I forgot to mention here that I would be travelling to Wamena for a few days, my last destination in Indonesia aside from the brief layover at Soekarno-Hatta, Jakarta, next Monday. Anyway, that’s where I’ve been.

Wamena is inland about a half-hour propeller-plane ride from Jayapura, pretty much exactly in the center of Papua. My Indonesian-made world map lists its elevation at 4000 meters, but that converts to about 13,000 feet and I doubt its accuracy, given that I had no trouble breathing and the same map also shows Chicago south of Denver and India as a tiny, barely detectable peninsula. In any case, it’s high enough to be cold – actually cold, not fake 85 degree rainy cold – and I slept curled in a down sleeping bag on the dark cement floor of Louise’s room. Nick sweated inches away under a sheet. Periodically, all the dogs in town would break out into frantic barking, and cease seconds later. I tried my best never to have to use the bathroom, because the water tank was filled with cold-hardened mosquitos; not the wimpy langorous ones by the sea, but ones who guarded the water tank like killer bees. When I woke up in the morning, it was always to clouds, hanging low enough, literally, to stretch up and touch. Rickshaws creaked up and down the street. In Jayapura, it’s ‘Mister, mister!’ we get yelled at us whenever we go anywhere. In Wamena, it was ‘Bye-bye! Bye-bye!’ Bye-bye as a greeting.

Since Wamena is so small, it hasn’t stamped out the surrounding tribal culture (and because of this, it’s considered a ‘dangerous area for tourists’ and we had to jump through hoops to get permission to go there). In the market, which looks exactly the same as in any other Papuan city, with everyone dressed in imported T-shirts and mid-length shorts, there are occasional naked old men wearing only kotekas. (A koteka is a horn-shaped wooden penis-covering held up with string around the waist.) Our last day there, Nick and I rounded a corner right in the center of town looking for somewhere to eat when one appeared out of nowhere and insisted upon giving each of us a hug. Then, after sitting patiently outside a food stall waiting for us to finish our milk tea and fish, he made urgent puffing motions with his mouth and then drew pictures of cigarettes all over his arms with a piece of sharp wood. We felt sort of morally wrong about buying cigarettes for an 80 year old tribesman in a koteka, so we caught the next rickshaw home. (We saw him again at the airport, where he tried to make me give him my sweater.)

We went to Louise’s boyfriend’s village, which involved climbing over the airport fence, crossing a hanging bridge over a wide, crocodile-filled muddy river, squelching knee-deep through some pigs’ muddy roaming ground, and stopping in at a cave in the mountains with pitfalls everywhere and an opening into a great yellow lake with about seventeen villagers fishing, but with no fish yet caught. Some children begged to have their picture taken with me. As the shutter clicked, they stood scowling fiercely. They thought it made them look cool. When they saw themselves in the tiny window of my camera screen, they screeched with embarrassment and laughter. Going back, an old man in a koteka careened to a halt in front of us, looking delighted. ‘Waa! Waa! Waa! Waa! Waa! Waa!’ he shouted rhythmically over and over as he took our hands. I asked later: it means hello.

Back in town, we were leaving the internet café and noticed that it had started to rain. We were wondering aloud where we might find some food when a Japanese man appeared and asked ‘Do you want a pancake?’ We thought we had misheard him, or misseen him, or both (there are no pancakes in Indonesia; also, no Japanese people) but followed him into this bizarre hidden apartment behind the internet cafe, where we found two cute young Dutch guys cooking cheesy pancakes with strawberry jam and chocolate sprinkles. This was a giant culture shock, but it didn’t stop us from stuffing our faces and cautiously speaking English to the first strangers we’d met all year who could speak it (and perfectly: very European of them). They had just finished getting very sick in the jungle.

That’s it, really. There was an electric keyboard, guitar, bass, and drums at the church down the street, and we jammed with a bunch of church kids, but it turned out awkward because they only knew songs about praising Jesus, and we only knew... well, everything but that. And then Nick had to say a prayer at the end, which only Louise and I knew he invented on the spot, and only Louise and I almost wet our pants from the strain of holding in our laughter – not because the prayer was funny, or that praising God in general is funny, but because nonreligious Nick praising God to a roomful of Indonesians who think all bules are Christian, in central Papua, where nobody understood a word of his prayer, yet bowed their heads solemnly if a little awkwardly, was extremely funny. In an absurd way.

Three weeks and two days ago from now the title of my blog will be misleading or just outright wrong. I will instead be newlyunindonesian, and newlychicagoan, or, I guess, newlyrechicagoan, given that I’ll never feel new in Chicago because I spent the first 18 years of my life there. I wonder how quickly 18 years of being used to being freezing can be erased. Probably really quickly. Probably I’ll step out of the terminal at O’Hare and promptly shrivel up and die.

