for the umpteenth time, I stalled with mumbled answers and throat clearing coughs until I could reply. “Well, Rosa, I don’t think it is advisable for girls or women to use whitening products of any kind. Indonesian women are very pretty and smart already, and they don’t need to change their skin. You know, this is crazy for me, because in America, everybody – except maybe Michael Jackson – wants their skin to be dark like yours!” With that comment, the audience erupted into hollers of approval and bursts of laughter.
The remainder of the session was pretty straightforward. As the cut-out letters from my name fell onto my head from the welcoming sign behind me (see photo), I answered questions about education disparities, my favorite national park, my favorite Indonesian food, and how the students could receive scholarships to study in America.
Just as I thought I was in the clear, a jilbab-clad girl with thick glasses approached the microphone and said, “Mister Nick, why does President George Walker Bush hate Muslims? Now we hate him too. What do you think about President George Walker Bush?” This sort of question requires a fair bit of diplomacy and chutzpah to answer without putting yourself in a trap. Noticing the rapt attention of many students who had begun to doze off or chat with their friends, I made a concerted effort to realistically set forth my own thoughts and represent my country and President while providing an answer that would not just duck the issue, but would hopefully add some new light to what is undoubtedly a very lopsided discourse.
“Well, like most of you, I think, that President Bush’s war in Iraq was a bad idea.” Several mumbled words of approval drifted towards me from the crowd. “I do, however, feel that President Bush is trying to do the right thing. Most Americans do not hate Muslims, and President Bush does not hate Muslims. America went to war with Iraq not because we hate Muslims, but because our government received bad information from the FBI and CIA.” More mumbled approval, mostly from the male students, as they recognized the American intelligence community acronyms. “President Bush and the United States want to make life better for the rest of the world. Just like SBY (Susilo Bambang Yudyhono, the Indonesian President), President Bush wants to make more democracy, less poverty, and more opportunity for people everywhere in the world. I disagree with Mister Bush that war can make these things come true. That is why I was happy to see President Bush promise SBY almost 200 million dollars for education, healthcare, microfinance, and the development of infrastructure in Indonesia. War will never help or force people to like or understand one another. I think that by learning more about each other, we can help one another solve the world’s problems. That is why you must all continue to study English, and not be afraid to try using your English when you have the chance to practice with a native speaker. Great question, next!”
Phew. I thought I did a pretty good job dodging that one, although it certainly didn’t hurt that ninety percent of the audience could only understand half of what I said.
After some closing remarks, group photographs, and a lunch on what is reportedly Indonesia’s most tasty goat sate (it was enak sekali), I got back in the car with two new escorts, and promptly slept the entire way home.

Visuals

2006-12-16T00:20:00.000-08:00

The Kid keeping it light after blowing-up last Tuesday.

Ethan "The Wire" Perry, Pak David, Ibu Nana, and The Kid in Madiun. The Wire stopped by for a twelve hour visit while touring around East Java. He's on a Fulbright grant in Padang, Sumatra. I stayed at his house while gearing up for Mentawai.

A speaking engagement on "Indonesian-American Intercultural Relations" at a nearby public school led to this mobsesh post-talkalot.

A silly becak dude in the heart of downtown Madiun.

The Kid at work. Notice the background. Right.

Disturbing the Harmony

2006-12-12T07:25:00.000-08:00

In the Bahasa Indonesia textbook that I’ve been using to teach myself when I’m not too tired to stay awake, there is a “Kebudayaan Indonesia, Indonesian Culture” section called “Maintaining Harmony.” And I quote:
“Indonesian people, and especially the Javanese, tend to live in a state of ‘balance’ and ‘harmony’ with each other at all times. To see an Indonesian lose his/her temper, to curse or to denigrate another person is extremely rare. Everybody knows that it is much better to maintain the harmony, even if inwardly you are seething with anger… Indonesian people will go to great lengths to avoid saying anything which could possibly offend another person… Rather than saying ‘he is stupid’, they would tend to say ‘he is not all that bright’. Awful-tasting food might be described as ‘not all that tasty’ or ‘less than tasty’, in case the cook should hear of the criticism and the harmony be broken. They might say about another person that he/she is ‘less than polite’; in other words he/she is impolite, but they are not going to be impolite enough to say so.
“To Indonesians the most important trait in people is their ability to maintain harmony, to be well mannered and to speak politely at all times. So, take care when describing things and people, take care not to offend, and take care not to disturb the harmony.”
Well, in light of this recent cultural sesh, I guess Mr. Nick pulled a major cultural faux pas today. During my last class of the day, after sweating through three absent teachers and five hours of airless classrooms, I walked out on a class that had been misbehaving for the past hour. I was getting no participation, no answers, and no English. I simply said thank you, goodbye, and left the room.
For the rest of the day, students approached me with a sense of mortified reference, bowing to me and touching my right hand to their foreheads. “I am so sorry, Mr. Nick,” was a common refrain throughout the afternoon. “Tidak apa apa, don’t worry about it,” I would invariably respond. I may have disrupted the harmony, but the kids were doing their damndest to set my bule blunderings right.

TEFLIN

2006-12-12T07:24:00.000-08:00

John, Ibu Hussai, and me. Ibu Hussai was the first female professor in Southern Sumatra, and is one of John's advisors in Sekayu, a hamlet three hours from the closest major town. Despite Ibu's impeccable English and serious credentials, she shied away from discussing political Islam with us. Maybe, unlike me, she just knows when to avoid a touchy subject.

After a weekend of debauchery and dancing in Surabaya, Monday morning Deanna and I flew to Jakarta. At the Sukarno Hatta International Airport (which was starting to feel like a home away from home away from home), we met-up with thirteen of the remaining seventeen Fulbright ETAs. The other four would be meeting us in Salatiga, where we would all spend the next three days attending the fifty fourth annual Teachers of English as a Foreign Language in Indonesia (TEFLIN) international conference. According to the TEFLIN mission statement, “The objective of TEFLIN is to provide English teachers with opportunities to share and discuss contemporary issues, trends, and development in language teaching, learning, and research.”
Nelly, the Fulbright Indonesia co-coordinator, met us at the airport in Semarang – a large, heavily developed port city in northern Central Java – where she promptly herded us onto a bus for the one hour ride to Salatiga. We slowly began to climb out of the smog and chaos of a typical Javanese city, speeding south through rolling green hills and rice paddies. An hour later, we were in Salatiga, a lovely colonial former Dutch hill station, where we would spend the remainder of the week in yet another four-star hotel, living the high life courtesy of Paman (Uncle) Sam.
The conference was titled “English Language Education Policies: Responding to National and Global Challenges” and was held on the surprisingly gorgeous Satya Wacana Christian University campus. Shuttled to the tree-lined campus courtesy of our hotel, I arrived and thought that I had died and gone to heaven. With a student body of 8,000, there were beautiful, young, and most likely smart and interesting women everywhere. Although I had just spent the weekend in Surabaya, rubbing shoulders with East Java’s glitz and glam set, the contrast between Salatiga and Madiun was still shocking. Whereas in Madiun the only interaction I have with females consists of fending off the “I LOVE YOU, MISTER” cat-calls hurled at me from doting students, on the Satya Wacana campus, most girls wouldn’t even give me the time of day. It was like drinking from the well of psycho-sexual reality, and was a refreshing ego shrink.
Because Satya Wacana is Christian, and only some fifteen percent of the student body is Muslim, jilbabs are a rare sight amongst the students. However, at the same end of the religiously motivated spectrum, the SWCU mission statement proclaims “In order to achieve our mission as a ‘Creative Minority’, we hold this fundamental ideal: ‘The fear of God is the beginning of all knowledge.’” It might not be Muslim, but strict adherence to religious precepts was still pivotal. My admiration for the female student body would just have to remain unrequited.
The conference opened with a set of three rather tedious plenary sessions. However, between interludes of zoning out, dozing off, and catching up on international news and celebrity gossip, I did find one major point very interesting. Dr. Jack Richards, a giant in the field of Teaching English as a Second Language (referred to as TESL, TEFL, TESOL, ESL, and probably a host of other acronyms), lectured to the crowd of five hundred teachers, academics, and journalists about teaching English during dramatically and drastically changing times.
He talked of using English only as a second language, a communication tool, and not as a mechanism of cultural transmission. “We’re talking about an Indonesianized version of English, not some Indonesian-English hybrid, but fluent English spoken as an international language filtered through a local lens.” He differentiated between English the International Language, and American, Australian or British English, all of which come with cultural biases and idioms that can be incomprehensible on a global scale. He gave the example of a woman, one who speaks fluent English, who works for Cambridge University Press in Singapore calling the company headquarters in the UK. After asking where she should send a certain package, the prototypically British response she received involved thirty seconds of incomprehensible balderdash about “Ohwelllet’sseemightaswellrightumyeahwellyoushouldehhmmm…” Even after she had received an answer, she had no idea what had been said.
Dr. Richards’ point was that international English, the lingua franca used for multinational business, politics and social services around the world, should not be connected to any particular culture beyond the international global culture. What then defines the global rubric that speakers and learners should strive for, and who is to say what constitutes global culture, if it isn’t just a mish-mash of hundreds of regional, national, and local tastes? It was an interesting and provocative idea.
In the afternoon, I attended a workshop called “Responding to Globalization: Ideas for Creating Class Activities Within the Global Context.” The jilbab-clad professor in charge of the session elaborated on Dr. Richards’ point, describing how to teach on a local, intimate, comprehensible level while catering to and producing the world’s future global citizens. Much of Dr. Marsaban’s exercise focused on the needed respect for different beliefs, values and cultures, and how to integrate those lessons into the everyday classroom. After dividing the thirty or so people in the room into groups of five, she handed out slips of paper with one of the words “security, tolerance, equality, democracy, freedom, justice, community, and self-reliance” written on each. Each group was told to rearrange the words in order of priority.
The four jilbab-clad Ibus that I was working with put security first, followed by tolerance, followed by justice, followed by community. Democracy came second to last, and self-reliance came last. The exercise was an interesting look into cultural sensibilities, and would work well in a class. As the workshop was wrapping up and chairs were being scraped against the floor, a jilbab-clad Ibu from the back of the room blurted out “What is democracy?” in an unsteady burst of English. I wasn’t sure if she actually didn’t know what the word meant, of if she was just getting in her own personal parting shot.
One of the Ibus who had been in my group was Dr. Ika. We spoke for an hour after class over coffee and Javanese snacks – deep fried meat products and chocolate-cheese quasi-pastries. Dr. Ika was the first female professor in Southern Sumatra, and in her early sixties, currently designs English curricula for college students. After talking for a while, I broached a topic that has been at the front of my mind since arriving in Indonesia. “Bu,” I said, “one of the greatest challenges facing our global community today is the threat from radical Islam. It could stop globalization dead in its tracks and bring the entire world back two centuries. As a moderate Muslim, I would like to ask you, how can we bring those radicalized individuals into our global society? What role should education play?”
The well-respected, jilbab-clad grandmother-like figure took a few seconds to gather her thoughts, and then responded with a quizzical expression on her face. “Why are you interested in these things? I hate politics, it will be the ruin of all good plans. Would you like some more coffee?”

The next day, John, Elena, and I met to have lunch with five female Indonesian students. The night before, we had witnessed their presentation “One Holy Night,” spoken poetry about women and their mistreatment in Indonesian society. The poetry was provocative, and as the girls were all English majors, was for the most part grammatically intelligible, if not correct. We met the girls for Cokes and iced teas at the university canteen, a cement structure in the middle of campus offering pizza, hamburgers, and hot dogs, in addition to the normal smattering of Indonesian food. Three of the girls were wearing sweatshirts despite the eighty degree day, while the other two wore pink t-shirts with slogans like “Suddenly Flower” and “Humanity” artistically emblazoned on the fronts.
Over a table made from a cigarette advertisement, we talked about women and gender studies, American novels, and second hand smoke. “My father pushed me, forced me to study English since I was young,” one of the nineteen year-olds recounted in unsteady English. “When I start university, I want to be faculty psychology, but my father graduated doctor from Washington, D.C., and he want me to know English, so…” Again, it was a pleasure to speak with Indonesian contemporaries who were smart, intelligible, and deeply involved with local culture. In Madiun, my English conversations are limited to banter about (but rarely with) girls, re-hydration beverages, and motorcycles.
TEFLIN was a case in point for me of how academics so often just serve peripheral roles. In Salatiga there were 500 experts in Indo English ed bouncing ideas off one another, yet there were no policy makers in the room. I felt like standing up and shouting, "YEAH, great ideas, now how are you going to actualize them?" A lot of the discourse seemed like self-congratulatory back patting, ultimately achieving little more than the perpetuation of an ineffective system. The failures are obvious, but the policy (as in the US) is dictated from a political platform high above the mud slinging, and thus misses the most pressing issues.

The Experience of Affluence

2006-12-11T07:39:00.000-08:00

A few months ago, I received word via the equivalent of telegram from the Fulbright Jakarta office that my presence would be required in the Central Java city of Salatiga for an English teacher’s conference during the first week of December. Instead of paying for a bus ticket to Salatiga, which is a relatively short five hour ride from Madiun, Fulbright mandated that I travel to Surabaya (three hours by bus), fly from Surabaya to Jakarta (one and a half hours), fly from Jakarta to Semarang (forty five minutes), and then take another hour bus ride to Salatiga. As ludicrous as the rigmarole seemed, it made perfect sense considering the bureaucratic hocus pocus that takes place at the Jakarta office. In any case, my convoluted itinerary at least gave me the opportunity to spend my weekend in Surabaya, Indonesia’s second largest city and home to my good friend Deanna.
I opted to take the train to Surabaya, and was treated to another picturesque journey through rice paddies, rubber forests, and infinite cassava fields. After arriving at the main station, I took a short taxi ride to the address that Deanna had given me. As the cabbie became progressively more lost, I marveled at the neighborhood that we were cruising around. Tall cement and cast iron gates enclosed fleeting views of verdant courtyards, parked Mercedes, and imposing Corinthian columns. The omnipresent bakso and sate vendors invariably still had shops set-up on every other block, but the streets were clean, even by Western standards. Deanna apparently lived in the posh part of town.
After multiple three point turns and repeated sorties into buildings to ask directions, the cabbie ultimately dropped me off in front of the correct address. I gave him the fare that we had agreed upon, but he stood waiting, staring beseechingly into my eyes, motioning with his hand towards his mouth. “Pak, come on bro, you charged me twice the normal fare to go ten minutes, when you said it would take thirty.” With a laugh, a friendly pat on the shoulder, and a drawn out “YAAAA,” he got back into his cab and drove away, leaving me in front of an impenetrable cast iron gate made of interlinked turtles. A security guard dressed in fatigues and an oversized pair of sunglasses materialized out of the ether and rang the doorbell. I heard a clatter and assorted commotions erupt from inside the house. While waiting awkwardly, I asked the guard if his sunglasses were from Deanna. “Bukan,” No, he responded. Well, so much for small talk.
I peered through the gate to see Deanna scampering towards me in front of an ancient ibu, hunchbacked, shriveled, and in full traditional (albeit faded) batik regalia. I heard the ibu going through the motions of releasing several padlocks, and when the large bronze door swung open, I was greeted by the toothless smile of a grandmother’s delight. After greetings and hugs, Deanna showed me into what can only be called The Compound. A life-size bronze tortoise protruded from one wall. A ten foot tall painted giraffe stood grazing amidst orchids and ferns. The house had high ceilings and marble floors, and armies of women shuffling about inside carrying various savory dishes to and fro. They all stopped to stare and giggle and receive a quick introduction from Deanna, who referred to all of them as “Bu.”
In the middle of the house was an inset courtyard, about thirty feet across, with a lushly vegetated (live) turtle sanctuary taking up most of the space. The interior of the house was classic Indonesian hippie kitsch, clean and neat but antiquated. Brown drinking glasses, Technicolor window shades, white artificial wood chairs, orange plastic cabinets – the things that I associate with photographs from my father’s childhood growing up in 1960s-era Brazil.
“Oh, yes, I see you are the good clean virgin.” I turned around to see a matronly ibu in her mid-70s striding purposefully towards me. “Excuse me?”
“Oh, yeah, Nick, this is Ibu Lika, this is her house,” Deanna explained.
“Oh, hello, bu, it’s nice to…”
“Yes yes yes, you are very handsome, and lucky you are tall or you would be very fat.”
“Ummmmm.”
“You are from New York, yes? I was there for a week before my husband died. He had to go to a conference in Las Vegas, and he left me in New York for a week. It was very lonely. People in New York are not like people here. They do not say hello and look at you in the face. Everybody is very serious. I did not like New York.”
“Ummmmmm.”
“Yes, I will call you jembut, it is a good nickname for you. You must always come stay here when you come to Madiun. I invite all the Fulbright people to come stay with me. You foreigners must have a home here in Indonesia, I know it can be very lonely. You must come here like a second home, yes? I know Madiun is very small, you need to come to a big city like Surabaya. You really should live here. Madiun is no place for a young man like you. All the beautiful girls leave and come to Surabaya. You must come live with me here in Madiun. Okay, now you will eat lunch. I will take a nap now, but tomorrow you will come to my son’s house, and we will go to the swimming pool. And I will find you a nice girlfriend here, yes. I have three girls for you. One is very pretty and good, the other is very smart and not so pretty, and the other is very naughty. But, yes, you do not know how to find the itil, I can see this. But it will be okay, you are very handsome and tall. Yes, this is your new home here. Madiun is no place for a young man, you must be come here. Okay, yes.”
With that, Ibu Lika waddled off into the kitchen leaving me feeling as if I had just been through a tsunami. “Are you serious? You deal with that everyday?”
“Yeah,” panted Deanna, “she’s a serious character. Her husband was a very successful orthopedic surgeon, but he died like twenty years ago.”
“Huh, and what does jembut mean? Why is that my nickname?”
“It means pubic hair.”
“Naturally, and what about itil? What does she mean “I can’t find the itil?”
“It means clitoris?”
“WHAT? What an extreme old lady.”
“Yeah, the computer guy came the other day and was talking with me about her. He said he was helping her with organizing her files, and like half the stuff on her hard drive is porn.”
“That actually doesn’t surprise me.”
While living in Madiun has undoubtedly served as an excellent introduction to the developing Muslim world, I have realized that extrapolating about the “Indonesian” or “Muslim experience” based on my perceptions there is a risky proposition. My wealth inherently separates me from the grand life choices – or lack thereof – that really make life in a developing country so different from life in America or western Europe. The life of an affluent expat, or any affluent person, living amidst relative poverty is by definition far removed from that of the mechanics, street vendors, janitors, post office employees, and even the teachers who make up the vast majority of the work force and population of a developing city and country. Ibu Lika lives in a similarly removed world of upper-class craziness, one that exists only for those who can afford the affluence of outlandishness. I reckon Ibu Lika and I are more similar than an initial reading would lend you to believe.

