It is something of a sight to see, for Indonesians, when I ride our motorcycle anywhere. I’m a woman – a bule woman at that – riding a blue and purple man’s bike very fast, and I have a man riding on the back! This is completely unheard of. You never see a woman riding with the man on the back. Never. Couple that with the fact that my hair in the wind, from under my helmet, is like some kind of waving blonde beacon in the sun that draws everybody’s eyes to me, and you get lots of commotion. Near accidents. Things like that.
As people are yelling at me (usually ‘EY!’ or ‘Wooo! Mister, mister!’ – very articulate) they are ignoring miracles that are happening on the same road, not a half-block away. I know that in America we have NASCAR, and we have highways where the speed limit is 75, and we have, especially in Colorado, mountain roads that wind so steeply you feel like you’re on a rollercoaster. We have downtown traffic jams that don’t move for hours, and we have motorcycles that weave around in the 1 centimeter of space between the stalled cars without losing control. We have motorcyclists who speed over jumps, who fly over any number of obstacles to land squarely on their wheels. I realize all this. But you haven’t seen impressive, you haven’t seen amazing, until you’ve seen a little old Indonesian man manuevering his groaning, creaking old motorcycle over a half-eroded gravel road with a straight drop to the ocean on one side and honking taxis on the other – carrying AT LEAST 300 EGGS STRAPPED TO HIS BACK.
People do this. They gathered their eggs across the bay, and they sell their eggs in Jayapura. But there are no delivery trucks, at least not the way we think about them. You have to ride in the truck with your produce. So what do you do? Strap 300 eggs to your back, of course! You see these guys, and they all invariably have crappy motorcycles that look as though they’re about to fall apart. From the back, you can’t see the guy. All you see is carton upon carton of eggs, at least as tall as the person riding and about four times as wide, lashed together on all sides with rope (I mistyped and typed ‘hope’, which is probably not entirely inaccurate), wobbling away down the road. And it’s not as though there’s no other traffic; it’s not as though the roads are all perfect. No, everybody honks at the egg guy, because he goes slowly. He goes slowly because, on any road at any time, there could suddenly be a ten foot deep hole, or a flood from a water pipe breaking, streaking down the middle of the road, or a mother chicken with her chicks all in a line behind her, or a lost cow, or a sideways pickup spilling durian and mango. But people still honk at him, instead of saluting him. Nice.
Friday, November 24, 2006
Friday, November 17, 2006
I've been thinking about whitening soap. Louise’s boyfriend gesturing at her face with its undissolved sunscreen, saying ‘Bagus, bagus.’ The shoe salesman trying to stroke the tiny hairs on my arm: ‘Bagus.’ Rambutan – deep red hair-fruit – the seller choosing the two most withered stalks and assuring me: ‘Bagus – limabelas ribu.’ Here, any arm hair on a woman shows that she satisfies her lovers. People want to touch it. People think I am exotic and wild. People think I am unworthy of respect. People think things that I am unable to put into words because my words are wasted and racing, trapped inside my head, pounding to come out. Pounding to come out, but coming out changed; coming out as the definition of a relative clause and how to express ability. My mind is rotting.
And my language center is beginning to transform; Spanish and Indonesian are starting to melt together. Tidak ada gente que bisa habla español, pues, puedo decirles que saya bicara eso. When Indonesians march up to me now and I am trying to relax and they start asking me the usual list of questions – where do you come from? where do you live? can I come to your house? do you want an Indonesian boyfriend? – I pretend I speak Spanish, and do, rapidly. They have never heard Spanish – when would they have? – and they don’t know how to follow up. Can bules be from Spanish-speaking countries? They don’t think so, but they don’t want to venture a possibly incorrect declaration.
This is all nothing, though, without someone to break it down with. Where have all my articulate friends gone? That’s right, I left them all behind, choosing instead to jet off halfway around the world seeking… something… and I took – who could I have taken?! and I took someone who would be just as contented with his mouth and his brain sewn shut, gardening among the cassava. This is not an insult. Believe me, it isn’t. But I… here is an excerpt:
-
I said this: “Make sure you have a lot of fun with your pickaxes for me. I’ll be dreaming about sushi.”