I’m drinking water. Trying to picture that water being ice. Trying to picture that ice being everywhere. My windows closed. Ice on these windows. Some rusting old heater – if Indonesia ever had a reason to make heaters, what bizarre defect would they have? – and its blasting cycles, like at home. For some reason I think it’d be like the one at home in that way.

Trying to remember walking in the snow, being so cold that the only thing I want in the world is to be warm. I remember it best in Chicago, the feeling of emerging from the subway. Wind tunnels down the stairs, like Chicago doesn’t want you emerging, would rather you stay underground. A scarf being the more important thing you own, and if it’s a fashion scarf, or knitted sloppily, with large looped holes in it, then it fails. No, it must be inches thick and ugly, industrial. Preferably brown and multilayered. Stuck to your face with frozen snot.

I can write it well enough, but that’s about it – I can’t feel it. The other day the sky opened up on me as I was arguing with a random guy who was trying to make me pay Rp. 20,000 for sitting on a hill, and my T-shirt stuck to my body and I thought, shit, I’m cold. I think it was about 85 degrees outside.

More adventures at the post office:

I had to go to the post office again to get a stamp for a postcard I’m sending (to someone who knows who he is) and said as much to the guy behind the counter, who was sitting at a desk littered with different types of stamps, and he took my postcard, but looked terrified, and held it in a shaking hand as he made several false starts. First he reached for a small filing cabinet. Then he rattled off a list of questions to his friend at the next desk. Then he squinted at the postcard and mouthed the letters ‘U... S... A...’. Then he picked up some stamps, and put them down again. He slapped the postcard down and picked it up. He turned to his friend again and giggled nervously. Then he held the postcard back out to me and whispered ‘Harus pakai stamp.’ (You must use a stamp.)

I gestured to the stamps littering his desk. ‘Seperti itu? Saya mau bayar satu untuk kartu pos.’ (Like those? I want to pay for one for my postcard. [probably in terrible Indonesian])

He looked confused and gestured to the office next door. ‘Tutup.’ (Closed.)

‘Apa tutup?’ (What’s closed?)

‘Something unintelligible.’

Okay.

So now I have the invaluable information that if I go to buy a stamp for a postcard, I must use a stamp, and it’s closed right now, despite all the stamps in stacks and rows in front of me. I’m pretty grateful for that knowledge, I’ve got to say.

Some photos I've been unable to upload until now - they're not meant to be artistic, just demonstrative:


In order:
Sunset from our balcony.


GREEN.


Skow Sae, my favorite beach. Almost at the Papua New Guinea border.


This is what I look like nearly all the time. Eating rambutan. I LOVE RAMBUTAN.


And a blown-out shot of a beach on Biak.

Spent today in the market staring at dead squid eyes and cow skins. Studying how things look whole. Living in the states, I forget. I forget that fish aren’t swimming, glistening fillets, and squids aren’t disembodied legs, or naturally breaded into calamari. I caught a glimpse of what I thought was sausages, and I was excited, because sausages become available maybe once every two months, but they turned out to be tamarinds, the only fruit in the world that looks exactly like lots of little pieces of poo.

This is good for me. Not the pieces of poo. Seeing how animals look before we render them unrecognizable. I’ve always said I won’t eat anything that I would have a moral problem with killing myself. (That’s one of those confusing sentences that’s impossible to repair, so I’ll leave it.) It’s harder here. You become faced with it. Here, I’ve been offered dog. I turned it down. I couldn’t kill a dog. I’ve been offered deer. I could kill a deer. I ate it. It was delicious. And someone probably shot it wild. Not that wild means much where I live. Deep, dense jungle fades abruptly into city. The city is built right into the crannies, until it’s too steep to be built anymore. Deer emerge from behind one tree to dart to another tree, to dart to another tree, and find themselves in the middle of the main road. I never picture deer as a tropical animal. Do you?

Things I Didn’t Know One Could Eat Until Papua:
Cow backbone
Raw sea urchin

The list is short, but it’s intriguing.

Friday, January 13, 2007
Have you ever dreamt that you had been shot in the head, and then felt an enormous sense of relief that now you knew what it felt like to be shot in the head? (Like a lightning strike of terrible stinging, but at a safe distance, at maybe a memory’s distance, and then a cocoon of fading, like beginning to dream.)

Last night it was the Catholic bishop in my Level 10 class who shot me in the head. He shot me because I was gathering stolen diamonds from the common room floor to pile in his arms. He shouted through a megaphone for everyone to drop the diamonds. People were trying to make off with them. I was trying to consolidate them so that they could be easily returned. I said this to him as he approached. He shot me anyway. It must have had something to do with his English listening comprehension.

I woke up to someone outside blaring his car horn through the rain. He blared it for a good half hour, at unpredictable intervals. He was probably blaring it for someone to come out who most likely wasn’t even home, who most likely was unaware of any plans to pick him up. Don’t ever make plans with Indonesians. They aren’t plans. They’re vague ideas, what-ifs, and they rarely, if ever, come to fruition.

