Bamboo

There is a small establishment next to our hotel called Papas y Burgers. It consists of a small house that opens up to a fenced off area shaded by a tin roof, populated by dark tables and chairs. They have napkin holders made of shaven bamboo trunks filled with brown recycled napkins that match the brown recycled toilet paper in the bathrooms. They provide chess and backgammon sets and a pile of National Geographic in Spanish. A skateboard and boogey board lean casually on the walls.

Three guys run this place and are reliably around for most of the day, all of the days. Two of them have English accents: one has his head shaved and the other wears aviator sunglasses. The third talks like an American, and is likely from the Bronx? LA? Chicago? I will have to ask...There is a Spanish-speaking girl that is often around, sitting at the tables sipping on beer, or walking in and out from behind the bar. Her skin is a dark caramel, toned by the weight of the waves. She wears a black tank top and short shorts with brightly colored palm tree and surf board patterns. She's the kind that has a tattoo.

They take the time here to brew a batch of tea and ice it to ensure that it is decaf the way I prefer it. I was excited to see that there is a newly installed bubble blowing machine tucked into the corner of the entrance now quietly injecting little glistening pearls into the sun-filled humid air. But my favorite part: the smooth, slow, chilling beats of what they call "Buddha Bar" that constantly pulse here off their iTunes playlist. It reminds me that it is still possible to find Zen, that Zen is waiting for me, for as long as I hover under this tin roof, my chin propped up on my elbows by the bamboo napkin holders.

Curious

We are in Costa Rica. The place seemed to be designed just for tourists: a very small piece of land in which you can drive to most places in less than 5 hours, where once you leave the beach, you find green mountains, keep going through the mountains and you'll find exotic rain forests with endangered species all around. No wasted space here.

We passed by many houses/huts in the mountains - the kind that seem to be common in tropical places. They lack thick walls, windows and chimneys - obsolete here. We passed one that had a large tent shielding large piles of lumbar and later a serious but calm looking man holding a machete over his shoulder, which got me wondering what these people did for a living. Did they all know their neighbors? If so, who did they know to be respectable? Who did they know to fear? Who did they avoid talking to? Sleeping with?

Monterrey Entries

Dust 2/14/09

Place 3/1/09

Place

“[People] are linked to that environment through three key psychological processes: attachment, familiarity, and identity. Place attachment…is a mutual caretaking bond between a person and a beloved place. Familiarity refers to the processes by which people develop detailed cognitive knowledge of their environs. Place identity is concerned with the extraction of a sense of self based on the places in which one passes one's life.” – Mindy Fullilove

After the episodes of traveling and the supposedly scientific paper writing about the topic, only now am I becoming cognoscente of how I come to know a place. I walked through el Parque Fundidora and afterwards along the canal Paseo de Santa Lucia to the downtown plaza one afternoon. The park is a large, flat stretch of land dotted with random structures of industry – rusty iron flumes penetrating the sky, bright yellow painted half-cars of trains, skeleton towers that once supported God-knows what at one time. At one edge of the park lies the sleeping giant – the Fundidora, or iron plant – dark and ominous with spikes jutting out of its unkempt mane. It breathes when I’m not looking. Its insides have been converted into a modern museum of the science and history of iron-making, a tribute to the industry that suckled and made fat the city. For the time being, it allows the human parasite to linger in its belly until the day it decides to awaken and do unto the petty squatters what it pleases. The poems and incantations of the long passed workers and servants give worship to the turbulence and majesty of its being: the heat of its insides, the fumes of its anger, the turbulence of its temper. It provided for them and toyed with their fragile corpses and hearts as all gods do.

It was the first time I was alone with the park and I decided that I needed to find a place within it that I would call my favorite to make it my own. I came upon a small clearing in which the cement pavement was replaced by a patchwork of square metal platforms. The patchwork was missing several pieces, the gaps revealing the vertical twigs of water spewing from rusty iron pipes running below: a chessboard made by a drunkard. On one edge of the patchwork sat an old metal piece of machinery whose function I realized was no longer worth understanding. It was now to be honored for its shape, its scars, its age, like an old woman in a black and white photograph. It matters not what it has gone through and suffices to say that it was ‘a lot.’ I chose this to be my favorite spot. It was to be mine and mine only to sit by and love as others walked by, once in a while stopping to marvel at its curious constitution. I suppose this is love: we decide that one is to be our favorite and stay by him, as the rest of the world strolls by in occasional admiration.

There were several more things I made my own that night – the chocolate and caramel filled churros from the small shop by the canal that consistently delivers the same crispy, gooey, sweet surprise; the bridge shaped like a rotary highway that allows you to descend to the side you seek only once you’ve followed its circumference; the sugar-sprinkled mini empanadas wrapped in clear plastic that inhabit the small bakery in the alleyway behind the flashy duplex mall; the mariachi band singing on a boat forever anchored to the bank of the canal being paid by whom to do so, I will never know; the aging man from Argentina guarding his telescope with a sign saying “Venus - free” showing passers-by his pet planet to whom we all feel obligated to give a few coins; and the lovers embracing and kissing proudly under the many milky pools of lamp light. I walked and sat until I was satisfied that I had collected enough belongings in this place. Yes, I can say I know Monterrey – or my little bite of it – for now and for eternity. Yes, these things now belong to me and in exchange, my sentiments, my tears, and a small serving of my heart now belong to it.

But I was wrong about knowing Monterrey. I didn’t then – not the Monterrey that I would come to remember.

In these foreign places where I resort to the sound of P. Diddy to remind me of who I am, I find myself even more sensitive to the stages of friendship: its growth and its expiration – stages that change rapidly and unpredictably with each passing day. I spend my hours here awaiting her silence that tears apart our fragile conversation, the drowning of my mind by an exclamation of undecipherable sounds containing the secrets he has finally decided to share with me that I will never know, the eventual loss of her gaze first intermittently and then forever as I spew out all the thoughts I know how to say, hoping that one of them would capture her interest, and finally his smile insufficient to cover the annoyance once he realizes that it just isn’t worth trying anymore. But today it occurred to me that this disappointment is all too familiar to be only due to my being here. This feeling of throwing darts at the hearts around me, hoping that one would stick, hoping that one would stay and accompany mine – it’s been my companion all along.

And the moment I had decided that I actually needed my inevitable solitude to grow complete and wise, one stuck – after just one throw, just one word, or perhaps even before then. And I recognized in that moment that this too was a familiar feeling. I have made a friend – in the way that I had always made a friend. It did not matter that I spoke in wrong tenses, needed him to explain his jokes, or was raised where there were never palm trees. It never mattered. And it will always be a mystery why we were chosen to have found each other.

It would remain a mystery why I was assigned to Maricela: 44 yo, with a twin sister, and >4 sets of twins on her own, making a total of 10? 14? 16 children? No one knew exactly at first because she could only stutter “ba ba” when she first arrived. The right side of her face remains drooping like a Dali painting, but she is now able to toss out words one by one like ping-pong balls: a speech resembling that of a mentally disabled child, but coincidentally the kind that I can understand best. Each day, she tells me the same simple things again and again, also just like a child and also so perfectly adjusted to my needs like a good teacher would have chosen to do. She tells me her face fell and her tongue became tied when she was making tortillas the way she does every day for her children, she tells me her babies are crying at home because they think she is going to die, she tells me her strength is improving but her face continues to droop, she tells me her husband is attempting to work enough days to earn the money for the last study she needs (an MRI arteriograph), she tells me she worries that her household is becoming unkempt and that she misses cleaning it, she tells me to take care and be well in my future.

My final night here I spent with my freshly made friends and their long-time friends in a Ranch in the mountains where many people owned rustic homes. I expected the ranches in the movies, but there were no wide-open fields, horses, or cowboys. There was a medium sized empty house and a mildly unkempt backyard that terminated with shrubbery overflowing a wire mesh fence. Under a large tree, surrounded by sparse bags of chips, coolers overwhelmed with ice and canned beer, packs of tortillas and bags of cheese, and of course the now all too familiar sound of Mexican music, there sat the relievingly familiar faces and shapes in the bendable breakable plastic chairs. This was to be the place where we would sit and drink and dance and laugh until the sun set and the night revealed the stars. In the air there were mosquitoes, chatter, and the strong regular beats of reggaeton. Inside, my heart gushed with the sparse memories of the few days in a life of many we have shared. I heard on replay the conversations we have had and the ones we will never have. I took in the feeling of being by each one of them: sometimes the feeling that there is nothing left to exchange but our giggles and head-bobs to the music, sometimes the feeling of satisfaction and camaraderie, and rarely, the feeling of severe insufficiency to ever exchange all that could be.

I like the music!
It was great meeting you!
I think you’re really nice!
Thank you for everything!
You should come to the US!

We parted like we always have with a touch/kiss on the cheek and transient hug – far too silent for the gushing of my heart.

