Hi!
My cousin wrote me to check in last week or so, which made my day, and she asked me to remind her about my program. Which merited a chuckle, let me tell you. But I thought I could share for Banannie a little about what-in-the-devil I’m doing here, in a bigger picture just-got-my-Masters kind of way, since its possible I’m starting to have a tentative idea myself.
What happened was, I kinda thought I wanted to get back out of the US after grad school so Uncle J sent my resume around to people he knows in development-ish fields and one of them saw it and wanted to do Uncle J a solid so he sold the director of this NGO that he helped start and has channeled funding to over the years on taking me on as a semi-volunteer and he got me a consultant contract from a funding agency he works for so that I could get a visa and some $ to live off of while I took language classes and then served as his gal on the inside at the NGO. So here I am.
Got that?
I’m withholding judgment for a little longer – as my gut opinion tends to changes day to day largely based on how bad the commute was and how annoyed I am by certain par-for-the-course aspects of working for a small nonprofit and/or with large bureaucratic funders and/or in a developing country and/or in Indonesia – but I tentatively think the NGO is pretty kick-ass. It uses micro-savings/loan groups as basic building block for engaging and organizing poor women around bigger-picture social justice goals.
My job description is as yet undefined. Based on evidence thus far, it may stay that way at least until my current contract runs out in August.* As far as I can discern, no one actually cares about the field center English-language program that I was supposedly brought here to implement. This is fine by me: I have faith that somehow, someway, someone will eventually deign to talk details with me about the organizational case study/"lessons learned" project that a lot of people with various sorts of say in the matter have said they want me to do.
Thus far my faith has gone unrewarded. But I’m excited about the project and it’s the one solid medium-term thing I’ve been told at least vaguely to do, so I’m working on that anyway to the extent possible without almost anyone knowing what I’m doing. Like a secret agent. So far I got my secret agent cover from a couple interesting short-term projects, namely a grant proposal that became a beast of a data collection/funding analysis task and a training evaluation I’ll say more about in a sec. Hopefully someone will either allow me to go above the radar (can you say go "overt"?) with the lessons learned research or throw me a few more short term deals soon so I don't blow my cover.
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I wrote a first draft of this letter while spending the week observing a training for potential leaders (in the old school organizing sense of the word) from new provinces where the NGO is starting to work. I’m in charge of the training evaluation, consisting of a pre/post/follow-up survey, hopefully with a few case studies thrown in there when I go to the field.** Of course I got the assignment to proceed with the evaluation 72-ish hours before the training started, I had very little idea of training content or goals at that point, no one really had time at that point to talk me through them, and the whole deal is in Indonesian. All in all the pre/post surveys are not my finest work but, considering the circumstances, I’m giving myself a pass. (Once more to be clear: I was in charge of writing a survey in Indonesian. Under a tight deadline. With little to no solid information to go on.)
The training is being held primarily at a training center out in the Jakarta megapolis. (Technically, not Jakarta, but Jakarta has this habit of eating villages and small towns whole.) The training center is attached to and presumably run by a mosque, smells constantly of stale cigarette smoke and slightly gone-off fish, and I’ve never seen mosquitoes bigger than the ones hanging out in my dorm room bathroom. The food, and the setting, are downright shabby institutional, and the coffee only comes weak and painfully sweet.***
I’m only providing the description for context, to set the scene if you all, as of course none of that really matters. (Especially since I brought bug spray and my own coffee in anticipation of just such issues. Thankyouverymuch.) There is no non-cheesy way to say this but the training has been really inspiring. Most of the participants have no to very limited formal education, at least half live on below $2/day, most have never been on a plane before or been to Jakarta or made friends from other provinces in Indonesia. But here they are in Jakarta, sitting in a classroom from 8 am to 9 pm everyday, learning from and bonding with each other over not only the basics of running a group and bookkeeping for the savings/loan activities, but over critical analysis of gender-based social injustices and how to address them.**** And we’re starting from the basic here: Although most of the women in the room are, in fact, the primary breadwinners, 46% of them are sure or very sure that being a head of a household is against their nature as a woman and 28% don’t think they have the right to own valuables in their name. Day 4, someone still raised her hand and said basically, “I’m sorry, I must have misheard. Women can be leaders?” When the facilitators guided the participants through unpacking the significance of women who work outside the home just as many hours as men still doing all the housework (in some cases, in villages where you carry water from a well to the house on a daily+ basis), it was a profound revelation that still hasn’t quite set in for a lot of people in room.