Deanna and I spent the night at Surabaya’s trendiest club, Blowfish. Located on the seventh floor of a downtown office building, by the time we arrived at midnight, the place was packed with fashionable, young, and beautiful Indonesians. DJs spun the latest international house beats while scantily clad women danced lasciviously on top of the bars. We could have been anywhere in the world, maybe with the exception of Madiun.
We were joined by two of Deanna’s friends, Ivan and Mimit, hip hop DJs at Surabaya’s most popular youth radio station. Mimit, who according to Deanna always wears the jilbab, was out for the evening with a floppy-eared ski hat on instead. It was a very interesting take on combining modern pop culture with a reverence for Muslim precepts, although I imagine she must have been sweltering.
After waking up late the next day, Ibu Lika wrangled Deanna and me into visiting her son’s house. Wawan’s place was even bigger than his mom’s. As stipulated by Javanese custom, Ibu Lika had bought Wawan his house for him after his wedding some fifteen years ago. Since then, his assorted business enterprises around the city have, apparently, done very well. He bought the two adjoining houses, and just a few days ago finished renovating the complex into a square-block sized compound complete with a basketball court, grilling station, pool and hot tub, Mediterranean and Classic Asian themed wings, a fish pond, and a state of the art media center.
When Deanna, Ibu Lika, her entourage, and I arrived, Wawan was welcoming two dozen other guests for a house warming cum “multi level marketing” session. While Deanna and I swam, watched high-definition rugby on ESPN, and gorged ourselves on freshly barbequed chicken sate, Wawan mediated the monthly Surabaya chapter Amway meeting. As the sun began to set, the meeting took a pause for the call to prayer. Women donned their full-body and head covering white prayer uniforms, and the men wore the peci, the Muslim prayer cap. One of the men from the meeting chanted the prayers from a spare bedroom above the basketball court. The full moon was rising over the rooftops, steadily creeping its way through the tangled mesh of barbed wire and satellite dishes. The prayers wafted through the sultry evening air as smoke from the barbecue drifted up towards gathering thunderheads.

That evening, I was treated to one of the most surreal experiences of my life. The day before, Deanna told me that we were invited to witness the filming of an Indonesian TV show, Lagu Rindu. That was all Deanna could tell me. Not relishing the idea of being part of a jilbab-clad studio audience, an only slightly more enthusiastic Deanna had to drag me to the affair. After changing into the red and black formal attire demanded by the teacher who had invited us (which meant jeans and a black t-shirt on my part), Deanna and I set off for the TVRI studios in Surabaya. TVRI is one of the national television stations, and is broadcast throughout the country. Daytime shows consist mostly of teary-eyed soap operas and B-side comedies. I had never seen a nighttime broadcast before.
Gorged on chicken sate and high quality home entertainment, we showed up at the studios at a quarter past nine, fifteen minutes late, but still perfectly within acceptable jam karet standards.
“OKAY OKAY OKAY, you are Ibu Ika’s bule yes? Let’s go, you are late,” a frenetic little man dressed in all black with a domineering headset around his neck met us at the studio entrance, and proceeded to usher us through a maze of hallways to a set of large swinging doors. Inside, about one hundred impeccably dressed middle-aged Indonesians sat gathered around tables set with white linen and crystal classes, nervously fumbling with their ties and purses. An eight piece band was on stage, dressed in matching aquamarine blazers and slacks. Six studio video cameras lay interspersed around the perimeter of the warehouse-sized room. And large, hot lamps hung from metal girders on the roof illuminating the spectacle as more small men dressed in black scurried between tables making last minute adjustments. As we entered the room, all eyes turned to us, not just with the normal “Oh, bules” sort of look, but with a more menacing “Oh, tardy inappropriately dressed bules” stare of disappointment and regret.
We were ushered to Ibu Ika’s table, directly within the sights of cameras Satu and Tiga. Ibu Ika, a woman in her mid-fifties who is a fellow English teacher at Deanna’s school, was seated at one of the twenty or so tables along with six other middle-aged women. All were dressed in very bright, very red outfits, ranging from full-body pantsuits to red leatherette jackets. Ibu Ika, a devout Muslim according to Deanna, had left her jilbab at home in favor of a black, bowler style hat. The others’ heads were uncovered.
“Oh, we were so nervous you wouldn’t show up!” Ibu Ika exclaimed in Bahasa Indonesia. “Blessed be Allah.” Brief introductions to the other Ibus were made, and a hush fell over the room as the countdown to broadcast began.
“Deanna!” I bent over and whispered “What the hell is going on? You told me we were going to be a studio audience. We’re not a studio audience, we’re center stage.”
“Just keep cool.”
An attractive girl in her mid-twenties with heavy make-up and an even more heavily sequined dress stood amidst the tables and began talking in rapid Indonesian. I was able to catch about a third of what she said, which consisted of “Welcome to the show” and “We have a special guest tonight, a former naval commander.” On a large flat screen TV located next to the band, I could catch glimpses of my large goofy head being broadcast to the other 15,000 islands in the archipelago. The band broke into a late-80s era piano-heavy jam, and a buxom woman from the audience rose to her feet and began singing Celine Dion.
“Deanna, are you serious? What is this?”
“I told you, I have no idea.”
Our table of crimson, scarlet, and cherry colored Ibus bounded up from their seats and began ballroom dancing with one another between and around the tables. Other couples did the same.
After the first tune ended, one of the larger and more intimidating Ibus returned to the table and demanded that I dance with her.
“Oh my god,” I pleaded with Deanna.
“Don’t be a baby.”
A new buxom and heavily made-up woman rose out of the crowd and busted into an Indonesian love song, eliciting loud cheers of approval from the audience. As I trampled the woman’s toes, I couldn’t help but notice that the large hi-definition screen intermittently flashed from images of the band, to solo close-ups of the singing Bu, to images of me bungling my way about the dance floor. I was led back to the table after the song had ended, and the Ibu thanked Deanna for letting “her borrow me.” Nary a word or look was passed my direction.
I sat sweating and staring slack jawed at my surroundings. Who watches this crap? I thought to myself. I never found out the answer to that question, and I never saw even so much as another hint or allusion to Lagu Rindu. Yet, after the hour-long program was over, I approached the young hostess. “You really should have danced crazier, like you did at the end,” she said in Bahasa Indonesia, referring to my reverse butt-shake boogie-down maneuver, executed in honor of my Aunt Rose, amidst thirty middle-aged Bus who were performing a choreographed line dancing piece. “When people dance like you,” the hostess continued, “we get higher ratings.”

Human body parts found inside croc

2006-12-06T20:00:00.000-08:00

POSTED: 6:42 a.m. EST, December 6, 2006

JAKARTA, Indonesia (AP) -- Villagers discovered two human hands, a leg and a T-shirt inside a 500-kilogram (1,000-pound) crocodile they trapped and killed in eastern Indonesia, a media report said Wednesday.

The five-meter long reptile, suspected of eating a 59-year-old fisherman last seen a week ago near a river in East Nusa Tenggara province, was hacked open by residents after it got caught Monday in a nylon snare, The Jakarta Post said.

When the villagers got over the shock of finding human body parts inside its abdomen -- together with skull fragments, strands of hair and a pair of shorts -- they cut the beast into pieces and divided up the meat.

It was unclear how many people the crocodile had eaten, but the paper said at least three have disappeared in recent months, all while fishing at the mouth of the Dusan II River.

The crocodile -- and at least two others believed to be still at large -- are also suspected of devouring dozens of cattle, pigs, goats and poultry.

Copyright 2006 The Associated Press.

Stress

2006-11-30T20:04:00.000-08:00

When Weedy, the local radio DJ, text messaged me on Tuesday, she recommended that this week on her show we discuss “stress.” This might seem like a strange concept coming from a country known more for its lax perception of time than the mental conundrums of the overcommitted suburbanite, but I have noticed that “stress” is an interesting and underappreciated concept here that bundles a variety of symptoms and signs into one oversimplified package.
While staying on the Gili Islands, I met a thirty-five year-old mother of three who had run away from home at age twelve, spent several years in jail, and was now in the process of opening her second beach front bar in paradise. One night over tropical fruity drinks with overflowing umbrellas and twizzle sticks, she described her “stress,” a word used interchangeably across languages. She spoke of bills to pay, kids to look after, and the unavoidable boredom of small island life. Yes, yes, yes, I thought, we all have issues. I get stressed when mangoes from my tree splatter on my driveway, and when my gas tank begins flashing obnoxious warning signs at me. I was getting fed up with her self-deprecation, until she took out her mobile phone-camera and showed me photos of her unconscious on a marble floor, blood streaming from her nose and mouth, a red pool surrounding her head.
“What the hell happened?” I asked
“Oh, you know, so much stress,” she replied, at this point nonchalantly, “so I start to drink much. Two bottles of vodka alone.”
“Are you crazy?”
“Maybe, ya. So I almost die.”
“And who took the photos?”
“My friends.”
“Well, with friends like these…”
“Apa?”
“Never mind.”
Stress. According to the OED, it’s defined as “physical, mental, or emotional strain or tension.” In Indonesia, it’s defined as anything from the proverbial minor headache to attempted suicide.
This prelude made my radio show with Weedy that much more interesting. After fifteen minutes of banter about exercise and keeping a journal to reduce stress, Weedy fielded questions via text message that are automatically relayed into her computer bank. Most of the responses repeated verbatim the recommendations that I had already made – get exercise, keep a journal, be creative, talk to friends, etc. One respondent, though, sent four different text messages, elaborating how he listens to rock music alone everyday after school because he has “stress.” Another, a teenage girl, talked about how she always gets “stress” and eats a lot and sleeps all day. One more respondent replied with a cryptic message about famous people being famous and dying because of “stress.”
In any case, the barrage of slightly off-putting replies got me to thinking on my feet about the Indonesian definition of “stress,” and how one doesn’t really exist here. Many of the respondents indeed were talking about strains or tensions of some sort, but the three mentioned above were definitely getting at something much more sinister. So was the thirty-five year-old mother of three, who came within a hair’s breadth of dying.
I launched into a five minute soliloquy on depression, a term that Weedy and my other co-host, Aji, had never heard about. “Yeah, guys, stress can be stress, or if there’s a lot of stress and it’s really bad and you don’t take care of it, using the ways we talked about earlier, it can turn into something much worse.” If Aji and Weedy’s inquisitive stares were indicative of anything, I thought that I saw a ray of light, that I had gotten through to them. “So the main question we have to ask then, is when does stress become dangerous?”
“Oh, okay, ya, like Kurt Cobain,” replied Weedy. “Maybe I want get depressed also so then I am famous, ya?!”
And that, mercifully, drew our show to a conclusion. “Nick, say hello to anyone listening?”
“Yeah, to all my students at SMA Dua, big up, guys. And Shendi, I know you’re listening because you have absolutely nothing better to do. Keep it easy and don’t stress.”
The “ON AIR” sign switched off, and I received big high-fives from the two pros. “Ya, good broadcast,” said Aji. “Now I go to my wife and children.”

Photos

2006-11-30T00:26:00.000-08:00

Caitlin jamming nachos at what must be one of the world's only movie theaters to come with reclining plush chairs, an on-demand butler, and a full selection of top shelf whiskys. Watching the new James Bond flick, Casino Royale, certainly didn't hurt the situation. I'll never watch a movie the same way again. Thanks, Gary!

A prototypical Bu in full-on PJ mode.

Caitlin and her burka-clad counterpart at the airport.

In Jakarta with Caitlin, Layne and Gary at the Dharmawangsa, maybe Jakarta's swankest five-star joint.

Another classic Bu.

Op-Ed

2006-11-30T00:17:00.000-08:00

On November 28, 2006, I had the following piece published on the Op-Ed pages of the Jakarta Post.

Why the U.S. must maintain its current strategy in the Middle East
By Nicholas Taranto

This past Wednesday, these pages published an opinion piece entitled “U.S. thirst for oil will keep driving Middle East conflicts.” While many of the author’s points were salient within a certain context, they failed to envision the current situation in the Middle East with the proper long-term geopolitical purview that it warrants. The American presence in Iraq may at the moment seem arbitrary and oil-centered. However, if the U.S. were to end its presence in the Middle East, the region and the world would undoubtedly be much worse off. For those concerned with creating a better and more peaceful future, having a permanent U.S.-led multinational force patrolling the Middle East is of the utmost importance. The end of war is within our historical reach. In order to get to that point though, the U.S. must continue its obligation to bring security and globalization to the Middle East. The following four points show why America can not, should not and will not leave the region anytime soon.
First, if the United States and the rest of the world were not pursuing the massive fossil fuel reserves that exist in the Middle East, the region would be the poorest in the world. Consider what would be of the Middle East if oil had not been discovered there. We could expect a situation similar to, if not far worse, than that of Sub-Saharan Africa. The only product or service that the region produces – and has produced for the past half century – is oil. Without oil and the U.S.-led international presence that follows it, the Middle East would be little more developed than it was a century ago.
Second, Middle Eastern states must begin to use the vast profits they make from fossil fuels to invest in themselves and other exportable goods and services. At this point, limited by Islamic usury laws, almost all of the Arab states’ assets sit inactive in non-interest earning accounts. If this were only several million dollars, it would not be an issue. However, currently over a quarter trillion dollars sit, for all intents and purposes, doing nothing while Middle Eastern states and their peoples stagnate. Aided by the U.S. politico-military machine, that money could be invested in a host of homegrown infrastructure, development, and business projects that would have knock-on effects for decades to come. The U.S. government and American multinational corporations would clearly profit from such a situation. Yet the economic, social, and political benefits derived by the citizens of the Middle East would dwarf the American rewards.
Third, even though many more nations than just the U.S. rely on Middle East oil exports, the U.S. is the keystone supplier of Middle Eastern security. If the U.S. left the region, global oil supplies would most likely sustain themselves for several weeks or even months. However, in a region prone to conflict, the first sign of trans-border animosity in the region would lead to plummeting oil production, which could in turn very easily promulgate a global economic crash. Remove American security from the global equation, and in return you will see international arms races, unchecked defense spending, and mass violence erupting all over the world. The U.S. has the world’s only functional blue water Navy, the world’s largest air force, the world’s most technically advanced weaponry, and the world’s best trained soldiers, meaning the U.S. military can deploy anywhere on the face of the globe in times of crisis. While the U.S. presence in the Middle East is not optimal for anyone, it is most certainly necessary for everyone.
Fourth, and perhaps most importantly, the way that that the U.S. is waging war in Iraq will define peace in this century. After 9/11, the U.S. developed myriad new sets of rules to fight terror. Unfortunately, the American government has done a poor job of describing these rules, not just to its enemies, but to its own citizens and allies too. The U.S. is fighting in the Middle East not just to prevent terror, although that is a goal. The U.S. is also trying to create a new future where all citizens of the world have the opportunity to make their own life decisions, where people don’t have to turn to terrorism because they and their children have no hope. The ultimate goal of globalization is giving hope through opportunities of connectivity. The American model of future peace is a fully integrated, globalized world where the U.S. exports surplus security in exchange for broadening nations’ access to all the resources of the modern world. Let me be clear here: The U.S. will not leave the Middle East until the benefits of globalization have arrived there, and those benefits will not arrive until Middle Eastern rulers acknowledge their peoples’ right to a better life. The U.S. is offering the people of the Middle East economic, political and social security, not only because America wants to see a secure Middle East, but because that is the only way America can remain free.
If you are like most sane individuals, you would rather live in a world of perpetual peace than unpredictable violence. With continued U.S. military support, and sincere commitments of reform and progress from its Arab and Muslim partners, peace in the Middle East can become the reality of our future. No other region besides the Gulf can supply the oil that the emerging world of the twenty-first century demands. No other security force besides the U.S. can provide the region with a veritable measure of safety. The U.S. has made similar efforts before and changed the world for the better. In the name of peace, America must be allowed to stay its course in the Middle East.

The writer recently graduated from Dartmouth College in New Hampshire, USA. He is currently on a Fulbright grant to Madiun, East Java where he teaches English and works with local microfinance organizations.