The man blared his horn anyway. He was persistent. Nick rolled over and opened his eyes.
“I dreamed that Father Y. shot me in the head,” I said.
“Mmm,” he replied, and rolled back.

A few weeks ago Dyah went into the bathroom at school to find the toilet closed and festooned with three little firecracker-shaped packages wrapped in newspaper. By the time I got there, there was a crowd of women, staring into the open bathroom door, everyone afraid to be the one to go in.
“What’s the matter, are you all in the qway-way?” I asked Dyah, because awhile ago someone’s student was late, and he wanted to impress his teacher to make up for it by using a hard word, so he used his dictionary to look up a synonym for ‘traffic jam’ and found ‘queue’. “Sorry I’m late,” he said to his teacher, “but I got caught in a qway-way in Entrop.” This has circulated. Now we say qway-way whenever possible. It never gets less funny. I don’t know why.
She didn’t laugh, though. “Look,” she said, pointing at the firecracker-shaped objects. “Maybe it’s bomb.”
Nobody touched them.
“I really have to go,” Enny said.
“So?” Dyah said, gesturing toward the bathroom and its possible bombs. “Go.”
Enny didn’t move.
“Ike?”
“Not me.”
“Hannah?”
“Never.”
The objects sat there, menacing. Students were starting to notice. Someone went to get Michael. He strode upstairs and opened one of the packages over the sink, wincing. Everyone’s hands strayed near their ears.
“BOOOM!” he shouted. The entire hallway shrieked. It was a tube of lipstick. Another. “BOOOOM!” It was a rolled up comic book. The last one. “BOOOOOM!” A plastic flute.

I lay in bed thinking about this.

It’s raining, finally. It has been raining for days. I need sheets to cover myself at night for the first time in months. Outside, my laundry is streaming soap and rainwater into the gutter, which is streaming soap, rainwater, sand, and orange leaves into the neighbors’ fish pond. A cream-and-white cat crouches on the tin roof overlooking this stream; its ribs loop painfully under its skin. It jumps in our kitchen window at night and eats our rats. Sometimes Ibu shoos it away with well-aimed kicks. I can’t understand this. Just because it washes the rats down with some of our trash.

I think about this, and how it relates to what I want. Mostly I think about how it doesn’t. I think about how I grew up. I think about my conviction that every only child is spoiled. I still believe this to be almost always true. It’s definitely true in my case. I’ve never denied that.

Louise was adamant, always, in her declaration that happy people will be happy regardless of changes to their environment, and unhappy people, the same thing. I believe her, even though I don’t want to. It makes wanting to go home irrelevant. It makes my now strong and pervasive desire for good food irrelevant – and when is that ever a good thing? What has the world come to when there’s no difference in happiness between masses of MSG soaked rice with a tiny, soggy cut of bay-caught, filthy-from-the-barge-traffic-tuna, and a wood platter stacked with an immaculate, perfectly cut variety of raw fish adorned with daikon, carrot, and seaweed?

It’s not that, though. I know this journal has tired of bearing longing-laden descriptions of faraway food, and I’m trying to quit, but at this point, it’s an addiction. Every thought train is derailed there.

Nothing really makes me happier, though, to wish for, than good food and an endlessly thorough back massage. And after that, a nap. In the sun. But not the equatorial sun, not this sun that’s impossible to cower under for longer than five minutes without beginning to feel faint. Somewhere Californian in June. And a swim in the ocean, at the kind of beach where there’s a slow, steady dropaway and bodysurfing waves. And more good food when I emerge. And then a soundproof music studio, equipped only with a great touch-sensitive electric keyboard and a microphone and no other human being for miles, just for good measure. Hours and hours of that, with snacks at hand, more hours until my voice is hoarse. And then a party. But a party with only my closest friends, and maybe their guests, and nobody who I felt I had to invite just to be polite or to keep up appearances. Getting drunk would be okay, but not getting drunk would not be prohibitive to having fun, and if the alcohol happened to run out, half the party would not take off for another party with a keg, nor want to. Everyone would take forever to get sleepy, and there would be a long period where everyone wavered in their minds between being asleep and being awake, and spoke with that dreamy quality that, if heard in the morning, wouldn’t seem to be following any thread. Everything would be uproariously funny – everything would hold gravity – everything would seem to hinge upon everything else. And everybody would fall asleep at different times and the conversations of the people remaining awake would drift into the dreams of the people who had fallen asleep.

If a trip was capable of having mental disorders, this one (to Biak) would be diagnosed manic-depressive the second it walked into the office. No inkblots, no portrait exercises of the soul, no long multiple-choice tests filled with bubbles. I can run it down in two columns: the happy, exciting column and the terrible column, and, chronologically, they stay equal and extreme. Behold:

☺: Upon arrival in Biak, which is dumping rain like mad, we run into a nice man that happens to also be our neighbor in Jayapura. He offers to give us a ride into town.