I said this last night, before I knew what I would dream about, but I did dream about sushi: mostly spider rolls, fresh toro, and seaweed salad. I held onto these things, especially, in my mind, because he wants to be a farmer, and farmers grow potatoes and vegetables. You can’t make sushi with potatoes and vegetables. Not even if you’re a Japanese farmer, which he… it’s fuzzy and uncertain, what type of farmer he wants to be, but genetics predispose him towards not being a Japanese one.
“Tell him,” he said last night, indicating the Papuan farmer in our driveway, “that I want to be a farmer. Tell him that being a farmer is my dream. Tell him…”
She was already translating, eliciting the vague, yet impatient smile the man wears when he already understands something in English, but is still working it out, or working out a reply. “Yes, yes,” he nodded, but what else could he say? He comes from a place where, if you are not a farmer, you do not eat. Dreaming about being a farmer, to him, is like dreaming about knowing how to fart.
“We’ll tear up the driveway with pickaxes tomorrow, expose the soil,” he says, eliciting... you know what it elicited. You read it already.
-
What could this be like alone? I spend my mornings imagining. And reality keeps happening:
-
“Cassava. Fields of it! Cashew trees! Red dust! I wonder if it is paint?”
He spits on a crumbling rust-colored rock in his hand. “Hold still,” he says. “Roll up your sleeve.” Spits and smears. Scribbling in ochre on my upper arm. I turn brown; finally, two square inches of my skin are sufficiently Indonesian.
“Maybe if you do my whole body, I’ll be able to walk the streets in peace,” I suggest, half-joking; mostly joking, really. “Let’s draw designs on each other.”
“I’m getting tired, actually,” he says.
“Do you want to take some home?”
“Not really.”
“………..”
“………..”
“Would you make Zen paintings with it?”
“It’s too colorful. But maybe… yeah, maybe.”
Maybe.
-
Like I said, reality keeps happening, and I’m too far behind. For the first time in my life I don’t know what I think about how I feel, and I especially don’t know how I feel about my change in thinking.
And my language center is beginning to transform; Spanish and Indonesian are starting to melt together. Tidak ada gente que bisa habla español, pues, puedo decirles que saya bicara eso. When Indonesians march up to me now and I am trying to relax and they start asking me the usual list of questions – where do you come from? where do you live? can I come to your house? do you want an Indonesian boyfriend? – I pretend I speak Spanish, and do, rapidly. They have never heard Spanish – when would they have? – and they don’t know how to follow up. Can bules be from Spanish-speaking countries? They don’t think so, but they don’t want to venture a possibly incorrect declaration.
This is all nothing, though, without someone to break it down with. Where have all my articulate friends gone? That’s right, I left them all behind, choosing instead to jet off halfway around the world seeking… something… and I took – who could I have taken?! and I took someone who would be just as contented with his mouth and his brain sewn shut, gardening among the cassava. This is not an insult. Believe me, it isn’t. But I… here is an excerpt:
-
I said this: “Make sure you have a lot of fun with your pickaxes for me. I’ll be dreaming about sushi.”
I said this last night, before I knew what I would dream about, but I did dream about sushi: mostly spider rolls, fresh toro, and seaweed salad. I held onto these things, especially, in my mind, because he wants to be a farmer, and farmers grow potatoes and vegetables. You can’t make sushi with potatoes and vegetables. Not even if you’re a Japanese farmer, which he… it’s fuzzy and uncertain, what type of farmer he wants to be, but genetics predispose him towards not being a Japanese one.
“Tell him,” he said last night, indicating the Papuan farmer in our driveway, “that I want to be a farmer. Tell him that being a farmer is my dream. Tell him…”
She was already translating, eliciting the vague, yet impatient smile the man wears when he already understands something in English, but is still working it out, or working out a reply. “Yes, yes,” he nodded, but what else could he say? He comes from a place where, if you are not a farmer, you do not eat. Dreaming about being a farmer, to him, is like dreaming about knowing how to fart.
“We’ll tear up the driveway with pickaxes tomorrow, expose the soil,” he says, eliciting... you know what it elicited. You read it already.
-
What could this be like alone? I spend my mornings imagining. And reality keeps happening:
-
“Cassava. Fields of it! Cashew trees! Red dust! I wonder if it is paint?”