Jakarta Part Deux

2006-11-30T00:13:00.000-08:00

A few weeks ago, a bit of reality crept into my life in Indonesia. Up to that point, most of my time here had been blissfully devoid of any real long-term responsibility. Between travel, teaching, having laptops stolen, and working with my microfinance team, I was hard pressed to focus on any sort of timeframe longer than a few days in the future. When my Aunt Rose e-mailed asking when she should buy tickets, since she only had six weeks left to do so, I told her to chill out – jam karet, babe. However, while grazing through the shelves of books at one of Solo’s English language book stores, it dawned on me that I needed to start making plans for after the Fulbright year ends in June. Staring down the rigid, foreboding cover of the GRE sent me through a spin, albeit a short lived one. Facing the prospect of the real world, I reckoned that grad school wasn’t a bad alternative. As an inveterate slacker of sorts, staying with my head stuck in the books for three more years sounded like a great way to round off my ten months in Indo.
So, the day before Thanksgiving, I left on the train out of Solo, Central Java headed for Jakarta. The plan was to take the Graduate Record Examination (GRE) the next day, and then to meet up with some friends for Turkey Day festivities (read: turkey and booze sans turkey). Not at all too thrilled about spending what is by far and away my favorite holiday with a bunch of State Department stiffs in nearby Surabaya for U.S. consular holiday making, I decided to cut my losses and make a little adventure of the test taking rigmarole. The Javanese train system is admired as one of the finest in Asia, and I wanted to give it a shot myself.
The recent proliferation of cheap, safe and high-quality airfare in Indonesia (and the rest of the world) has begun to give the long-distance train market the air of obsolescence that seems to nip at the industry’s heels in both developed and developing nations. Unlike most other things in Indo, the trains actually run on time, if not slightly ahead of schedule. Slightly frumpy train attendants – for lack of a better phrase – dressed in day-glo blue and orange form fitting uniforms dole out pre-boxed meals of luke warm rice and stale potato patties. I was more than happy to spend the day gently swaying from side to side through endless miles of arid cassava fields and rice paddies, crossing over rocky river beds and shabby terracotta hamlets via late 19th century era trestles, stopping momentarily at rural waypoints, where middle-aged ibus in their ubiquitous teddy bear pajama uniforms and flip-flops ply their goods while waddling down the train’s aisle.
As the train sped from rural vistas of brown and burnt fields through dry mountain dells across flat and expansive plains into Jakarta proper, the assorted hallmarks of one of the world’s biggest developing cities became visible through the spider web patterned cracks running across many of the coach’s windows. The slums, shantytowns, mosques, rivers of garbage, grease slicked paddies, slick new housing developments, massive energy and telcom infrastructure, soccer fields of red packed dirt, bench presses with weights made from cement-filled buckets, novels worth of graffiti, and of course, thousands of people from various emerging walks of life on their temporarily muted buzzing and humming motorbikes.
As we pulled into Jakarta, Mr. Bean was interrupted during one of his skits courtesy of “Show on Rail TV,” which had previously been sporadically interspersed with gory advertisements recommending that people heed traffic laws at railroad crossings. I couldn’t figure out who was more grim – Mr. Bean with a tea kettle stuck on his fist, or the small, gray haired man on the TV adds preaching safety and prudence to the backdrop of Muslim chants, clanging bells, and animated gore splattering the screen.
Coming back to Jakarta really does feel to a certain extent like returning home, or at least returning to a place full of fond memories and good friends. Despite the Fulbright officials’ warnings that Jakarta is not Indonesia and Indonesia is not Jakarta, this city in many ways does embody a broader image of Indo. Like any megacity in the world, it harnesses all possible iterations of the human experience – all the hope, optimism, fear, and sadness of a nation, distilled into a bubbling and throbbing mass of wonderfully semi-ordered anarchy.
I got off the train at Gambir, Jakarta’s main hub, and quickly realized that I was right back in the thick of it. No more timid and refined East Javanese villagers, but instead the barked cries of “Hello, Mister! Where you go?” or “You want transport?” hollered with the authority of someone who has been standing in the same place for three years. I descended into the maelstrom of the main atrium, and after exchanging nods with the presiding Polisi Militer, beelined for the Dunkin Donuts – the first franchise I had seen in nearly a month. I ordered a coffee, and let the cashier peer pressure me into an almond donut. I devoured the two meditatively as I watched pretty women with babies, ugly men with no arms, and every iteration of civilization in between pass outside the store’s plate glass windows. I was back.
After my donut disappeared, I made my way out of the station, directly across the street from the national monument, where I previously spent hours and hours on lazy Sunday afternoons walking and talking with people of all stripes. Now, on a late Wednesday afternoon, the monument was empty, save for a few soldiers jogging around the perimeter. The monument is a large and verdant park with a focal point of a massive spire topped with some obscene amount of gold leaf shaped into an enduring torch of freedom or some such nonsense. It was constructed by Sukarno late in his reign, and playing off of the old man’s renowned sexual proclivities, is commonly and comically referred to as “Sukarno’s Last Erection.” I had always been tempted to climb – or ride the elevator, as the case may be – up to the top of the six hundred foot tall unit, but the weekend lines deterred me every time. Now, with the park empty and closing time at hand, I took a leisurely stroll over to the base of the marble monstrosity, where I managed to convince the frumpy female guard with bright red lipstick smeared across her lips and most of her palate to let me through despite it being past closing time. In exchange for her good graces, I was supplicated by her and her male entourage of armed guards for kisses upon leaving, but pretended not to understand. Gross.
After riding the elevator up to the observation deck, I spent a solid hour staring out over the seemingly infinite expanse of Indonesia’s capital city. The Grand Mosque, fifth largest in the world, and its neighbor, Indonesia’s biggest protestant church; the national headquarters for Pertamina, Indo’s oil and natural gas conglomerate; the President’s residence; the U.S. embassy; the national museum; the Javanese Sea visible on the gray, smoggy horizon; and off only a few blocks away, the Hotel Aryaduta, where my great big Indonesian adventure started nearly four months ago.
Attracted as if by some gravitational pull, I descended the Erection and wandered through rush hour traffic until, panting, sweating and covered in the airborne effluence of nearly fifteen million inhabitants, I found myself in the pristine, air conditioned lobby of the place that I called home for over four weeks. The intermingling of dozens of accents and languages was welcomed music to my multicultural sensibilities. Madiun is certainly exotic, but it’s anything but diverse. I never would have thought that being in a room with a Swiss banker, the International Herald Tribune, and a hummus and grilled vegetable panini was the recipe for bliss, but after a swim, a steam room, and another locker room encounter with the flamingly gay Jakartan who attempted to seduce me while I was changing back in August, let me tell you, it was.

While we were staying amidst the four-star splendor of the ‘Dute, room prices were a common Fulbright ETA topic of conversation. It never dawned on me to ask the price of a room while I was there, but now that I needed a place to shack up for the night before taking the GRE, I approached the counter and asked. “Our most affordable room is 550,000 Rupiah, Sir.” Krikey. That’s over sixty bucks. I didn’t even bother to ask about the rooms where we had stayed, which were a step above the most affordable option. All I could mutter was, “Thanks, Uncle Sam.”
Leaving the ‘Dute, I asked Fredie, one of the resident doormen, about recommendations. “Ah, the Formula One is new and cheap, Sir, and is close to where you will be taking your test.” Peachey, thanks Fred. Fredie had remembered me when I entered the building earlier in the afternoon, and throughout my brief stay in the lobby and fitness center, a handful of employees approached me to ask about my health, how teaching was going, and how my various comrades were faring at their respective sites. I felt ashamed that these people knew so much about me, but I couldn’t even place their faces. It certainly felt nice to be remembered, but it was also a lesson in the futility of trying to keep low key.
I followed Fredie’s advice, and a ten minute taxi ride later found myself at the race car-themed Formule1 Hotel – with an “E”, that’s right. The fluorescence was sub-optimal, but the twenty-six dollar price tag would have to suffice, and I was hoping that the beds would be shaped like race cars. Awesome! While the room was clean, new, and adorned with a foot-wide yellow racing stripe over the bed, unfortunately there was no other heyday of racing accoutrement to be found. I consoled myself with several English language publications and a vocab cramming sesh, and drifted off to sleep with images of Miss Sklerew, my octogenarian SAT proctor, zipping around my bed cum test taking station in a 1960s era roadster.

I thought that Jakarta was a pretty grim place my first time here. Nothing, however, compares to the grimness of the megapolis’s city streets after a nice filth generating downpour courtesy of the musim hujan, the rainy season. My first stop was the hotel’s “lobby,” in essence a quasi-guarded door to the street juxtaposed with one of Jakarta’s scores of Starbucks. Even – or maybe especially – at 7AM, the omnipresent chiming of instant message alerts echoed across the hum of caffeinated conversation. A venti latte and toffee muffin in hand (and three bucks later; who honestly pays American prices for coffee in Indonesia? Apparently I as well as hundreds of thousands of yuppified Jakartans do. Somehow that brilliant corporation has branded themselves so well that people buy their sub-standard coffee for up to one hundred and fifty times the street value! It’s just absurd, and absolutely brilliant.) I headed out on to the streets.
I decided to walk from Formule1 to the test center in order to get my blood and gall circulating proper like. The only gall that I successfully generated was the type that comes out of stray dogs and waterborne rats, and in any case, that wound up all over my shoes. Wading over open air cesspools, crossing through muddy construction sites, and leaping over exposed, inestimably deep holes in the sidewalk, I made my way past the Four Seasons out of the posh Kuningan district and into the heart of downtown Jakarta. I expected the Menara Imperium, my GRE location, to be some sort of squat cement complex surrounded by black water and garbage filled moats, similar to so many of the buildings that make up this city. Instead, I was treated to the luxury of a thirty-eight story gleaming edifice of marble and modernity. After another highly caffeinated coffee beverage in the building’s lobby, I made my way up to the twenty-eighth floor. In the elevator, I was surrounded by men and women in ties and skirts. Minus my being the only white person in this building, I could be in any elevator in the world, I thought to myself.
Per usual, jam karet applied in full, and although I had been told to show-up at 8:30AM, no employees appeared until minutes before 9:00, when the test was scheduled to start. In the interim, I struck up a conversation with the only other person in the marble-lined foyer, an attractive twenty-something year-old Indonesian woman, dressed as if she were going to work at some fashionable banking house, not take some lowly standardized test. It turns out that Agni was applying for the exact same schools and programs that I am interested in, namely international development and public policy. As another prototypical Indo coincidox, she was also working in Aceh, where I had spent several weeks on my first trip to Indonesia. Furthermore, the daughter of the parliamentarian from the district that neighbors Madiun, she was born in Indonesia, but raised in Ithaca, New York, where my brother is currently going to college at Cornell. She has studied conflict management in Sweden, and (just when the story gets spicy) she is getting married to an Australian employee of the World Bank in April.
As I sweated bullets through the test – was it supposed to be this hard? – I kept thinking of my competition, seated right next me, divided only by a flimsy cubby. Here we were, from two complexly different and simultaneously similar worlds, taking the exact same test, applying for the exact same programs at the exact same schools. If this isn’t an example of the triumph of globalization, I don’t know what is.
As the three hour computer adaptive test came to an end, I was presented with the choice of canceling my scores, or viewing them instantly. I wavered over the former, concerned with how difficult I found some of the sections, but ultimately, after thinking of the pain in the ass it was to get here – and the $150 test fee – I clicked accept. Completely surprised by how well I had done, I let out a big “HELL YEAH!” and did a full double fist pump while jumping to my feet and knocking over my chair. Way to go, you big, goofy American. Meanwhile, Agni had surreptitiously snuck out of the room, and was waiting for me in the lobby.
Riding high on our recent victories over the standardized machinations of doom, we walked twenty minutes to a nearby Indian restaurant that Agni swears by. Over lassies and simosas, I was overjoyed to speak proper, non-dumbed down, culturally common English with someone who fully grasped the Indonesian perspective, not from a position of temporary contemplation, like mine, but from an irreversible lifetime bond. I hope to see her around Harvard/Hopkins/Columbia/Cornell next year.

Agni and I parted ways – she had to go order her wedding invitations. Before she left though, I asked her for a recommendation as to where I should get my hair cut. Torn between supplications from an ex-girlfriend to regrow my ponytail and the more pressing urgings of my surrogate mom to shear it all off, I was finally caving to Bu Nana’s constant criticism of my shaggy appearance. After a few hours of interneting and another Starbucks hit, I made my way to Plaza Indonesia, one of Jakarta’s biggest malls, and home to several of the city’s most posh female hair salons. Thanks, Agni. For thirteen bucks – an exorbitant sum to pay for a haircut, even by some American standards – I was given the all-star treatment. After informing the receptionist – I kid you not, there was a front office and a very fashionable woman working there – that I wanted a potong rambut, freshly scented pretty ladies whisked me off to the rear chambers, where my mane was cleaned, shorn, and styled.
Halfway through my overhaul, I received a text message from Nelly, the AMINEF-Fulbright co-coordinator and general bearer of bad news. “Nick, I hear you are in JaKARta. You should come to Donna’s house for turkey dinner. Nelly.” Well, if that just wasn’t a splendid offer. I had run away from East Java in an attempt to avoid the State Department types in Surabaya, but after spending the day surrounded by the decadence of contemporary consumer culture and standardized tests, I was starting to revel in the thought of sharing my evening with the centuries-old traditions of gluttony and merrymaking.
After my salon session, looking like the respectable Marine that I always wanted to be, I was ready for the Jakarta embassy crowd and the Thanksgiving festivities that they would be providing. I met Nelly in the lobby of the Dharmawangsa, purportedly Jakarta’s most expensive hotel, where John and I had attended the reception for the Versailles-like wedding back in August (see post). It was a short walk from there to the AMERICAN CLUB, a two-block-square compound consisting of a miniature country club surrounded by the houses of Jakarta’s more prominent American officials and mid- to long-term guests.
Nelly, a self-purported gossip, gave me all the dirt on the other ETAs – unfortunately, there really isn’t anything too exciting, at least not yet. (NB: Last year two of the nine female ETAs got knocked-up over the course of the year. Rumor has it that one of them recently gave birth in the U.S., but that Nelly made the executive decision to deny the would-be father an American visa. I’m just waiting for the day when this year’s version of such a scandalous newsflash comes tearing down the ETA text message chain of command. I’ve got bets going with myself to see who the first one will be…). We arrived at the compound, a fifteen-foot tall metal and cement wall topped with barbed wire, and Nelly greeted one of the guards with, in Bahasa Indonesia, “Well oh my, Pak, aren’t you looking FAT!” Just one example of the cultural callousness that may have eventually led the female ETAs to seek the sanctuary of an illicit affair – I’m not condoning the act(s), but I can understand that the impulse comes from more than just a heightened and under-exercised libido. But I digress.
Inside the gates, Nelly and I were greeted by a chirpy pair of Fulbright grantees – not in the ETA program – who made savage attempts at telling Nelly comic anecdotes in Bahasa Indonesia. Let’s just get inside the house and do what we came here to do, ladies. While waiting at the door for what seemed like twenty minutes, I zoned out on their conversation about taxis, and made a visual inspection of the place. Inside the compound, neat and spacious one story houses surrounded the country club core. Each house had its own garage, garden and screened-in porch. The houses and gardens all seemed to run together, and it seemed if, especially considering the type of people whom I had met at the embassy, privacy and personal space might be issues.
Donna, a regional officer of some sort (and evidently a big-enough-wig to merit a government funded house), eventually came to the door and welcomed us into her home. The first thing I noticed was the mouth watering aroma of homecooked food. Now, I have eaten pretty damn well since coming to Indonesia. I may have lost a bit of weight, but that’s never such a bad thing. The food here is by and large delicious and plentiful, and wherever I go someone tries to shove some new snack or meat product down my throat. However, walking into that house and being bombarded by that aromatic mountain of olfactory goodness was like taking a space-warp to my Mom’s kitchen. I had visions of golden brown turkey, small geological formations of mashed potatoes and stuffing, caramelized carrots, big fat pumpkin pies, and all the other trappings of the best holiday ever. I was instantaneously happy with my decision to forsake my status of cool aloofness in favor of this veritable cornucopia.
Guests continued to arrive, a few of whom I actually knew, including two other ETAs. The awkwardness of random introductions was alleviated with the opening of beer and wine, as I simultaneously became more and more interested in the research of the other Fulbright Seniors, one of whom was looking at local legal reforms in Aceh. The food was brought out on large, steaming platters, but even the gnashing of perfectly cooked turkey couldn’t suppress the room bubbling with conversation. In a room full of good people, delicious food, and a sizeable wine collection, I may have been 3,000 miles and twelve time zones away from my family, but I was certainly giving thanks.

Some Recent Photos

2006-11-22T23:14:00.000-08:00

Whitey and some tough Indo military bros at a local wedding.

My Indonesian keluarga (family), the bride and groom, and THIS DUDE at a traditional Javanese wedding. From Left to Right: Random Bu, Bu Nana (my "Mom"), Demos (my "BRO"), Hana (my "SIS"), scary Indo military husband Bro, his beautiful but timid new wife, Dismas (my other "BRO," one letter subtraction and a one letter replacement from "Dumas"), Pak David (my "Dad" and the master of girlish laughgter), Gigantor White Dude (read: me), some other Random Bu. Front Row: Dennis (the 13 y/o menace of my Indonesian existence. Love that kid.)

Bu Nana, Hana, and a really huge white dude in need of a haircut

My next door neighbors and suppliers of my six-a-day diet of Pocari Sweat, the local take on Gatorade.

Weedy (from the radio station) and me (in only slightly less menacing form)

Bush in ‘da House!

2006-11-22T22:04:00.000-08:00

It seems like the biggest news to hit Indo this week – besides the story of the “Real Batman” in Radar Madiun – is that George W. Bush will be gracing the capital with his presence today. Granted, he will only be here for six hours between visits to more geopolitically strategic or tumultuous places like China, Japan, and India, but still, it has all of my friends, most of my co-workers, and nearly every motorcycle mechanic that I meet brimming with pride.
Every TV channel is playing clips of protesters burning American flags around the archipelago, and my opinions on Mr. Bush’s politics have become the teachers’ new favorite pastime at SMAN 2, the local school where I work. I tell the teachers that for US$12,500, the sum that I will receive during my year as a Fulbright grantee, America could have alternatively bought four-and-a-half M-16s in Iraq. I ask them, in Bahasa Indonesia, what they think about that, and they laugh – the prototypical Javanese reaction to the uncomfortable. He is the leader of the Free World, and I do carry a passport from his country, but most of the time it seems to me that we just live in different worlds.