This was to be the Monterrey that I will remember. Just like the China I remember, the Indonesia I remember, the Korea I remember, the Maine…the Troy…the Boston…the New York…

I soothe myself to sleep with the promise that I will slowly exchange all that needs to be exchanged through the pieces of text in cyberspace over time, all the while knowing that it will only be the need that will dwindle rather than the exchanges be fulfilled. But this is what I have signed up for, knowing that this happens every time, knowing that I have always been so greedy for closeness, knowing that I will always have to let go of those words never spoken and the potential I work so hard to build, knowing that I will always leave again. It’s a masochistic habit, this traveling. Maybe one day I will stop tormenting my own heart, trying to teach myself the lesson of forgetting that I know I will never learn. Maybe one day – but not yet.

Dust

For days I’ve been trying to identify the substance that I inhale here from the gusts of wind, that upon contact dries up the back of my palate. It is tasteless, colorless, and ever-pervasive in these parts. It makes me want to escape it by crawling into my windowless, vent-less dorm room with fluorescent buzzing lights. As we rode out of the city and into the arid lands today, I opened the window of the taxi cab that smelled of exhaust, only to find myself suffocated with more of the stuff from the wind. I realized then, that of course – it is dust.

Like most places, there are two kinds of people in the hospital here: the doctors and the patients. But I have yet seen a place where the two differed so much. I have yet to see as good looking a group of young people as the medical students and doctors here: the young girls with their hair pulled back, makeup neatly lining their lips, clothes formal but tight-fitting and flattering; the young men with their hair slicked, dark eyes and intense eyebrows.

The patients, on the other hand, blend in with each other as though they are of a slightly different skin-tone altogether. They are browned by the dust. They come with their various colored blankets and small bags of belongings that somehow all appear brown in the distance. They come with young and old attached to them and it’s often difficult to tell who is the sick one. Their skin is grooved like dried mud, and they pile together along the walls, against the pillars, and overflow to the outside sidewalks and curbs like the inevitable and relentless brown that stains a corner, unable to be reached by the dull tools and the strained cleaning schedule available to the hospital’s caretakers. The area of the stain waxes and wanes but it is always present. People are always waiting. It’s as though the caretakers have given up and decided to continue sweeping only the areas that is most convenient, leaving the grooves to continue browning.

The patients remain just as different, just as brown once moved onto the hospital floor. Some still have hands and feet caked with dirt, only rubbed off along with gel used for the echocardiogram that marked a spot finally deserving to be hastily wiped with toilet paper. There is Martin, the 68 or so old man who has curly gray hair and particularly dark skin, lying patiently with a distorted right arm now in the shape of a banana after some accident long gone in the past. He is aphasic now, after a stroke, but smiles when I tell the other medical student in broken Spanish about how I warn my younger sister not to choose medicine if she can be happy doing anything else. There is Miguel who is only 23, and near possibly the end of his life with AIDS and presumed toxoplasmosis encroaching on his brainstem, making him appear cross-eyed and forcing his hand to dance its way to his nose when he is asked to touch it. A woman sits by him most of the time, presumably his mother. She feeds him and a matter-of-factly instructs him to follow God’s Words as she points to the cross on his chest. Finally, there is Juan, someone’s name I don’t hear called often. He is 60 but appears the size of an 8 year old child since most of his flesh is wasted away and his right leg has been shortened by an amputation. He is strapped to the bed with various make-shift restraints created from sheets and torn cloth. His eyes wander freely about the room as he is in a state of coma, and his voice is only heard as the spasms of wheezes and coughs that produce bursts of projectile sputum from his tracheostomy, landing as far as the bed across the room.

Perhaps the only items that penetrate the brownness are their eyes – framed by wrinkles, even in the young. They remain bright and flickering, grateful and content. They are eyes that have learned not to be surprised by disappointment, eyes that have seen what things can happen in life, eyes that now patiently accept the random and meager rationing of God’s gifts. They do not disapprove of the professor’s daily request to tap their fingers together to demonstrate their perhaps permanently disabled coordination, nor of being fully exposed amidst the crowd of doctors for the changing of the fluid-stained and odorous sheets beneath them. It’s as though their spirits have already become detached from their bodies and their physical frames are but the beaten vessels that shield them from the harsh sun and dust. They have transcended to a place I’ve only known through the writing of philosophers. I am envious of their freedom.

There are also two kinds of prices here – probably for the two kinds of people. There’s the two-hour bus ride to the outskirts of the mountains for 8 pesos (50 cents), and there’s the bottle of Herbal Essence for 100 pesos (8 dollars). It makes me imagine the two worlds that these two kinds of people might traverse in, the two universes of goods and culture, perhaps never needing to interface each other except at the hospital – but even there, we are divided by spaces we occupy – between beds or on them, gliding through the center of the hallway or clinging to the walls.

Today there was a man who was in a coma from Guillam Barre syndrome. Alongside him was a medical student, squeezing the balloon “ambu” bag every few seconds into a tube that fed into his lungs, supposedly keeping him alive. Another student came by and took over, but not until the next changing of the guards did I realize that there was no machine on its way – this was the way things were supposed to be. I offered to help for half an hour, both appalled by the use of manual labor in such a hasty, risky way, and empathetic towards the dire conditions it must mean we are all in. So I gloved and took over the bag, warmed by the hands of the medical students before me. I was a personal ventilator. If I stopped or malfunctioned, he would slowly drift away.

I tried to talk to Martin who was in the bed across the room. His dense mutism has melted a bit into a grumbling and I felt proud of him. I asked if he could read the sign on the wall and he walked up and read part of the first word – the name of the patient who I was keeping alive for the moment. I told him he was improving and he nodded. I asked him what had happened to his arm, and he grumbled back gesturing some object falling from the sky. For a moment, he looked longingly at his banana arm but then quickly resumed his usual content nature, shaking his head and smiling as if to say “tis is life.” I chuckled at the situation, realizing for a moment I was trying to understand a man whose language I barely spoke who is aphasic and just learning how to grumble again. But then the others in the room were catatonic and comatose and strangely we were the two that had the most to say. Several times, I looked down at the patient I was ventilating and wondered whether he was still alive. Once I even checked his pulse just to be sure, but quickly resumed bagging, fearing that he would expire without the next puff. This may have been the biggest role I played in a patient’s life for a while.

Most of my friends are other exchange students here from other countries. It makes it difficult to say that I know what it means to be Mexican. It’s much harder to write this time around. I believe it’s because I’m not so lonely. I find that the more I know about people, the less I have to write about them – they become too real for words. Maybe my writing is only limited to simple things – things I can paint with my dullish fingers. Perhaps I’m just scared that I won’t get it quite right as there are so many more mistakes to be made.

My only conclusion had been that Mexicans are very kind. I told a taxi driver this and he responded ever so wisely, ‘there are good people and bad people everywhere.’ I have been told this in many places of the world and it is a lesson I should have known by now: that culture and place runs only so deep, and underneath, people are really all the same everywhere. There are ones who give and ones who cheat, ones who worship the truth and ones who lie when it’s more convenient. It’s funny that I think I am writing to capture the flavor of different parts of the world, when in the end, below different colors of candy coating, it is all just the taste of humanity.

So far I don’t know what else to make of this place. I have shared the few thoughts I have. But I feel comfortable with this. I have learned from a friend recently that not everything makes sense at every moment, although it all may in time.

Meulaboh, Indonesia Entries

Summer, 2007:

The Road to Calang 7/1/07

The Road to Parapat 7/9/07

The Road to the Market 7/21/07

The Road Home 8/16/07


January, 2008:

The Traffic Light 1/8/08

The Camp 1/13/08

The Last Night in Meulaboh 1/23/08

The Last Night in Meulaboh

Dear Friends,

This is my last night here. The rain is pouring harder than I have heard it yet. It is a relief. I will miss the rain here, the untamed tears that come gushing at unpredictable times of the day…so loud that it drowns out the music from my lap top on full volume. It waxes and wanes…in indecision of whether there are more disappointments to complain of for the moment.

Clara said to me at our last dinner tonight…'try not to be such a perfectionist, Bev,' in the way she says Bev frequently interjected into short sentences she likes to use. 'you're already doing everything with your heart, Bev…you know you have to enjoy every moment of the processes…of life.' That's really all she said…she never says much, but I think I will remember this.

I ate 5 dishes of sauce with my squished chicken today…like an appropriate last time. Record breaking really. I know I will be back. But not for a long time I know. This place has gotten sweeter and softer than I remember it to be. Perhaps that is what friendship feels like…with people, with a place.

All in all I feel quite lucky this time…actually, amazingly lucky. Things somehow fell into place for the time being. Perhaps God was watching over me this time around. Perhaps I finally learned not to set my goals too high.

My professor toasted me today. It meant a lot to me but somehow not too much. I didn't really feel the need for the affirmation. I consider that a big step for me.

There was a big dinner party at the office for the departure of Dr. Rizal yesterday. I finally felt part of the family like never before. I bought the girls in the office silly headbands with pom poms on them. They thoroughly enjoyed it for every bit of the 5,000 Rupiah they were worth. Giving gifts are by far what makes me the happiest out of all the things I could do. I often forget that.

I will miss Faras, the granddaughter of my landlords here. She is one of those children who exemplifies everything good and beautiful about childhood…innocence, curiosity, mirth, spontaneity. Children are even harder to describe than adults probably. Perhaps because words are invented by adults. She named the stuffed cat I gave her Susie, but the first name was inevitably Animal.

