Goodbye Yogya.

Hi again

Today around noon I sauntered into the massive family room/dining room of my homestay to grab my bulé[i]-style breakfast of wheat toast and peanut butter (fried bananas were thrown in for good measure), and found Ibu[ii] watching news on the TV… there was a train crash, and Mt. Bromo is acting up, and people are donating coins to protest President SBY’s complaint about his salary not having been increased in 7 years,[iii] and a music star is being prosecuted under the anti-porn laws for making a personal sex tape.[iv]

Living with Ibu is one of my favorite things about Yogyakarta, and I love her even a little bit more now: She has the video files of the sex tape on her phone, and offered in all seriousness to let me watch them.[v] (Two things: She’s in her 50s. And the antiporn laws make this like having heroin.) This is the same woman who two weeks into my stay, during dinner, told me that she added a private bath to her bedroom many years ago because with 4 sons there was always pee on the floor of the family bathroom.[vi] She’s also the same woman who brought a tattoo artist to the house so that she, her friends, neighbors, and granddaughter could get eyeliner, eyebrow and lipstick tattoos. (All I could think while she pushed me to get my eyeliner done was, What if there’s an earthquake?)

They earn a lot of money from having homestay guests, but she and Bapak take our status as guests very seriously in a way that has nothing to do with our status as paying customers. He can tell you something about every single person who’s signed their “register” over the years, and she’s a mother hen, in the best way possible, and a spitfire. I’m going to miss her in my dank and unfriendly boarding house is the middle of nowhere East Jakarta. (I don’t actually know yet where I’m staying in Jakarta – my uncle’s is way too far of a commute - and it will probably be just fine, but, bear with me while I’m in my whiny I-fear-change stage of saying goodbye to Yogya.)

Cousins. The 12 yr old is in his school uniform

Even accounting for the laundry services, 2 meals a day, private bath, and free wifi, this homestay is extravagantly expensive ($96/week) compared to what I could be paying ($25/week easy, plus food and laundry for at most an additional $20/week). But as always for me, the people made the difference.[vii] There’s Ibu and Pak, their 4 sons, the sons’ wives, and 9 grandchildren. The youngest son and his wife live here with their toddler, as does the 12-year-old son of Ibu’s oldest (to be closer to a good school). The other 3 sons, daughters-in-law, and grandchildren come for holidays and on weekends, which makes the house pleasantly rambunctious. (Ibu says, and this is a quote, I love having grandchildren but when they’re all here, my head hurts.) There are also 3 “pembantu” – literally, person who helps, aka servants – who are lovely and lively as well, including a nanny for the toddler.

Nyanyi nyanyi nyanyi

Said toddler (the one who lives here with his parents) is 17 months old and solidly one of the cutest children I’ve ever hung out with.[viii]  He’s skinny and has huge inquisitive eyes, is usually in motion (berlari-lari, running around, that’s an Indonesian word that just works) and is usually smiling. His favorite words are “Apa” and “buah” (“what?” and “fruit”), and now “nyanyi” (“sing”), particulary when he’s running around with the karaoke mic, and he’s starting to say more and more every day in a mix of Indonesian and Javanese. He’s very curious and unafraid of strangers, which is a big asset considering (or possibly a product of the fact) that his house is a moving feast of foreigners who speak about as much Indonesian as he does. 

His father is Ibu and Bapak’s youngest son, and is also very friendly especially now that I can more or less carry a conversation. (Seriously, the patience of this household has to qualify them for sainthood – they’re Catholic so it could work.) I love seeing how hands-on he is with his son, and how affectionate and interactive in general the family is with all of the grandchildren. I don’t want to draw more general conclusions, as I’m not sure how else sons of Ibu could possibly have turned out, but actually I have heard that it’s a cultural thing, that it’s a norm for Indonesian men to be affectionate and hands-on with children. Solidly in the plus column for Indonesia if I was making a list… [ix]

The house itself is enormous, especially with the addition in back of extra rented rooms. Ten bedrooms, a massive common area and additional common area in back for the homestay guests, 15 foot ceilings, and - as seems to be the norm for middle class people and above - an inner courtyard area with plants, bird cages and a goldfish pond with a waterfall. (Indonesian cities mostly lack green space outside but I guess people make up for it with indoor greenery.) 

My life here otherwise has mostly been spent at the language center about a 12-minute walk away, taking 2-5.5 hours of language classes a day Monday – Sunday. I’m told I’ve learned all but the most arcane of Indonesian grammar (and, outside the school, that no one ever uses most of the less arcane constructions either anyway. Sigh.) The classes were one-on-one, which was intense, but let me go at my own pace and have time-out conversations with the teachers when my brain hurt or my frustration hit a critical point. I liked my teachers, in large part because they indulged my need for tangents and because they were patient as all get out (all of them were Christian, so the sainthood thing works here too). It was also nice to have built-in cultural translators. And my fellow students - from Japan, Germany, Australia, US, Netherlands among other places - tended to be here doing pretty cool stuff, so it was nice to meet them too.

