Aceh journal.

Hi there

I’ve been back in Jakarta for over a week though its really hard to say how long it “feels” like I’ve been back. Getting away for awhile from a city like this is always a good thing, and I had a particularly full and enlightening time in Aceh, yet sitting here now in the embassy people’s apartment laughing at their crazy cat, looking out over Jakarta from the 14th floor, it’s like the trip didn’t really happen. Just like when I was there, I couldn’t “feel” my life, such as it is, back in Jakarta. Paradoxically, considering my thoroughly homebody temperament, I’m almost constantly in motion – so I’ve experienced these dislocations plenty of times in the past. 

Anyway, that is far too much deep thinking for a Sunday morning. Let’s just see what I can come up with to share with you…

Purpose and activities: I spent two days observing “monitoring” meetings with grassroots groups and 3 days at a training for adult functional literacy instructors, all in the easy company of 2 national-level staff members of the organization I’m working with. After the training, I headed to a different district to meet up with the provincial coordinator for my organization and the UN-funded researcher she was hosting, spending the remaining 6 or so days involved as part of the UN project team, interviewing government officials and community leaders, various community groups, the community activists/volunteers that my organization trains and supports, and the field staff. My purpose for the whole trip was collecting data for the lessons learned project, as well as to support the research for the UN project.

Oh and also to be interviewed on community radio and record the station id/tagline for one of radio stations run by members of the organization I’m working with. 9 pm and I’d just woken up from sleeping in the car and had no idea what was planned for me….surprise!

Getting there and away: Taxi ride to Jkt airport. ($18.) Jet plane to Banda Aceh. Car and driver (yes he waited at arrivals with a sign with my name on it) during day 1 stops and to the training center in Aceh Jaya. This leg of the journey included 2 separate ferry rides on wooden rafts that would have made Huck Finn proud but which made me escape-plan in my head. Same driver to Abdya after the training to meet with the research team. (Free to me plus $8/day in tips.) Car and driver around Abdya and Meulaboh. 12-seater plane to Medan. (I was in the front row and thus clearly heard an exchange between the pilots and the luggage crew clarifying whether or not there were guns on the plane. The luggage crew assured him there weren’t, not very convincingly if you ask me. … Um. The principle mystery here is, what made the pilot ask in the first place?) Jet to Jakarta, taxi home.

 

The scenery: Aceh is stunning. Pristine beaches, lots and lots of green – whether forest or rice paddies - and rivers. Unfortunately the forest is being slashed-and-burned, I saw some areas on my drive between districts that were in the process of being turned into palm plantations – burned stumps and lingering smoke with some green vegetation hanging on among it all, it was hauntingly beautiful if you didn’t know what you were looking at. Mostly what I saw though, had already been turned into rice fields.

Flooding is also a problem; we drove through a town on the way to flight out of Aceh that was underwater just to the depth that I thought we might float away. The buildings are mostly built elevated, but I saw the wake of our car push water into a shop as we passed  - so that only goes so far. I have no doubt my environmentally minded friends would draw a connection between the burning down of the forests and the flooding.

In the “daerah tsunami,” tsunami-affected areas…. unless you knew what to look for, you wouldn’t know that's where you were by looking around. But all the houses are “rumah bantuan” – aid houses – and local people can tell which charity built which house by which color it is painted. And then of course there’s the ship washed 2 miles inland, sitting there still, among a neighborhood of rumah bantuan. And there’s no mangroves left where there should be. And the roads are either dirt tracks or brand spanking new shiny black asphalt. 

The scene: I know the area to be socially conservative, and Sharia law is in place and enforced besides giving weight to community pressures for conformity to a patriarchal view of good behavior. There was a story and pictures in the Aceh paper while we were there about four people being whipped as punishment by the Sharia court for being found alone in the company of someone unrelated of the opposite sex, and we heard stories about community and police harassment when people did something perceived as immoral, and its still considered inappropriate for women to attend meetings at night. There’s no alcohol anywhere to be found (maybe in hotels in Banda Aceh, the capital – or that’s the rumor – but the little remote village and the outpost district capital where I spent my time: none, nary a Bintang beer or Smirnoff Ice in sight.) And women really do all wear headscarves, by legal mandate if they wouldn't be personal or familial choice anyway, and there are many more young girls wearing them in Aceh than anyplace else I’ve seen in Indo, and for the first time I saw an Indonesian woman cover her face, too, not just her hair and neck.

The men “hang out” more than I’ve seen anywhere else in Indo. Not that I’ve been many places but my Jakarta colleagues agreed. Going to the coffee shops (the Aceh coffee is deservedly renowned) is considered a social obligation for men [the concurrent obligation for women is to be at home making them meals and cleaning up after them, of course] and the coffee shops are filled with plastic beach chairs with a reclining back. It’s a come-and-stay-awhile kind of set up.