I finished inputting the data from the census of the village. I'm so proud of the women of this village to have contributed so much. Mostly though because I'm so impressed that they actually managed to administer most of the questionnaire correctly, a process I doubt they have ever encountered before…a stream of Boolean logic so routine for our overly-educated scientific minds, so artificial and awkward for what nature intended.

I am impressed by this place: the people, their challenges, their inevitable flaws, and their energy that flourishes here in the exhausting heat and extinguishing rain. I could not live here, but I wouldn't want to ever stop coming back.

Bev

The Camp

Dear Friends,

I was reading through my journal from this summer…it’s the same journal I’m using now because I didn’t quite fill it up last time. I was reminded of the tensions I experienced that no longer haunt me here. I think I have changed a lot…perhaps during that summer, perhaps after.

I found this excerpt that was the last one I wrote from Meulaboh before I left for Bali.

What it is that I cannot even confess here is my own fragility. My uncertainty that what I believe and see and feel is even what I really believe and see and feel – or should I be feeling something else? Perhaps I enjoy writing because it does not let me change my mind. Such that for once, my thoughts are still and eternal. In reality, every thought is a quiver and every belief just a trembling stumble into a certain direction.

Yes, that feeling lasted all summer…until I finally reached Bali I think…and even then, not until the third day. It was my birthday. I bought myself a drink and sat at the bar of a hip restaurant listening to a band that played international new-age music. I think I told myself I had arrived at something I could call my own accomplishment – probably one of the first in my life that wasn’t invested in, demanded, or deemed important by someone else. It was my own choice, one of my first choices I really owned.

This time around, such choices seem more natural to me. I guess I’m growing up.

It’s incredibly hot outside today. There are so few clouds in the sky such that there’s just no avoiding the sun. These days I would rather work in the airconditioned office than be on vacation out in the heat.

We had a large meeting with the community leaders yesterday along with the boyscouts. It was a major milestone and crucial step: the response from the community really makes or breaks this project. There were 16 block chiefs, one village secretary, and one village chief. I was most impressed by the village chief who is also the religious leader in the village. He was a short man, maybe only a couple inches taller than I am, and he had one of those faces that seemed to have found everlasting peace. He wore a plain white garment and white pants and a hat men here wear for religious activities. He spoke very softly throughout the meeting and really spoke very little at all. Every motion and word had a sense of finality and deliberateness. He’s one of those leaders that upon the first glance, one could immediately understand why he was the chosen one. I am looking forward to meeting with him again.

It was Professor Azrul’s last day today. He is the national boyscout leader in Indonesia. He was to leave at 6am this morning. I happened to be awake then due to my sluggishness in overcoming jet lag so I rushed out to say goodbye to him. He came out of his room to sit and chat for a while. He leaned back in his chair and spoke as he gazed off into the distance – his usual posture while telling tales of his life past. Just looking at the way the light glazes over his dark leathery skin, one senses the many lives he must have lived: writing books on everything from romance to biostatistics, serving public offices with various titles, traveling around the world giving lectures on public health, being shuttled from place to place by an entourage of young scouts. He says to me ‘I pray to God and ask Him to not make me too wealthy…it’s the wealthy ones that have the problems…why do you think all those men have mistresses these days?’ I joked to him that I will make sure I don’t find a husband who is too rich.

We visited a scout camping event last evening. It was held at the school where the children go. There were 7 or 8 tents of various shapes and sizes set up in the school courtyard. Most of the children were eating in one of the classrooms. They had cooked the food themselves. We asked the boys who were better cooks, the boys or the girls, and they responded quite seriously that it was one of them in particular, as though there was no question. One table of girls were singing a song as we entered. I fumbled to switch my camera to the video function but failed to capture it on time as the room was lit only with a few small candles on the tables. The children’s families had donated the materials for them to cook: the rice, some chicken and vegetables. It was simple but the children seemed content. This was the first camping event the scouts in this city have had since the tsunami, the scout leader said with pride. We congratulated him. I felt very excited for the children, to imagine what it must be like to be the first to have this experience in years in all of Meulaboh (although nearly invisible on the map, it’s a big place for the children here). I remembered the sheer bliss that small events out of the ordinary had brought me when I was younger: the unquenchable excitement of what could happen, of sleeping in a tent outside of home, of being surrounded by my friends past dinner time, of staying up past curfew…these are degrees of excitement I no longer reach…I again recalled that these peaks of happiness have been eroded by the sands of persistently lingering worry and disappointment that comes with age. The happiness I know now is one of contentment, a warm glow with tapered edges. Only through watching the children do I come close to feeling that kind of happiness again.

It’s time for me to move on with my day. Hope everyone is well at home…don’t take cold weather for granted!


Bev

The Traffic Light

Dear Friends,

Hope you all had a great New Years. I just arrived here in Meulaboh again yesterday afternoon. I’m staying in the same room I stayed in last summer. The office got some new furniture and the guest house lost some furniture, but I suppose gained more space.

I’m listening to that same calling for the prayer I heard last summer, sitting in my bed, wide awake at 4am. So strange being back to a place so foreign yet so familiar. I suppose I am just as foreign, just as familiar to myself as well. The way I appear in the rusted, mildly distorted mirror on the cabinet in the corner of this room…the shape of my thighs, the blemishes on my face, the waves in my hair…all strangely not quite the same as before. It’s a bit like time-lapse photography, revisiting a place after a while has passed, seeing it and myself in juxtaposition with the way we were in my memories. Even the feeling of mosquito bites that awaken me in the middle of the night reminds me of how things remained the same and have changed in an unmeasurable way.

Perhaps most of it is me that has changed: my goals, what I long for at home, my feelings about this place – from one of discovery to one of nostalgia.

It’s actually quite chilly here at night…I had to put on a sweater to go outside! What a concept. It rains several times a day here these days. It reminds me of the relief I felt over the summer whenever rain fell from the sky. And yet it’s all so plentiful now. Another thing that is the same yet different I suppose.

Time is a funny thing. It changes so much. Just time alone. The big talk of the office is that there’s now a single traffic light on our street. The first and only one in Meulaboh. It’s shocking to see the traffic actually obey something. That particular intersection was previously policed by 4-5 men and women but mostly operated under the rules of first come first serve/who can honk the loudest and most persistently.

It’s funny to imagine I was just walking around the Magic Kingdom 5 days ago. It’s amazing how we traverse time and space these days.

I think I can learn a lot this time around about how to get things done. It’s a bit overwhelming since there’s about 6-7 people in the office alone who is working on this project and several other projects at the same time. So many people to coordinate with. I’m still unsure who is ‘my boss.’ It appears that it might be this new officer, Dr. Rizal. He seems very organized and experienced. He’s also very polite, almost to a point that makes me uncomfortable. I hope I can learn a lot from him. I think I will make that one of my goals. The meetings are going to involve several more people than I expected, which will make it much harder to predict how they will go. It’s a different feeling than anything I’ve tried to accomplish before. It’s a bit like trying to stay on the back of a bucking bronco…so many times you just want to give up and fall onto the hay, but you just have to keep pulling yourself onto the saddle despite feeling like you never quite get on it before falling off again. I’m hoping things will settle a little bit after this first week once the major introductory meetings have taken place. I’m just trying to give a good first impression – be humble but not seem too disorganized so that I earn some respect.

It’s hard to predict what will happen in the next two weeks. The only thing I foresee is that it will be a lot. Nothing will be routine this time around. I’m hoping I can take a minibreak to the city for a couple of days, but it will have to depend on what God wills.

I will write again soon,

Love, Bev

The Road Home

I have left Meulaboh. It’s one of those things you can’t imagine ever happening until it has already happened. I didn’t really know how to feel about leaving this place. Since I last wrote, I’ve gotten used to it, such that when I left for a weekend getaway I was actually relieved to return. I’ve come to love the daily 5am chanting of the prayer from the nearby mosque, and then come to expect it, and finally depend on it to tell the time. Those who perform it do not receive any pay. They do it because it’s an honor. I look forward every night as I lay down to sleep, to the once awkward breakfast of fried rice and papaya, the familiar feeling of my squeaky rolling chair at my desk in the office, surrounded by an assortment of crispy chocolate wafers found to occupy ¾ of all the aisle space in all the supermarkets, and the excitement of deciding which of the 3 restaurants we will be eating at that day (each of which only serve 1 item). Then of course there is the rare pleasant surprise of the occasional downpour that breaks the heavy heat which has made me understand why every civilization simply must have a rain god. I sense that I don’t crave home as much as I did when I wrote last, so perhaps, is it possible that I have found a home here?

