Mount Kawi

Last week, we took a late night trip to a shrine on Mount Kawi. Though located in mainly Muslim Indonesia, this site attracts Chinese pilgrims hoping to attract wealth. A bizarre cultural mash-up resulted. 

We arrived at about 9 pm and climbed the mountain path, which was lined with houses and shops. It was chaos, and the burning incense didn't help our addled brains. 

We passed hundreds of people waiting to pray at the grave site. We were invited into the altar space and asked to kneel at the grave, ahead of the poor people who waited in a separate room for hours. We knelt by the altar filled with incense and flower petals for a moment, whispering to each other in the confusion. Even though we didn't know who this man was or what he did, we were given special treatment. It felt wrong.

While there, we saw a wayang kulit, a traditional Indonesian shadow puppet show, accompanied by female choir and gamelan. We only stayed for two hours of the show, which usually lasts about seven. Because we didn't understand the story, paying attention was difficult, but at the halfway mark, a comedian came onstage and invited several CLS girls onto the stage. It was awkward.

We arrived home at about 2 am. Here's us the next morning:

Child Labor

On Saturday, we paid a visit to an Indonesian snack factory. Whatever I expected, I was not prepared for this:

These children work nine hours a day twisting these strings of dough into snacks and frying them. I tried my hand at it, but a girl about twelve years old got impatient with my unpracticed fingers.

These children don't go to school. In their own words, they work to help their families. They don't seem unhappy or particularly badly treated, though the open fires in the room burned our lungs and eyes. The youngest among them looked at most eight years old.

After use, the frying oil sat in these uncovered pans on the floor to cool.

These two youngsters helped flatten the dough. They moved the pieces from one table, where they were cut into strips with a butcher's knife, to the table where they were rolled into twists.

In front of the final product:

Conditions in this factory weren't awful, though it lacked ventilation and the room filled quickly with cigarette smoke and heat from burning oil. The children smiled at us pleasantly, and none of the workers acted like we were seeing a big secret. 

Many economists theorize periods of cruel industrialization are necessary steps for a modernizing economy. What do you think? Is child labor ever justified? If so, when, and why?

An ode to rice

Rice

When I researched Indonesian food pre-trip, it looked like Indian food. I love Indian food. Tandoori Oven, in Logan, Utah, is possibly my favorite restaurant of all time.

This is no Indian food. Nor is it Tai food.

Alumni also warned me about the amount of rice I'd eat. I shrugged that off. I love rice. I eat rice all the time. There was no way I could get tired of rice that quickly.

In Indonesia, you eat rice with every meal. EVERY meal. Breakfast is leftover dinner with rice. Every meal is rice, tofu, and some kind of boiled vegetable. Sometimes you get meat, sometimes you get an added sauce, but the rice remains. ALWAYS.

Tonight, fed up with rice, I went to McDonalds with my tutors and another student, but I found no refuge there. As a side to your Big Mac, you can have french fries, or you can have rice.

I chose an ice cream cone instead.

Indonesians eat with spoons in their right hands and forks in their left hands. DO NOT touch the fork to your mouth. Use the fork for pushing food onto the spoon, then eat out of the spoon only. This was the first thing my host family taught me. It's a big deal. I don't know why.

For the first week or so, I loved the food. I handled the various tofu concoctions with finesse. Many Indonesian dishes are delicious. I've developed a special liking for rotiboy, bread buns filled with butter and covered in brown sugar.

Other dishes are not as good. For example, my quest for ice cream yesterday brought me to the mall. The food court, hilariously named "Spicy Kitchen," boasts a few ice cream stands. I purchased an ice cream sandwich, which turned out to be a solid block of grainy ice cream on a vaguely fruit-flavored piece of bread. An actual slice of bread.

Yesterday morning, I had my first "I can't eat this" moment. My Ibu served me white rice in a very spicy peanut sauce called pecel with bright yellow tofu chunks and boiled spinach. For breakfast. It was spicy, squishy, and stringy. I ate as much as I could, desperately covering my gag reflex. When my Ibu left the room, after a moment of soul-searching, I scraped the rest into a napkin and threw it away. I didn't want to make myself sick.