Live and Learn

2006-11-22T21:56:00.000-08:00

When I first realized that my laptop had been stolen, I felt like I had woken up in an iced bathtub to find that my left kidney had been surreptitiously removed. I was horrified and in shock. My encounter was as novel as a newborn, even though I have been robbed twice before, both times also in interestingly frustrating situations. My first encounter with the thieving class (or at least their aftermath) occurred on a train ride from Prague to Bucharest while I was studying in the Czech Republic. I fell asleep seated upright with my bag between my legs, and I woke up with my bag still between my legs, but with my iPod, Nikon digital SLR, three Nikon lenses, and my sunglasses gone – estimated loss, $3,200. Fortunately, all the good’s were covered under my Dad’s homeowners’ insurance, and I was able to file a sizable claim, which I used to buy a new set of black and white Nikon photo equipment. In turn, while I was rock climbing in Little Cottonwood Canyon on the outskirts of Salt Lake City, that Mormon bastion of blondeness, skinny ties, and purported ex-urban fuelled safety, my car had its back window smashed, and all of my camera gear stolen, again. My two buddies and I drove around Arizona, Wyoming, and Utah for the next two weeks with a poncho duct taped to the window, until my Dad came to the rescue – not for the first time, and certainly not for the last – when he insisted that we get the mess fixed, on his tab, before making the three thousand mile return across country.
Most people that I know have had a run-in with some sort of major robbery. The general sentiment seems to be unequivocal – it sucks. Being robbed in a place like Hungary or Indonesia, where you know from the outset that your chances of recovering the goods are negligible, only adds insult to injury. I have been riding economy busses, time permitting, since I arrived in Indonesia three months ago. With the preconceived desire to “mingle with real people,” I thought that riding the four-hour, dollar-twenty bus to my microfinance project in Solo was a good idea. I, however, forsook the first, boldfacd rule in the book – NEVER FALL ASLEEP WHEN RIDING PUBLIC TRANSPORTATION – and wound-up going through an eerily and frustratingly similar situation to that which I had in Eastern Europe. I woke-up to find my bag opened and my beautiful, pristine, and quite frankly sexy Macintosh Power Book gone.
After going through the trauma and self-debasement of the remainder of the bus ride, I still had to go through the truly epic rigmarole of filing insurance papers with the local police – a country specific rite of passage that I learned in the pirogi scented and cigarette filled halls of a minor police station in downtown Budapest. I met my friend and co-worker Akbar at the station in Solo, where after recounting my bad news, he whisked me off to the police en route to our project site. Before arriving at the station, he contacted his local shaman, who stayed in touch with us for the next few hours. The shaman’s initial reading on the matter was “If you feel very bad about this, the computer is probably gone.” Thanks, Doc.
The apathy with which civil employees do their jobs seems to remain universally constant across the first, (formerly) second, and third worlds. (Please pardon the throwback to the days of non-alignment, although judging from recent reports from Cuba, some loony dictators and assorted other ragamuffins seem to imagine the system alive and well. On a tangential note, the term “non-aligned” – and the stratification of developed democracies, communist entities claimed by the USSR, and the others belonging to the inauspicious “third world” – was branded here in Indonesia in the city of Bandung in 1956 where the inaugural Asia-Africa Conference was held. Right.)
At the regional police station in Solo, I spent the four remaining hours of Friday afternoon filing insurance claims and observing with horror and fascination as the gears of sub-provincial bureaucracy creaked into motion. As one officer copied my information from various official documents to his computer, the rest of the force peered over his shoulder, only contributing help in any way when the ashtray began to overflow. The incomprehensibly epic task of copying my name, address, and birth date was extended even further after we were informed that the printers downstairs were not working, and that my information would have to be transcribed to paper, whereupon it would be reentered upstairs, where the printers were purportedly working.
Frustrated to the point of anger by the whole ordeal, I left the smoky office and joined my acquaintances from KOMPIP (the Javanese NGO with which I work) outside in the main foyer. The building was surprisingly modern, well-maintained and clean. A replica model of the complex was showcased in the middle of the hall, and I spent a good half hour wondering why blonde plastic miniatures would ever be playing tennis at the police department’s neighboring sporting complex – oh, the trials and tribulations that plague great minds. As developing techno echoed down the marble hallways, a pair of uniformed officers came striding by. As one of them sized me up, I noticed that his black patent leather boot was trailing a streamer of toilet paper. He followed my gaze, and embarrassedly clutched at his foot as he lengthened his stride.
Upstairs, once my data had been successfully re-re-rendered, I was sat down in front of a barefoot, heavyset man in a loose fitting casual shirt. As he prompted me for questions regarding the time, place, and location of the robbery (in Bahasa Indonesia), I couldn’t help but stare at the massive sweat stains forming under his armpits and manbreasts. He was a true prototype of humanity.
As the sun dropped behind the surrounding hills and rice paddies, the five of us left the police station and made our way to the microfinance site. The shaman was still in contact with Akbar, and was now claiming that I had actually left my computer in Surabaya – East Java’s largest city – despite the fact that I hadn’t been there in over three weeks. Akbar offered more practical advice, and told me that there was a ten percent chance that he could track down the laptop. If you’re going to have a piece of expensive electronics stolen from you in Central Java, there are few people you’d rather be with than the members of KOMPIP, a smattering of people well connected in the criminal world due to their work with the disenchanted and poor of the region. I gave Akbar a weak smile, but didn’t put much hope in his offer. Even after my Dad convinced me to offer a US$200 reward on the black market, I knew that there was little hope for getting back the machine. I lost all of my grad school applications, all of my photos from Indonesia, and much of my recent writings and ruminations.
Live and learn – and back-up your F-ing hard drive – so they say.

Make the World a Sillier Place

2006-11-16T02:01:00.000-08:00

Note: Please pardon all of the recent text. Internet connection has been slow, and my laptop was recently stolen. More info to follow shortly...

I spent today’s class in what is euphemistically called the language lab. While the room is equipped with all the trappings of a technologically advanced language retention center - gobs of electro gadgets, individual cubbies, headphones, pro-quality speakers, a computer, a big screen TV - it drove home, yet again, just how preposterously silly this country and the large majority of its inhabitants truly are. As Michael Jackosn’s “Heal the World” blared over the sound system, rattling the windows with what seems to be a nationwide pandemic case of uncalibrated bass, the students were asked to stand at their desks and tell their memorized life ambitions to the other forty members of the class. With their odd pronunciation and even more bizarre cadence, I usually have enough trouble understanding the students. But with MJ shrieking the background, I had trouble deciphering anything.
As I became more and more perturbed, fidgeting in my chair in an attempt to escape the aural trauma that was quickly driving me towards the depths of a Neverland-fuelled fantasy of driving myself into a wall on a panda-themed rollercoaster, I couldn’t help but notice that the other forty-some-odd functional humans in the room seemed to be oblivious to the cacophony surrounding them, if not reveling in the chaos. Indonesians have an incredible gift of being able to just shut-out the surrounding world. This comes with perks and drawbacks. For one, it allows massive groups of individuals to sit through never ending speeches, proclamations, and totalitarian blessings of progress and prosperity, the last of which had to be retooled for a contemporary lexicon of “freedom and democracy” with the fall of Suharto eight years ago. Unfortunately, the knack for blocking out reality also comes with drawbacks, such as an inability to follow rules of the road, a penchant for apparently enjoying epic government office lines, and an oblivious approach to all measure of taste in both volume and quantity of horrible, gut-wrenching, truly torturous developing world techno (DWT) music. I should really devote an entire blog to DWT, the phenomenon certainly warrants one.
To illustrate the point, some students were standing at their desks playing with large leaves, others were tooling with the electronics panels in front of them, while still others were locked on my person with a stare of death that I couldn’t shake even after I had matched their slack-jawed awe with what I reckoned to be my silliest grin. In the middle of all this, as one lanky, acne pocked boy was talking about how he wants to join the army to “front free from my country and must kiss parents,” the reigning teacher, Pak Suhartono, a man in his late-50s with large bifocals and an unkempt mustache, raised himself from his desk, went to the closet, and removed a very large, very obscene feather duster.
The device was made from what appeared to be, and after closer inspection definitely was, rooster plumes. As Pak pussyfooted around the class dusting the students’ desks, anarchy continued to develop in pockets of body-odor and hair-gel scented revolt. Well, perhaps “revolt” here is the wrong word since it implies that the group doing the revolting is raging against some sort of authority, whereas in this case, the authority was no more threatening than Mary Poppins. At random intervals, squeaky-voiced boys would anonymously shout “I love you!” into the ether at no one in particular, in an attempt to achieve I’m not sure exactly what.
Halfway through the class, Pak Poppins handed out sheets with partially completed Michael Jackson lyrics, and I was treated to another symphony of student-led Heal the Worlds. As I sat at my lectern perspiring like a well-fed Dutch colonialist, Pak rummaged through papers and the students bobbed their heads and sang along while waving their arms above their heads in the universal call sign of the burgeoning hippie. Outside the classroom, under a sweltering one hundred and four degree sun, the remainder of the nation pursued its path towards making this world a sillier place, one off-pitch and mispronounced step at a time.

Pretty Women

2006-11-06T22:53:00.000-08:00

A few nights ago, I got home from my daily workout session at Klub Bali Center Fitness dan Kolma Renang (swimming pool) around 7:30, and I found myself inescapably bummed out. The feeling had been gnawing at me for the past few days, and I guess to a certain extent, it was to be expected – I had just returned from a month of holiday to some of the world’s most intriguing and wonderful places, and now I was sitting alone in my palace of fluorescence, jamming peanut M&Ms down my gizzard by the handful. I was staring at my still-blank white walls, contemplating how I should go about hammering nails into the quasi-cinderblock substance they consist of, when my buddy Shendi sent me an SMS (text message): “What’s up bro? have u a plan for tonight?” As a matter of fact, I was planning on settling down behind “Verandah of Violence: The Background to the Aceh Problem”, but the thought of sitting alone on my floral print sheets reading summaries of eighteenth century Dutch military travails quickly began to lose its appeal. Instead, I told Shendi that we should go investigate Fire Club, Madiun’s only disco and liquor-serving establishment.
Lo and behold, twenty minutes before Shendi was supposed to arrive, my membantu (literally ‘helper’ but used to mean housekeeper) and surrogate mom Bu Nana decided to make an unscheduled visit to clean my house – why she would do that at nine o’clock on a Saturday night, I will never know. She doesn’t like me going out after 9:00PM, so Shendi and I were forced to keep our rabble rousing low key, for the time being. We hung around the house for a while and watched “Pretty Woman” on the as-of-yet unused TV that I bought nearly two months ago. When your time is occupied with modern-day tales of Islamic woe and self-taught Bahasa Indonesia lessons, there is nary a minute left in the day for the cultural riffraff of the American hoi polloi. We both did, however, enjoy watching a young and vibrant Julia Roberts strut about Rodeo Drive in her uniform of the night.
After Bu Nana left, we took off on Shendi’s motorcycle for Fire. To sum things up, my time there answered a few of the more pressing questions that have been running through my mind regarding Madiun and Islamic culture more generally. As we walked in through the main door, it took me a few minutes to grow accustomed to the smoky darkness inside the club. A pretty, scantily clad girl in go-go boots was singing on stage, and as my eyes adjusted, I saw groups and individual men sitting at small tables with drinks in their hands, staring silently at the girl on stage. Towards the back of the room, crowds of even more scantily clad women lingered and mingled together in small flocks, lasciviously eyeing Shendi and me as we walked to a table at the far end of the room.
“Wait, so Shendi, these ‘pleasure girls’, as you call them, aren’t hookers, but you’re supposed to pay them to sit at your table and have drinks with you?”
“Yes,” he replied, as if that made total sense. “Maybe sometime you get hand phone number and call maybe. But is very dark in here.”
As the singer left the stage and the Manchester United versus Portsmouth game fired up on the projection screen, a twenty-something year-old woman in tight jeans and a low-cut, spaghetti strap shirt approached our table. After unsuccessfully trying to communicate with me – the blare of developing world techno had destroyed any chance for proper conversation, and was giving me a pulsing headache on top of it – she sat on Shendi’s lap and laughed as she twirled her heavily perfumed hair. She got up and left some minutes later, and sauntered back to the bar.
“So what was that about?” I enquired of Shendi.
“Oh, she just a friend from high school,” even in this pitch black room, I could see the smile creeping across his lips. “But now she work here.”
Interesting.
After another twenty minute bombardment from the heavily amped sound system, I told Shendi that I had to leave. Several middle aged men were dancing like seahorses on methamphetamines, clutching at their female escorts as the high pitched screech of the currently popular dangut style techno reached a crescendo. My head was pounding, and even the dimly lit, scantily clad, pretty women couldn’t ameliorate the menace of highly syncopated bass lines. “Ok, bro, we go see my friends.”
After a short motorcycle ride we found four of Shendi’s close friends, some of whom I had met before, at their favorite local haunt, sprawled around a bamboo table drinking whisky cokes and eating bits of fried tempe. As Rocky IV spilled from the overhead TV, the guys talked with me about iPods, masturbation, Jews, the ever popular Free Sex, and how many bottles of Jack Daniels I could stomach. We left at 1:30AM, and Shendi dropped me off at home.
To make a vast and perhaps painfully broad generalization: The vast majority of people in the non-radicalized Muslim world share the same impulses, desires, and aspirations as anyone from any number of strata in the modern, secularized portion of the world. Here, however, many of those impulses must be confined to the fantasy of a dark corner and a devious rendezvous. As I drifted off to sleep on top of my floral sheets, I was alone again, but I had a smile on my face and a head full of thoughts (and pretty women) to keep me curious.

Grammatically Incorrect Dreams

2006-11-01T23:32:00.000-08:00

Today’s class, the first since we went on break for Ramadan nearly a month ago, was focused on the students’ dreams and career goals. While many of the blooming adolescents spouted the normal idealistic aspirations of sixteen year olds, I was surprised by how many had seemingly well structured plans to become doctors, economists, policemen and the like. Considering how perpetually disjointed all facets of life normally are here, reading over tangible and oftentimes very realistic and highly motivated goals and plans was a bit startling. I particularly liked the following entry:
“A police woman, ah that’s a piece of cake job I have known. The job is a sparkling easiest thing that always makes me a top woman in this year. The uniform, the saxophone, the whistle, the weapon, the shoes and the sirene, they are for me. I was born for those. I had known that from my grandma, that’s my curse. Yeah, to be a top police woman. When my legs moving, there are many eyes watches my steps. They become because of my perform. Honestly, it makes me bore but how could I bear it. So far, I know they are my stupid fad I have ever met. When I drive my horse, I mean my car, everyone will say ‘Morning miss’ or ‘Hey that’s a really miss universe but in police woman edition.’ Honestly, I really like this life.”
Maybe that wasn’t the best example of realistic and tangible, but it certainly put a smile on my face! Well over half the students expressed interest in becoming doctors. Reasons for said career path included “I want to be it because I want help everybody out from their troubles,” “I will be happy and enjoy because I always work in room with AC,” and “Because I want my parents happy and proud me.”
Most ended their paragraph or two with a supplication of some sort, like “I think enough about my dream, help me if you are praying” or “I want all my family are blessed by Allah and there live peacefully with all Moslem in heaven. May Allah bless us. Amin.”
I also particularly liked this composition:
“Like other girls, I have a dream. It is to become a steward. Because I think that steward always to be seen beautiful, clever, and have inner beauty. The manner of her speak is very sweet and dainty. Usually the steward is very confident too. The steward is very neat in her appear from clothes to hair fashion.
“But to become a steward is not easy. We must can speak many languages. Besides of that, our healthy is the factor to become steward too. The steward also must to manage the anger and must be confident to everyone.
“But become the steward is very attractive. We can fly like a bird although by plane. So, we can revolve the world. The traveling to abroad is very attractive. Beside of that, the task of the steward is very easy. It is serve the strange sitter. And the salary of steward is not little. Because I love travel and money. So, I want to become a steward.”
After the students finished reading their essays aloud, they swarmed around me to collect their papers, graded by the other teacher. While being mobbed by noisome, body odor drenched students, I reflected and found it ironically poignant to be sitting there in a sweltering, poorly ventilated class, handing back these kids’ grammatically incorrect dreams.

WORLDS OF CHANGE: The (Mis)Adventures of Development in Mentawai

2006-10-26T19:44:00.000-07:00

And there it was – the video arcade. Next to the food court – now empty because of Ramadan – it glistened with the dull, throbbing pulse that those of its kind share throughout the modern (and not-so) world. I walked in, attracted like a mosquito to the fluorescence of something that I acknowledge as unhealthy, but perpetually addictive nonetheless. As I watched jilbab-clad teenage girls bounce on mock-skateboard platforms, and older men vying for rice cookers at the ticket trade-in counter, a wave of sadness washed over me. This is what we’ve brought, I thought. This is the mark we’ve left. I rummaged through my bag for my camera, and snapped a few shots. “Excuse me, mister. You can’t take photo here. Please,” and the short, slender Indonesian man who was confronting me with a Cheshire cat grin pointed the way to the door. “Gladly,” I replied. Three hours until departure, and I was ready for a trip to another world.
The unexplored portions of the terrestrial world are gone. A rock wall on Baffin Island or an obscure beach in the Philippines may offer blank canvases where human feet have never tread, but most likely they are within striking distance of a well-trodden path or brand new Carnival Cruise Line circuit. The rivers and mountains that once proved impassable, stoking the fires of fear and excitement for the countless expeditions they enticed, are now catalogued, photographed, forested and touristed to the point where exploration is as easily accomplished via Google Earth as by the non-digital acts of trekking and tramping. The only true venues of exploration that we have left are the untrammeled spaces that our brains are incapable of comprehending without empirical encounters. And even then, the internet and other media of instantaneous and accurate information shape the future realtime impressions that we may or may not have.
Consequently, the exploration of this generation and millennium rests on a different measure of creativity and discovery. What has been mapped and photographed is not by any means inherently understood or sufficiently appreciated. For those who are still beckoned by the call of adventure, we must search for new frontiers of a non-geographical bent. Rest assured, adventure is alive and well, it has merely entered a new and probably more all around beneficial phase. For this wanderlust-struck twenty-two year-old, the quest to reconcile development and the troubles that it brings has become a challenging and illuminating vehicle unto itself. For those compelled to experience the trials and tribulations (and tribal tattoos) of a far-removed reality, there has never been a better time to be alive, healthy, and in command of a bit of money and free time. The following story certainly roams at the edge of uncertainty. Hopefully it also sheds light on those more cerebral frontiers that, regardless of our proximity to adventure, we should all feel compelled to explore.