Warms my over-educated over-analysis-ized heart, besides bringing it back to the basics on a personal level as well, for why and how I want to do the kind of work that I’ve set out to do (i.e., participatory, grassroots, power to the people.) It also reminds me to be incredibly grateful to have been raised in a context where - in addition to many, many other privileges - although god knows things are far from perfect, at least I understood and could articulate from very early on that it wasn’t fair for me to be treated differently as a girl or to have less control over my decisions and actions than did the boys.
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Sitting and observing for 4 days felt creepy to me since I didn’t even really need to be there for the survey, my one official role to do with the training. (The observations were very important for the lessons learned project, but I’m still secret agent-ing that, so….) However, I did have one very important contribution to make. Of the stories the women will get to share about having gone to Jakarta, one that I can only imagine will be high on the list is, they get to say they hung out with a bule. And, they will have ample proof: I am not exaggerating when I say that the Ibus collectively took at least 150 photos of me over a four-day period. “Look at the picture of the bule here on my handphone. Here she is eating (that’s me in the background posing, she didn’t even know I was there!), here she's nodding off in the middle of the afternoon session, here she let me stand next to her - that's me down there near her armpit.”
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Before I share a couple quick highlights from the weekends that bookended hanging with the Ibu-ibu’s I need to acknowledge the ironies and contradictions and hypocrisies inherent to my hanging out all week and being brought back to my central values by a group of women who survive at or around a $2/day level, and spending an easy $100 on fun over the course of 2 days this weekend (in the kind of places built on the backs of and operated at the expense of the women at the training). Westerners outside the West, people from the middle class working in poor communities, people with insanely high levels of education and connections that give them access to education, formal power etc. etc. working with communities that do not have access…etc. etc. – these are daily head trips way too big for me to process via a blog post. But they’re there, they surely are.
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Java Jazz, March 4-6, International Expo Center. Brought to you by a cell phone company that blocked other carriers’ service in the area, a bottled tea company that made finding some water to drink like finding gold, and a bank that made you stand in line to put money on a faux credit card in order to stand in line to buy overpriced food. (As another bule friend said, not so much with the spirit of jazz.) Santana came and apparently brought down the house; I went to see Zap Mama instead and loved them. Earlier in the evening, I had enjoyed an Indonesia pianist-bass duo and an Indonesian jazz ensemble that incorporated Sundanese drumming. A lounge music-ish group that sang in English, Indonesian, and Ambonese was OK. I was just annoyed by the Indonesian pop group we saw, and serious disliked the general ambience. The overzealous sponsorship didn’t help at all, and, for a supposedly non-confrontational culture, so far in my experience Indonesians are exceptionally pushy when you’re in the way of something they want, whether it be bad pizza, the boy band on the stage next door, or the perfect photograph of the African dancing. (Or to bring it back to my day-to-day, the one small space left on the bus you’ve waited 20 minutes for. Sigh.)
Then this past Saturday I experienced, at long last, the reknowned Jakarta club scene. Dragonfly was an “enh” at best. A la Java Jazz, it wasn’t just a club, it was a club “concept” brought to you by such-and-such “productions” – as proclaimed on the TV screens scattered about the place – and had a long list of fancy shmancy drinks that tasted pretty awful, and had a sink in the bathroom that you had to be smarter than to get water from, such was the haute design. And nothing but techno.
That said, clubs usually disappoint me anywhere in the world (less so if they can scrounge up some good hip-hop or Lady Gaga. Maybe next weekend.) And, there were also some dinners and game nights and late lunches and mall wanderings and a beer garden with cheap off-menu liquor scattered across the weekends that I’m not going on and on about. Thanks to these smaller quieter moments, all in all in both weekends were actually pretty good. Or should I say, thanks to the “smaller quieter concepts” brought to you by “new and a few old friends productions.”
Love,
M
*No, I don’t know what happens then. Yes, I really need to start thinking about it.
**The field being anywhere that’s not Jakarta, according to Jakarta NGO/international agency speak.
***There were exceptions to the food rule - a traditional Sundanese sour veg soup with a crunchy peanut-dried anchovies deal to top it with was yum.my…Sundanese is an ethnic group, traditionally centered in West Java outside Jakarta.
****All in Indonesian, which is not quite as much as a stretch as it is for me but for some of them, approaching it. People tend to be at least bilingual here, and for very few is Bahasa Indonesia their home language particularly in rural areas.