As it is, I'm not expecting many solid bowel movements for a while.

Friday Prayer

Last Friday, some CLS students went to the local mosque for Friday prayer. My friend Osamah is Muslim, and a few of us went with him to observe. I took pictures!

Muslims remove their shoes before entering the mosque, or masjid in Indonesian.

They wash their faces, ears, hands, heads, and feet.

These boys did not want to stay still!

This little fellow tried to talk to us in English. He was too cute!

A Simple Life

This is Pak Laskar. He works at a tea plantation called Wonosari. Each day, he picks kilo after kilo of tea leaves in the sultry Indonesia heat. He doesn't have time for any hobbies. He has seven children. He lives in the same place he was born. He appears older than his age because of years of hard labor.

He calls his life simple, and he is happy.

Coming here has made me appreciate how much of my life is determined by the luck of the draw. What separates me from the man covered in black boils begging on the median? We both have thoughts, feelings, problems, relationships, but even as a poor college student I have wealth beyond his imagination and a promising future. I could have been born in a situation like his. More people are than are born into mine.

For the rest of my life, I must justify my actions to people like him, and like Pak Laskar.


Here's another example. We call one of the tutors here IndoJesus because of his resemblance to Jesus in appearance (long hair, scraggly beard) and attitude. I'll upload a picture as soon as I can politely take one :) He's inseparable from his friends. At Wanosari, they sang and played guitar until long after I'd gone to sleep. The next morning, the met us a 6 to tour the tea factory with smiles and more music. They don't seem to know or care about the possessions they lack. They have no American pretentiousness or self-consciousness.

I don't think I've ever seen a culture so musical. Even the Italians lack the spontaneity of Indonesian music. When we drove back to campus from Wonosari yesterday, my driver sang unabashedly along with the pop songs on the radio. My host family plays music loudly every morning, both gamelan and pop. Tutors sing around our class building. Five times a day, everyday, the call to prayer resonates across every corner of Malang, and I often wake early in the morning to voices singing in praise.

At Wanosari, after dinner, a karaoke band began to play. Karaoke is a big deal here, unlike in the U.S., where it's awkward and done only by very intoxicated people. After several minutes of awkward reactions from students, including me singing L.O.V.E. by Nat King Cole to a room of embarrassed Americans and cheering, enthusiastic Indonesians, we slowly warmed up and joined in the dancing. Ben and Danny sang "Leaving on a Jet Plane," and hardly knew the melody, but we danced in a circle with our arms draped around each other, swaying and laughing and remembering the people we miss. From that moment on, I understood. Music, for Indonesians, means community support, not performance, and love, not nerves. We danced and sang together for a few hours, until we Americans decided to sleep. Our Indonesian counterparts kept singing long into the night.

The Broom Under my Pillow and Indonesian Showers

This posts is the first part one of an ongoing series called "Amusing Anecdotes from Indonesia." 

There's a broom under my pillow, and I slept with it there, because I didn't know what else to do. This morning I asked my instructor what the broom was for, and several other students chimed in that they'd encountered bedroom brooms as well. According to guru Mbak Nissa, Indonesians dust off their beds and smooth the sheet with a broom. Who knew?

I say "the sheet" because Indonesians don't use top sheets, and they mostly don't use blankets. On my bed, I found a fitted sheet and a thin striped blanket folded at the foot of my bed. They do use body pillows. I haven't figured out how, so I left my body pillow on the floor for the night. I hope that wasn't a major error.

In addition, there's a flag hanging on the wall above my bed. I'm pretty sure my host family thinks it's an American flag, but it isn't. My guess is New Zealand, maybe? 

The Ibu Attack

My first story occurred the afternoon of June 11th. Following a grueling first day of classes and painfully staggered conversations with my peer tutors, I landed in the home of a completely unfamiliar host family that spoke nearly no English. After hiding in my room for an hour, too nervous to try and talk to my family, I texted a few other students to ask if they'd like to go to the mall near campus. I needed to get supplies to make flashcards, since I'd acquired about two hundred words to memorize in class. I grabbed my bag, went downstairs, and told my Ibu I was meeting some friends to go to the mall. 