John and I had been in Padang, the provincial capital of West Sumatra, Indonesia, for three days. Our only goals were to stock-up on supplies, buy ferry tickets, and make contacts while staying with our buddy Ethan. The three of us met in Jakarta two months ago during the orientation for our current Fulbright scholarships. Along with another fifteen recent American college graduates, the three of us are teaching English in our respective cities, Ethan in Padang, John in a rural village in South Sumatra, and me in a mid-sized city in East Java. Because John and I both live in conservative Muslim areas, we were graced with a month-long break for Ramadan. We decided to make the trip up to Padang, where the allure of the isolated Mentawai Islands was too strong to resist.

I made my first two trips to Indonesia following the massive Southeast Asian tsunami of December 2004. While photographing, researching, and volunteering on grants available through my alma mater, Dartmouth College, I also read about and became enthralled with Mentawai, a scant two hundred miles south of the devastated Aceh Province and Nias Island. While Nias took the brunt of the tsunami, and the Mentawais remained unaffected, my guidebooks talked about ritual tattoos, loincloths, and the Mentawai peoples’ struggle to retain control of their lives in the face of illegal logging operations and missionaries. As a photographer, I was drawn to anticipated images of tribal hunters bartering with cigarettes for kerosene and chocolate.
The Mentawais are made up of four main islands, all of which are accessible only by ferry or charter boat from Padang, although there is talk of an airstrip opening next year. German missionaries arrived at the start of the twentieth century, and despite their brutal massacre at the hands of locals, missionaries of many beliefs persevered in their quest to convert. The islands are now majority Protestant, with the remaining peoples split between a mix of Catholicism, Islam, Baha’i, and animist beliefs. Until the past twenty years, when surfers and trekkers started arriving, villagers shared everything in a communal, subsistence existence that still survives in some of the more isolated villages that I visited. However, as illegal loggers have continued to devour the forests, local people have been forced to reform their harmonious and holistic approach to life in favor of a more proactive resistance. Such dramatic and drastic changes are a hallmark of development and modernization, and Indonesia has more than its fair share of examples.

In discussing Indonesia, one can’t help structuring any social or political commentary around the paradoxes and bewildering juxtapositions that exist here on every level. Nationally, the current President Susilo Bambang Yudyhono – known affectionately as SBY – has staked his political career on fighting the vestiges of corruption left behind by the thirty-year Suharto regime. To a certain extent, his campaign is working. This past August, the business tycoon Adelin Lis was arrested and fined the equivalent of twenty-five million dollars for his role in the monstrous illegal logging trade that exists throughout the archipelago. Yet, corruption still exists on every level in Indonesia, and is so ingrained in the culture that eradicating it will take reforms from every sector and stage. When I went to get my motorcycle license with the vice principal of my school, we skipped the entire line, I was then handed an already completed sheet, which I was told to sign and return, along with the equivalent of fifteen dollars. Anyone with the resources (read: money) can expect similar benefits. Suharto’s regime was ultimately brought down my KKN – corruption, collusion and nepotism. If history teaches us anything, the people of Indonesia struggling to develop a sense of national promise would be well advised to start following a new path.

I woke with a start to what could only be the sound of automatic machine gun fire. Peering cautiously out of my berth, I was initially relieved, then amused, then mortified to see the hardest rain of my life pummeling the tin roofs of Muarasiberut, the largest city on Mentawai’s largest and most northern island, Siberut. After twenty-four hours on a rickety, vomit-lined ferry, we had arrived. Sort of.
After stumbling off the boat and being informed that it was seven miles to the nearest lodging house, John, our bags, and I succumbed to the ease of one dollar motorcycle rides. We had been told in Padang that we would arrive in Pokai, our jumping off point in northern Siberut, on Monday evening. Instead, we spent a grim twelve hours crossing the Mentawai Strait to Sipora, an island to the south, where we spent eight hours in port. After another six hour boat ride from hell, we were now spending the night in Muara, and were told that we would reach Pokai the following evening, a full forty-eight hours behind schedule. In our three months in Indonesia, we had both come to appreciate the concept of jam karet, rubber time, an Indonesian aphorism that accounts for delays in everything from postal deliveries to the start of class to the arrival of international airplanes. On our ride to Muara’s only hotel, the driver told me that the professional surfer cum pop music icon Jack Johnson had just left the island yesterday. It could have just been your average white guy looking for a laugh, or – and I think more likely – it was yet another absurd coincidox of life in Indo.
The next day, while waiting for our boat to Pokai, we met a twenty-five year-old Indonesian soldier named Indra. He was in Mentawai for three days distributing the equivalent of US$20,000 for microfinance initiatives in small villages. In addition to volunteering that information, he also showed us his Winchester .38, in the process pointing it fully loaded at John’s right kidney. While it was good to see the Indonesian military involving itself with grassroots civilian development, it was a bit disconcerting to extrapolate what other forms of laxity exist in such a massive bureaucracy where the officers on the ground brandish sidearms like plastic straws.

“Conservation will not work without education.” After yet another six hour vomitfest of a boat ride, we finally arrived in Pokai. I was seated in the house of a friend of a friend, talking with Fauzan, the thirty-two year-old manager and CEO of the Siberut Conservation Project. Originally from a wealthy suburb of Jakarta, he now spends four months at a time living in a tent in the jungles of Siberut, playing host to foreign researchers – mostly anthropologists and primatologists – while promoting sustainable forestry practices with indigenous peoples. “There is only one option now,” he continued. “Development. And that development means environmental degradation. Of course, people want electricity and television and blah blah blah. But when their forests are gone, and their children must move to Padang, what then? Many of the local people here are still in between. They don’t know what their lives mean today. ‘Do I forage? Do I farm? Do I do illegal logging?’ It is tough for us at the Conservation Project, because the local people don’t understand what we do, and they steal from us. Now, the illegal loggers come to North Siberut. They bring money and electricity, the local people sign contracts, the forests die, and we all lose.”
The next morning, we arrived at the Pokai police station around 9:30AM, where we woke-up the still slumbering police chief. After jumping out of bed and throwing on a t-shirt, he proceeded to intently review John and my photocopied passports. After sufficient mock understanding, he began transcribing the information into a large, water-stained journal on his desk. Tourists are rare in North Siberut, and the book was entirely blank despite its weather-beaten cover. His first pen ran out of ink, and after his rummaging around the small cluttered office failed to produce a writing implement, I offered him mine, making it very clear that I wanted the Honda dealership pen back after he was done.
We set out from Pokai on two motor bikes, laden down with our bags and provisions for the next week. Our guide, Adi, would meet us in his village, Monga Poula, an hour’s ride into the jungle. Following a cement path, we sputtered and popped through clear-cut tracts of land, several still burning at the edges. As we drove farther, the cement gave way to a single track dirt path, bounded by lush greenery that whipped at my feet as we drove past. The old growth had almost entirely been cleared; the only remnants were a few magnificent, buttressed trees sprawled and butchered on the forest floor. At one point, we even drove through the trunk of a ten foot diameter behemoth that lay waiting to be carved up by its new, most likely illegal owners.
At Adi’s house, over cups of what our host claimed was purified rain water, John and I discussed our plans for the next week. We told the half dozen men gathered around us that we wanted to visit the schools established by Yayasan Bhinekka Tunggal Ika (YBTI), a German-funded non-governmental organization that promotes education in rural areas of North Sumatra and Mentawai. We had been connected with YBTI through a Baha’i friend of Ethan’s in Padang. Many of the people we would meet in the villages of Siberut over the next week would have photos of the magnificent Baha’i temple in Haifa, Israel hanging on the otherwise unadorned walls of their homes. We also expressed interest in seeing what development looks like in the traditional villages, those untouched by Western religions and technologies, and which have made Siberut and the rest of Mentawai famous beyond the surfing crowd.
After sorting out costs and logistics, we visited the first of six Mentawai YBTI schools, located ten minutes away on the outskirts of Monga Poula. Marfua, the teacher there, was a pretty, twenty-seven year-old from Central Sulawesi, an island some 2,000 kilometers from Siberut that is currently embroiled in its own civil conflict, and is on the U.S. State Department’s no-go list. She was in Monga Pouola on a two year contract with YBTI, teaching kindergarten-age children who would otherwise be running about playing in dirt. “It’s difficult for me here,” she said in Bahasa Indonesia, smiling radiantly. “The food is terrible, it takes a month for news to get here from the mainland, and the people have no knowledge.” She showed us to her office/library/classroom, an all wood affair with plenty of breeze and ambient light. “We start with kindergarten, because that is where education begins. Without this, the children will grow-up to do exactly what their parents do. It is difficult for me here, but I must stay, for the children.” The afternoon’s class stormed into the building singing merrily. The twenty students stopped dead in their tracks when they saw the two new foreign visitors seated talking with their teacher. Most of the six year-old students carried machetes in one hand and Teletubbies or Sponge Bob themed backpacks in the other. After introductions, it was obvious that many of them had running noses and festering wounds covering their bodies. “Worms,” Marfua explained. As we left, the students formed a circle around us – machetes now mercifully out of sight – and sang a “goodbye teachers” song. It was a quiet walk back to the village.

Under the relentless midday sun, we waterproofed our gear, took our malaria pills, and packed the dugout canoe that would be our home and transport for the next week. With Adi’s four year-old son in tears, we bid farewell and made our way five hours upriver to Bojokan, the next village on our itinerary. Upon our arrival, we were greeted with unabashed giggles and inquisitive stares – tourists are a very rare site in northern Siberut. In an effort to break the ice, John broke-out the day-glo pink Frisbee that he carried around for this exact purpose. The fifty or so children in the village, many of them barefoot and dressed in torn and soiled clothing, went crazy, falling over one another at the opportunity to touch the strange disc from another world.

At sunset the village’s sole generator kicked in, and the day’s three hours of electricity flowed into a handful of lightbulbs and a CD player. As the gaggle of kids at the uma, communal house, danced to the menacing beats of developing world techno, their parents told me about school fees and why this village will die in the near future. The village of some five hundred people is devoid of any humans between the ages of twelve and twenty-two. The people here, through the help of YBTI and the elementary school they built, have come to realize that education is the key to furthering knowledge and protecting their lands. Yet, the closest middle or high school, as John and I had experienced, was a five hour dugout canoe ride away. “Once the children leave,” Adi told me, “they don’t want to come back. They stay in Padang, or go to Jakarta, or to America.” And you can’t blame them. Here, where a Frisbee represents a leap into modernity, education does not just shift paradigms, but breaks down and rebuilds the community according to the demands of a more globalized society. “Yes,” Adi continued in Indonesian, “this village will be nothing but old people soon. And then it will die.” The dozen middle-aged men with whom I was smoking cigarettes laughed uneasily, then turned off the generator some fifteen minutes later. Time for bed, apparently. It was 7:30PM.

“I mean, this just makes every other trip I’ve ever been on seem cushy in comparison.” It’s the next morning, and John, a native Minnesotan with a predilection for month-long canoeing and hunting trips in northern Canada, is screaming at me over the thumping roar of the five horsepower engine that is propelling our dugout canoe upriver. Due to hallucinations from the over-the-counter anti-malarial medicine that he bought in Padang, and the unforgiving plank wood floor that we slept on the night before, John is a woozy, bleary-eyed, bedraggled mess. Our guides, on the other hand, are models of nicotine fuelled fitness. The day before, we had picked up two more guides, Yetno, a stoic thirty-something year-old, and Playboy, a raffish, heavily muscled man of the same age with a large, poorly done Playboy bunny tattoo on his left biceps. Upon entering Bojokan, I was expecting the intricate and ornate tattoos for which, in some circles, Mentawai is famous. Seeing that crude Playboy bunny was amusing, if not slightly horrifying.
As the day progressed and we left behind the illegal forestry ravaged river banks, we entered Siberut National Park. Old growth trees crept down to the water and formed massive natural arches overhead, shading us from the north island’s one-hundred-fifty-third day straight without rain. It may have been storming in the south, but the north had taken on a surprisingly arid look, some of the trees wilting and the rivers painfully shallow. We passed dug out canoes filled with slack-jawed locals who were often too stunned to return our greetings until we had passed. The day slid by with the banks of the muddy, rocky creek, until nightfall, when the intermittent gravel beds became too frequent and extensive to portage. “Tomorrow, we make the seven hour trek to Simatalu,” Adi proclaimed. “Tonight, we camp here.” Suddenly, he jammed his fist beneath the water. It emerged seconds later full of writhing river shrimp. “Dinner,” he proclaimed, with a big toothless grin.

Beyond missionaries, the only significant contact with outsiders that Simatalu has ever had was by way of calamity. In 1976, when five hundred miles to the East napalm deployment was at its peak over the jungles of North Vietnam, the Simatalu village head spent three days running through the jungle to Pokai, the closest “major city,” to inform the “outside world” that Simatalu residents were dying by the handful each day due to some ghastly sickness that traditional medicines could not cure. A doctor was helicoptered in from Padang, but due to unfavorable landing conditions, was forced to rappel into the village, where after diagnosing advanced dysentery, he distributed medicine, thereby saving the place and its citizens from extinction.
Simatalu is not on many maps, and maybe rightfully so. It is small, and average in many ways, perched on a bend in the river some ten miles from the Indian Ocean on the west coast of Siberut, home to three hundred people and perhaps twice as many chickens. There is a private elementary school, but like Bojokan and many other small Indonesian villages, it has no middle school or high school. Consequently, the town is overrun with young children, married people, and old men, while nary an adolescent is to be found.
We decided to make the arduous four-day trip to Simatalu for the reasons that by the same stroke make the place both attractive and unappealing. It is isolated, small, poor, and renowned on Siberut Island for its heavily tattooed and slightly unhinged residents. There have been several Catholic missions to the village over the past sixty years, and most children still bear the initially puzzling mark-names of the Italians who passed through – Cornelius, Januarius, and Emelius.
Simatalu is the type of place that prompts big questions, some of them banal (Will I ever taste Nutella again?) and some of them deep and probing and worthy of serious contemplation and dissection. I have been studying economic and social development academically since I started at Dartmouth, and through travels and study in Eastern Europe, Central and South America, and other parts of Asia, I have grappled with some of the practical issues that surround peoples and nations efforts to enter the globalized marketplace. Yet, in Simatalu the merits of development and globalization took on a clarity and prescience that I haven’t found anywhere else.
It is the people in between, like Fauzan said in Pokai, those who are neither part of the modern world nor still attached to their cultural and traditional roots, who suffer most from the broad umbrella of economic and cultural development that has been branded globalization. In Simatalu, where TVs and electricity don’t exist and foreigners appear sporadically – and at that, only in the form of missionaries and trekkers, as opposed to aid workers and development practitioners – life carries on much as it has for centuries, if not millennia. While most families have begun to use plastic cups and plates, cell phones, motor bikes and the internet are as abstract as America.
The argument can and has been made that it is not the developed world’s place to decide who receives the perks of a modernized life – which include the relatively recent discoveries of longer lifespans, decreased infant mortality, and increased literacy, amongst others – but that such benefits should be distributed universally. Unfortunately, along with such advances come the apparently inevitable cultural and social cleavages that have marred developing – and developed – societies across the globe. As Thomas Friedman wrote, “Globalization is like the sunrise. You can’t stop it, but you can wear sunscreen.”
The people of Simatalu, who would all be considered the Earth’s extreme poor – living on less than US$1 per day – were until very recently at one end, most would say the bottom end, of the globalization spectrum – any community that is threatened by extinction due to dysentery is certainly at the whim of a host of powerful factors. Now, however, the people of Simatalu are starting to climb the global ladder. The first generation of Simataluans will graduate from high school over the next few years. What is worrisome, though, is that even though on paper these students will have climbed the first rung towards international preparation, in reality, the people of Simatalu are not using their sunscreen.

By anyone’s definition, life in Simatalu is hard. The women wake at 3AM to kill the day’s chicken, stoke the family fire, and prepare sago, coarse, brown, tasteless bread. The men spend their days hunting, farming and sitting around smoking hand rolled cigarettes. All of the men over forty-five wear only loincloths and tobacco pouches, and most bear the traditional full body tattoos that have made Mentawai famous. When I asked one of the younger generation why no one his age has the tattoos, he replied “I want to be clean. Once you get the tattoos, you can never leave the village without feeling strange and out of place.” None of the older men speak Indonesian, only the local Bahasa Mentawai, and they have rarely, if ever, traveled beyond the hills that surround the village. The younger generation has begun to yearn for more, and that has led to all sorts of complications.
Simatalu, like most Mentawai villages, is arranged around the uma, communal house, which serves three roles as the main artery for community dialogue, the school, and the boarding house for the rare outsider who happens through. Every night, the village children gather at the uma for what are euphemistically called Catholic prayers. Pak Guru and his brother lead the children through a simplistic and heavy-handed legion of Catholic prayers, in Indonesian, before dispensing a list of commands, which are shouted back by the children in unison. The occasion is not so much prayer as mandatory indoctrination from the two power hungry and angry men who have taken the helm of the village.
The same two men, both in their late-twenties, conduct school lessons every day except Sunday, when virtually the whole village goes to church. “School” is similar to prayer. The two men stand in front of the forty or so elementary-age students shouting commands, which are responded to en masse. If a student speaks out of line, Pak Guru (literally Mr. Teacher) stops the “lesson,” storms down the uma’s steps, and grabs the offender by his belly fat above the pants line, pinching and pulling it outwards and upwards in a snapping motion until the child begins to cry, at which point the rest of the students laugh at and ridicule the offender for being the equivalent of “soft.”

Pak Guru and his brother, in addition to administering prayers and running the village’s education program, also live in and maintain Simatalu’s uma. They have in essence taken on every role of responsibility and leadership within the village. The regal and intimidating tattooed elders of the village have been relegated to peripheral and subsidiary roles, which wholly consist of pig hunting and smoking cigarettes. Pak Guru and his brother are breeding an obviously apparent culture of violence that manifests itself in children attacking one another with machetes, villagers beating dogs to the point of shock, and women and older men playing background and marginal roles that only perpetuate the power and respect given to the two domineering and frankly frightening men. It is no wonder that children refuse to come back to Simatalu once they’ve found a way out.