I have failed while in Yogya to do anything particularly big or adventurous or even really to sightsee (although Ibu believes that I can and should fit in multiple World Heritage sites and a traditional dance performance into the next 48 hours). I’m feeling a teensy bit regretful about that, although while I was here I rarely felt the antsy boredom that means I need get out and find myself an adventure. ... So what did I do, besides homestay-classes-gym/pool? … I went to the Affandi Museum and to an art show at the Cemeti Art House. (My favorite pieces at Cemeti were the iron poem spilling from the wall to the floor that had been translated from Dutch to Indonesian, back to Dutch and then "re-interpreted" by the accidents of the Indonesian-speaking welder, and the photoshopped image of Batman at the Yalta Conference.) I spent a Sunday with a dear friend of my extended family, on a tour of the old sultan’s water palace and in the old KotaGede section of Yogya at her parent’s, her grandmother’s and her uncle’s houses. I attended a party hosted by old friends of my uncle. I went to Mirota Batik a few times, on the downtown shopping/market craziness of Malioboro Street, to feel overwhelmed by the narrow aisles and sheer volume of the selection, and to decompress while drinking gingered coffer in the breezy refuge of the open-wall restaurant upstairs. I went up to Merapi twice. I treated myself to non-rice based meals every once in awhile in the classier tourist neighborhood in South Yogya, and to pizza and blueberry cheesecake at the pizza place in my 'hood, and went out otherwise to a few other places that actually served alcohol (shocking, I know). I baked M&M cookies in a friend’s toaster oven, confirming in the process that palm sugar works as a substitute for brown sugar.

So I’m going to say maybe that’s not so bad for 7 weeks, considering that those things were done alongside learning just about the entirety of Indonesian grammar…. Tomorrow, a cooking class and carting a massive pile of rupiah over to pay the language center.[x] To Jakarta on Tuesday, then a mini-beach holiday, then I start at the office on Monday.

xo

M

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[i] White person – think gringo or tubaab.

[ii] Ibu literally means mother, but also serves as a title or name-replacement for any woman of a certain age. I call the wife/mother of the homestay family “Ibu” and call the lady in the market “Ibu” and call the cook at my uncle’s house “Ibu” …. etc. Bapak or Pak serves the same purpose for men, Mba and Mas do for younger women and men.

[iii] The President makes $790,000 a year plus a huge household allowance in a country where the per capital gross national income is $2,010, according to 2008 World Bank data.

[iv] Update: He was sentenced to 3.5 years in prison. Disturbing.

[v] I graciously declined so have no juicy details to share.

[vi] Ibu and Pak have separate bedrooms, which I understand is typical.

[vii] As did the food. Good shit. See "16 days in Yogya."

[viii] Of course my youngest cousins, the neighbors I nannied, and my friend's son on the UWS – you know who you are – still win.

[ix] Which apparently I am as I just re-read "My first week" and mentioned a list there too? So, fine, I'll add this to it: Wall mounted vacillating fans. Also under the plus column. Awesome idea that I have seen nowhere else.

[x] I owe them just over $2000, including homestay, and the biggest bill you get out of ATMs is worth around $10....

Mount Merapi, after the 2010 eruptions.

Hi there,

Today I went up to Mt. Merapi. As my friend’s motorbike ascended up the mountain, the smell of woodsmoke got stronger and stronger. I noted it as odd but didn’t give it much thought - I was just the passenger on a friend’s motor, so I could take in the wild green canopy and the roadside houses and warungs (food stands). Then apruptly the canopy disappeared, and we ascended instead through open fields dotted with charred tree trunks. There was still plenty of green lower towards the ground – things grow fast in the tropics – but the tall trees were ruined. I imagine the smell of smoke has lingered there since the “hot clouds” erupting from Merapi passed by in October and November. 

My friend on the motorbike is from Germany, learning Indonesian at the same center as me, and volunteers with a Yogya-based NGO. The NGO is working on a participatory documentation project, in which children from villages who had to evacuate during the eruptions learn to conduct and document interviews with other villagers about their experience during and since the eruptions. That way, the childrena are engaged and learning skills, the experiences of people in and following the disaster are documented, and people get an opportunity to speak out loud about what they went and are going through.