☹: Nick somehow manages to use one of those American expressions to accept his offer that means yes but sounds exactly like no. The man climbs into his car and drives away alone.

☺: The taxi fare turns out to be Rp. 1500.

☹: But we have no idea where we are going or whether there are any hotels.

☺: We run into a coworker’s sister while we are wandering aimlessly around town (having arrived there mostly by luck). She takes charge of us and leads us on a tour of every possible hotel in town.

☹: The hotel we like won’t let us rent a double room because we aren’t married.

☺: The sister tries to bribe them. This is funny even though it doesn’t work. We find a better hotel, lie about our marital status, and are subsequently given a double room.

☹: Now I have to think of Nick as my husband. Creepy.

☺: We take a walk down to the beach and find a beautiful grove of palms. We decide to explore.

☹: The palm grove turns out to be a graveyard. The villagers are visibly upset that we almost trod on their dead. One of them walks over, looking menacing, and…

☺: …after some friendly conversation, offers to drive us to a good beach in East Biak the next day.

☹: He flakes.

☺: But as a direct result of his flaking, we meet another man, who, upon discovery that we aren’t rich tourists, offers to take us along for free on a snorkeling outing to the outlying coral islands he’s going on anyway with a couple of Russian tourists the next day.

☹: It rains, so no snorkeling trip.

☺: We find a nearby restaurant that serves shrimp and squid, Chinese-style. It is indescribably delicious.

☹: It gives me mild food poisoning immediately, waits a day, then gives Nick severe food poisoning.

☺: We run into Snorkeling Trip Guy, who’s actually really nice, at the fish market. He lends us a snorkeling mask and puts us on a public taxi to East Biak, where we find a gorgeous beach positively encrusted with nearly untouched seashells and a nearby cliff to dive from.

☹: Then there’s a gigantic thunderstorm.

☺: New Years Eve fireworks!

☹: New Years Eve fireworks shot haphazardly by drunk people out of backyards, off roofs, down streets, at people, etc! Bottle rockets sweeping policemen’s feet out from under them! Truckloads of people with firecrackers all clamoring to throw them out the window at the same time!

☺: The next day is sunny and we are able to go on the original snorkeling trip.

☹: But unfortunately it’s New Years Day, and everything is closed – supermarkets, tokos, warungs, everything. This means we have no breakfast and can’t pack a lunch for the trip. We are so hungry all day we almost die.

☺: In my delirium, I don’t remember that I always get seasick. So I don’t get seasick. I am able to pay attention to the swarms of flying fish that skim the air around our boat.

☹: The Russians are Supertourists. They don’t like the snorkeling area. They have a sneaking suspicion that the boat driver isn’t a certified Snorkeling Operator or something. The woman walks around in her bra and underwear, unaware that she’s being entirely culturally inappropriate. There is a lot of yelling and complaining. The sun hurts them. They know better than the boat driver which way is the correct way to go. Etc.

☺: We catch our plane home without any dramatic fuss.

It starts and ends with smiles, right? So I guess it was a success.

Merry Christmas. Running water has temporarily run out, so we’re all washing dishes with, and wiping our asses with, and drinking, boiled rainwater, or, you know, we would be, except it hasn’t rained for a week. Because of this, Nick has reinfected himself with the same stomach virus two or three times, whereas I remain inexplicably immune. I would really like to take a break from the squalidity for awhile, though. Is squalidity a word? I am heavily feeling my American privilege right now. The fact that I can even consider taking a break. Even though it will stay that – just considering – it somehow sets me apart.

Christmas here is a little like Halloween in that everyone cooks a feast and then waits for everyone in the neighborhood to come visiting and partake of the feast. Wade says that the reason behind that is that any of the visitors could be the Messiah. And who could live with themselves if they accidentally refused food to the Messiah? Unfortunately, bules can’t be the Messiah, I guess, because even though our household, too, cooked a feast, we just get LOOKED AT all weird when we show up at other people’s houses. This, plus the fact that all the stores are closed for Christmas, plus the fact that there’s no water, means that we’ll pretty much starve all day, except for the gratuitous amounts of chocolate my parents sent in their Christmas packages. Isn’t Papua great? Isn’t Christmas great?

I’m depressed here lately. I don’t know if you can tell, because I focus endlessly on minutae instead of whining about it (thankfully). But I am. I wish my culture shock would follow the approved trajectory outlined in my helpful ‘Dealing With Culture Shock’ pamphlet, but my culture shock apparently doesn’t read pamphlets, because it’s marching to the beat of its own depressed little drummer. According to the pamphlet, I should have had a honeymoon period for the first month or so, then about three months of frustrating assimilation paired with sleepless nights and homesick thoughts; then, at five months, begin to feel at home in the new culture. In truth, I had a honeymoon period during the second month only, during which I happily drew all the nature around me, took photos of it, chattered away in broken Indonesian to any curious local who approached me, obviously creepy or no, and spent lots of free time coming up with fun, complicated games for my classes. The first month was spent getting pissed off about showering with cold water from a bucket and the like, and the third and fourth month were spent in a foggy state of apathy. Now, in the fifth month, I’m just sick of everything. The next person who tries to get my attention with a ‘Sssst!’ through their lips, like I’m an animal, is getting punched in the face. The next person who tries to touch my arm while we’re both riding motorcycles really fast by riding up dangerously close to me and yelling ‘BULEBULEBULEBULE’ is going to get ridden off the road, and then punched in the face.