I met an ex-pat on an island at the farthest western point of Indonesia called Sabang. It’s a popular weekend destination for NGO workers living in Banda Aceh. I asked her if she missed home. She said that she doesn’t really have one. She was born in some town in Germany but then grew up in Frankfurt, then went to school somewhere else, and since then has spent a year or two here and there. She said she was sad that she didn’t have a home, or didn’t know what to miss or where to feel like she belonged. It seems to be a common dilemma for this crowd of 20-something yo NGO workers all lost at sea and washed up here clinging to each other. As we sat in a small restaurant by the beach, I watched the chitter chatter of small talk in English flavored by accents from all over the world generated by this crowd of pale skinned, multi-color haired, T-shirt and cargo pant-wearing, beer drinking ex-pats, being served by the local brown skinned islanders who have picked up a good deal of English from their regular customers here, I was reminded of some scene in an old movie set in Africa, where women wearing puffy skirts holding parasols, men with top hats, and black skinned servants carrying their luggage stepped off the train into a desert savanna landscape civilized with white pillars and horse drawn carriages. We were all there for some purpose, brought together by the fact that we didn’t really belong anywhere else and the fact that this was one of the two restaurants in Aceh that openly served beer. What an interesting study of displacement and migration! We were the Western diaspora. Was this just another wave of colonization…only a bit more polite this time around? The presence of NGOs in Aceh is defining of the place. NGOs have spurred the economy, become a market in itself, dug out its territory into the culture and history of the people and become a new indispensable vocabulary word in the streets. I could not help but continue staring for hours, in the way one cannot help but stare at some bizarre evocative mating ritual on national geographics, at the phenomenon taking place in front of me over my grilled fish with coconut milk. What is really happening here? Is this what I am to be a part of?

The first thing I realized I will miss about this place is the sound of the language. Indonesian is hard to come by, unlike the dime-a-dozen Chinese or French or Spanish. So unless I decide to become one of the ex-pats I have just described, I will be saying goodbye. It’s funny that I’ll be missing a language I barely knew. But I suppose in some ways it makes sense. The languages we do understand are merely ideas. But those we don’t understand we can still hear as music.

I said goodbye to the children by taking their pictures…which is in a way not having to say goodbye I guess. I have over ten or so lined up to be sketched now and I’ve had surprisingly little time to do as I promised. It’s amazing how excited I get when I see the same child a second time, and to sense that twinkle of recognition in their eyes. It’s as though we’re old friends reunited by some tremendous feat of fate. Things are so transient here I suppose…for us and for them. We are in one village one day, another the next. They meet one NGO worker one day asking about water sanitation, and another the next month asking about schools, and then for moths - nothing. It seems to be a miracle that something happens more than once in this place. And I too am uncertain whether fate will miraculously bring me back to Aceh again.

I’m not really sure what to make of my time here. There are now 66 typed pages of notes on the stories of parents and children – their tragedies, hopes, and fears – a crowd of voices, once in a while chanting in unison but most of the time not. And yet this is how a “people,” a “culture,” is defined…by straining their most complicated thoughts and emotions until only the dry filaments of fiber remain: the Acenese complain that their children are naughtier after the tsunami, hope their children will get higher education but fear that they will not be able to afford it, but above all hope their children will be good people.

I watched the sun set over the shore of Bali today, and at the last gasping breath of sunlight, - at that point when it looks so ripe that it could either set like it’s supposed to or somehow burst into the universe staining everything bright orange – I felt an explosion. But instead of the world bursting into flames, just a single tear rolled down my cheek. It caught me by surprise because I hadn’t been thinking of anything in particular. Nevertheless, I found it saturated with the close-up photographs of the wide-eyed children, the relentless heat and stench of sewage lined dirt paths, the noise of the voices on those 66 pages, the taste of room temperature deep fried fish, and that all too familiar feeling of not being good enough. Strangely enough, that moment was the closest thing to clarity I’ve had all summer. And the sky thereafter was left with only gray clouds and the air with a subtle chill that hints that something warm had come and gone.

We asked a group of children what they would be like if the tsunami didn’t happen, and a young girl replied ‘I would have more spirit.’ Later that day, my partner told me that third year seemed to have broken mine. I wondered if I was really broken, or just weakened, or just growing up. I thought the little girl was remarkably clairvoyant. If there was a psychiatric term for “broken spirit,” I suppose that’s what we would diagnose them with. It’s not depression or anxiety…but a stunning sense of sobriety towards life – one that ought not to be found in someone so young.

It’s amazing what tunnel vision I have – I fill out the rest of the world with the images I have collected in my meager travels. Until my last days here I believed all of Indonesia to be like Aceh but I could not have been more mistaken. It’s a fascinating country consisting of multiple civilizations with their own dances, music, fashion, and gods – of which Aceh is only a small remote member. I guess that’s what to be expected from a country of a thousand islands. In Bali, the architecture is mainly reminiscent of India with Hindu temples and statues. Out of respect, they dress their statues with cloth sarongs and gold sashes. In front of every front porch and even dotting the beaches, there are small banana leaf baskets of herbs and flowers and burning incense used for prayer. Unlike in Aceh where skin is rarely seen, the Balinese used to all walk around topless until Westernization. Their dance consists of quick syncopated movements of hands and eyes that mimic the poses of goddesses in Hindu paintings, tightly bound to the beats of drums and chimes. The people’s faces are gentle and round compared to the rough jagged features of the Acehnese. I have never seen more smiles and greetings. Despite the number of sketchy dark allyways along the main street, one needn’t worry because all one has to do is scream and all the men in proximity will come running out to help, armed with clubs and knives of all sorts – and will gladly beat the poor thief/rapist/random suspicious guy to death. In Aceh there is the uniformed military strolling along the streets with machine guns; in Bali, I suppose they keep the peace the old fashioned way.

The beach is filled with as many beach boys as tourists, identifiable by their thoroughly deep bronzed skin, offering you surfing lessons, a tour of the island on their motorbikes, and a good time in other ways if you’d like. In the clubs, gorgeous local girls can be found with their slender limbs draped over the couches and each other in the dim light, glistening with jewels waiting for you. Anything will do for a bit – or a lot – of money around here. One can be entertained all day, all evening, and all night long. If one is lucky enough to meet a real friend, one might actually see where the Balinese really live: in the dimly lit basketball courts of the high school, at the half off sushi supermarket, in the mall arcade playing a jazzed up pirated version of DDR, within the steep cliffs of reefs set back from the beach strewn with winding roads leading to quiet neighborhoods, in the wave carved caves along the rocky coast blocked off from the beach, and in the roadside light-bulb lit tent-covered eateries that make the best satay around. There is enough for anyone to fall in love with here.

Sitting in the New York Laguardia airport now I can understand all the signs, all the conversations. It seems much too easy. I strangely miss the challenge and mystery of deciphering the language. This time around, I don’t feel myself rejoicing at the sight of my country’s people. Rather, I sense how overweight, how rude, how hasty of their appearances, how unaware of themselves, and how full of attitude everyone is...but then, perhaps this is just New York. Perhaps I belong in an island nation, where it is warm, where there is always music in the streets of colorful rhythms, where understanding will be a constant art that requires effort and perfection, and where I will always be suspended between foreign and familiar. I believe I will have to return one day.

The Road to the Market

I had a day off not long ago and it was the first time I had vacation without having Chris, my partner in crime here, around. I stayed in my room most of the day, as I eavesdropped on the sounds of the voices in the kitchen in the language that remains a crossword puzzle much too advanced for me. Ibu Rose, our housekeeper, had her children over, which she does pretty often. I was trapped in my room despite my longing to play with them. It’s a constant battle: wanting to reach out for some company but fearing facing my inadequacies with every sound I utter. It’s a catch 22. I wish I hadn’t the option of hiding in my room because I would always take it. I felt like a coward.

Later that day, I forced myself to take a walk in the streets. I used buying things as an excuse to talk to people in a setting I’m comfortable with: it’s a limited transaction, purposeful, and doesn’t require much vocabulary. “How much?” I would say, and then it would take me a few seconds to decipher the string of sounds they utter back. I would nod and smile, and hand them a large enough bill to cover whatever may have been reasonable. They would then hand me a ball of money for change. “Thank you” I would say. They would often then start to ask me questions, some I could barely understand and some I knew I didn’t have a chance of figuring out. Occasionally I would pick out the word for “name” or “from” and I would nod eagerly and say “Beverly” or “Canada” (I never say I’m from the US anymore in fear of the bad reputation we have in politics). They would then keep talking and asking questions until eventually they too realize that they have exhausted the limits of my vocabulary and the extent of this brief friendship we were to have. An awkward silence would set in if I didn’t first say “see you later!” or “good afternoon” a little too eagerly to avoid it. By then, my face would be tired from the extensive amount of smiling I do to compensate. Each encounter, though so brief, was exhausting. I realized as I reached my doorstep how many bags of food I had bought, some of which I still couldn’t identify and some of which I didn’t even like. All this to rid myself of my loneliness, to make some contact with someone and to not feel completely invisible.

The streets here are very exposing. People sitting in the endless shops and restaurants that line the streets stare at me and point at me as I walk by. I hear some shouts of “Hello!” and occasionally “What’s your name!” in an accented English that has become too familiar. My eyeglasses give me away. No one else wears them here. Those driving motorbikes and scooter carriages honk at me to ask if I am looking for a ride, as I am the only one walking on the street. It’s surprising that people don’t walk much here. Perhaps it’s because of the heat. Perhaps everyone already has a motorbike. Perhaps it’s the obstacle course of garbage, gutters, and broken concrete that one has to take on when trying to walk. It only makes me stand out more. I feel naked in these streets though I’m covered down to my wrists and ankles. Exposed, yet invisible.

