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.

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.