Apologies and such for the long absence; they were doing porn-based repair at the internet café for a few weeks, or at least that’s what I gathered from the repeated denials of the front desk guy that they were open even though there were 6 guys inside downloading porn.

(Oh, and incidentally, who keeps posting comments and then deleting them? That drives me insane. Like, I’m ‘blessed’ with an overactive imagination that keeps conjuring up images of lovelorn secret admirers when the truth is probably closer to people getting drunk and typing rambling comments which they delete the next morning. Either way, I need to know.)

The entries I had had written follow:

Thursday, December 14

Things are looking up. Whenever I use that idiom after four months of teaching English I picture all the animate and inanimate components of the improved situation literally looking up. Scanning the sky. Getting a suntan. Desks, students, cheesy posters, the EF building in general. Although most of it, actually, is still looking down, the small part of it that I mean is that I was looking at the teachers’ schedule the other day and realized how insanely better my schedule is than everyone else’s. Better for me, anyway… meaning that when everyone else is teaching loud obnoxious misbehaving children, I tend to be teaching Pre-Advanced Level 10 adults. Loud obnoxious children still figure significantly into my schedule – there’s really no avoiding it – but definitely not to the degree that they figure into everyone else’s. I salute you, fate. I salute you, Director of Studies.

Friday, December 8

I’m struck sometimes by how inaccurate of a portrayal of everyday everydays this blog, or any blog, is. I wonder if it’s possible to depict an atmosphere, a general feeling, in words. I’m struck by inconsequential things too, though - I’m struck by the location of my commas, and not in a complimentary way – so don’t attach too much gravity to it or anything.

How many times must I impress upon cyberspace the lingering odor of durian in the open market before I feel vindicated? Is there an upper limit to the number of entries in which I can mention the many ways in which being a bule sucks? How about the hundreds of beautiful beaches? Does it ever end? It’s repetitive because my life here is repetitive. Remember that and you will have something of a grasp on what my entries are failing to communicate.

To attempt not to whine in the midst of something crushing is fruitless. The last sentence I said aloud was ‘Stay the hell out of the Mody chocolate paste – I mean it.’ Before you ask, it’s basically icing in a glass mug, but it’s the cheapest form of chocolate there is.

The enormity sometimes hits me right around the times when I’m giving a Papuan Catholic bishop (the same one who was present when I had to explain was a cock was) his final speaking test, and the question is on fears and phobias, and I’m expecting spiders, I’m expecting cockroaches or maybe crocodiles, but I get the Indonesian Army; I get that he and other local religious leaders – Hindus, Buddhists, Muslims – are traveling to Yogyakarta to meet with the Indonesian President about the problem of violent clashes between the military and the people. I ask a sixteen-year-old girl about a stressful day in her life expecting too much homework or a breakup with a boyfriend, and instead I get that her mother sold her pet dog to people who made it into dog stew for a feast, and they killed it in her living room where she could hear its screams.

There are these times, where I’m captivated and saddened, and I think it will last forever. I think it will last forever until I step out into the evening heat of the marketplace and insert the hum of complaints about being treated like a celebrity here. Actually, don’t. There’s nothing I can say after the image of the girl’s pet dog being killed for stew that won’t sound, that won’t BE, trite.

Wednesday, December 6

There’s one pitted lychee on each finger. One finger on each letterkey. Typing still feels alien to me. When I look at my hands, I remember why. If I squint right they look like a frog’s, the finger pads splayed and glistening.

I’m writing this for you, so pay attention.

This morning there was a thin beaded mask of sweat on every surface that I touched. A band around my upper lip and the back of my neck like a slipped bandanna. I was dreaming about stretching out on my classroom floor. Seven-year-olds shuffled flash-cards by my feet, chorusing mixed vocabulary and screams. Sun-browned teenagers with ankle-sock tans furrowed their brows and questioned me telepathically about relative clauses. They whispered to each other and their faces faded when I tried approaching. I don’t know if I’ve mentioned it unequivocally here or what, but I kind of hate my job.

Coasting on perfectly placed dialogues with strangers, or between strangers, sends sparks to a halt when everything is in Indonesian. I’m clinging to the tail of intonation now. The sun on the tile when I unstick one eyelid. My school dream this morning was centered entirely within a cubist painting. Waking up, my feet and their shadows rippled living rectangles onto the mattress. Eight o’clock. His grandpa’s pocket watch has sand in the winding mechanism. Waking up, capsizing to ‘Fuck!’s.