I in no way mean to discount those very real sociopolitical factors operating in the lives of Aceh people when I say that as an obviously foreign woman, Aceh was much more welcoming than many other places I’ve been that are not majority Muslim, or that are but that have no leanings towards implementing Sharia.  I do want to point it out, though, for any readers that might make assumptions based on the religious make-up and fundamentalist leanings of the Aceh political elite. I never wore a veil and people didn’t blink an eye (above and beyond the usual, that is, considering my blonde-hair-blue-eyed-5 foot 9-ness.) Day to day people were friendly and very welcoming; I didn’t feel that there was suspicion or mistrust of outsiders at least as far as surface level interactions went, and any intrusive male attention was limited to staring. Men and women shook hands, stood close to each other, and spoke freely. For my scratch at the surface, Aceh was chill.

Eats: Aceh food is good. Other than the bread and peanut butter I chose over the hotel rice breakfast during the second part of the trip, and a couple meals of famous and delicious Aceh noodles, and one exceptionally good omelette, it was mostly white rice - but there were fish, shrimp, and squid in various delicious preparations to go with, and spicy sour sauces, and sour pickled eggs, perfect eggplant, green beans, tempe with peanuts, and one memorable fish grill-out the last night of the literacy training that was just fish and an insanely good dipping sauces made with sweet soy, vinegar, hot peppers, shallots, garlic, onion, and tomatoes.

Coincidentally or not, the secret ingredient in Aceh coffee shop coffee and curry sauces is “ganja” – which means exactly what you think it does.

Front of the house

Places to stay: The fish cook out was organized by the same woman who was putting myself and other staff members up in her beach villa, as we only half-jokingly called it. It was exactly like your typical WI lake cabin  - except with a view of the sea, a prayer room being built out back, and mosquito nets over the beds. Hammock hung up in the back room, big long front verandah. Delicious.

View from the back

We broke every day in time for everyone involved with the training to wander to the beach to watch the extravagantly gorgeous sunsets. 

    

 

 Really, in no way did I rough it any point in my stay - first there was the beach villa …. then, the hotel in the district capital I moved to after the training was done. While I thoroughly expected a dirty, airless pit, it had AC, back porches looking out over the rice paddies, and clean bathrooms (!!) with hot water (!!).  

Just the way things are: The only opportunity for discomfort really was all of the sitting on the floor. People don’t “do” chairs here for community-type meetings. I’m getting used to it but I don’t think I’ll ever like it. I haven’t sat on the floor this much since kindergarten and I look like a praying mantis when I try to fold myself up small.

Trying to keep a straight face through some truly epic and memorable burps is possibly another minor hardship – burping sessions, really, no one just burps once, an average session is a good 3-4 minutes long of deep, wet belches. Some of the best were from the head of the Women’s Empowerment bureau in her office during an interview, and by a community activist in the middle of telling a story about confronting government bureaucracy –I mean, whatever, its totally socially acceptable and unnoticed here. Thing is, I’m not from here, those were some seriously noticeable burbs, and I had an English girl 2 butts on the floor over from me trying just as hard not to laugh.

**

Getting deep again, all in all, I was inspired by the women who are doing the work of the organization, both the field staff and their entirely humble quietly fierce approach to their work, and to the women who have developed into activists and community volunteers and are shaking things up in an equally quiet and humble and powerful way. I was awed by what some of the women have lived through and faced. A tsunami the size of some very tall palm trees crashing over their village, washing away their entire family; getting kidnapped and held at gunpoint by rebels who thought they might be government spies when they came to a new village to hold an organizing event; government leaders and entire communities that had no doubt that a child being raped by her grandfather or a young woman with epilepsy being starved and beatan by her parerts were entirely private, domestic affairs – and still carried on with their work.I'm not writing this up for an annual report, this really is true unvarnished reality.

It’s hard to know, in the face of the work they are doing, what I have to offer, but the trip also gave me some ideas and, in getting me out of Jakarta and giving me an opportunity to see the work on the ground and to bounce ideas off the UN researcher, gave me some idea of where to go from here – where I want to go and where I can actually contribute in a way that’s meaningful in some small way. They’re still ideas, half-formed in the back of my mind, but  - I don’t want to jinx anything by actually getting my hopes up but - I’m going to have some conversations soon that might lead to an actual plan, hopefully one that extends at least a year in the future and involves some amount of an actual income. I’ll keep you posted.

Love,

M

Status update.

Hi there,


How am I doing?, a few people have written to ask. … When I first wrote a draft of  this, a little cracked out on senseless TV and corn syrup. Mom sent Mike & Ike’s as per my request (also the Oscar edition of People and US Weekly) and Star World Asia plays daily repeats of American Idol and other such classics as Australian Jr Master Chef, British Next Top Model, and Castle. At the very moment, sitting at the Jakarta airport taking advatnage of a free wifi hotspot. (?!??!) More about the trip later...

