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.