At this rate, will anyone be able to understand me when I return?

This exchange slid softly into my head:

Someone says something perfect.
“Be careful of saying that… you’re going to make me fall in love with you.”
Someone says something perfect.
She laughs, and behind her laugh is something starting, finally, to distill.
Someone. Says. Something. Perfect. Deliberately.

Has this ever happened to anyone? I hope so.

Thursday, November 30

Here is the true face of everyday Jayapura: me about to stuff my face with rambutan. I’m having second thoughts about moving back to the states, knowing that they don’t have rambutan – I mean, what other fruit looks like a pod alien and tastes like a cross between a grape and a coconut?! You tell me.

Strange things keep happening. If this wants to become the wacky cultural anecdotes blog, so be it. It’s itching to do so, and I don’t have the energy to try and derail it, at least not right now.

We bought a box of green tea awhile ago, and when we got home and opened it, there was an rp. 5000 bill folded up inside – exactly the cost of the tea. Apparently when Indonesian advertisements claim that if you buy their product you might get a rebate, they mean that there is actually hard cash inside some of their products. No clipping coupons or sending in a self-addressed stamped envelope – just money, already put inside the product. I find this amazing. Since then, I have found empty decorated Idul Fitri envelopes inside my buckets of Sari Kelapa, stickers buried in my palm sugar, a plastic tiger in my oatmeal, and a 500 coin wrapped in Christmas paper in my motorcycle helmet.

There’s also this thing here among 10-13 year old boys where, if there’s a fat boy in the class, every other boy will try to be his partner or otherwise sit near him. Can you guess why? It’s so they can climb all over him and intermittently spank him. I have a class with three fat boys (nearly unheard of in Jayapura) and it’s… really awkward to teach a class when all the boys are spanking each other. I think they actually just see fat boys as jungle gyms, because when they’re partners for group work, they don’t sit next to each other – the fat boy lounges on his stomach and the skinny boy lounges too - on top of the fat boy. Double decker. This makes the fat boys very, very popular and sought after.

Nick’s parents’ Christmas package arrived today, nearly a month early. It smells of spiced tea. There isn’t a ‘Do Not Open Until Christmas’ sign anywhere on it, but there may as well be for all the fuss Nick is making about not opening it until Christmas. From the looks of it (and by ‘from the looks of it’ I mean the ever-increasing greedy-looking trails of ants) there are pfeffernous cookies somewhere hidden inside. Over Christmas we might be on Biak. It will be hot. This will be strange. It’s already strange. Jayapura has badly dubbed versions of Christmas songs playing all over town, with, like… MIDI keyboard instrumentation and techno backbeats, and they’re either in Indonesian, in which case the words don’t fit to the song because Indonesian hardly uses any words to convey the same meaning that English would need at least a paragraph for (Indonesians could have written that sentence better), or else they’re in English, with an accent that renders the lyrics indecipherable.

Speaking of. One of my punishments for late students (it’s sort of universal EF punishment, actually) is having them sing a song in front of everybody. It’s the only way to kind of keep people from being late, because this is a culture of extreme lateness – two hours or more. Anyway, someone in Level 2 was late recently. Level 2, even though their English is necessarily pretty bad, is one of my favorite classes because they’re essentially self-governing. Virtually all of them really want to learn, so they tolerate no disobedience from their peers. If someone starts speaking Indonesian, I don’t even have the chance to open my mouth (and anyway, usually in a level this low I let them speak Indonesian) before there’s a chorus of ‘Eyyyyyy, speak Inglees!’ and indignant looks and, often, reprimanding slaps. And if anyone is late, the entire class takes up a chant: ‘Sing! Sing! Sing! Sing! Come on, sing!’ If the person hesitates, the class dissolves into: ‘Eyy, ma’am say!’ and ‘Hurry upppp!’ and ‘Time is finissed, do it!’ The last time this happened, the late girl, a talkative 14-year-old Muslim in a veil, immediately broke out into “My humps, my humps, my humps! My lovely lady lumps!” – and the entire first verse - to a round of genuine applause and ‘Her English so goooood’s echoing around the room.