He spits on a crumbling rust-colored rock in his hand. “Hold still,” he says. “Roll up your sleeve.” Spits and smears. Scribbling in ochre on my upper arm. I turn brown; finally, two square inches of my skin are sufficiently Indonesian.
“Maybe if you do my whole body, I’ll be able to walk the streets in peace,” I suggest, half-joking; mostly joking, really. “Let’s draw designs on each other.”
“I’m getting tired, actually,” he says.
“Do you want to take some home?”
“Not really.”
“………..”
“………..”
“Would you make Zen paintings with it?”
“It’s too colorful. But maybe… yeah, maybe.”
Maybe.
-
Like I said, reality keeps happening, and I’m too far behind. For the first time in my life I don’t know what I think about how I feel, and I especially don’t know how I feel about my change in thinking.
Sunday, November 12, 2006
I have, with considerable difficulty, refrained so far from filling this blog with teaching stories. Because every teaching challenge that comes up seems at the time to be enormous and insurmountable and obviously the most important challenge that anyone has ever been faced with ever, I follow the universal Rule of What Other People Will Care About, and realize that, to anyone removed from the situation, how infuriating it is when my High Fliers won’t stop fighting each other or how awkward it is when a Waystage 2 student tells an entire class he had a wet dream or how exhausting it is to teach 6 hours straight in one day isn’t really infuriating, or awkward, or exhausting, or even interesting at all – it’s just blurry, and thus boring. Plus, I’d hate for my students to see themselves portrayed in a light that is highly colored by my nervous energy. But (and you knew there was a but) I’m going to make an exception. Because I made the most genius lesson plan ever today, and I am granting myself bragging rights.
I have a small Keystage 2 (low-intermediate) class at night. 4-6 students, depending. Twice a week. This class acts as though opening their mouth to speak to me in English will result in their immediately being beheaded. It’s not because they don’t know English – most of them got at least 85% on their last test – and it’s not because I am intimidating – is it? I’ve had them for almost three months now, and have never yelled at or threatened or punished or killed any of them – but I don’t have any idea what the real reason is. Day-to-day, it doesn’t matter. All that matters is that I have tried everything in the world to get them to speak: roleplays, debates, putting my ear directly next to their mouths so they can’t whisper ‘…apa?...’ to each other in Indonesian instead of talking to me, sitting silently and staring at them when they sit silently and stare at me, getting Nick, who is an enthusiastic teacher almost to excess, to come in and parade his activities in front of them, etc., etc. The only thing that gets them motivated is competitive, fast-paced games. But the thing is, to get to the point where it is possible to play competitive games in class, students actually have to learn something first, which requires speaking, since EF is a fucking speaking-based school. A speaking-based school, and attempts to communicate with this class go as follows:
Hannah (slowly and clearly): David*, did you have a fun vacation?
David: (whisperwhisperwhisperwhisper, blank stare, giggles, whisperwhisperwhisper) Apa?**
Hannah (more slowly, more clearly): Where did you go for vacation, for Idul Fitri?
Students: (whisperwhisperwhisperwhisper, blank stares, giggles, whisperwhisperwhisper) Apa?
Hannah (you get the picture): Was your vacation good? Or bad?
David: (barely above a whisper): Good.
Hannah: What did you do?
David: (whisperwhisperwhisperwhisper, blank stare, giggles, whisperwhisperwhisper) Apa?
And so forth, until smoke comes out of my ears and I assign them an essay out of pure spite (and unwillingness to carry on a one-sided conversation for 80 minutes).
The thing is, the Keystage 2 book is also incredibly boring. Right now, we’re supposed to be learning about formal English in the workplace, which, I don’t know, these kids are about 14, so it’s pretty irrelevant. But I have to at least touch upon it or I have an entire class failing their progress tests. So today I wrote up two example job ads. One was for someone to sing and dance and play music in funny clothes outside the new music store in town to attract attention to it, and the other was for someone to live in Antarctica for a year with no human contact, observing and recording the weather patterns. I did NOT tell them that they were going to have to interview for these jobs, I just asked them which one they would prefer. Actually, I didn’t ask them, as that would require them to answer. I just told them that everyone who preferred the music store job to stand on the left side of the room, and everyone who preferred the Antarctica job to stand on the right side. Everybody – all 6 of them – went to the left. Not surprising, because any one of these students would rather be drawn and quartered than be singled out from the rest of the group.