Louise used to tell me stories about how she bloodied people’s noses, and I would be amazed at how anyone could take that much offense at what was obviously harmless, but now I understand perfectly. I am so on edge that I get filled with rage now when I think of how uncreative Indonesians are with their cooking, even, or when I see someone throwing their soda cans and peanut bags into the ocean, like everyone does all the time, or when I rent a movie and notice that half the scenes have been censored. If I try and comfort myself by eating, my choices are some form of rice or some form of noodles with bitter, tough spinach and some overcooked fish, all generously soaked in MSG no matter how many times I tell the person to tidak pakai vetsin. I mean, please. MSG COSTS YOU MONEY TO BUY, AND FOOD WITHOUT MSG DOESN’T COST LESS TO SELL. IF SOMEONE SPECIFICALLY DOESN’T WANT IT, YOU SAVE MONEY BY NOT PUTTING IT IN. I’m so lucky my Indonesian is still terrible. If I could say everything that I wanted to say, someone would have shot me by now.

Awards to Things I Brought In My Suitcase

Most Useful:
Laptop Computer, but that’s cheating, I think, so A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson

Most Ridiculous:
Warm fuzzy slippers

Most Weather-Appropriate; Unfortunately, Also Most Culturally Inappropriate:
A red bikini

Most Initially Useful, But Eventually Gave Me a Painful Esophageal Infection:
8 bottles of Doxycycline malaria-preventive pills

Most Unethical:
A DVD set of Penn & Teller’s Bullshit! that I forgot to return to my friend Molly before I left the States

Most Curious to the Locals:
Contact lenses

Most Regrettable:
A relatively expensive, heavy speaker system that cost me $50 in overweight baggage costs and then promptly fried the second I plugged it into the wall here, despite the presence of the appropriate voltage converter

Most Reminiscent of Home:
Blueberry body lotion, or a necklace of dried roses

Thing I Most Wish I Had Brought, However Unexpected This May Sound:
100 packets of Kraft Macaroni and Cheese Mix

December 21, 2006

All my interactions with people here are accompanied, always uncomfortably, by The Smile. You know the one. It’s the fog of nonthreateningness that you wear when you know that very very few actual words are getting through. The Smile persists through every kind of encounter; with fruit vendor dudes, with chicken saté dudes, with post office dudes, with random dudes on the street who want to have conversations about where I live, etc.

The Smile is distinct from the tight-lipped half-smirk that Americans give to each other when two strangers or remote acquaintances pass each other in a place where it would be considered rude not to look up. Here we call this the bulesmile because nobody uses it except white people. I’ve seen a few white people here, and they all do it. Look up from the ground, twist the lips, look back at the ground. Like ‘I see you, and I don’t want to get into anything with you, goodbye.’

This is not at all like The Smile. The Smile is broad and toothy and involves the entire face. It puts a laugh in the voice of the person using it. The doggedness of it made itself clear to me today when I wore it all through the following encounter with the guy who works in the package room in the post office. I was picking up a package sent to me by my dad. The postal service had failed to actually deliver it, like always. Instead they hoard it in the far reaches of the post office (I’m writing it in English for obvious reasons, but it was all in Indonesian):

Post Office Guy (smiling): Okay, that’ll be Rp.10,000.
Me (smiling, pointing at the postage mark, which reads $34.15): Paid already.
Post Office Guy (smiling): Yes, but you must pay 10,000 to pick it up.
Me (smiling): No.
Post Office Guy (smiling): Yes.
Me (smiling): The people at EF told me I shouldn’t have to pay.
Post Office Guy (smiling): Oh yes, yes, of course, that’s okay. Goodbye, Merry Christmas.
Me (smiling): Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to you too.

Like, that’s the conversational equivalent of smiling brightly, laughing a tinkling laugh, and saying ‘Hey, you’re trying to extort money from me because I’m a bule and ostensibly don’t know better, and I totally see right through you! Tee hee! And now that you know I speak Indonesian and have actual knowledge, you’re trying to pretend that you never tried to extort it in the first place! Ha ha ha! You’re an asshole!’

But even if I could say all of that in Indonesian, which I can’t (the closest I can come would come out something like ‘You person not good’) I wouldn’t, because I don’t want to make him angry. If I make him angry, he can pretend my packages never arrived in the first place, or steal them, or do any number of things I don’t want him to do.