We spent our days doing as the Simataluans did. Mostly, that just meant smoking a lot of cigarettes, although one morning I did set-off pig hunting with one of the village elders. Followed by a procession of school-age kids, I could see immediately that unless they were deaf to the hollering of a dozen dirty and shoddily clad boys, no pigs would come within a mile of us. My assumption proved correct. I did however, get the opportunity to make a fool of myself slipping and sliding on vines and roots behind the tiny, lean, tattooed man who was at least twice my age. The boys scampered up sixty-foot trees and retrieved coconuts and jackfruit, which all of us consumed with the same jungle-fueled hunger.

Soon after, with two weeks left in our Ramadan vacation, John and I left Simatalu. The night before we trudged off, though, John had half of our remaining money stolen from him. While he was sleeping, John had seen Playboy rifling through his bag, but he figured that the guide was just returning his playing cards. With the light of day, the truth became apparent. However, with an arduous and sketchy daylong jungle hike and at least two days in dugout canoes ahead of us, we thought it best not to confront the thief, who had otherwise been a flawless and oftentimes essential guide, helping us peel off leeches and pick our way along indecipherable and precarious trails. Ultimately, we had to arrange a special deal with Adi so that we could mail him the rest of the money we owed him. John and I could understand the impulse to perceive foreigners as walking moneybags, because, let’s face it, relatively speaking, we are. Playboy got away sixty dollars the richer, but will never work as a guide again.
As we were leaving the village, Pak Guru gave the family mutt one last resounding kick to the rib cage, thrashing the bony beast against the walls of the uma. John and I made our way out along the dirt paths between thatched houses, not even half sad to be journeying back to a world of Nutella, Frisbees, and video arcades. The people of Simatalu will give up their tattoos and buy TVs. I can only hope that they begin to wear their sunscreen, too.

Ramadan

2006-10-05T00:06:00.000-07:00

Well, it’s been a nice four days of (un)strenuous teaching here in the lovely hamlet of Madiun. Ramadan is in full effect, which means classes have been cut in half, shortening days so that they end before noon, in time for a nice long afternoon nap. I was fasting the first day, Monday, for Yom Kippur, and I could easily share in the teachers’ and students’ pain of having to suffer through teaching and paying attention while starving. As an added bonus, the hot season is coming to an end with a roaring finale, and temperatures have been hot and the air particularly dry every day.
While my fast ended on Monday, I’d reckon 95% of the students and teachers observe the Muslim version of the month-long puasa. They wake up at 3AM, jam a full day's worth of food, pray at 4AM, maybe go back to sleep for an hour, and then wake up at 5:30AM, pray again, and head to school, which still begins at 6:30AM. I would say that I’ve been pretty considerate of everyone, making a point not to drink or eat in public. I did slip-up today, though. While teaching, I took out my water bottle, and took a nice long pull. When I heard moans and groans coming from throughout the class, I looked towards my students to see them eyeing me like a pack of hungry hungry hippos. Ma’af!
I have filled my days with a bit of extra work. In exchange for a custom tailored Batik dress shirt, I’m editing a teacher’s PhD thesis on idioms in nineteenth and twentieth century American Western novels. Some of the idioms he has underlined include “He thrust his enormous penis in and out of her, tearing her apart” and “She watched him gliding in and out of her.” Idioms? Right.
I also spoke at the local university again yesterday. This was a class of future nurses, all except one of the fifty late-adolescent women. You can imagine what sort of stir I made. When I told them that my Mom is a doctor (HI MOM!), the whole class began clapping and cheering for her. Sorry, Dad, no such luck for “medicine business!”
In any case, I’m off again on another holiday – if you can believe it! This one is the real deal. I won’t be back in Madiun until November 1st. That’s over three weeks – simply ridiculous. I’m meeting my buddies John and Ethan in Padang, West Sumatra tomorrow afternoon, where we’ll put together an itinerary for the next ten days.
Please don’t get nervous if you don’t hear from me for a while. There’s a good chance that I’ll be heading into the bush, away from internet, electricity, and cell phone service. Wish me luck!Ramadan
Well, it’s been a nice four days of (un)strenuous teaching here in the lovely hamlet of Madiun. Ramadan is in full effect, which means classes have been cut in half, shortening days so that they end before noon, in time for a nice long afternoon nap. I was fasting the first day, Monday, for Yom Kippur, and I could easily share in the teachers’ and students’ pain of having to suffer through teaching and paying attention while starving. As an added bonus, the hot season is coming to an end with a roaring finale, and temperatures have been hot and the air particularly dry every day.
While my fast ended on Monday, I’d reckon 95% of the students and teachers observe the puasa. They wake up at 3AM, jam a full days worth of food, pray at 4AM, maybe go back to sleep for an hour, and then wake up at 5:30AM, pray again, and head to school, which still begins at 6:30AM. I would say that I’ve been pretty considerate of everyone, making a point not to drink or eat in public. I did slip-up today, though. While teaching, I took out my water bottle, and took a nice long pull. When I heard moans and groans coming from throughout the class, I looked towards my students to see them eyeing me like a pack of hungry hungry hippos. Ma’af!
I have filled my days with a bit of extra work. In exchange for a custom tailored Batik dress shirt, I’m editing a teacher’s PhD thesis on idioms in nineteenth and twentieth century American Western novels. Some of the idioms he has underlined include “He thrust his enormous penis in and out of her, tearing her apart” and “She watched him gliding in and out of her.” Idioms? Right.
I also spoke at the local university again yesterday. This was a class of future nurses, all except one of the fifty late-adolescent women. You can imagine what sort of stir I made. When I told them that my Mom is a doctor (HI MOM!), the whole class began clapping and cheering for her. Sorry, Dad, no such luck for “medicine business!”
In any case, I’m off again on another holiday – if you can believe it! This one is the real deal. I won’t be back in Madiun until November 1st. That’s over three weeks – simply ridiculous. I’m meeting my buddies John and Ethan in Padang, West Sumatra tomorrow afternoon, where we’ll put together an itinerary for the next ten days.
Please don’t get nervous if you don’t hear from me for a while. There’s a good chance that I’ll be heading into the bush, away from internet, electricity, and cell phone service. Wish me luck!

Photos

2006-10-03T00:52:00.000-07:00

Holiday, Again

2006-10-03T00:23:00.001-07:00

“You look like the kind of bloke who’s going to get a job.”
“Well, Bob, despite my best efforts to front the life of a man of leisure, you might have me there.” My ten day holiday finished with a night out on the town in Ubud, Bali talking to Bob, a Southeast Asian ancient maritime migrations specialist who, at one point, rowed his own hollowed-out canoe from Java to Madagascar. Much of the rest of the break followed a similar bent of amusing albeit slightly surreal experiences.
My time in Jogya was of a traditional sort, spending days at Borobudur and Prambanan, two of Southeast Asia’s most famous attractions. The May 26th earthquake left Prambanan slightly worse for wear, and walled off to tourists. A few backhanded bribes later, though, and John, Deanna, Elena, Nico and I were crawling amongst arguably the world’s greatest Hindu temple, known widely as one of the original manmade wonders of the ancient world. Deanna, a PhD candidate in Sanskrit and South and Southeast Asian history, was in heaven.
Borobudur, Prambanan’s pyramid-like counterpart, nestled amongst rolling green jungle with a jaw-dropping view of smoking Mount Merapi (the world’s most active volcano), was exquisite. The story of Buddha unfolds over nine ascending layers of intricately carved volcanic pumice that were only rediscovered a century and a half ago. John and I spent our second night in Jogya drinking heady alcohol on the foothills of the smoking mountain, listening to my buddy Nico’s rock band as his art school colleagues partook in an epic bacchanal reminiscent of the freshman American frat party. “YOU ARE ALL LIGHTWEIGHTS IN THE PUB CRAWL OF LIFE!” John screamed at them over the PA system.
Ramadan began our third day there, and subsequent ragers were kept to a low key minimum. I did however spend a day with Scuba (aka Mark) from Hands On Disaster Response. Hands On is leaving the Jogya area within the week, and one night I witnessed the group auctioning off the shovels, wheel barrows, pick axes, and even a chain saw that they had been using to remove rubble over the past four months. The following day, I returned to Sawit, one of the hardest hit villages near Jogya, where I met with Scuba, some of the village elders, and Akbar from Yayasan Kompip, the Indonesian NGO that I’m working with to establish microfinance initiatives in Java. After a few hours of cheerful banter, bananas and tea, we decided to back another micro-lending initiative in Sawit. Hopefully Dave Campbell, the itinerant and effusive benefactor of Hands On will front the money to provide long term economic support to the devastated village.
Having thought that I had finished with the humanitarian and cultural side of my holiday, a group of us decided to make our way to Bali, where the nightlife-suppressing specter of Ramadan is superseded only by the threat of belligerent Aussies and the suicide bombers they attract. John, Deanna, Caitlin and I spent our first few days surfing, the nights frequenting clubs and bars, berjalan jalan (hanging out) with the local Indonesian surfer crew that taught us how to make longboarding look easy. Three hour sessions in the waves were interspersed with forty cent bowls of nasi goreng and tahu pedas, soaking up the life of a true hedonist.
After a few days of rinse, wash, repeat, we expanded our boundaries and set-off for Tanah Lot, a hindu temple perched on a series of breathtaking cliffs on the Southwest coast of Bali. To commemorate the one year anniversary of the most recent Bali bombings last October first, 5,700 villagers dressed as traditional Kecak dancers performed ceremonial rituals while lights played across the cliffs and clashing waves. As a Balinese theater troop performed wayang under the aegis of a National Geographic film crew, the thousands of dancers hollered and clapped in a surreal unison that reverberated and echoed in tune with the smashing waves. After an hour and a half of dancing and singing, the entire mass of dancers lit individual torches, and made their way off the beach in a surprisingly unsweaty mass of sarongs and flip-flops. We all agreed, it was one of the top ten coolest things we’d ever seen.
Continuing our Balinese cultural odyssey, the next day we made our way north to Ubud for the city’s third annual writers and readers festival. There were a number of fascinating workshops available (at the student price of five dollars each!), but I decided to attend the three most relevant and interesting sounding sessions. After the Wave featured two Acehnese poets speaking through translation and a Sri Lankan novelist and humanitarian with flawless English with whom I spoke about starting microfinance in his village near Colombo (on a microfinance note, Citigroup just announced a series of low-interest loans totaling $100 million to be made to microfinance groups in over thirty countries around the world. It looks like the trend is catching on).
The Rise of the East featured a fascinating discussion about the rise of Asian and Muslim literature and how it will dominate global culture within my lifetime. Suketu Mehta, a Pulitzer prize finalist and recent author of Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found made some excellent points. He spoke about Diaspora and the new examination of the fragmentation of identity. He addressed the twenty-first century’s multinational generation, and its characters who are comfortable in any and all youth cultures. He also brought up an interesting point regarding literacy – first generation literate people don’t have enough English to work internationally, but just enough to be alienated from cultural tradition. He didn’t stress this point, but I wondered whether such feelings of non-belonging lead to extremism and radicalism? The panelists, all Asian, also bashed what they called “the post-colonial romp through literature – an ill-advised label for English writing by non-‘Westerners.’” The panelists spoke of technology solving the problem of language, after which the “story” will once again become the prominent part of literature. They referred to the ping-pong game of ideas between West and East, from the Bahagad Vita influencing Thoreau to Martin Luther King influencing Indian untouchables. After the session was over, we had coffee and drinks with Suketu. My favorite quote of his was, “I slam, you slam, we all slam Islam. Read the Qu’uran.”
In the town square that night, after a presentation of Wayang Skateboard: A Modern Interpretation of an Ancient Tradition, we watched a film made in 1977 by the renowned filmmaker John Darling. With incredible 16mm color, he documented the last days and the cremation of a Balinese carving master, who died in 1976 at age 116. Imagine the experiences that man went through in his life.
We finished the night off with Bob at the local bar. I told him I was interested in rowing across the Atlantic, and he told me that was boring and for pussies. I plan on meeting up with him the next time I’m in Bali.

Yom Kippur (What?)

2006-10-03T00:23:00.000-07:00

Who woulda thunk? The Messianic Christians are active in Madiun. Ray, a senior at the high school where I teach, spent last year in Texas on an exchange with the American Field Service. My first day of school, he asked me the usual questions, “What’s your name? Where are you from? Are you married? What’s your religion?” After hearing my reply of “Yahudi” to his last question, he went buck wild. “JEWISH! Really? Well, me too, sort of.” Since I don’t really know much about Christianity – or Judaism, for that matter – it makes my commenting on Messianic Christianity a bit of a hairy undertaking. All that I really could gather was that they are Christians who believe in observing Jewish rituals and holidays. Thus my attendance at the Indonesian take on Yom Kippur, described in literature given to me by Ray as one of the “Seven Feasts of the Lord.”
“From a Messianic standpoint, there is much symbolism in Yom Kippur. Forgiveness is asked on the basis of Abraham’s offering of Isaac as a sacrifice, a foreshadowing of the sacrifice of Messiah which was to come. Though Messiah is our Kippur, our scapegoat, our high priest, this holiday offers us an opportunity to celebrate the fulfillment of prophecy and the awesome nature of God who gave His only Son for us and for the remission of sin through his shed blood. It should be a day of self-examination and prayer, including fasting and intercession for Israel.”
Really weird, right? More pamphlets proclaimed, “The Jewish Prophets show the Way” or “How can you be Jewish if you believe in Jesus?” – which is answered with “We believe that Scripture plainly shows who Messiah was to be… and we believe he is Yeshua (Jesus). (And you don’t even have to be Jewish to believe in Him!)” I mean, WHAT?
Anyway, the service was epic, in a small room on the second floor of an even smaller church. A banner featuring Hebrew with translated Indonesian (YAHWEH inside of JESUS is the LORD!) hung over a set of keyboards, an amp, and a nearly obscured cross. A chubby little boy in a Spiderman t-shirt sat stuffing his face with Oreos. Generic keyboard rhythms kicked in, and we were off as well- but shabbily-dressed Indonesian men and women tinkered with the PA system. “Shalom, Mr. Nick, hag samea.” So FRIGGING bizarre.
Ray’s mom met some dude named Mr. Suradi in Jakarta about six years ago, and since then, the whole family has been practicing Messianic Christianity. The pastor intoned, “The name of the Lord is Yahweh, not this corrupted version, Jesus. We go back to the Hebrew, not the modern Greek interpretation.” Ray’s mother, a portly middle-aged woman in a bright orange, pearl bespangled jumper and matching lipstick, turned around and gave us the English translation of the Bible – ON HER HANDHELD HP EQUIVALENT OF A BLACKBERRY! There I was, in the midst of the most populous Muslim nation on Earth, listening to Christian rock while reading computerized versions of Leviticus. The temptation of a still-robed challah lay under the watchful flickering of two Shabbat candles, as cellphones intermittently chimed between shouts of “Hallelujah!” and “Shalom!”
The pastor continued (in Indonesian), “Yom Kippur is a command from the Lord – it should be observed by all Christians.” The muezzins’ call to prayer, announcing the end of another day of Muslim fasting, floated through the open windows of the church as the pastor dove into his sermon. The three pillars of Western civilization, repeating, reflecting and reverberating off one another like waves, melded into a cacophony of fast-addled surrealistic interpretations of the world around me. Are those elements of the world that I pick apart as obvious as I imagine, or am I transposing hopeful generalizations on to a scene that really requires contemplation, if not deeper understanding? “If you test the DNA of Jews and Javanese,” Ray tells me excitedly, “a lot is the same!”
I’m not sure whether it’s a curse or a blessing to be able to speak for hours. Maybe I just don’t understand how it’s done. When I speak publicly, and I see my audience’s eyes glazing over, I speed-up, change topics, or talk more animatedly. This pastor just kept on going. You could hear the eager sighs of relief every time he issued an amen, hallelujah, or shalom, but such wishful thinking was quelled with another soliloquy on something that I couldn’t understand. Ray made efforts to translate, but it all turned into something having to do with Yahweh’s love and Israel and the fast and I told him to stop. I might have been mildly hallucinating. It’s tough to tell in situations like that.
We prayed for Israel, and then had Kiddush, the most ridiculous event of all. Sipping thimble sized glasses of bootleg Manischewitz (read: grim grape juice) and chomping on chopped-up pieces of Wonderbread (alas, the napkin was hiding bowls full of pasty white crustless cubes, not a big, beautiful mountain of kneaded bread, as I’d hoped) I broke the fast. This year in Indonesia? Next year in Jerusalem!

Israel, Indonesia talked during Lebanon war

2006-09-24T22:49:00.000-07:00

Cleveland Jewish News [US]
September 23, 2006

Israel, Indonesia talked during Lebanon war

(JTA) — Ehud Omert told the heads of a US Jewish group
that he had direct contact with Indonesian leaders
during Israel's Lebanon war.

The Israeli prime minister met last week in Israel
with Steve Gutow, executive director of the Jewish
Council for Public Affairs, the umbrella body for
Jewish community-relations councils, and Martin
Raffel, the group's associate executive director.

Olmert said Indonesian leaders contacted Israel during
the war. He did not divulge details of the
conversation, but Israel subsequently dropped
objections to Indonesian participation in a
peacekeeping force in southern Lebanon. Israel has no
formal relations with the world's most populous Muslim
nations, but ties have warmed in recent years, and
Israel delivered aid during the 2004 tsunami.

(JTA) — Ehud Omert told the heads of a US Jewish group
that he had direct contact with Indonesian leaders
during Israel's Lebanon war.

The Israeli prime minister met last week in Israel
with Steve Gutow, executive director of the Jewish
Council for Public Affairs, the umbrella body for
Jewish community-relations councils, and Martin
Raffel, the group's associate executive director.

Olmert said Indonesian leaders contacted Israel during
the war. He did not divulge details of the
conversation, but Israel subsequently dropped
objections to Indonesian participation in a
peacekeeping force in southern Lebanon. Israel has no
formal relations with the world's most populous Muslim
nations, but ties have warmed in recent years, and
Israel delivered aid during the 2004 tsunami.