And I smiled to myself, because they had all walked directly into my trap.
I told them then that all six of them wanted this job, and only one of them could have it (that was the necessary taste of competition), and that they all had to have an interview with me, the owner of the music store. They did not have to be themselves; they could invent a person who was perfect for the job, and interview as that person. After each had had their interview, I would decide which of them was best for the job. These kids don’t need any incentive, candy or otherwise, beyond simply being able to say that they won. So they all immediately began plotting and planning how they were going to prepare for the interview, and beat everyone else to the job. In the excitement, they all forgot what the job actually entailed, and what the interview was likely to consist of.
Gleefully surveying their preparations, I began writing the interview questions:
What is your name?
How old are you?
What is the highest level of schooling you have completed?
What are your previous jobs?
What musical instruments can you play?
Can you sing? Please sing a song for me.
Can you dance? Please do a dance for me.
Right about at this stage in the writing, students started realizing what they were in all likelihood preparing for.
Lidia: Ma’am! Ma’am! Can I switch?
Robert: I want to go to Antarctica!
Paulo: Can we change jobs?
Oh, now they were speaking. I smiled, shook my head no (to a resounding chorus of ‘Aduh!’s)***, and continued writing the interview questions:
Do you have any funny clothes? Please describe them.
How about funny hats? What do they look like?
Do you have a very loud voice? Please demonstrate by yelling ‘crocodile!’ as loud as you possibly can.
Can you talk to strangers? Please prove it by introducing yourself to the teacher teaching the class next door.
Why do you want this job?
Do you have any questions for me?
I must say here that the first student to be interviewed’s head nearly exploded when I got to the singing question. His thought process was almost visible: Must win… but… cannot…sing… in front… of the scary teacher… must….....WIN….....but….
He sang. ALL OF THEM SANG. None of them danced – they couldn’t bring themselves to go that far - but all of them sang, and they all had to yell ‘crocodile’ and describe their funny clothes and hats and walk into strange classrooms and introduce themselves in front of upwards of twenty of their giggling, whispering peers and six confused teachers, and they did all of this just so, at the end of class, they could be the lucky winner of a fake job in a fake music store for a fake salary.
I think that it is probably redundant to say that, in the Grand Battle of Wills, the score is now:
Silent Class: 50
Hannah: 9000
*These are pseudonyms, but people have amazing, often hilarious names here. That was a veiled reference, by the way. Email me if you want me to list some. It will be worth it.
** ‘What?’
*** ‘Ouch!’, literally, but used for a wider variety of situations, like when you have just realized that you will probably have to sing and dance in front of everybody.
I have a small Keystage 2 (low-intermediate) class at night. 4-6 students, depending. Twice a week. This class acts as though opening their mouth to speak to me in English will result in their immediately being beheaded. It’s not because they don’t know English – most of them got at least 85% on their last test – and it’s not because I am intimidating – is it? I’ve had them for almost three months now, and have never yelled at or threatened or punished or killed any of them – but I don’t have any idea what the real reason is. Day-to-day, it doesn’t matter. All that matters is that I have tried everything in the world to get them to speak: roleplays, debates, putting my ear directly next to their mouths so they can’t whisper ‘…apa?...’ to each other in Indonesian instead of talking to me, sitting silently and staring at them when they sit silently and stare at me, getting Nick, who is an enthusiastic teacher almost to excess, to come in and parade his activities in front of them, etc., etc. The only thing that gets them motivated is competitive, fast-paced games. But the thing is, to get to the point where it is possible to play competitive games in class, students actually have to learn something first, which requires speaking, since EF is a fucking speaking-based school. A speaking-based school, and attempts to communicate with this class go as follows:
Hannah (slowly and clearly): David*, did you have a fun vacation?
David: (whisperwhisperwhisperwhisper, blank stare, giggles, whisperwhisperwhisper) Apa?**
Hannah (more slowly, more clearly): Where did you go for vacation, for Idul Fitri?
Students: (whisperwhisperwhisperwhisper, blank stares, giggles, whisperwhisperwhisper) Apa?