Another conversation inappropriately permeated with The Smile:

Guy Who’s Bothering Me While I’m Trying To Write A Song On The Beach (smiling): Do you like Indonesian men?
Me (smiling): All individual men are different.
GWBMWITTWASOTB (smiling): Can I come to your house?
Me (smiling): No. Definitely not.
GWBMWITTWASOTB (smiling): Am I disturbing you by sitting next to you?
Me (smiling): Yes.
GWBMWITTWASOTB (smiling, continuing to sit next to me): Oh, okay.

What’s especially perverse about it is that it’s the exact same Smile I use when I’m having pleasant conversations with nice people (contrary to what my blog may have you believe, these people do exist):

Woman in the Back of a Taxi (smiling): Hey, hey! You dropped your motorcycle helmet out the window!
Me (smiling, relieved because I would have lost my helmet): Thank you SO much!

or

Fruit Vendor Dude (smiling): You buy rambutan so often, today you get half free.
Me (smiling): That’s nice of you!
FVD (smiling): You must watch out for that man – he is trying to touch your butt.
Me (smiling): Thank you, I will.

So it’s an indiscriminate Smile, which makes it even stranger. By looking at me, you would never be able to tell what kind of conversation I’m having, or how I feel about the person I’m having it with.

The Smile is also often accompanied by the Awkward Southeast Asian Half-Bow of Acquiescence, but we won’t get into that. Let’s just leave it at the fact that it’s mostly used for everything except acquiescing.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

This entry is actually two entries. (And this, hopefully, is a picture of Jayapura Bay from the top of a lighthouse at the beach). I have (finally) found a way to connect my computer at the internet cafés, so I can type my entries at home, where there is no SHITTY DISTRACTING MUSIC, and then post them in a lump later. And incidentally, everyone should use AIM more.

10/25
Idul Fitri. I find myself on a long, skinny speedboat with skids on the side, weaving in and out of of heavily jungled islands, with a family that is only tangentially mine – the family of a fellow teacher’s fiancé. Everyone is shy and they pretend we aren’t there. Where did they get the boat? I don’t know. Whose house is this that I’m standing in? Could be anyone’s. Why is there a Canada plate mounted on the wall? Why are we taking the baby parrot on a boat ride? Now we’re in another house. Whose house? Beats me. There’s an entire village built on sticks sticking out of the shallow bay. The roads are wood slats laid across stronger wood slats laid across stronger wood slats laid across… what? Does anybody know why our motorcycle isn’t falling through into the bay filled with Pocari Sweat cans and black plastic bags and sickly looking fish? Whose porch are we parking on? Why is that guy taking all our shoes and throwing them in a plastic bag? Why do biscuits exist that are flavored with salt, butter, and artificial grape syrup?

We maroon ourselves on a tiny beach at dusk that only gets tinier as the tide rolls in. I’ve been there before; it’s the one that takes the two hour long terrifying hike to get to. I prefer the boat, even with all the uncertainty and the fact that no one seems to notice that we’re going to have to eventually navigate our way back home on the open ocean around random rocks and coral reefs and treacherous cliffs’ edges in the pitch black night. I ask Nick if this is such a great idea, to which he replies, “No big deal, dinghies have pretty powerful lights.” Except ours doesn’t, because it’s made out of logs. But, you know, it’s all the same to him.

The anticipation of the night to come makes me slightly insane, and as I’m struggling in my soft, bare feet after the group as they clamber up the slippery, steep rocks of a mountain stream to see what is promised to be an amazing waterfall, I’m silently muttering in my head: “Myeh myeh myeh, I’m Indonesian! The soles of my feet are like leather! I can walk on volcanic rock that has sharp points sticking out of it everywhere! I like running across narrow logs balanced precariously on mysterious chunks of dirt that are suspended over hundreds of feet of nothingness! I can relax anywhere because I grew up without chairs so I can squat on absolutely any surface for hours without looking awkward and falling over! I can selflessly help the stupid American move maddeningly slowly for hours and hours without showing the least bit of impatience! Myeh myeh myeh!”

But, to tell you the truth, I loved them the entire time I was muttering, and after, when we all showered together under the waterfall, and before, when they fed everyone fish barbecued over a fire on the beach. “Hey, our people have custom,” Daniel, Ike’s fiancé, says. “Custom is, we must eat all we have brought, or else we not allowed to leave. It’s your responsibility.”

What it is is an excuse to get us to eat our eighth slice of fish without feeling guilty, and it works. “This is my favorite kind of responsibility,” I reply, pouring peanut and chili sambal over the fish and the rice. I have a pile of pink and purple and green and cream shells around my feet. Nick is trying to surf on a piece of driftwood. Hiron has the parrot riding around on his head like some kind of pirate. Daniel is telling me how bad he feels for us that we don’t have any family in Papua, and how, if we want, he can be our family. It’s a pretty perfect day as perfect days go, even with the bleeding feet and a cashew chocolate bar melting all over my backpack. Even with that.