Although the atmosphere during the taping was lively and cheerful, when asked, how did you feel during the disaster, the people interviewed said, trauma. ... One woman spoke to my friend and I about how her grandmother was burned by the hot cloud, and spent 2 days in the hospital in Yogya before dying. The village’s economy rests on cattle, and all the cattle died. - Someone said, even if you were rich before the eruption, you have become poor. - Many people’s homes were totally destroyed, but the government won’t give cows to people who don’t have somewhere to put them – but the same government’s timeline on providing housing recontruction assistance is impenatrably mysterious. It was difficult for children to attend the distant junior high school even before the eruptions, which interrupted what education they were getting, and took away the funds to continue.

And yet people want to stay in the village – it’s home, and they believe Merapi gives as much as it takes away. Unfortunately, while many people in the village returned in early December, many people are still in camps (whether official or  - more likely – unofficial) or with relatives. The aid for those people is coming from the community only, as the government will only provide food assistance to those registered in the official camps. According to the NGO director – and anecdotal evidence everywhere else – the only effective emergency response is coming from the grassroots, from individual donations and work, and from the thriving NGO sector. My strong impression is that people don’t expect the slightest help from the government  - so despite the massive wrong of that fact, they barely bother demanding what should be coming, and get on with doing what needs doing.

Of course kindhearted individuals only have so much to spare...and the disaster is still ongoing. There are still massive floods of sand and stones that come down off the mountain once a week or so, washing away bridges, houses, and filling the houses left standing with wet sand. You can’t take any route up to the mountain without passing a few rivers, and so you can’t help but see areas flattened by the lahar dingin (or so-called “cold lava”).

On our way back down the mountain we took a different route than on the way up. This time we passed through an wide area that had been flooded - you could see the flood lines on homes; the landscape was totally sand. As we drove through, we rounded a curve and noticed a line of steam or smoke in the direction our LSM friends were leading us. It seems that the “cold lava” isn’t really cold; the sand and material is still warm enough to cause the water passing over it to steam. The part we forded was shallow, and narrow, and our tires (and our feet) survived just fine.

We finished the trip back to Yogya with a stop at a sate shack. A few tables covered with oilcloth, some bamboo “couches” and off to the side, the sate man sitting on a stool in front of a oilpan and gas burner, raw meat hanging over his head on hooks.  The sate meat itself wasn’t worth writing home for, but that sauce was truly tasty: a little sweet, a little smokey, a little acidic and just the right amount of spicy, along the lines of really good BBQ sauce, except with a palm sugar and sweet soy base. And of course the company is the salt to any meal; the NGO guys are kind souls and so is my friend of the motorbike, and so the meal was a lovely end to an intense day. Waving goodbye from the back of the motorbike and realizing I wouldn’t have another real chance to visit the Merapi villages made my imminent goodbye to Yogya feel real, and bittersweet. I wrap up language classes on Monday, and back head to Jakarta on Tuesday. 

More later,
M

Someone else's blog

Hi!

Early this morning, one of my American Fulbrighter friends packed up her Bahasa Indonesia books and left our homestay in Yogya for West Kalimantan to start her dissertation research on proboscis monkeys. (See her map – its the best one of Indonesia I've found online, not sure how she did that.) I’ve only known Katie since mid-December, though she and I share a similar history and outlook on this whole “living far away from our roots” thing, and I firmly consider her to be an important addition to my crew of happy accident friends (which, incidentally, most of my closest friends are). C knows what I mean… the kind you are thrown together with and would only ever get the chance to get to know well under very accidental circumstances, like, in Katie’s case, just happening to live with the same family in Yogyakarta, Indonesia for 5 weeks while studying a language most Americans have never heard of and trying at the same time to do “real work” to prepare ourselves for our “real lives” after exiting the language school bubble. 

I finally read her blog all the way through and am kind of tempted just to give this blog up and tell you to read Katie’s instead. She’s hilarious and right on, and also she takes pictures, whereas I’ve taken 2 since I’ve been here. However, now that Katie’s really headed to the jungle, our experiences might diverge a teensy bit. In terms of a work/professional path, she’s, and I quote, “not so into the people thing.” Not totally true, actually - I got to feel smart and give her a professional perspective on the social program evaluation she wants to incorporate into her research - but I’m solidly 100% into the people thing and know not a thing about monkeys, tropical plant species or birds, or more generally the incredible biodiversity of the Malay archipelago other than (1) nature is pretty cool, except that I'd rather stay far away from crocodiles and sharks, (2) it's bad to cut down the forests and to pollute and stuff like that and (3) whatever she and my other scientifically-minded friends tell me. 