Of course that didn't work. My Ibu did not want me to leave the house alone. Even though I'd already told one friend I was on my way, Ibu insisted on walking me to the house where my other mall friend was staying. When we arrived, I discovered her Ibu had made her take a shower, so we sat on the couch for twenty minutes waiting for her to finish the mandi. Only then were we permitted to go to the mall, after Ibu's daughter walked us to find our third companion, who had nearly despaired of us ever showing up. He hadn't had a problem getting out of the house, but I suppose that's the benefit of being male in Indonesia...

Kamar Mandi (Bathroom)

Indonesian bathrooms generally include two fixtures: a squat toilet and a square, deep water basin. Some might have a sink, some a western toilet, and some an actual shower, but rarely will you find all three. How do these rooms work?You do whatever you need to, and you scoop water from the deep water basin, called the mandi, with an obliging utinisil about the size and shape of a four-cup glass measuring cup and pour the water on the floor or over yourself to clean up. Drains pockmark the floor, but nonetheless the puddles on the floor never seem to dry (other things that don't dry in Indonesia: my hair, goldfish crackers, paper, underwear hand-washed in the mandi, and socks I accidentally wore into the kamar mandi before I knew how this worked). 

Luckily, my mandi has a toilet, though toilet paper is not provided in the mandi. Cue confusion number one: do I clean up from the mandi? Confusion number two: Where do you spit when you brush your teeth? The drain on the floor? My American brain can't handle that. My first night, they gave me a cup of water when I went to bed, and I brushed my teeth in that, because I couldn't figure out where else to do it.

My first Indonesian shower was a pleasant experience. Though the water was cold, it didn't stay on me for very long, and it felt refreshing in the Indonesian heat. I also felt very environmentally responsible; I probably used only eight cups of water in the whole shower. Go me! But I still have this cup of toothpaste water in my room...What am I going to do about that?

I've made a huge mistake.

Oh yeah. I forgot I'm terrible with languages.

Yesterday we met our peer tutors. For the next two months, our two peer tutors are our official in-country friends, and we'll shop and talk together. There's only one problem: they aren't allowed to speak to me in English.

At all.

Yesterday we talked for two hours, and by the end, I was nearly ready to throw in the towel. Most of the time, I couldn't understand the questions they asked me, least of all respond with any semblance of correct grammar, so for two hours they spoke to me and I tried to break apart what they said word by word, asking "Apa rambut?" Rambut means hair, it turns out. That keeps coming up. They tried to stay patient and positive, and so did I, but by the end we were all exhausted, and I had four pages of vocab words scrawled in my notebook, which I frantically tried to copy onto flashcards.

I realized as I dozed, surrounded by flashcards, that though this experience terrifies me, I've already learned an impressive amount. I must remember it can only get better from here.

Hopefully.

Mistakes I made yesterday:

Trying to hand someone money with my left hand
Forgetting respectful titles: Ibu, Bapak, Mbak, Mas

Alive, Alert, Awake, and Enthusiastic

I crashed into my bed at 7:30 p.m. last night, and gasped awake at 3:50 a.m. with no chance of returning to sleep. Normally I can sleep for ten, even twelve hours if nothing wakes me, but with jet lag, my body was fully awake after eight hours. How can I get that all the time?

I just found out I'm missing the Tony's. Hilariously, I'm disappointed.

Last night the CLS coordinators brought a man from a bank to exchange currency. Apparently, if you exchange on the street the rates can vary widely. He gave me 950,000 rupiah for a crisp, unfolded $100 bill. In Indonesia, the rate you get depends on the crispness of the bill. A friend of mine had one fold in her bill, and got a lower exchange rate as a result. It's as though the bills themselves possess value, which I'd never considered in the United States. The bills are rated as 1s, 2s, etc., and how crisp and clean the bill is determines the exchange rate. I'm not totally sure how that's legal, but that's my American mind talking!