Hannah (you get the picture): Was your vacation good? Or bad?
David: (barely above a whisper): Good.
Hannah: What did you do?
David: (whisperwhisperwhisperwhisper, blank stare, giggles, whisperwhisperwhisper) Apa?
And so forth, until smoke comes out of my ears and I assign them an essay out of pure spite (and unwillingness to carry on a one-sided conversation for 80 minutes).
The thing is, the Keystage 2 book is also incredibly boring. Right now, we’re supposed to be learning about formal English in the workplace, which, I don’t know, these kids are about 14, so it’s pretty irrelevant. But I have to at least touch upon it or I have an entire class failing their progress tests. So today I wrote up two example job ads. One was for someone to sing and dance and play music in funny clothes outside the new music store in town to attract attention to it, and the other was for someone to live in Antarctica for a year with no human contact, observing and recording the weather patterns. I did NOT tell them that they were going to have to interview for these jobs, I just asked them which one they would prefer. Actually, I didn’t ask them, as that would require them to answer. I just told them that everyone who preferred the music store job to stand on the left side of the room, and everyone who preferred the Antarctica job to stand on the right side. Everybody – all 6 of them – went to the left. Not surprising, because any one of these students would rather be drawn and quartered than be singled out from the rest of the group.
And I smiled to myself, because they had all walked directly into my trap.
I told them then that all six of them wanted this job, and only one of them could have it (that was the necessary taste of competition), and that they all had to have an interview with me, the owner of the music store. They did not have to be themselves; they could invent a person who was perfect for the job, and interview as that person. After each had had their interview, I would decide which of them was best for the job. These kids don’t need any incentive, candy or otherwise, beyond simply being able to say that they won. So they all immediately began plotting and planning how they were going to prepare for the interview, and beat everyone else to the job. In the excitement, they all forgot what the job actually entailed, and what the interview was likely to consist of.
Gleefully surveying their preparations, I began writing the interview questions:
What is your name?
How old are you?
What is the highest level of schooling you have completed?
What are your previous jobs?
What musical instruments can you play?
Can you sing? Please sing a song for me.
Can you dance? Please do a dance for me.
Right about at this stage in the writing, students started realizing what they were in all likelihood preparing for.
Lidia: Ma’am! Ma’am! Can I switch?
Robert: I want to go to Antarctica!
Paulo: Can we change jobs?
Oh, now they were speaking. I smiled, shook my head no (to a resounding chorus of ‘Aduh!’s)***, and continued writing the interview questions:
Do you have any funny clothes? Please describe them.
How about funny hats? What do they look like?
Do you have a very loud voice? Please demonstrate by yelling ‘crocodile!’ as loud as you possibly can.
Can you talk to strangers? Please prove it by introducing yourself to the teacher teaching the class next door.
Why do you want this job?
Do you have any questions for me?
I must say here that the first student to be interviewed’s head nearly exploded when I got to the singing question. His thought process was almost visible: Must win… but… cannot…sing… in front… of the scary teacher… must….....WIN….....but….
He sang. ALL OF THEM SANG. None of them danced – they couldn’t bring themselves to go that far - but all of them sang, and they all had to yell ‘crocodile’ and describe their funny clothes and hats and walk into strange classrooms and introduce themselves in front of upwards of twenty of their giggling, whispering peers and six confused teachers, and they did all of this just so, at the end of class, they could be the lucky winner of a fake job in a fake music store for a fake salary.
I think that it is probably redundant to say that, in the Grand Battle of Wills, the score is now:
Silent Class: 50
Hannah: 9000
*These are pseudonyms, but people have amazing, often hilarious names here. That was a veiled reference, by the way. Email me if you want me to list some. It will be worth it.
** ‘What?’
*** ‘Ouch!’, literally, but used for a wider variety of situations, like when you have just realized that you will probably have to sing and dance in front of everybody.
Tuesday, November 07, 2006
Update: the police are taking prints from my PIN card, and polling the pool of people who could possibly have perused my purse, but my pity party will only pollute one post, so don’t panic.