Even more crucially, she’s going to be living in a village only reachable by bush plane or 12 hour boat rides, and needed to bring enough equipment for her work that we figured out that if the plane crashed into the jungle, she could survive for months on her own with whatever she packed, including her trusty machete, 90 Clif bars and 3 pairs of boots. My luggage, on the other hard, included 4 pairs of ballets flats, a pair of high heels, 2 slinky going-out dresses, 2 bikinis, and a few granola bars from the Co-op  - I did bring a Swiss army knife and a headlamp but am not fooling anyone with those – and in little over a week I’m heading back to start work in Jakarta with its 15 million people, constant traffic jams, dedicated mall culture, etc. etc.

So, I suppose I should keep this thing up, and just be inspired by Katie to take more pictures and to share more about my daily life (who wants to know my internal head trips anyway? I know a lot of you find them amusing but I’m sure I’ll email you with them regardless, or save them for Skype. Which, by the way, we should start doing more of. The 10-13 hour time difference is annoying but with some online time zone converter tools  - check - and superior planning abilities – check, check - totally manageable.)

I meant to write one today about my experiences etc., but now that I’ve plugged Katie’s it’s 11:30 a.m. and I haven’t grabbed my homestay breakfast yet… so I should go find food and then do some of my aforementioned “real work” first. Also probably study some Indonesian affixes. Just you wait until I get to telling you about those.

But, Mama, I promise: more soon.

Love,

M

Selamat tahun baru 2011.

1/1/11!

Happy New Year, everyone!

I got a hotel room here in Yogya for New Year’s Eve with two American friends who lived at the homestay with me. I was hoping for a pool, a bar and someplace with character - all of which this place promised at a cool $33 each for the deluxe room and extra bed, including breakfast and New Year’s Gala Dinner. I really enjoyed our small veranda and the green lawns and bushes that separated the bungalows, not to mention the garden in our bathroom (no joke); I hadn’t realized quite how much I’ve been craving green space. Unfortunately, while the pool was pretty nice, the bar was empty both of staff and of drink of any kind. As for the character.… well, possibly the buildings had some in 1970.

New Year’s Gala Dinner was held in a harshly bright pavilion with table after table of teenagers who had come in a large tour bus earlier that evening. We arrived to the pavilion as most of them were digging into their meals, promptly convinced ourselves the real dinner was somewhere else, went looking but found nothing but the want-to-be bar, and returned, resigned, to the pavilion. At this point multiple very officious and magenta-clad staff members ushered us through a buffet station of greasy fried rice, fried noodles, tough beef and poorly seasoned chicken sate. They made sure to seat us at the table right up front, where the MC could more easily poke fun at us and whereby the entire room had a polite excuse to stare. The singer-dancers stood right next to our table as they rounded up teenagers and attempted to force them to dance in front of all of their friends.

At risk of pointing out the obvious, let me make clear that we were the only people in the space who weren’t Indonesian. Admittedly, the few adults besides us not chaperoning the teen group appeared just as discomfited by the whole scenario, but they had us to distract them, and surely they had arrived with a clearer idea of what a “New Year’s Gala Dinner” implied. (Namely, bright lights, terrible food, a gratingly obnoxious MC and off-key singing by women in too-small high heels and tacky hair extensions, with some public humiliation and door prizes thrown in to really kick off the New Year right.) Let me also make clear that singers aside, we were pretty close to being the only women there not wearing jilbabs; and that there was absolutely no hope for alcohol of any kind at the dinner.

After a polite sojourn we escaped back to our bungalow, and passed the rest of the evening on our veranda finding humor in topics ranging from “Stuff White People Like” to avian predation of early hominids to Indonesian usage of the third person in references to self, and watching the fireworks our bungalow neighbors were shooting off with much smoke and potential for amputated fingers. We rang 2011 in with beer smuggled from the gas station; beer is bubbly, right? Close enough.

***

Funnily enough the shattered expectations for New Year’s Eve fit in well with my current state of cultural adjustment. I’m in a secure and pampered bubble right now, back and forth between language classes and a homestay providing two meals a day, hot water and AC if I want it, and with English-speaking bule (read: gringo, or toubab) friends readily available for advice and escapism and partnering-in-crime. But those moments when the real world intercedes and I must slow down, change my approach, let go of any expectations or assumptions, and/or accept that I have no idea what is going on are coming more frequently as I both become more antsy to get out of the bubble and am forced out of it by real world responsibilities.

2010 was a big year – I finished my Masters, I left the city where I’d lived for three years, I helped my sister with an even bigger transition, I found a job, I came here. Right now I’m dreaming of much, much smaller things out of 2011: understanding my total at the supermarket without needing a visual; finding someplace to enjoy a glass of wine; remembering to ask permission to sit down in at the station of a travel agent who has never seen me before; walking down the main road without losing my nerve with the motorbikes; giving directions to the taxi driver that make any sort of sense.

xo

M

PS – I figured out a mailing address and that some friends have actually received letters and non-valuable packages. Send me an email if you’re tempted.