Sometimes living in Indonesia is not too different, day-to-day, from living in the U.S., except that the following things can (and do) happen:

I wake up in the middle of the night to pee, and upon opening the door to the bathroom, I find that there is a baby parrot with no neck feathers and a dog leash around its ankle perched on a music stand with a green towel thrown over it.
"What the hell is that?" I ask Nick, waking him up.
"Oh, it's the bird," he says, groggily. "You haven't met the bird?"
"No. Whose is it? Is it anybody's?"
"Oh, someone found him outside getting chased by a cat, so they brought him to Louise as a present. Louise doesn't like pets, so she gave him to Shayna, and I guess Shayna's keeping him in the bathroom."
The parrot bites, but doesn't talk, and loves attention. He eats mashed-up bananas, but only out of a clenched fist. He gets stuck in my hair a lot. Soon, he will be going home to Wamena with Hiron, who is the subject of the next story in the list of Stories That Wouldn't Happen in the States:

Hiron is Louise's boyfriend. He is also a member of a tribe of inland-dwelling Papuans who, not fifty years ago, hadn't ever heard of the rest of the world. He's not sure how old he is, because they don't keep track or care. Hiron can make a meal out of anything - you know the common refrigerator affliction of having lots of food, but nothing to possibly make with it, such as mayonnaise, chili powder, half a muffin, and ketchup? He could make a meal out of that, and it would be delicious. He made a meal out of a bag of cassava, three eggs, and salt, and it was enough to feed four people. If he doesn't eat for three days, nobody can tell. He is making us an English-Indonesian-Dani dictionary (Dani is the language of his tribe) and it's just bizarre to see him sitting in the living room watching Indonesian soap operas, which he does often. How can you make the change from raising wild pigs and growing vegetables and occasionally warring with other tribes to sitting in a tiled living room with a bag of KFC and watching Indonesian soap operas in a matter of months?

Here's one for the culture-clash experiences file:

I was coming out of the girls' bathroom at school and Nick was coming in, a tiny four-year-old girl in tow. "Actually," he said to me, breaking off, 'will you help her use the toilet?"
"No," I said, automatically and immediately.
"Come on," he begged, "will you? If you don't, I have to, and I think... I think it's better if you do."

It's not that Indonesian four year olds don't know how to use the toilet. They do. But the toilets in Indonesia are formed completely differently than Western toilets, and the school, for some reason, employs Western style toilets. Indonesian bathrooms consist of a slightly raised mesa, maybe 10 cm off the ground, with what we call a toilet seat embedded directly into the tile. You squat over it with your feet on the rim, level with the ground, and go. There's no flush; instead, there is a bucket or some kind of reservoir that is filled with water, and you dip a little ladle in, and pour three or four of them in until it 'flushes'.

So I go into the bathroom with the little girl, who is chattering away in Indonesian, interrupting herself only to point at the odd bathroom accoutrements and look up at me with wide trusting eyes as she asks me questions about them that I can neither understand nor answer. She stands next to the toilet, easily half her height, and looks at me. When making pulling-down-pants motions at her fails to inspire action, I lift her shirt and realize that what I thought were her pants are some kind of elaborate facade for her real pants, which (presumably) lie underneath somewhere, once you can get past the fifteen ribbons and buttons and zippers holding them up. What reason could there possibly be for dressing a four-year-old like that?

Finally, after peeling away all her deceptive clothing layers, she pushes my hand away and starts trying to climb up on top of the toilet. Attemps to get her down only elicit screaming, whining, and the odd spat tidak (no). She wants to stand on the three-foot-high toilet seat and just let loose pee in any random direction, which, from three feet, could end up anywhere, especially after she falls off, and she will: her many pairs of pants are still all bunched up around her ankles, just waiting to get peed on.

So I lift her, struggling and squirming, until she's sitting, more or less, on the toilet seat, but she is so small that if I were to let her go, she would fall in immediately. I am holding this girl suspended an inch above a Western toilet in Indonesia as she tries to pee as fast as she can because it's... weird to have to pee while a tall, scary blond stranger who can't speak your language holds you aloft and your pants drag around on the floor and your mommy is nowhere to be found (come to think of it, where is her mommy?) and there is a button that could whisk you down into a big vortex if this stranger lets go and this stranger didn't even know how to work pants, so how can you trust her holding you above a fucking vortex? and so on...