10/20
We raced our engine up and down cliffs and our motorcycle is a quiet one so we had to scream the engine noises instead.
“BURRRRRRRRR!” Nick yelled as we downshifted for a steep climb and passed a pickup full of Papuans*.
“BA-BAP! BA-BAP!” I shrieked with the gearshift as Nick kicked it down, down, down, down, one for each gear, to stop at a stoplight.
‘REOOOOOH! REOOOOOOOOHRHRHRHHHRH! REEeeeeoooooHHEHEHRHRH!” we shouted together at bikers without mufflers as their exhaust pipes shot out blipblipblips of smoke and we went flying past them.
“Hey, QUIT holding onto my shirt!” Nick spat back at me, so I threatened to pull it up and flash passersby his tits. “Do it!” he said, so I did, as we flew around a corner and through a little cluster of warungs and markets screaming girls-gone-wild style all the way.
People don’t stare, or at least they don’t stare anymore than they do already just because we’re bules (Westerners, but slightly more offensive), which is always and hard, so I guess they do stare, but we’re past caring. I pull his shirt back down just as we pass a traffic cop, blowing his whistle in vain at every single driver on the road, because every single driver on the road is doing something illegal.
Road rules here are more like suggestions, anyway. "One Way Street" means "don't go the wrong way on this street, unless of course you're in a big hurry to get somewhere, or you are learning to ride your bike and don't want to make a bunch of right turns unnecessarily, or are going to speed down it so fast the police won't care about catching you." The other day Nick weaved around some blocking cones that were meant to control rush hour traffic and shot down a one way shortcut street the wrong way, and right at the corner was a police campout. One of the policemen yelled 'Hey!' and then went on chewing his betelnut. The others hadn't noticed because they were watching an attractive woman coming out of the marketplace.

*Is it clear what I mean when I say Papuans, as opposed to Indonesians? In Indonesia, there is, and was, a resettlement effort, to try and shuffle the population so it would get more evenly distributed. Papua has only recently become part of Indonesia, so the native Papuans look entirely different and have an entirely different culture than the Indonesians who have recently moved here. When I say 'Papuans', I mean the natives, even though they are also Indonesian, technically. They, however, are much much more polite, helpful, and friendly than Indonesians from other parts of the archipelago, and I know that this is a generalization, but everything I've observed so far holds it to be true. Every time I have spoken in this blog of someone helping me through the jungle or up and down cliffs or someone cooking me food for no reason, it's been Papuans who have done it.

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?

The inevitable has happened, and it has happened after a deceptive string of innocent requests. "What's a Rolls-Royce? What's ESP? What's 'going bananas'?" Leading, leading, leading.
I tell him, but "Where do you hear these words?"
"Oprah."
"Ah."
"What's a call girl?" Okay, not entirely innocent. I tell him, though.
"Where'd you hear that one?"
"The internet."
"Ah."
"What's a detention? What does it mean to have a crush?"
And...
"What's a cock?"
A cock?
"Do you want me to spell it?" He thinks I don't know. It doesn't occur to me until later that it is an option to pretend I don't know.
"No, I know what it is, I just..."
"Is it a bad word?"
"Yes... no. No."
"Then what?"
Silence for a couple of seconds. It's a fifteen-year-old asking, and the class has another teenager, a 45-year-old Catholic priest, and a 39-year-old extremely devout Muslim in it. Can I say 'penis' in front of a Catholic priest and a fasting Muslim woman looking tiredly, but expectantly, at me, shrouded in her headscarf? I'm not entirely sure.
"I'm asking because... I was on the internet and someone said 'Suck my cock.'"
OH.
"I know what suck means! But I don't know what cock means!"
Now it's not just saying 'penis' in front of the aforementioned people, but talking about sucking cock. AWESOME. I shouldn't have given him the opportunity to use it in context.
I tell him, though: "Cock means penis."
"OHHhhhh?" he half-shrieks, then, as class is over, I have four students studiously avoiding my eye as they file out.

I am digging deep into the red dirt with all twenty of my fingers and toes. My sandals are somewhere about a hundred feet above me, hooked in Nick's belt loop. Two Papuan women are bracing their palms on my butt. Pushing me up as gravity is pulling me down. This is either a path from the beach or a cliff; I can't decide which. "Make your feet like a duck!" Nick yells down at me as the women strain against my butt. They are mostly immune to gravity because they are about five feet tall and sturdy, grounded, with strong toes that curl into any surface like roots. Both of them behind me going up. One on each side going down, linking arms with me, alternating between springing across the rocks and weeds and hesitating, motioning to me with hands that are half-encouraging and half-cautious. "Hati-hati!" they admonish. Three hundred feet of plunging crumbling grey rock two inches away from my slipping left heel.