Although there are countless types of food I yearn for every day that I am here, there is now one food that I will yearn for every day when I return to the States, and I am not sure how I will deal with the loss of it. It’s called Sari Kelapa – Coconut Fibre. It’s… all it is, is cubes of coconut flesh soaking in sugar-honey water, in a little green squishy bag, but it tastes marvelous for some reason. You take it home and I think you’re supposed to put it in a bowl and eat it with a spoon, but I just slice open the top of the bag and squeeze all the cubes right into my mouth. Each one has a different texture, but all of them have a texture never imagined before by man. Gelatin meets coconut meets carrot meets chicken. Amazing. Amazing and 25 U.S. cents. I thought they might be sneaking cocaine into the Sari Kelapa, because it has now come to pass that I can’t go a day without eating at least a bag, even though the recommended serving size is 1/3 of a bag, but then I realized that cocaine would make it a little more expensive than 25 cents. You know what else I realized? That I won’t physically be able to go shopping for food when I return without having a mild heart attack every time I see the price of anything. “Ten dollars for a fish for dinner for 1 person??!! That’s like a hundred thousand rupiah! I could live on that for three or four days! I could totally bribe a police officer with that!!” And then I’ll try to go out to dinner and fail, because 25 bucks for a meal, even sushi, is just… unthinkable. Actually, it was unthinkable before, but now…
Come to think of it, I am writing like the Sari Kelapa does contain cocaine. Every time I go out on the motorbike by myself, that happens. I am straddling this monstrous machine, and if I drive it wrong, it falls on me! If I stop too short, I go over the handlebars! It’s great! It wouldn’t be great if it happened, but that fact just makes it even better when it doesn’t happen. I don’t know that I would get the same feeling driving on the highway. The highway would just be terror, and terror is different. Terror is different from veering around jungled cliffs and having to brake to avoid chickens and dogs and goats that are wandering around in the road, trying to find the Pasar Dua beach and instead ending up on a road that appears to be paved with banana fronds, large rocks, and cats, constantly having to pass taxis driving 15 km/hr, three motorcycles deep, in no passing zones, finally finding the Pasar Dua beach road and suddenly noticing, one second away from too late, that the road ends abruptly and immediately becomes STONE STAIRS.
Stone stairs and a pair of talkative Indonesians, who talk to me about Arnold Schwarzenegger, religion, Papuan noses, short people, tall people, waterfalls, and American boyfriends for two hours. Sometimes, usually when I just want to quietly study shells and put my feet in things, this happens. But I have to be nice; I am the representative of buledom. I alone have to undo decades of damage done by imported porn, sitcoms, condescending tourists, and American foreign policy. This obviously trumps any desire I might have to spend a quiet reflective day at the ocean’s edge.
Although there are countless types of food I yearn for every day that I am here, there is now one food that I will yearn for every day when I return to the States, and I am not sure how I will deal with the loss of it. It’s called Sari Kelapa – Coconut Fibre. It’s… all it is, is cubes of coconut flesh soaking in sugar-honey water, in a little green squishy bag, but it tastes marvelous for some reason. You take it home and I think you’re supposed to put it in a bowl and eat it with a spoon, but I just slice open the top of the bag and squeeze all the cubes right into my mouth. Each one has a different texture, but all of them have a texture never imagined before by man. Gelatin meets coconut meets carrot meets chicken. Amazing. Amazing and 25 U.S. cents. I thought they might be sneaking cocaine into the Sari Kelapa, because it has now come to pass that I can’t go a day without eating at least a bag, even though the recommended serving size is 1/3 of a bag, but then I realized that cocaine would make it a little more expensive than 25 cents. You know what else I realized? That I won’t physically be able to go shopping for food when I return without having a mild heart attack every time I see the price of anything. “Ten dollars for a fish for dinner for 1 person??!! That’s like a hundred thousand rupiah! I could live on that for three or four days! I could totally bribe a police officer with that!!” And then I’ll try to go out to dinner and fail, because 25 bucks for a meal, even sushi, is just… unthinkable. Actually, it was unthinkable before, but now…
Come to think of it, I am writing like the Sari Kelapa does contain cocaine. Every time I go out on the motorbike by myself, that happens. I am straddling this monstrous machine, and if I drive it wrong, it falls on me! If I stop too short, I go over the handlebars! It’s great! It wouldn’t be great if it happened, but that fact just makes it even better when it doesn’t happen. I don’t know that I would get the same feeling driving on the highway. The highway would just be terror, and terror is different. Terror is different from veering around jungled cliffs and having to brake to avoid chickens and dogs and goats that are wandering around in the road, trying to find the Pasar Dua beach and instead ending up on a road that appears to be paved with banana fronds, large rocks, and cats, constantly having to pass taxis driving 15 km/hr, three motorcycles deep, in no passing zones, finally finding the Pasar Dua beach road and suddenly noticing, one second away from too late, that the road ends abruptly and immediately becomes STONE STAIRS.
