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.)
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| 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.
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| 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
[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....