The roads are very dusty here. They’re lined by cracked pieces of previous attempts at a sidewalk or just piles of dirt in the process of becoming a sidewalk. Occasionally one finds a relieving stretch of a few feet of tiles that is currently in tact. Even the ground cannot escape the transience of things around here. But reliably, along the sides of the street much like a moat, there is always a sewage gutter, 2 feet wide, 3 feet deep, just deep enough for one to worry about falling in, just shallow enough for one to always see the sometimes green, sometimes brown fluid thick with garbage and other unidentifiable items that flows through…if it flows at all. Perhaps this is the lesson the city learned from the frequent downpours, or from the occasional tsunami but in the face of which the presence of gutters would be a moot point.

There are occasional clusters of fruit stands selling the same exact assortment of fruits such that I had no idea when or where to stop looking and finally spend my money. Otherwise the street is lined with restaurants consisting of a roof and 3 walls that open onto the street with tables and chairs both under the roof or outside. There is always a glass case near the front displaying colorful fruits and vegetables or ready-made plates of various dishes, sometimes shielded from the swarming flies only by a lacy curtain but never anything more substantial. People here seem to have no difficulties eating dishes that have been sitting in the case for the day, despite the number of flies that have been previous customers or the perfect temperature for bacterial colonization. I too have become a believer. Refrigeration is so overrated. Food here is served at the temperature of the day: high 80’s – 90’s with a small chance of downpours.

DVD stores and cell phone stores fill in the gaps between the restaurants and fruit stands. They all look the same such that one wonders how anyone here decides which establishment to frequent. All the restaurants serve the same food, all of them advertise “Nasi Goreng” (fried rice), which we all know can be found anywhere at any time anyways. All the stores have the same large bright red banners for “Clas Mild” cigarettes.

I realize I’ve been avoiding talking about what I really care about most. Perhaps it’s often easier for us to talk about things that are tangential because it is of limited consequence, limited investment, and limited duration. Perhaps the things we care about the most are often too difficult to characterize in the ready-made vocabulary we are used to. Whatever the reason, I will try to talk about it this time.

I feel inadequate. Inadequacy is a feeling I’ve gotten used to here. Inadequacy in understanding, in expressing, and in my energy to keep trying. I play with children in the daytime, and I hear the stories of the families at the end of the day when I realize I may never see them again. I hear about their loses and troubles second hand through the somewhat awkward and broken English of our interpreters whose abilities are tested by the depth and power of the accounts they are required to recite. I don’t see the tears they see or hear the frustration they hear in the people’s voices. I get the report stating blankly that “mother lost everyone in her family and her home during the tsunami. Her son is very shy and has become afraid of wind and rain. She hopes her son will be a good person one day.” What parts were forgotten? What did I neglect to ask? What was lost in translation? I will never find out. I feel inadequate in the depth of emotion I feel for the people despite knowing the worst of their tragedies…because I cannot be there to listen to them with my own ears. I thirst for the tears I once shed when listening to someone talk about their failing health and I realize that I probably won’t have them here. Despite all of this, transcribing the stories onto my laptop was my favorite part of the day.

I have taken up sketching the children I am fond of…by fond of I mean somehow not being able to get enough of their smiles because really that is the main constituent of what I manage to exchange with them. How I wish I could ask about their hopes and dreams, about their friends and favorite subjects. I can get as far as their age, their favorite flavor of juice, what they like to play, and how many siblings they have. And then they leave me with the familiar yet incomprehensible sounds interrupted by laughter and eventually the apprehension of an answer from me I don’t know how to give. I have a lot more time to take in the looks their eyes make, telling me that they’re proud of their drawings, that they feel special we’ve chosen them, that they’re bashful and shy. I spend hours studying the curves and the shadows on their faces, trying to decipher what I cannot learn otherwise. I trace the outlines of their eyes in attempt to show them my hopes for them because I don’t know what else to give back. A girl I went to China with who didn’t speak much Chinese had done the same back then…she sketched everyone she met…perhaps so that she could take away something or absorb something if nothing else.

It rained one day when we were interviewing families in a small barrack here. Most of the people there have already moved out, leaving about 20 or so families in a small courtyard. The barracks are made of wooden planks and resemble those outhouses one might find at a rest area on the side of a highway at home. They are simple wooden huts on stilts with wooden planks leading up to each doorway. The floors are a thin and bounce up and down and squeak as one walks across. There is always a smell of mold inside. Each family has 2 rooms usually the size of 2 singles in Vandy. Some hang up curtains to create more rooms. There are usually a few straw mats on the floors of colorful designs and always a plaque displaying Arabic letters embroidered in gold somewhere near the ceiling. Some hang up old photographs of family members on the walls. Some have drawn on the walls in chalk portraits of family members who have passed away. Occasionally there are fluorescent pink or green curtains that hang in the doorways. For light, people open the window or the door. At the center of the barrack, there is a raised wooden platform with a wooden roof on stilts. It is where the community meets, although I’ve never seen them do so. This barrack was particularly muddy. Some random goats and cats roamed about picking at the garbage scattered around.

At the end of the day, it was raining quite hard. I walked out to find a crowd of children shouting and giggling throwing around the rubber ball we gave them to play with. They were mostly boys whose bare brown chests were already covered in mud streaked by the falling rain. “You’re dirty!” I told one of them and then he ran under the giant red water tank in the middle of the barrack to wash himself off. They scrambled on top of one another striking poses as I pulled out my camera. They reminded me of the innocence and freedom I once had…or perhaps never had. What must it be like to have no pretty clothes to soil? To have no money to lose? To have no status to upkeep? What must it be like to lose everything one has and be left with nothing but the mud and rain?

There was one boy who had the best smile. Here are my notes on him:
“T is 12 years old. His mother lost everyone in her family in the tsunami except her brother. Her husband lost everyone. She was very sad when asked about the tsunami and said she feels as though she relives it when we ask her about it. She started to cry. T is a good boy and often lets other people win. But when he knows he’s right, he will stand up for himself. She hopes he can be a good person and have more money. She hopes to send him to Banda Aceh for school and have a higher education when he grows up. It’s difficult for her to get much money and her kids don’t have money for allowances. She makes popcicles sometimes to make money for her kids spending.

We found T at a small snack shop in someone’s home. He was wearing pants with a belt that was much too long for him. He had no shirt on but put one on when we started the drawing session. He smiled a lot. He asked his mom for permission to do the interview and his mom said he can’t draw well. He was a bit bashful but then said he wanted to do it. He got more and more interested in his drawings during the interview. He would nod and smile at his drawings when he is happy with them. He enjoyed playing ball with us very much. While playing with other children, he tries to make sure everyone gets a chance to catch the ball.”

T was one of the children I decided to sketch. I’ve attached a picture of him. He’s quite handsome, isn’t he?

Well, here I am with 3 more weeks left, struggling to extract all I can from my time here. Hope all of you are enjoying your summers wherever you happen to be.

The Road to Parapat

This weekend we shoved our bodies against a crowd and finally squeezed ourselves into the bus, one that appeared as though that any trip now may be its last. Everything chattered with the engine and it was uncertain how far the domain of the exhaust fumes reached. Despite this, a garland of bright pink cloth flowers wrapped itself around the railing above the windshield and lime green ruffled curtains stained with the gray of the air lined the glass. We finally popped ourselves into our reserved seats and suddenly realized that we were the only riders who bought tickets. The others relied on their brute force to win over the rest. I was smashed between the window, the hard metal seat with a poor excuse for a cushion, my partner’s sweaty cargo pants, and my laptop case. I could move one limb and I decided it was going to be my left arm. But then I didn’t know where to put it so I left it hanging on the railing above the window much as a monkey would do if given the option. The doors finally closed and we were relieved by a small intermittent breeze through the front door window as the movement began. A small man stood by the door frequently sticking his head out the window yelling “Parapat! Parapat!” at people standing at the side of the street. When they yelled back, he would signal the driver to stop, open the door, shove them in, and shut the door again in one graceful swooping motion, and before we knew it, we would be moving again. He also doubled as the bus DJ and shoved an audiotape into the slit by the steering wheel. The lively exotic rhythm and a woman’s voice reminiscent of something familiar but unidentifiable filled the atmosphere already stuffed with exhaust, sweat, and cigarette smoke, and suddenly the picture was complete…and it was perfect.

For the next 6 hours as we drove down the one highway through the center of Sumatra, I watched the people on motorbikes, people leaning against their shops, people frying things behind glass displays, people sitting by the fire…there’s something about watching the world as one speeds along that clarifies things, much like a flip book that only makes sense when flipped through quickly. Perhaps it allows one to catch on to the patterns in the way people move, the way they are when they’re unaware that you’re watching, the way they watch you when they’re unaware that you’re watching. It is like seeing into small peepholes of people’s lives one after another at 50 miles an hour. The woman holding a child waiting to cross the street; the man smoking a cigarette sitting on a stool in front of his shop; the boy holding a stick on a boat in the river. What lives they must have? It is intense. It is powerful. I attempted to digest an episode of The Office at my partner’s suggestion, but it was not long before I found myself turning out the window, seduced by the voice from the cassette player to keep watching the filmstrip going by. This is a place with a compelling story to tell.