Photos

2006-09-22T02:53:00.000-07:00

Jogya (And Gumpas) on My Mind

2006-09-22T02:52:00.000-07:00

In typical Indonesian fashion, at five PM last night, Pak David, my contact at the school where I work, notified me that I am on holiday for the next ten days. I was speaking with students, asking them what they wanted to discuss next week, when they told me that there will be no school because the fasting month of Ramadan is set to begin on Sunday. I have no complaints whatsoever. As the adage goes, better late than never. I would, however, have been angry if I arrived at school next week to find no one there. As the case may be, I have nearly two weeks to continue exploring this wonderfully disorganized country.
I arrived in Jogyakarta last night around midnight. A dozen or so of the Fulbrighters are meeting up here for the weekend for a mini-reunion of sorts. The city is home to the ancient capital of Srivajaya and Borobodur, acclaimed as one of the seven ancient wonders of the world. I’ll post photos and thoughts once I visit.
The city was also close to the epicenter of the May 24 earthquake (gumpa, in Bahasa Indonesia) of this year. Hands On International, the retooled version of the group Hands On USA that I worked with in Mississippi, is working here rebuilding houses. This fact slipped my mind until I arrived, when my taxi driver Suparman (real name) told me that there is a group of bule from America volunteering here. Within minutes, I was on the phone with Scuba, one of the main coordinators from Biloxi, Mississippi who is running the Hands On show here, on the other side of the globe. On the way to my hotel, Suparman picked-up from the train station a girl named Jacqueline, who is working here for Hands On, and whom I also met while in Mississippi. Yet more evidence that, as Thomas Friedman put it, our world is flattening and shrinking every day.
I’m staying in a hotel with my buddy John, who is posted in South Sumatra in the only locale more rural (and much more removed) than mine. There is no internet in his village, and hordes of people linger outside his apartment, waiting to practice their English and to whisk him around town on motor bikes. He seems a bit crazed already, suffering from rock-star-bule syndrome and the lack of any substantive conversation over the past month. His hard drive on his computer also recently crashed, so he has no music to console his lonesome, bored, and intelligible English-deprived soul. The next week should be good for him!
After spending a few hours talking with Willow, a girl stationed here in Jogya, John and I retired to our room. Within ten minutes of lying down, the room started shaking. I’m proud to say that I survived my first earthquake unscathed! Nothing fell from the walls, but for half a minute, the window panes rattled and the building swayed, sending John and me out into the hallway away from the threat of falling ceilings and swan-shaped ceiling lights.
If the past twelve hours are any indication of the way my current holiday will go, it should certainly be an exciting and good one.

The Commoditization of Mr. Nick – Part Two

2006-09-22T02:41:00.000-07:00

Wednesdays are traditionally a day off for Mr. Nick. Today, however, I was invited to MU, one of Madiun’s two local vocational universities. I spent two hours addressing crowds of roughly one hundred first-year college students, answering their questions about education reforms, cultural comparisons, the cost of university, sports, and religion. I surprised myself with my Indonesian, and was actually able to carry on some substantial parts of the Q&A in Bahasa. At least I understood what I was saying!
After the two hours were up, I was swarmed with requests for photographs. If I didn’t have the ego of a rock star already, Madiun certainly hasn’t deflated it at all. After the photo session, I promised to meet some of the students for coffee and tea to practice their English, and my Bahasa. We’ll see if that ever comes to fruition.
As I was walking out the door, my contact at the university pulled me into a side room, and gave me a box full of the local take on cake, and an envelope filled with the equivalent of fifteen dollars. Considering that the vice-principal whom I eat lunch with every day only makes one hundred dollars per month, fifteen dollars for two hours’ honest work is remarkably good. Actually, it’s ridiculously good.
I don’t know yet what I’m going to do with the money – I’ll either buy something for my students at school, or I’ll use it to reregister my motor bike, which expires tomorrow. In any case, I brought the cake over to Pak David’s for lunch, and consumed about two-thirds of it with a big glass of unfiltered coffee before falling into a late afternoon nap. As I was leaving Pak David’s house to return home, I got into a minor motorcycle accident with an imbecile of a high school girl who was turning right in the wrong lane. I scraped up my hands, and the bike is a bit tweaked, but I’m okay. For the most part, it was only my pride that was hurt. Just another day in Indonesia.

Bali

2006-09-22T02:38:00.000-07:00

Bali is quite simply paradise. I imagine that whatever you’ve seen and read has not led you astray.
Sandwiched between two fifteen hour bus rides, I spent my four-day weekend surfing and attending Balinese traditional ceremonies. Hillary, a fellow Fulbrighter, has the good fortune to live in Denpasar, about fifteen minutes from the world famous Kuta Beach. I arrived bleary eyed and bedraggled on Friday morning, and spent the day dressed in a sarong and Balinese version of the do-rag, reciting Hindu incantations and dousing myself with holy water and rice (see photos).
Hillbo and I spent the afternoons on Kuta, Legian, and Seminyak beaches, where I rented a surfboard for three hours for the equivalent of two dollars. For an extra five dollars, I was given my first real lessons (sorry Caspary, Malibu doesn’t count).
The crowds weren’t what I expected them to be, which can be attributed to two factors: it being the beginning of the low season, and the spate of bombings that took place the same time last year. Hillbo and I spent some quality time (and money) at Seminyak’s nicer eating establishments, which included a swank on-the-beach lounge/resto/disco called KuDeTa – clever, no?
It was nice to get out of Madiun for the weekend, and to harken back to what it’s like to eat pasta and drink beer. But I actually did start to miss this place. It really has become a home of sorts.

Korupsi

2006-09-13T03:23:00.000-07:00

Today, I was given an insider’s view into the means and machinations of Indonesian bureaucracy – and by nature of the beast, corruption. Pak David, the vice principal of the school, took me to the local police station to get me my driver’s license. To make a long story short, the equivalent of seventeen dollars and twenty-five minutes later, I had become an official, legal driver, having bypassed the official, legal Indonesian drivers’ test and the official, legal four-hour line. I entered the examination hall, and after looking over his shoulder, the administrator slipped an already completed test (with a passing score) from under his stack of papers, and handed it over for me to sign, and make official. When I asked Pak David about the matter, he gave me one of his loud, squeaky laughs in return. “It’s funny, yes? You no wait in line, they do test for you, so now you drive. Is funny, yes?”
Well, my brother Simon once gagged, “Have you heard the joke about dehydration? NO! That’s because there are no jokes about dehydration.” The same could be said for korupsi. For a government, society, and people that are trying to break free from poverty and the shackles that come with it, I don’t think corruption is a laughing matter at all. Apparently the locals don’t share my point of view.
Decades of strong bureaucratic centralism left Indonesian local-level officials unprepared and unable to conceive of governing in any democratic form. I continuously have to remind myself that Indonesia’s first “free and fair” elections were held only two years ago. Up until that point, collusion and nepotism had dictated who would run the government. A natural reaction for many of the local and regional leaders who found themselves in power was to follow the previous thirty-year Suharto example, the only model of effective leadership they really knew. Thus, the centralized corruption of the Suharto years from 1965-1998 rapidly turned to local corruption, as increased local revenues brought about through increased foreign direct investment went directly into local leaders’ pockets.
The national elections of 2004 demonstrate that post-Suharto Indonesia’s combination of optimistic reformism and cynical fatigue has led to an uncertain approach to governance. Under Sukarno, who led from independence in 1945 to Suharto’s coup-of-sorts twenty years later, the catch-word of the country was “revolution.” The following thirty-some years were dominated by promises of “development.” Under these two nation-wide umbrellas of political focus, common Indonesians began to develop a clear sense of national direction. With the economic crisis of 1997, and the four new presidents who have followed in eight years, that direction is now uncertain for most people here.
As Vickers writes, “The good intentions of genuine reformers have been drowned by a political culture in which access to power is synonymous with access to the economy” (For an excellent, relatively short introduction to contemporary Indonesia, try Vickers’ “A History of Modern Indonesia” published in 2005 by Cambridge University Press). I take this next passage from Vickers in order to illustrate exactly how destabilizing and ultimately harmful corruption has been, and can be, in Indonesia:
“The ultimate symbol of what was going wrong with [Suharto’s] New Order was its most extravagant scandal, which began late in 1995. News seeped out that the world’s largest gold deposit had been discovered in Busang, Kalimantan [Borneo]. The main foreign company involved, an obscure Canadian firm called Bre-X, ended up in a bidding war with major US companies in which more and more generous offers were made to members of the governing inner circle to see who could buy the most influence. One of the Suharto children was rumored to have been offered US$1 billion. With all the international agencies publishing accounts of Indonesia’s growing prosperity, investors felt assured of returns on their money. In true New Order style, there was of course no gold. The geologist who had signed off on the discovery mysteriously fell out of a helicopter, but the fraud was revealed late in 1996 through the actions of honest public servants and the investigations of the international media. The Suharto children… were not at all concerned that Bre-X and other companies had lost millions on the investment, or that Indonesia’s reputation was irreparably tarnished in the eyes of international investors. They had got their commissions. While some economists maintain that a level of corruption is a normal part of the operations of capitalism, the Bre-X scandal showed that the regime’s corruption was eating into the base of the economy” (my italics).
In addition to the century’s worst drought and the Asian economic crisis of 1997, Suharto’s regime was ultimately brought down my KKN – corruption, collusion and nepotism. If history teaches us anything, the people of this country struggling to develop a sense of national promise would be well-advised to start following a new path.

Photos

2006-09-13T02:49:00.000-07:00

Weekend in the Kampung

2006-09-12T02:40:00.000-07:00

I've been pushing it pretty hard since Friday night, this is the first real chance that I've had to sit down and think, let alone write. My friend Deanna - a Fulbrighter stationed in Surabaya, about three hours away by bus - came to town. We spent Friday night at another basketball game, where Madiun thrashed the opposing team. Deanna stayed in my house, which we were both expecting to generate massive amounts of controversy in the community; we were both forewarned that people of the opposite sex should not spend the night in the same house until marriage. Either the local elders didn't find out, or they just didn't care. The event went without issue.
Saturday, we drove my motor bike an hour West of Madiun to Lake Sarangan. The lake was less than we had hope for, having been nearly drained to compensate for the recent lack of rain. But we putt-putted farther up into the hills, where we hired a guide who toured us around the hills, valleys and terraced rice paddies for the day. It was some of the best beauty-to-accessbility hiking I've ever done. Hobbled ibus came running by with sacks of hay flung over their shoulders and farmers worked the land and fed us raw carrots (see photo) as we talked with them. At one of the waterfalls in the valley, I also met a group of students from my school (see photo), who were convinced that Deanna was my istri (wife). The thought of spending extended periods of time alone with a person of the opposite sex who is NOT your spouse is seemingly antithetical to local culture and custom.
Saturday evening, after a long and excellent day, we huffed it to Solo, one of the colonial centers of Central Java, where we spent the night in a Quality Hotel. Deanna left the next day, but I met up with the owner of KOMPIP, a local yayasan (NGO) committed to disaster relief and supporting marginalized peoples, like prostitutes and street children. I spent the day touring earthquake-affected kampung (villages) with Akbar and three of his staff. Working on behalf of the Los Angeles-based NGO Real Medicine, I spent my time evaluating how best to use Real Medicine's funds to support villagers who had been affected.
Priorities in post-disaster situations, once disease and deaths have been dealt with, go from providing housing, to treating post traumatic stress, to establishing new mechanisms of generating income. Since the government will most likely be providing shelter, Akbar and I decided to start a "community savings," or microfinance, program in a village called Biren in the district of Klaten. Assuming Real Medicine approves the plan, KOMPIP will establish a sub-center in Biren, where a director and two assistants will infuse money into local neighborhoods over the next six months. I saw several villages where similar plans had been implemented. Through uniquely designed saving mechanisms, whereby villagers contribute a set rate per month (normally the equivalent of ten cents), the money initially supplied (around $US250) multiplies nearly exponentially over a matter of years.
Akbar, the head of KOMPIP, returned from a conference on democracy and economic sustainability in Helsinki the day before I met with him (ie Saturday). His goal is to expand the "community savings" model so that it can be implemented by local governments. The idea is amazing, and very inspiring. If Real Medicine backs our plan, we can support over 1,000 villagers who were left with literally nothing after the May 24, 2006 earthquake.
It was a RAD weekend.

Photos

2006-09-07T00:07:00.000-07:00

The internet is painfully slow here, and I don't know how many more photos I'll be able to post before I get to another major city, but here is a sampling of what I've been seeing. Madiun is on the cusp of modernity and development, and the contradictions that come with its position in the international pecking order are omnipresent and often painfully obvious.

A Modern Race

2006-09-06T23:59:00.000-07:00

In my classes at school, of which there have been seven in two days, I introduce myself to the forty or so students per class, and then write “U.S.A.” on the whiteboard. I ask, “When you see this word, what is the first word that you think of?” The responses that I get have been, to varying degrees, entertaining, funny, and in some cases, provocative. The usual first response is “big” or “beautiful,” followed shortly by “White House,” “Hollywood country,” or “FBI.” After the rabblerousers have had their turn, the introspective girl with the glasses and long bangs will posit “cruel” or “modern and liberty.”
In the late nineteenth century, the Dutchman CLM Peders wrote, “I interpret the natives’ reluctance to attend school not as laziness, but as carelessness and thoughtlessness about their futures. The main reason for this is that they do not use their brains, because they have not been taught to do so.” Despite such colonial muttering, historians have shown that many native Indonesians actually valued their educations quite highly. According to Adrian Vickers, “Some were grateful, looking to the Dutch as examples of all that was modern.”
In Indonesia, modernity apparently still maintains positive and as yet unreached connotations. Where in the U.S. we’ve moved on to post-modernism, and then some, I find it fascinating that “Modernity” is still considered a holy grail of sorts.
After my introduction, I give the students an opportunity to ask me questions. Again, most are banal, ranging from “what is school in America like?” to “are you married?” Yesterday, though, a young man named Karisma asked a great question that jarred me a bit. “Are you proud of American culture?” Well, that’s a tough one, K-bone.
I am implicitly expected to embody stereotypical America, and I have embraced the role to a certain extent, as might be evident from my jingoist ranting in previous entries. But there are also times when a massive wave of depression washes over me when I think of what WE have done.
For instance, tonight’s regional high school basketball tournament at the local stadium, where Madiun was playing Surabaya, East Java’s capital city. I was amused and horrified to see that the tournament was sponsored by Surya, one of the country’s biggest cigarette manufacturers – apparently I haven’t yet become entirely accustomed to being bombarded by tobacco product placements, which are literally everywhere.
The tournament was testament to what could be called modernity; high school boys wearing bootleg Nike shoes and uniforms shooting freethrows to the unrelenting pulse of Jock Jams Volume Seven, only superficially oblivious to the halftime dancers – a troupe of local women with enticing bodies and scanty, skintight white outfits – shaking rhythmically out of unison. Remember please, this is a highly conservative Muslim community.
Only seventy years ago, over ninety percent of native Indonesians lived in the countryside, while over seventy-five percent of the Europeans here lived in the cities. The colonial rulers needed to be able to keep social groups apart, keep the locals from developing common interests, such as anti-imperialism. The main mechanism by which the Dutch achieved this was through institutionalizing the concepts of race. Today, as I’ve mentioned in previous entries, race – or what I have termed the Bule (white person) Effect – is still an omnipresent reality of everyday life, especially in Madiun, where Bule sightings are few and far between.
I’ve made friends with some local guys here, and we spend the evenings – Madiun essentially shuts down by 9PM – riding motorbikes from rumah makan (literally eating house) to mall to the city square. The guys own a mechanics shop in town, and were friendly with Mr. Richard Thompson, the Fulbrighter who was in Madiun last year. When I am not hailed as “BULE!” while riding my motorcycle – bought second hand off Richard – around the city, I am inevitably called “Richard.”
Friendship with the Indonesians here can be a touchy matter, though. After an unsuccessful attempt at trying to use my Mac laptop at the local Warnet (internet shop) today, I briefly exchanged numbers with one of the shop owners after he promised that he would call if they found a solution – highly unlikely. In any case, after returning from the basketball game, I found the following SMS (text message) waiting on my phone: “Good evening, do u have friend in here, if no friend, u can plan/come to my home, sorry about internet I cant help u. am had married, how about u? I want to be friend u.”
Although it may sound hyperbolic, I am starting to see myself as one more commodity in the race to develop, a product to be consumed and shown off like a pair of Nikes. As Vickers wrote, “The tragedy of Indonesian history is its continued pattern of exploitation, lives lost and opportunities squandered.”
Earlier in the evening, my neighbor brought me a bowl full of picture-perfect ripe mangoes. After one of my new friends dropped me off from the game, I dove into the yellowness, sucking every rind dry, consuming it like a pound of flesh.

Hari Pertama

2006-09-04T05:32:00.000-07:00

I’m on the internet at a WarNET (warung internet, internet shop) about two hundred yards from my house. The service is abyssmally slow, costs 40 cents per hour, and I have to deal with Rod Stewart circa 1981 blaring overhead. The shift key also has the tendency to jammmmm for extended periods of time.
This past weekend was the 53rd anniversary of my school (SMA Negeri Dua, SMA2), complete with student-run bazaar, fun games, and the new international teacher embarassing himself on stage, again.
I had my arm twisted into performing in front of the crowd of several hundred, and lacking any better ideas, I was cajoled into singing the school’s alma mater, in Indonesian. Put on the spot, I abandoned the traditional lyrics, and in Indonesian, sang something like “SMA Negeri Dua, Saya guru bule gila” – which translates roughly as “I’m the crazy whiteboy teacher.” Good work, Mr. Nick.
Later in the day, the school’s rebel faction, the Caution Skaters and Breakers clique, performed in the warehouse across from the school, and then in front of the crowd. Most of these kids, dressed in low-rise jeans, trucker hats and skater shoes, could have been pulled out of any American suburb.
I taught my first few classes today. The students’ English isn’t bad, but it’s painfully obvious that they’ve been learning from books for five years, and have minimal experience actually holding a conversation with anyone. My goal is to get the kids out of their shells - which they are perfectly comfortable doing in Indonesian, especially when whispering about me behind my back – and to introduce a measure of analytical reasoning, which seems to be devoid from most classes here. I am also co-coaching the debate team, made-up of several older students who have already studied abroad in the U.S. I’m also slated to teach English to the English teachers, and to coach the basketball team.
As I was leaving school today, one of the ibus (older women) grabbed my arm and in Indonesian said, “I hear you’re Jewish. Be careful. It’s best if you don’t tell your students, because there are some fanatics in your classes.” Well, I’ve decided that I’ll hold back for the first few months, but my job here is to serve as a cultural ambassador and to break-down cultural and social stereotypes. Even the teachers here have a very hard time understanding the difference between Jews, Christians, and Israel. I feel that at some point, it will be my obligation to clear things up – with caution, of course.
Selamat malam.