Stone stairs and a pair of talkative Indonesians, who talk to me about Arnold Schwarzenegger, religion, Papuan noses, short people, tall people, waterfalls, and American boyfriends for two hours. Sometimes, usually when I just want to quietly study shells and put my feet in things, this happens. But I have to be nice; I am the representative of buledom. I alone have to undo decades of damage done by imported porn, sitcoms, condescending tourists, and American foreign policy. This obviously trumps any desire I might have to spend a quiet reflective day at the ocean’s edge.
Friday, November 03, 2006
My Indonesian is more broken than usual at the bank. I don’t know tenses. How can I say that I’m meant to have Rp. 10,000,000 ($1000) in my account, my full two-months pay, but instead have only 126,000 ($12.60)? How can I make it clear that my ATM card has obviously been stolen, that every transaction made in the past few weeks is unauthorized? Is it as obvious to them as it is to me that I couldn’t cancel my card because the bank was closed all week for Idul Fitri, and the whole time the bank was closed, this person kept withdrawing millions of rupiah per day? Most of all, how can I make them understand that I’m not rich, that without the salary I’ve earned since I arrived in Indonesia, I won’t be able to eat? In Indonesia, bules are rich; that is all there is to it. If you’re a bule, you have a lot of hardcore-porn-style sex, with anybody who asks, and you have a giant house and a fancy car and anything you do is just for amusement, because you have a cushy job your rich daddy got for you straight out of university, and any money that is stolen from you you probably deserve to have stolen, because anyone else needs it more than you do.
I won’t be getting any of it back. And this means, basically, that I’ve been working full-time in a lonely country, enjoying maybe half of it, the teaching-adults half, but dreading the teaching-children half with such intensity that there hasn’t been a night where I haven’t had nightmares about school, for a boss who demands materials-request forms for supplies as obviously necessary as sheets of white paper and whiteboard markers, and then often denies the requests, all so he can save a few pennies when he’s already quite independently wealthy, especially for Indonesia, and… I have been doing all this, and becoming ill with unexplained maladies, and eating rice for every meal, here, in Jayapura, for over two months, and my reimbursement for all of this is: $12. My salary was already somewhere around $3 an hour, but it has effectively just dropped to $.03.
It is causing me psychological turmoil, though, beyond just the initial brute rage and the temptation to loll depressively around the house, because I know that, despite this, I will live; I will not die, I will not starve, I will not lose my house – the house is free, the meals will come, somehow, from Nick’s salary, and in Indonesia, if you are poor, you get health care anyway. I am upset about the theft and I am angry with myself for being upset about the theft. I mourn the loss of the financial ability to visit other parts of Indonesia, like Hiron’s village in the highlands near Wamena, or the temple at Yogyakarta, or even just Biak, the Papuan version of a resort, at the same time that I suddenly become aware of the thousands of people who have never left Jayapura. I will miss my monthly treats to myself in the form of the expensive (by Indonesian standards; about $7 a meal) Chinese restaurant up the hill, and, but, here are people, right in front of me, every day, who eat fried rice for every single meal. It’s confusing. It’s confusing! I don’t know what I have the right to feel. While I hope that the person who took the $1000 is spending it on a lifesaving operation for their mother or something equally cliché, I know it’s infinitely more likely that they took it straight to Sip (the rich people’s mall) and bought a new surround-sound stereo system. It doesn’t matter what they did, anyway.
Maybe the thing that bothers me the most is that, when I return to Boulder, I won’t have enough money saved up to even put the security deposit down on an apartment. Because of this, I probably won’t be able to return to Boulder. And Boulder is where I want to be.