Despite the long sleeves and pants, people here are more naked than I am used to – in the way they move, the way they stay still, their facial expressions, and their gaze. It is familiar yet it feels like long ago. They don’t wear layers of make-up, shame, or vanity as do the people we see at home. There is something raw and earthy here, reminiscent of an innocence which may have been found in the Garden of Eden. I’m not sure when that was lost to us in America. Was it when we saw each other on TV? When we picked up our first issue of Seventeen magazine? When we somehow decided that the world was watching us? What were we all like before we saw ourselves being seen? Was there ever such a time?

There is something sacred about this place. With every greeting, we hold the other person’s hand between ours, bow, touch our hearts, and utter ‘selamat pagi’ (good morning) or ‘assaimamulaikum’ (God be with you). The children occasionally will gently bring your hand to their forehead out of respect…and each time, without fail it brings my heart closer to the surface. With entry into every house, we leave our shoes just outside the doorstep. There is often very little furniture, just a straw mat or two people bring out for guests to sit on. The floor somehow remains remarkably clean. Every day at 6pm like clockwork, the town closes its doors for the protection of the prayer hour from the tainted rubble of business. Women’s bodies are covered down to the wrists and ankles, and most wear head covers as well, to protect from the dirt and fumes of the city that which is sacred underneath. Even the smallest glimpse of a bare knee or a fleshy shoulder could arouse the strongest emotions.

The sacredness has remained despite the intrusion of the dust, the water, and the disaster.

The resilience of the people here is remarkable. The night guard here at the guest house showed me his tattered birth certificate. He said he carried it with him as he swam through the waters the flooded the city. That’s why it became so worn. He lost his father in the tsunami as well as his house. He now lives in a new house built by an NGO. He does traditional Acenese dance and likes Ricky Martin. He smiles a shy smile. The pay here isn’t great but he enjoys working here. He is 24 like me.

But this is a people that is used to trying to recover. A 10 year old girl from the barracks lost her father after he was beaten by the army. He actually made it back home and to the hospital and was told to follow-up. 2 days later he didn’t follow-up and died of internal bleeding. Her mother was left with three children on her own and was at work when the tsunami hit. Prior to the tsunami reaching the shore, the water was sucked back into the ocean, leaving hundreds of meters of exposed sand carpeted with flopping fish that were caught off guard. People rushed in to grab the fish believing it to be a blessing, amongst them was the girl and her sister. Only seconds later, the tsunami arrived and took them in. Miraculously, they survived, but the girl was never the same again, not with her friends, not with schoolwork. We always play a game with the kids where we try to throw a ball between people’s feet. She has so far been my all-time favorite player…plays by the rules, but tricky.

An 11 year old girl from a nearby village used to live in the barracks. Her father worked as a security guard at a plantation and was forced to pick up numerous dead bodies of those who had been shot on the plantation during the civil war. The girl was still young back then. These days she struck me as quite mature for her age. She was the leader of the crowd of children in her village and enforced the rules of our dodgeball and kickball games and initiated the singing and drawing amongst themselves when I ran out of ideas and energy. She has a certain way of nodding at the end of each sentence and was one of the few who tried to help me find the words I didn’t know how to say. She always looked at me as though she had so many questions for me that she knew I couldn’t understand. She was particularly good at coloring in the leaves she drew and refused to use one color more than once for her bouquet of flowers.

We bring a ball and 2 stuffed animals every day and other than a few threatening looking “toy” guns that shoot metal pellets, they are the only toys we have seen. But the children make do with what they have. They can be found making a small fire from the trash, teasing and picking up the stray cats, climbing on their family motorbike, etc. Most of the time, they just sit with each other on the porch watching motorbikes drive by. Many of us cannot claim to be much more creative without our shopping malls, television, and Nintendo Wii’s. I always underestimate the children’s ages here. They are smaller, more innocent in some ways, more corrupt and jaded in other ways that allows them to point their toy guns at us and each other and, to our surprise, pull the trigger. The children can be quite dirty here, more so in the barracks than in the villages. Their feet are shades darker than parts of their face, and open sores dot their toes and shins, inhabited with which parasite I cannot recall from my boards studying. They do not mind the piles of trash alongside their roads and underneath their homes. They do not mind the greenish putrid sewage that drains into the open gutters just outside their front door. They seem to play and grow up just the same.

Despite the threat that water brings, I suppose water remains the oldest friend of an island nation. Everything is wet around here: the gutters that line the front porch of every establishment, the floors of the bathrooms, even the toilet seats. Coming from a place where wetness is disgusting, it’s taking me a while to get used to water being my friend. Here, it washes away the odors, stains, and garbage of the day’s spending, leaving things wet in exchange. But I’ve learned that there is nothing so frightening about wetness alone. Water on my clothes, my feet, my shoes – no need to wipe it away – it all eventually dries in the heat.

After a paradise mini-break over the weekend, I find it comforting to return to my room here in the guest house. Despite the lack of a shower, of access to more food options than the handful of greasy fried dishes, and of the opportunity to swim in my bikini in the middle of a lake where I can’t be seen and judged, this is my home here in this country. As I hear the all too familiar sound of Whitney Houston’s voice suddenly parting through the exotic rhythm I’ve been immersed in this entire time, I realize that even more so, despite the lack of the triumph of helping the needy, of the adventure of torturing oneself into fitting in to a foreign culture, and the luxury of discovering a different people, I miss my generic upper-middle class ranch in the suburbs of Detroit, where I can reliably go to the toilet without getting wet at all, wear whatever I choose, and discover only the mundane daily activities of those few people I’ve known my entire life: my family. I have a hard time saying that I miss home…I think this may be a general phenomenon we have, those of us who come from the most fortunate of lifestyles. To say we miss home is to admit that we can’t take the hardship, that we are indeed (surprise, surprise) spoiled. Whereas those who immigrate from the direst of situations may cry out for home with every opportunity and be genuinely glorified for their love of their way of life, we are left to be shunned for wanting too many luxuries. But don’t we have the right to miss home? What about our culture of shopping at Costco, going clubbing on Thursday nights, or lounging in our bikinis at the pool? If missing the US is shunned, then missing Harvard is simply unspoken. Since when did being privileged mean sacrificing one’s right to a home and an identity one can be proud of?

All this because of Guilt. It’s an epidemic that has yet to be identified but it has been there since the beginning. The guilt of leaving others behind, of being happy in a world tormented by war and poverty, of living the supposed “dream” of mankind. Where is true happiness if when one finally achieves it, all one could feel is the guilt of having done so? Happiness becomes a myth and a riddle without a solution.

I should probably stop here before I upset more of you with my ranting. Unlike my previous trip to China, I have a lot of room to think this time around, for better or for worse, thanks to the fact that this project is not run by a slave-driving tyrant (AKA me). All in all Meulaboh is a place I find that I can stay for a short while. The people here are kind and strong. It becomes too much to think of all they have been through so I prefer to think of them as who they are at this moment, and that is not without problems but also not without incredible spirit. Perhaps all people become such when given the opportunity. People in general amaze me, I think.

The Road To Calang

All the office workers decided to take a trip to the beach in a nearby town called Calang. We have the tsunami to thank for our trip. The town was hit quite hard by the tsunami but as a result, afterwards, a road was built using foreign aid provided to the government and now the trip is possible, taking only 2 hours as compared to the 4-6 hours it used to take when the road was a rocky dirt path. As we road smoothly along in our air conditioned SUV to Indonesian house music which occasionally resembles bangra, I, clutching my camera in my sweaty hands, town after town, desperately attempted to capture the rhythm of this land.

I’m at a loss of words to characterize this place. It seems to be the one time I’m at a loss of stereotypes and categories. Perhaps the most honest thing to say would be that this seems to be a place that hasn’t had the chance to sleep.

Sleep is what one might say the Aztec empire did when they were left alone to become indulgent enough to build pyramids to reach their gods before they were demolished by the Spanish; it’s what the many tribes in Africa had done before the AIDS epidemic; it’s what the people of rural China are just waking from now that capitalism has invaded their villages. To sleep is to be at peace, left alone to become saturated with oneself.

It’s hard to imagine that this place had ever had time to sleep: sometime between being infiltrated by the Arabic, Chinese, and Indian merchants, then preached about Buddhism, then Hinduism, then Christianity, then Islam, followed by being conquered and colonized by the Dutch, then slaughtered by war and flattened by the weather, and then resurrected by NGOs, and now finally being abandoned by them. It’s hard to know when to start calling anything Indonesian, anything a tradition, anything a change. And of course the remaining 9/10ths of the country is all different from here and from each other. I’m completely confused.