The Kid's New Vektor

2006-09-04T05:06:00.000-07:00

I have found myself the prototypical Indonesian village. If I were a director trying to find a more perfect Javanese backdrop for my new movie (I'm thinking "When the Chickens Revolted: Attack of the Bird Flu, Part Deux"), I would be hard pressed to do so.
My house is a two-storey affair with two bedrooms, a cement-floored kitchen and a living room on the bottom floor. I have a paved-over front yard with an enormous mango tree sprouting in one corner. I can pick fresh mangoes from the second-storey balcony cum rooftop, where I do yoga and read in the sun, and where there are two more bedrooms. From the roof, I have a picturesque view of the setting sun over rice and sugar cane fields.
Almost every hour of the day, and night, is filled with the chanting of the muezzins from the half dozen mosques that surround my house. The electronic jangle of the Good Humor ice cream man, who pedals around the neighborhood every hour on the hour, and the rhythmic thumping of the omnipresent motorbikes round off my auditory backdrop.
My next door neighbors – the sister-in-law and her husband of Pak David, the owner of my house and principal at my school – own a sundries shop where I buy candy bars, shampoo, and eggs. Their year-old daughter has Down Syndrome, and slaps herself in the face every time I say hello.
Rich, the Fulbrighter who lived here last year, sold me his furniture, DVD player, stove, and mattress. I bought a fan, TV, incandescent reading lamp, and mosquito electrocuter today. I’m putting up maps and photos on the walls, and am adjusting to the naked fluorescent bulbs that adorn the house.
Bathing, or mandi, consists of filling a 20-gallon cement tub with water, from which I splash myself repeatedly until saturated. The toilet is non-squat (i.e. Western) but does not have a flush mechanism. I find myself pouring water into it from staggering heights in order to activate the reverse pressure release, whatever that means. There is also no toilet paper. I still haven’t figured out how to wash myself without soaking all my clothes.
It’s already starting to feel like home.

Home Sweet Home

2006-09-01T21:27:00.000-07:00

I was invited to a twelve year-old boy's penis cutting ceremony this morning. VERY exciting stuff.
Needless to say, I'm in madiun. The city (more like a village) is small, sunny, clean, and friendly. My house is between a mosque and a rice paddy. The mullah's call to prayers and the roosters crowing at 5AM are sure to keep me spiritually and pandemically secure.
I'm on the internet at SMAN 2 (my school) right now - they have class on saturdays, poor kids! It's the school's 53rd anniversary here today (this country loves to celebrate dates), and they're having FUN GAMES in the courtyard. Upon arriving, I had to address the whole school and community, about 900 people. I tried to make a speech in Indonesian, but everyone just started laughing at me, so I switched to english, and everybody still laughed at me. This is going to be awesome!
There are a few exchange students who speak top-notch English (former American Field Service exchange students to Oklahoma, Texas, and Pittsburgh) and everyone is trying their best to make me feel comfortable/like royalty. They even gave me the anchor spot in tug-of-war guru-guru versus murid-murid (teachers vs. students), although I think the honor was due more to my ponderous size rather than any sort of cultural respect.
I'm going shopping for kit for my house this afternoon, and I'll post some photos as soon as I have 'em.

The End is Nigh

2006-08-30T01:40:00.000-07:00

Today was the last day of classes here in Jakarta, and I couldn’t be happier. Spending eight hours in class every day for the past four and half weeks has been a serious challenge. Coming off of a year where I was either out in the field, or able to come and go from my office as I pleased, sitting through often monotonous and superfluous lessons turned into an incredibly frustrating affair. I have immense respect for my twin sisters, Alice and Daphne, who are entering eighth grade this year, and are just now being initiated into the world of waking up at 6AM, riding the bus, taking classes all day, playing sports in the afternoon, riding the bus home, eating dinner, doing homework – and rinse wash repeating for five years. I certainly don’t have the attention span or mental endurance to go through with that today!
An average day here consisted of three hours of Bahasa (Language) Indonesia classes, split between the morning and afternoon, and four hours of teaching English as a second language classes. Several times a week, we had guest speakers come to talk with us about everything from finding medical care to cultural taboos to part time volunteer positions at our sites. The nineteen of us will be spread across the archipelago, from Medan, North Sumatra to Denpasar, Bali – Hillary, who will be living in the latter city, is the envy of us all.
This morning, an American Marine helicopter captain came to sit-in on our class. He will spend the next year teaching Indonesian marines in Surabaya, East Java how to speak and how to teach English. The idea behind his mission is to give Indonesian military personnel an added skill set while preparing him for a future role as a regional commander of some sort. He seemed like a great guy, and I’m happy to know that our troops are being managed by people like him. Check out his blog for a different take on life as an expat in Indonesia:
JonB-One.blogspot.com
We were all given our travel arrangements to our sites today. I’ll be flying to Surabaya on Friday morning, where (in theory) I’ll be met by the consulate general and the principal of my school. Only forty more hours in Jakarta!

Puppets and The View

2006-08-28T21:29:00.000-07:00

My last weekend in Jakarta was a good one. I frequented the clubs, made a trip to the Wayang puppet museum, and finally got on top of an office building to snap a sunset panorama of the cityscape. Here are some photos. Enjoy.

Why the U.S. Supports Israel – And Must Continue to Do So

2006-08-28T20:07:00.000-07:00

After running into some opposition here regarding the state of Israel and Jews more broadly, I thought it would be appropriate to outline some causes for the perception of blind American support for the Jewish state, and why those causes are justified. There are four main reasons why America continues to unabashedly support Israel, even when its policies seem contrary to international or American values and law:
1) Both nations are “bastions” of democratic practice and liberal economic success. The U.S. sees Israel as a strategic ally in maintaining security, pushing forward peace, modeling democracy, and showing the world how economic success leads to national unification and individual prosperity in a region where such pillars of modern nations are either forsaken or constructed ineffectively. Since World War II, and even more so today, the U.S. looks to Israel as a dam, one that holds back an uncertain and unwieldy tide.
2) Both nations share similar cultural backgrounds, namely faith in a Judeo-Christian God. Again, in terms of regional neighbors, Israel is a unique position. With the exception of Lebanon – which on paper is a Christian state – the Middle East is overwhelmingly Muslim. While Muslims do share many traits in common with Jews and Christians – including a founding father, Abraham – as of late, the differences have appeared more striking than the similarities. Recent Islamist – I have adopted the habit of calling the religion “Islam” and the ideology “Islamism” – approaches to political independence and economic success, starting with the 1979 Iranian Revolution, have led to the cooption of Islamic and Islamist principles as a front for insurrection at the gates of the political and economic status quo. Israel, America, and the Jews, always scapegoats of the politically marginalized, have once again been bequeathed the dubious role of oppressor. As long as radicals and militants refuse to acknowledge – not accept – Western approaches to sustaining livelihoods, this divide will exist.
3) The U.S. feels a duty and responsibility to protect Israel and Jews after its failure to do so during the Holocaust of World War II. This point is self-evident. The Balfour Declaration that followed World War I set the stage for the transfer of power. The atrocities of World War II cemented an obligation in the minds of Europe and America. It has yet to be seen whether institutional memory will hold the same regard for Israel and her people once the Holocaust is only remembered and taught on the History Channel and in textbooks. Hopefully the U.S. will never forget its obligation to supply and support those that it forsook.
4) AIPAC, the American-Israeli political action committee in D.C., is one of the strongest political influence groups in the country. In Indonesian academic circles, and I imagine in other Muslim nations, AIPAC is often given as the number one rationale for why Israel garners such firm support from the U.S. While it is undeniable that AIPAC and its $70 million play a significant role in persuading policy makers to defend Israel, it is certainly not the only, or even the most important reason. AIPAC is a seventy year-old institution, whereas its Arab and Muslim counterparts are no more than toddlers in the life of American politics and foreign policy. It will be interesting to see what role Arab and Muslim political action committees play as they garner more clout over the coming years and decades.
None of these points are particularly original, but seen together on one page, I hope they contribute to a picture of the current Israeli-American relationship, and why it is – and must remain – so special. I welcome comments.

America the Inspiration?

2006-08-25T21:45:00.000-07:00

Walt Whitman wrote, “The core of democracy is the religious element.” In Indonesia, his words ring especially true. The entire nation is currently wrestling with itself over the future of its seven year-old democracy and how – or in extreme cases, if – it can be reconciled with the majority’s dedication to Islam.
I believe in America the Inspiration. We are a democracy and country that, relatively speaking, works quite well. Over the past two centuries, our government and society have been models for the rest of the globe. Our business and political successes, our commitment to humanitarianism, and our unprecedented ability to create the goods and services that the world craves have made us the contemporary equivalent of Rome. But, confronted with a new millennium and a new global system, we must ask ourselves what kind of America we want the world to see in the twenty-first century. Perhaps more importantly, we must also come to terms with the kind of world that we want to inspire.
In his inaugural address, President John F. Kennedy pledged America’s commitment “to those peoples in the huts and villages across the globe struggling to break the bonds of mass misery… [We promise] our best efforts to help them help themselves, for whatever period is required – not because the Communists may be doing it, not because we seek their votes, but because it is right.”
Foreign aid is no longer just a hand-out, but a mechanism for counteracting terror before it starts. While the ideological right and left long stood on opposite poles on almost every international issue, today, that is no longer true. Especially on humanitarian matters, in which religious conservatives have expressed a special interest, the two extremes overlap. As did Kennedy, both sides recognize not only a moral obligation, but a practical interest in helping those in direst need. It is in all of America’s best interests to provide the scaffolding with which developing nations can construct their own functional societies and economies.
It is unclear, however, when our policy of helping became the propagation and idolization of opulence. The desire to accumulate is our main export today. Look at my last entry (Versailles of the East) for an intimate look at what happens when liberal economic policies succeed. The result is the same the whole world over. The success of the nouveau riche often results in the same staggering displays of wealth and status that I witnessed last weekend. The extremely wealthy should by no means be told what to do with their money. But it struck me that such ostentatious and frankly gratuitous spending only feeds the fires of resentment that the U.S. is trying to quell.
As George Bernard Shaw observed, “The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man.” Osama bin Laden and his acolytes advocate a world view that consists of resentment, envy and guilt. They are focused on old injustices, not future opportunities. Where America stands for the values of “freedom,” “liberty” and economic prosperity, bin Laden and other militant, radical Islamists demand that their followers embrace an “unreasonable” view of mirthless consolation. They do not offer tangible ideas for improving the lives of people here on Earth. Rather, their morality is of the most selfish kind, where all citizens of the world suffer for the glory of a few. Radical Islamists demand that the Global North, and all those who follow our policies, apologize for seeking longer, healthier, and happier lives.
Unfortunately, as of late, the United States’ motives in fighting terror have been widely disparaged as insincere. Many people, and not only in Muslim societies, believe that America’s real aims are to control oil, defeat Muslims, advance the interests of Israel, and dominate the world – just as Al Qaeda has alleged. An advisory panel of the State Department reported that in many countries the United States is viewed as “less a beacon of hope than a dangerous force to be countered,” and that large majorities in Egypt, Morocco, and Saudi Arabia see “George W. Bush as a greater threat to the world order than Osama bin Laden.”
To a certain extent, since September 11, the U.S. has played perfectly into Al Qaeda’s hand. Leonard Weinberg, a terrorism expert and former-Fulbrighter, says that terrorists seek a combination of or all of the following three factors: The sowing of widespread fear, the creation of publicity for the terrorist group, and the provocation of an over-reaction by the authorities under attack. As we have witnessed in both Iraq and Lebanon, fear, publicity, and over-reaction have resulted in disastrous outcomes.
The difficulty in combating terrorism is not that the Bush administration has sought to exercise leadership on moral grounds; virtually every administration has tried to do that. “The problem,” as Madeleine Albright writes, “is that [the administration’s] rhetoric has come close to justifying U.S. policy in explicitly religious terms – and that is like waving a red flag in front of a bull.” The members of Al Qaeda envision themselves fighting a religious battle where good and evil are as real as they are to the American President. As Albright continues, “With strong leadership, the United States can bring the world together in opposition to the murder of innocent people. But we will never unite anyone around the proposition that to disagree with the president of the United States is to pick a quarrel with God.”
If the U.S. is to succeed in counteracting terrorism, we must first reevaluate the merits of propagating a world based on morality-coated greed. A recent column in the Jakarta Post read, “Despite the gloomy situation, I am still confident in saying Indonesia is a great nation. Why? Because we never look back… but continue to prepare ourselves for the incoming disasters and misery! Why should we learn from history when neglecting that history helps us feel there is nothing wrong with us?” After a month here in Indonesia, I would have to agree that Indonesians, by and large, have adopted a tragic life view. I have met countless Indonesians who work incredibly hard in order to provide themselves and their children with the possibility of having more opportunities. But, due in large part to the economic crisis of 1998, they simultaneously acknowledge that there is no sure bet.
To make a rash generalization, Americans are also by nature a perseverant and confident bunch. However, as former Secretary of State Albright said, “Confidence comes from the effort to learn all one can about a problem; self-righteousness comes from a tendency to believe that one has learned all there is to know.” It seems to me like much American public thought these days is trending towards the latter. Our flawed domestic policies prove that we haven’t yet discovered the holy grail of economic and social development.
Then why are we still held in such high regard? I think the answer may lie in the fact that we actually aren’t.

Versailles of the East

2006-08-20T23:36:00.000-07:00

I never would have guessed that Indonesia would be the location of my first Evangelical Christian wedding. I’ve hung out with Evangelicals all over the world, from Thailand to Mississippi, but never in a Versailles-like palace, complete with Italian marble balustrade and Louis XVI original armoires. Nico, the seventy-five year-old Indonesian man that John and I met while trying to find a bookstore, proved to be the stereotypical crazy, gay uncle of the family, but his fondness for bule granted the two of us access to a social scene that until yesterday, I’d only read about.
We met Nico at his house at 8.00AM, and were whisked away in a caravan of SUV’s to a suburb of Jakarta called Sentul. The gated community we entered was home to dozens of Mediterranean style villas, perched thousands of feet above the dry, rolling hills of West Java. The house where the wedding service was held belongs to the bride’s father (it turns out Nico never married, and many of the tales that he spun for John and me in his broken English were totally fabricated, as corroborated by the various family members we befriended throughout the day) who made his money selling “office supplies.” We didn’t prod any further.
The compound must have been forty thousand square feet. The photos above don’t really do it justice. The palace was an Indonesian nouveau riche take on seventeenth century opulence and elite social standing. The father of the bride, a practicing Muslim, had built a prayer house next to the pool in the backyard. A legitimate waterfall fell forty feet from the prayer house’s roof into the gunnite lined pool, surrounded by bronze sphinxes and Sundanese textile weavings.
Beyond the sheer opulence that surrounded me, what struck me most was the obvious juxtaposition of East and West. An enormous, fat white man (he must weigh 350 pounds) delivered a heavy-handed, culturally generic sermon to a crowd of some one hundred people, of whom only John and I understood his rapid, southern inflected diatribe on forgetting the past, starting anew, and building a family based not on a shared history, but on the promise of the predetermined path. The service was accompanied by an Indonesian Christian rock quintet, which burst into mispronounced rounds of variations on the savior and squawky electric guitar solos.
Indonesia is ninety percent Muslim, but it seems that Jakarta is home to a disproportionately large number of Christians, many of whom belong to the country’s upper crust. Religion here is treated like an appendage – along with your home and marital status, your religion is a point of introduction in everyday conversation. Beyond the five culturally accepted religions – Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, Catholicism, and Protestantism – religions are not recognized. Being a Jew puts me in an interesting situation.
On the one hand, as a “cultural ambassador,” I feel obligated to share with people that Jews don’t have horns, they all don’t live in Israel, and they all don’t hate Muslims. On the other, explaining “Yahudi” tests the limits of my abysmal Indonesian skills, and also, I’ve been told, is an excellent way to garner otherwise unsolicited antipathy and hatred. Consequently, in normal conversation and on my security card issued by the government, I say that I’m Kristen (Christian), which is usually enough of an answer for most people.
Those people to whom I reveal my religion are often unfamiliar with the concept of Judaism. I venture “saudara Ibrahim” (brothers of Abraham), and try to steer away from any connection to Israel, which is perceived and talked about here as the “permanent aggressor.” Even my Bahasa Indonesia teacher, Ony, who spent a year on a Fulbright grant studying at Stanford, thought that the word Jew was interchangeable with Israeli.
John and I spent the evening at Hotel Dharmawangsa, one of Jakarta’s swankest spots. While we were only two of roughly one hundred guests at the morning service at Versailles, at the night reception, there must have been fifteen hundred people. We were the only bule there, and were worried about being perceived as bums off the street who had come to cash-in on the deluxe buffet and dessert bar. Our fears were assuaged, however, within a few minutes, when we saw our faces broadcast onto a twenty-foot wide projection screen, giving our muted congratulations via digital video tape to the bride and groom. We had been recorded individually that morning while drinking coffee and making small talk next to the waterfall. And now here we were, two scruffy, random white dudes, eating tiramisu and rubbing shoulders with the country’s hoi palloi. We didn’t need money or friends or supermodel girlfriends. We were bule.