We meet our host families on Tuesday, but for now, we're in a hotel, and a much nicer one than I expected! Other than the cigarette smoke, which fills rooms ubiquitously, it's a much nicer hotel than the one we stayed in in D.C.! From our window, we see the bright city lights, churches, and mosques sprawling across the landscape.

When I imagined Malang, Indonesia, (pronounced MAH-long), I thought of a quaint, small city, similar to Logan in size, surrounded by jungle. In reality, Malang boasts 3.5 million people, and Mount Bromo, a volcano, rests to the east. In comparison, Salt Lake City has only 1 million people in the metropolitan area. This place is huge. In stark contrast, the airport of Malang is so small there are no terminals and there is only a single runway. We walked off the plane onto a parking lot sized tarmac, then into a small building where our luggage came in on a single conveyor. I talked to a man who worked there named Anton. He teased me about only knowing how to say a few things, but he was so excited to converse with us he beamed. As we left the two room airport, a crowd stood in the soft rain, jostling, smiling, taking pictures, and helping us with luggage as we piled into a bus. I never imagined how important this was to them, and how proud they would be to have us, and I felt unworthy and foolish for not working harder and learning more before arriving.

After checking into the hotel, we killed time by going to the mall to avoid falling asleep at 2 p.m. The director sent us with one of our instructors, a recent college graduate named Nisa, as an escort. No one else got an escort, but I suppose Sarahann, my roommate, and I look especially vulnerable. Sarahann is the youngest member of our group at 18, and I'm the only blonde female. Nisa bought us tea and showed us around the mall. Her English was very good, especially compared to my Indonesian. I decided I owe her dinner. She insisted on buying us tea, even though we resisted. Sharing drinks and meals seems to be a requisite part of going out together in Indonesia, unlike in the States. I felt awful letting her pay, but we hadn't exchanged currency yet, and she seemed to really want tea. I'm going to call that experience my first serious cultural mistake, and try to fix it later by giving her a special treat.

Today means another adventure: my first well-rested day in Indonesia.


Note: This blog is not an official State Department website. The views presented are my own, not those of the CLS Program, the Department of State, Ohio University, or the University of Malang.

Dazed

Currently, I'm sitting in a modern-looking chair in the Singapore Changi airport, counting down the hours until our next flight. We landed just before midnight here, and we're meeting to get organized at five a.m. I've lost track of the hour a long time ago, but it's 1:16 p.m. in Logan, Utah!

The Singapore airport wins the Andrea award for best wifi and most gardens. We visited a butterfly garden, a fern garden, and a cactus garden, and also a koi pond. The butterflies and koi were all sleeping, but the cactus garden was outside, and I got to breath sultry Singapore air.

Fun fact about Singapore: the disembarkation form warns that drug trafficking is punished with the death penalty. So that's fun.

We started travelling at 6:00 a.m. on Friday, Logan time, and now it's 1:30 on Saturday, Logan time. That means we've been travelling for 31 hours, and we still have two flights to go! I feel so confused. I can't believe real life is still happening outside the world of airplanes.

I can feel the sleepiness changing me. I'm losing focus and getting distracted. I don't make sense anymore.

I'm going to post this anyway.

About to fly

D.C. is crying.

I actually despise the rain=crying cliché. Rain isn't inherently sad, of course. Some people cheer about rain. I'm sure some are ecstatic about the rain I'm watching now. I'm simply projecting my emotions onto the weather, and right now I feel fear and gnawing exhaustion. The rain isn't helping.

I know I should feel grateful, excited, and honored to have such an incredible opportunity. I know most people will never have the chance to travel so far, especially not for free. I know that by taking advantage of this opportunity, I will grow professionally, academically, and personally. I know I shouldn't complain.

But right now, I want to run straight home to Wyn, to my bed, to my shower, to my t.v. I want to sit at home and play the Sims. I feel paralyzed.

I won't run home. Tomorrow, I'll step on the airplane and do something terrifying. For a while, I'll be afraid, depressed, lonely, and homesick. Eventually I'll be able to handle it all. I will grow.

No pain, no gain. Another cliché  But as Jillian Michaels reminds me in my workouts, "Clichés exist for a reason: because they're true.

"So hurt for me."