I’m cat sitting for awhile so I have an “embassy people” apartment to myself. (People are checking in on the cat while I'm gone, but I'll head back there after the trip.) Read: a pool, in-house masseuse, housekeeping service, a gym with free personal trainers, with a view. I  have pictures but I'll have to add them later; my USB drive is somewhere mixed up in my carry-on....[25 April: Adding photos! ] So anyway I worked from home a little this week. Meaning that I’ve devoted quality time to wandering around the apartment in my underwear eating Mike and Ike’s and torturing the cat with the laser pointer.

I’m crazy about the cat. He is gorgeous and quirky and smart as shit, but not snotty about it. Actually he’s pretty affectionate and responds appropriately to a stern “no”, a little puppy-like in that regard. He was a street cat – have I mentioned the cats before? There are a lot of them. I’m more used to goats, dogs, and/or chickens but here: cats. Very, very skinny cats. This cat has put some meat on his bones but kept the personality.


It’s good that I’m enjoying hanging with him because I’m still lonely a lot. Nothing dire; just saying is all. I’m being pretty good at not taking it personally but my social life is skimpy at best. And really, a lot of it is that I miss my people at home. Like Katie said, the main problem with here is that it’s really far away from there.

But I’m in a moderately solid groove at work and I’ve been rocking out Jakarta public transport and geography – For one, I figured out my route from the embassy people apartment to my office all on my own. (I know it sounds basic but this is a BIG accomplishment, trust me. Look at a Jakarta map sometime, and then up the ante with the understanding that a good 30-40% of it is wrong or wishful thinking or not called that in real life, and that public transport routes mostly aren't mapped for the public.)

Also, I bought a motorcycle helmet. No more searching around for the one guy at the ojek post with the functional helmet; moreover, any potential lice, dandruff, ring worm, sweat in the helmet I wear is now mine alone. The helmet dealer and the ojek driver I drafted into bringing me to make the purchase both agree that “Miss” looks very beautiful in her “helm.” … Looks are the main thing, really.

Work is shaping up to be interesting on many levels. I wouldn’t go so far as to say I have a job description…but, why tie oneself down? I’ve done some interesting projects related to fundraising and monitoring & evaluation/organizational learning, a bit of translation and English teaching, and the big news is that all this is (yes, in Indonesian but also) embedded in my aforementioned secret agent lessons learned project, which has finally been allowed into civilian life….

The only differences in how I roll now that the secret’s out are, one, I feel less creepy sitting in on things and thus am sitting in on any and everything (structured observations, baby, occasionally of the participant observer type) and two, I feel empowered to ask for actual interviews with people (although have yet to do much of that... everyone's so busy, I'm more comfortable as a fly on the wall), and three, I actually feel like I should start trying to produce something - so I’m scrambling to write up some “initial findings,” plus trying create a note taking system that keeps me from wanting to cry when I go back and try to draw any conclusions from the data, winnowing through the massive list of questions I want to ask people (Is this actually key information, or is it just me being nosy, or is it just me being baffled by something that makes perfect sense to an Indonesian person…?), that sort of thing. And, four, I’m going to the field.

The field! As I think I mentioned, in our very Jakarta-centric way of speaking, that means anything but here. Its kind of messed up and I would stop using it but such is the lingo in the NGO and in the expat and aid worlds. …

But anyhoo, semantics aside, I’m waiting on my flight to Aceh right now and will be there for 11 days. As in post-tsunami sharia-law Aceh. I’m packing a couple head scarves and my gratitude for being slowly weaned off alcohol in Jakarta and Yogya. My quick Lonely Planet perusal makes me want to go back already with time to wander, but this time, I’ll be observing a training and a couple site visits and then joining with a researcher on a UN Women project who’s preparing a case study on the NGO’s work on government accountability in Aceh.

And, friends, I have a travel budget. Not saying it totally fits yet, though I sure did get used to having servants quickly enough - I am even worse about doing dishes now than what certain former roommates and family members remember - so I imagine soon enough I’ll be perfectly at ease with someone else booking my flights and my car & driver.

Yes, you heard right, car & driver. Public transport isn't always realistic (and the admin assistant looked at me like I was crazy when I suggested I might take it. As for the driver...would you want me driving here? Um, no. Just so we’re clear though, I will be sleeping on the floor of community learning centers and peeing in public bathrooms for most of the 11 days (and eating a whole lot of white rice, sigh). I could stay in a hotel in a bigger town nearby and keep the car around for me to come back and forth – it would get paid for – but then what’s the point? You miss the good stuff when you only show up for the regularly scheduled event.

Upon return to Jkt my embassy cat-sitting awaits, then I have a few more trips “approved in the system,” to NTT, South Sumatera, and North Maluku.

So, how am I doing? Doing OK. Finding my way slowly slowly. Missing home and also feeling like I have some things to do here yet. Anxious like I always am before any big trip, but excited to get to get on a paid-for plane and see what's going on out there.

More later.

Love you,

M