I don’t even know who to study. I spend a few hours a day observing interviews of the people living in villages and barracks, then most of my time mingling in a city of people who may or may not have been irked at all by the weather, then in the time in between listening to the stories of the upper-middle class employees of this NGO, most of whom are from the very modern capital, then on occasion meet the expats who have devoted the rest of their lives to the people here, then occasionally overhearing about the notorious group of volunteers who have already come and gone. I can’t decide who has a more intriguing story, or who is really Indonesian.

I would have to say that with respect to the term “melting pot,” this place makes the US look like we still haven’t taken our ingredients out of the box. People can look anywhere from Chinese to Persian. Skin tones range the full brownscale. The music sounds Arabic, the MTV clips resemble Hindi films, the food tastes Thai/Chinese, the architecture appears “Polynesian” (whatever that is in my head) but with occasional mosques to remind you that it’s much more complicated than that. Then there is the element of time: women wearing embroidered tunics, over cargo pants and crocs, riding behind their husbands or alone or with a girlfriend on motorbikes, with their bright colored head shawls blowing in the wind. Along the side of the road one sees old wooden plank houses, new cement houses, brown gray houses blending into the dirt, hot pink and aqua houses, houses overflowing with children and elderly, abandoned houses, and fields of houses waiting to be broken into. Regardless of how worn down, how basic the shacks, how poor the people, there seems to always be room to decorate it with bright colored paints: hot pink, bright blue, orange, yellow, aqua…It all melts together: the flavors, the colors, the time.

All this is set in a backdrop of palm trees rising above large leaved tropical bushes, interrupted occasionally by a field of rice paddies or an area of flattened green that hasn’t quite awakened from the memory of the storm. A large round salmon sun hangs low just above the fingertips of the palms against the dim gray of the dusk. But I was wrong…no, that is the moon.

Riding in a car here always feels like you’re involved in a ridiculously risky stunt you would have only attempted in high school. There are few roads with lines drawn on them to designate who should be where, and when they are there, they taken only as polite suggestions. People generally drive on the left side of the road here…but really, they prefer to drive in the middle of the road. That goes for people going in either direction, which makes for a problem whenever anyone crosses each other. That’s when the honking begins. The rule is to just keep honking until the other gets out of the way. But of course, livestock always have the right of way because they don’t know the rules and they move slowly. The fact we’re often the only full size vehicle on the road and that most of the traffic consists of couples on motorbikes with the occasional cement truck and flock of cows makes things possible.

Regardless of how old, how wooden, how few houses there are in the village, there is always a mosque. The mosques here are breathtaking, perhaps made even more so when they rise amidst the humble decaying crooked shacks like the people’s spirit from the ashes of the past. They are incredibly intricate yet remarkably simple: a matrix of pillars standing on a cement or marble base that hold up an elaborately carved roof of geometric patterns topped by shapely domes. The air moves freely through the holy space created. One can often see straight through the entire mosque between the pillars. The walls are made of solid cement. No hidden rooms or insulation or gadgets or wires or pipes or furniture. The people gather to worship and kneel on the marble or cement floor, easily seen from the road. It is pure and transparent. It is the way God should be.

Each morning, I awaken to the sound of distant chanting in Arabic, a floating, wandering melody that, in the way the smell of incense makes its way into your deepest secrets, climbs through the awnings and window panes, teasing the pages of my dreams. Somehow it feels as though this is the way it should have been every morning, as though I have finally come home.

Just as reliably in each village there is a village community center with big bright letters marked ‘Balai Desa’, often appearing like a hot pink birthday cake in the middle of the forest of shacks. As I had guessed, they were mostly sponsored by the NGOs and recently built. Like the mosque it is just as simple and transparent with just a few walls and pillars holding up a roof to a base. I suppose that’s all one really needs to live a good life here.

I wish I had a better sense of what is Indonesian. I don’t think I could have asked for a more complicated question. But perhaps the answer is very simple: just a people who, like all people, are trying to make a good life with what they have. They are like the people of Costa Rica, of China, of Chelsea, of my home town. I suppose there’s nothing so foreign or complicated about that.

Last Email from China

Dear friends,

This will be my last email from China. I left the rural village and
arrived in the large city of Xi An last night. It was a very striking
transition. We got off the train and were caught in a massive flood of
people. There must have been more people on that train than in all of
the village or even the county. I could suddenly understand everyone
around me cuz no one spoke the rural dialect anymore. On our taxi ride
home, we stared at the beautiful people in their fine flowing dresses,
high heels, carrying shopping bags, looking leisurely at manekins in
store windows, comfortably enjoying their mp3 players, audi's, and
their view of themselves in the reflection in the glass. In contrast
to the villagers who were always working on something, carrying
alarming amounts of grain on their backs in hand woven baskets, trying
to feed their children while batting away the flies from their bowls,
the people in the city looks so much more comfortable and unstrained,
carefree and so lacking of wrinkles on their bodies or dirt on their
clothes. We ate at McD's today and had real ice cream for the first
time in months last night. People here looked so happy, so contented.
Their lives are so great. I felt so relieved and felt at home almost
immediately. I didn't realize the amount of strain the lifestyle
placed on me. I'm undoubtedly a city girl and probably always will be.

Since I last wrote, my experience of the village changed a great deal.
It took a while for me to look at the people in the village as anyone
I could be close to. They were warm, admirable, and genuine, but only
creatures that I observed from afar and talked to to figure out how
their lives were. Only toward the end did I learn to love them like
real people. They became a part of my life and I was a part of theirs.

I'll just talk about one of them:
I met a 14 year old boy named Zhang Xin one of the first days I was in
the village. That day he told me that he wanted to be village chief
one day so he could improve the living conditions for his people. He
doesn't really want to be an official because there's so much
corruption, but he was determined to help his village. From that day I
sensed that he was different from the other kids. Most kids just
giggle and stare as we walk by them down the street. Others would
answer our questions with a word or two and ask some questions they've
been curious about, like whether there's cats and dogs in the US. I
don't believe Zhang Xin talked to me out of curiosity and wonder. He
actually knew a great deal about the US and was a great fan of the NBA
and Yao Ming of course. But I think he talked to me because I listened
to his dreams. He wanted to teach me about what China and what his
village was all about. Throughout our conversations, he explained to
me the meanings of countless Chinese sayings and poetry, and told me
so many stories from Chinese history and literature.

One of his stories was about a man and his family who lived on one
side of a tall mountain that few people could cross. He had to cross
the mountain to reach the rest of the village and their relatives. The
man walked a path so much he carved a road into the mountain and as a
result, all people were able to use it from then on and people were
finally able to cross the mountain. He said this story is to teach us
to be persistent and that what we can accomplish could help so many
others. I asked him if he thinks about these stories and if they
influence him. He said of course, especially because there is a need:
the older generation of officials are very corrupt and old fashioned
in their thinking these days.

Before we left, he took us mountain climbing and led us down safely
from an incredibly dangerous slope so we wouldn't fall. At the bottom
of the mountain, he led his friends in building a bridge of rocks so
we could all cross a stream. He gave us many gifts before we left:
bracelets he made himself of red thread, bags of rocks from his rock
collection (he had a story and a name for each rock), a snake he
carved and painted himself from a stick he showed me one day on the
street, and a poem he wrote into my notebook that embedded my Chinese
name into his sentiments for our friendship. His handwriting is
absolutely beautiful. He doesn't make any mistakes and if he does, he
rips up the piece of paper and throws it out. That's the custom here,
he says.

The day before we left the village his mother invited our whole crew
(8 people) for lunch. Their family owns a restaurant we eat at
frequently, but this time, she cooked instead of the chef, and we ate
in their home upstairs instead of the restaurant on the first floor.
That was the first time I felt like I was a real friend. Not just a
foreigner everyone wants to be polite to, not just someone people are
curious about, not just a guest everyone is obligated to serve. This
was completely gratuitous. His mom made 10 dishes as well as
dumplings. It was the best food I've had during my entire stay in the
village. Zhang Xin wasn't eating much and I asked him why. He said he
was too happy that we were there. Him and his two uncles ate with us
while the female members of the household stood outside to eat. That
was the custom here. It's not that great for the women, he said. That
was the first time I heard a man say something disapproving about the
sexism around here. His uncles played the popular drinking game "Tiger
Tiger" with each and everyone of us. The girls drank Fruit Beer, which
was a really low alcohol content drink that's very popular here. The
men drank real beer. We were all experts at Tiger Tiger but despite
that I ingested enough Fruit Beer to turn bright red anyway.

Zhang Xin's clan takes up most of the houses on the street of the
village. He said there are thousands of his relatives in the township
and the weddings and New Years celebrations are enormous. There's a
long poem of characters that was written by his ancestors and each
successive generation has a designated character for their middle
name. His is "He" or "together." He shares this with everyone in his
generation. His father is an electrician and one of his uncles sells
motorcycles. The past few days he got into a fight with his dad while
his dad was drunk and he slept over at his friend's house for a week.
His dad gets drunk quite often like many of the men here. He also
smokes a great deal as all men do here and yells at Zhang Xin when he
tries to convince him to quit. That may be why for his summer project
Zhang Xin is having people sign up for a study on how much money they
spend a year on cigarettes and how that could all be used towards
reforming education in the town. He already made fliers to put up on
the street corner. His mom never graduated from elementary school cuz
her family needed her to work in the fields and help out at home. But
I'm sure she's a very wise woman regardless because her kids are all
so wonderful. Zhang Xin has two sisters. One is studying Chinese
medicine next year and the other is an amazing writer and loves to
sing. There's about 8 kids living in their two story house and 4 or 5
adults. Behind their house is their field where they grow some corn
and other crops.