Louise takes my face in her hands when I tell her. It is a perfect gesture, but maybe just to me because I know if anybody hugs me I will burst into tears. She spends the next half hour brainstorming ways to help. It quickly disintegrates into distraction, because it becomes obvious that nothing will help, and she whispers in Indonesian to Hiron what happened, and then adds in English, to me, “I know! We can just sell Hiron.”
“How much do you think you can get for him?” Nick asks.
Hiron, who understands more English than he lets on, cut in: “Duapuluh.” (Twenty.)
“Duapuluh apa? Rupiah?” She laughs. Twenty rupiah is .2 cents. “Duapuluh ribu?”
“Duapuluh juta,” Nick and I say in unison. Twenty million. Still only $2,000, though. The gears of our minds grind slowly around the translation, how cheap it turned out, and then at the same time again, we say “Duapuluh juta juta.”
Twenty million million. It’s about two billion US$. Hiron smiles and looks down. “No, no, no, no, no…”
Anyway, nasi sudah menjadi bubur. Roughly, and very roughly, nothing I can do to change anything now.
I won’t be getting any of it back. And this means, basically, that I’ve been working full-time in a lonely country, enjoying maybe half of it, the teaching-adults half, but dreading the teaching-children half with such intensity that there hasn’t been a night where I haven’t had nightmares about school, for a boss who demands materials-request forms for supplies as obviously necessary as sheets of white paper and whiteboard markers, and then often denies the requests, all so he can save a few pennies when he’s already quite independently wealthy, especially for Indonesia, and… I have been doing all this, and becoming ill with unexplained maladies, and eating rice for every meal, here, in Jayapura, for over two months, and my reimbursement for all of this is: $12. My salary was already somewhere around $3 an hour, but it has effectively just dropped to $.03.
It is causing me psychological turmoil, though, beyond just the initial brute rage and the temptation to loll depressively around the house, because I know that, despite this, I will live; I will not die, I will not starve, I will not lose my house – the house is free, the meals will come, somehow, from Nick’s salary, and in Indonesia, if you are poor, you get health care anyway. I am upset about the theft and I am angry with myself for being upset about the theft. I mourn the loss of the financial ability to visit other parts of Indonesia, like Hiron’s village in the highlands near Wamena, or the temple at Yogyakarta, or even just Biak, the Papuan version of a resort, at the same time that I suddenly become aware of the thousands of people who have never left Jayapura. I will miss my monthly treats to myself in the form of the expensive (by Indonesian standards; about $7 a meal) Chinese restaurant up the hill, and, but, here are people, right in front of me, every day, who eat fried rice for every single meal. It’s confusing. It’s confusing! I don’t know what I have the right to feel. While I hope that the person who took the $1000 is spending it on a lifesaving operation for their mother or something equally cliché, I know it’s infinitely more likely that they took it straight to Sip (the rich people’s mall) and bought a new surround-sound stereo system. It doesn’t matter what they did, anyway.
Maybe the thing that bothers me the most is that, when I return to Boulder, I won’t have enough money saved up to even put the security deposit down on an apartment. Because of this, I probably won’t be able to return to Boulder. And Boulder is where I want to be.
Louise takes my face in her hands when I tell her. It is a perfect gesture, but maybe just to me because I know if anybody hugs me I will burst into tears. She spends the next half hour brainstorming ways to help. It quickly disintegrates into distraction, because it becomes obvious that nothing will help, and she whispers in Indonesian to Hiron what happened, and then adds in English, to me, “I know! We can just sell Hiron.”
“How much do you think you can get for him?” Nick asks.
Hiron, who understands more English than he lets on, cut in: “Duapuluh.” (Twenty.)
“Duapuluh apa? Rupiah?” She laughs. Twenty rupiah is .2 cents. “Duapuluh ribu?”
“Duapuluh juta,” Nick and I say in unison. Twenty million. Still only $2,000, though. The gears of our minds grind slowly around the translation, how cheap it turned out, and then at the same time again, we say “Duapuluh juta juta.”
Twenty million million. It’s about two billion US$. Hiron smiles and looks down. “No, no, no, no, no…”
Anyway, nasi sudah menjadi bubur. Roughly, and very roughly, nothing I can do to change anything now.
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