It is the first day I have been able to carry on a conversation in Indonesian, and it has probably saved my life. Being able to say 'beach', 'I don't understand', 'we will be here for a year', 'bird of paradise', 'I am tall' and other completely random phrases has made us an instant crowd of friends who, upon seeing our growing procession, drop their cassava-farming-implements and join us, forming a parade down the terrifying cliff to the beach. This is my favorite beach - (mostly) lacking sea urchins but with high waves and with a high waterfall that pours down onto the back end of the beach with enough force to wash me completely of the coarse, sticky sand that one finds here and also to wash my hair better than any shampoo ever has or ever will. Standing under the waterfall at high tide, the ocean comes pounding up to my ankles. At high tide, there is no part of the beach that is dry. Have you ever stood beneath a waterfall cascading out of the jungle with the ocean ebbing around your feet?

The villagers have a little orange blow-up basketball. They want to play volleyball with it in the water as they point at things, shout their names in Indonesian, and inquire eagerly 'bahasa Inggris?' How do you say it in English? After 'beach', 'swim', and 'waves', they lose interest, and focus on correcting my water-volleyball technique, which I can't really figure out because there are no boundaries, no teams, no points, and occasionally a big set of waves will come and wash someone out to sea or deposit them roughly on the shore. They are mostly unconcerned about drowning, or about anything, really. I am gearing up to serve in what has been mild water when suddenly this 15-foot wave comes charging up and I don't have time to think about what to do. It comes crashing down right into my left ear, lifts me, wildly flailing and sort of surfing, but mostly just tumbling, and, as the beach rises before me, shoves my jaw and most of my head into the sand, and recedes. Children are rising, unruffled, around me, but my head is pounding so loudly that I feel like the entire ocean has been washed through my ear into my brain. My jaw is out of alignment and clicking. I sway and go down again. Nick washes up on the shore with the next wave and puts his arms around me, which causes everyone to shriek with giggles and to clamber over some rocks, singing a song in harmony and screaming every time the sea sprays over their rock. They are correct, of course, and in five minutes we are up and sharing our peanut butter and jelly, teaching greetings and colors in English because that's all they want, to learn English, and a great bargain it is, in exchange for saving me from plunging to my death about four or five times! Every time Naomi, the first to join our initial beach parade, speaks a word in English that hasn't been specifically modeled for her, she claps her hand over her mouth and collapses in giggles, out for the count for at least a minute. On the way back, I can hear one of the children chanting, "Red, green, purple, yellow, pink, brown, black. Red, green, purple, yellow, pink, brown, black!"

I begin wishing that I could quit my job teaching structured, boring English to rich people and kids with rich parents in exchange for a paltry salary and just teach fun, relaxed English to a village full of Papuans in exchange for food and shelter, and in between, we could play beach volleyball with no rules, get pounded by freak waves, pull the pineapples that grow, with no provocation, everywhere, and generally just wander around in the jungle looking at stuff. I'm not usually that kind of person, but I must admit that that would be THE life.

Face up, butt down, on a green cot in the military hospital. Muslim nurses; to my eyes, blurry, and my swimming mind, they look like Catholic nuns. But gentle. They murmur soft commands in Indonesian. Louise hovers in the background, translating on occasion. Someone asks her if she is my mother. I laugh, jerk, cough, cough, cough. Louise is 28. “Those fuckers,” she breathes, but she, too, is laughing. I wonder, in between fits of coughing, how I came to be struggling to breathe on a curtained-off cot with an ancient armpit thermometer tucked in my T-shirt and a young Australian near-stranger acting the part of my mother, right down to the part where she cooks me spiced salad, green beans, and cheesy mashed potatoes, and, on another night, pumpkin spaetzle, and refuses to let me move a muscle to help. How, also, did I come to be playing Hitler Has Bad Gas with six teenagers from all over the Indonesian archipelago, and how did that particular game come to depict Angelina Jolie as a purple marker stick figure with 3 arms? How did I come to live trapped in a tiny hot saggy-mattressed room with someone who seems to hate me, and, more importantly, how did I come to stop really caring?

Diyah, my team-teacher, tells me that she drank a noxious glassful of mixed plants and herbs that her sister concocted every morning during her senior year of high school to cure her nearsightedness. She thinks it is puzzling and quite hilarious that I, and every other Western teacher in the room, is immediately upon her: "How do you make it? How do you make it?"

Some of the plants, most of them, only grow in Java. She doesn't remember. Her eyesight is perfect now. She watches, fascinated, as I put in my contact lenses. I watch, fascinated, as she entirely fails to grasp the sheer awesomeness and power of what she has said.

Anyway, "You must stop Doxycycline," the blue-wrapped nurse tells me as she scribbles out a prescription for enough antibiotics to fell a hippo. "If you take, you feel like this every day." So no more malaria preventatives. But I can swallow. And I can breathe. And I am (mostly, at least) alive.