I've never met a kid quite like Zhang Xin. He seemed years wiser than
the other kids in town, much wiser than I was when I was 14. His
friends respected him a great deal despite them being much older than
he was and much taller and bigger. They listened to him when he spoke.

During our last night in the village, I gave Zhang Xin a letter and
spoke to him. I told him that I would pay for his college education
and that I would help him come to the US for college if he wanted to
come. I had three requests for him and they were to work hard, write
to me and let me know what he's doing, and to not tell anyone else
about this, except maybe his mother. He nodded and said he would. I
could see he felt the real weight of what this meant.

I had to think about this alot before I decided what to do. It was a
big promise but totally do-able for a working person in the US.
College there costs 10,000 Y a year, which is a little over $1,000 US.
But to people in rural China, it's a great deal of money. Most farming
families have no income at all. They grow enough to feed themselves
for the year. Coming to the US is a much much greater challenge than
that. Zhang Xin's family is one of the better off ones. I thought
about all the children I've met including the young 1 year old who
still has yet to have her own name, and how hard they and their
families have to work to keep them in school. One of the school girls
I talked to said about 1 in 10 can make it into college. For them, she
said, college is just a dream. How much we envy all of you! she said.
I thought how much this place needed a scholarship, and how little
money that would be to give for doctors like us in the US. For the
money I've gotten this summer alone, I could have put 2 or 3 kids
through a year of college in China.

When we said goodbye to Zhang Xin, he was pretty quiet and just looked
down. He ran upstairs right after. The health official told us later
that there's a saying here that "men only bleed, they don't cry." His
mother walked us to our bus and she had tears in her eyes. She had
given us a bag of eggs she boiled for us, and a bag of walnuts for the
road. I saw her many times in the restaurant near the beginning of our
stay. Back then, she was just the restaurant owner. Now I see how much
she cares about her son, his friends, and his future. I felt comforted
by her presence. I think it's because she reminded me of my mother.
She says very little, but cares and gives so much. She held me for a
few seconds and I crawled into the bus quickly and saved most of my
tears for the road.

Meeting Zhang Xin and his family changed what the village meant to me.
Before I surely would have left with a piece of the village in my
heart, but now I have left a piece of my heart back there. Now there
is reason enough for me to go back one day.

I will be returning to the states in about a week and a half. I hope
everyone's had a great summer. I can't wait to see pictures. I am now
just a tourist like most visitors to China and I will enjoy the
luxuries of air conditioning, washing machines, and real ice cream
once more. I'll wait anxiously to hear all your stories when we are
reunited.

much love,

Bev

Stories from Rural China

Hey!

I miss you guys and can't wait to see you again.

This is a very long email so feel free to choose to read
whichever paragraphs you'd like. They're just stories I've experienced
that were significant in some way.

So I have returned after visiting two remote villages around here. I
have to say that the days went by incredibly slowly at first because
there's just so many details and obstacles one had to struggle with
and as a result, will remember.

I'm back in the small city, which I realized today was much bigger
than I thought. I was once again overwhelmed by the plentifulness of
all the goods here compared to the three little junk shops in the
villages where we stayed, where everything from fly swatters, bras,
and bottles of orange juice were discolored from age and covered with
a thick layer of dust from the lack of circulation of customers. It
was almost a culture shock this time to come back to the city. Three
of us girls got off the bus and just stood around dazed by all the
food, shops, people, and cars buzzing around us.

Our bus was even more crowded than last time. It has 25 seats total,
and is a small van. When it stopped for us to get on, the door barely
opened and people were almost falling out of it. The woman told me
there were no other buses coming and I stared in disbelief as I
squeezed into the litterbox of people. There were large heavy bags of
grains, dvd players, and tomatoes in the isle on which piled some
sitting people on which piled some standing people, on which I would
pile onto. Somehow, the three of us and our large bookbags disappeared
into the crevases of this bundle of bodies. We stood the whole way
down the winding bumpy road. Falling wasn't a problem – there was no
room to fall. The bus stopped suddenly twice. The first time was due
to a few large rocks that had fallen from the side of the mountain
onto the road. Some men got off and moved them and we drove on. The
second time, there was heavy traffic all of sudden. We were stopped
for inspection and everyone standing in the isle was told to squat and
duck down to hide. There were over 50 in the van and if the inspectors
saw more than the 25 it was supposed to hold, we would get fined. I
don't understand how we made it with the sea of bodies.

Since I last wrote, I met the people from the real rural areas. Many
live on distant hills that require a 2 hour treck to get to from the
center of the village. Children have to travel by foot to get to the
village center to go to elementary school; then take a 1 hour bus ride
to get to middle school, then another 1 hour ride on another bus from
there to get to high school in the small city. It's a big deal to make
it to high school, not to mention college. Most people I've
interviewed never completed elementary school. I met one girl who
graduated from college and I was really excited for her. I understood
after that how much people must envy those with education and how
lucky they feel for them. She was the first out of the over 50 I've
interviewed who made it to college. She studied math and is 23 years
old, like us. She will be teaching high school starting in the fall.
She looked at me and I looked at her with such fondness and mutual
admiration; I for her ability and fortune to rise out of the dirt
houses where her parents still live, and she possibly for my being
from where she has only heard about and suddenly there in her old home
in the mountains. We were so reluctant to part, despite only
exchanging a few words.

Hepatitis and TB are very common here. I met one man with hep B who
lived on a mountain. He was in his forty's. He was unmarried and had a
1.5 year old daughter (which was unusual), and lived with his parents.
He could no longer work because he's too weak and by the slow and
distant manner in which he spoke, it was no surprise. I asked what he
was most worried about with his illness, he said he doesn't know what
will happen to his daughter if he can't work, since his parents are
getting old. His dad was out working in the fields as we spoke. People
work until their bodies give out around here. I looked at his daughter
and imagined what would happen to her if her dad were gone. His
daughter was very pale and pretty. It was a blessing to see such pale
and tender skin after seeing the leather-like skin of the peasants,
browned and toughened by the sun in the fields. I understood then why
Chinese people treasured pale skin so much. I asked him what his
daughter's name was and he said she doesn't have one. I was shocked. I
asked what he called her, and he said 'girl.' 'Why don't you give him
a name?' he asked me in a somewhat desperate tone. I was speechless.
The fact that such a beautiful girl didn't have a name for so long
made life seem so arbitrary, so plain and generic. And to ask a
stranger to give her a name made it seem even more meaningless. Was
this what life was like here? Just another shot at survival? The man
asked me again to give his daughter a name when I stepped out the
door, and I realized he actually meant it. I told him his daughter
liked to smile a lot and if he runs out of ideas, he can call her 'le
le' which meant 'laughter.' It's my cousin's name. He wrote it out
with his finger on his hand and nodded, and we said goodbye. I don't
know what the little girl will be called when she grows up. I don't
know if I'll ever find out. I hoped for me that I could leave my mark
by having her named after my cousin, but I hoped for her that she
wouldn't be named in such a reckless manner by a complete stranger.

I've heard of many stories of mental illness since I last wrote.
Everyone in the villages knows of all the people with mental illness
in their village. The village minister told me that there were 7 in
the village I visited last. One died, four recovered with some
relapses once in a while, and 2 are still ill. All of the cases lasted
over 10 years. Most cases seem to be due to marital problems. The
marriages were all arranged until 10 years ago. They all sounded like
they began with anxiety or depression. One case many people mentioned
was a woman who always suspected her husband was cheating on her while
he was away in the city working, which I'm sure happens quite often
with so many migrant workers. She went crazy after a while under such
anxiety and paranoia. The first two years, people said she would go to
her mother's grave in a nearby village and cry for days on end. Later,
she would not eat for days and then eat raw meats and vegetables and
everything in sight. She's fine when her husband is not within sight
and can talk to people normally, but when her husband would walk by,
she would lose all energy and become withdrawn. It's been over 10
years and as far as the village minister knew, she never went for any
treatment until the past few months. She went to a mental hospital for
3 months and returned with no sign of improvement. I found this odd
since her husband was a doctor. I asked why her husband decided to
treat her all of sudden, but the village minister didn't know.

Another man went crazy after he his wife left him over 10 years ago.
He runs around at night all over the village and takes things from
stores and takes food off of people's tables without inhibition. Other
stories involve people cursing and hurting other people and ruining
crops for no reason. I've never heard of depression like this in the
states, but then again, I've never encountered depression that has
been left untreated for over 10 years. With so many severe cases in
one village, it's hard to imagine how many milder cases there are that
are still developing untreated. I can't imagine how bad depression
would have to be for it to manifest like this.

I've been impressed by the sensitivity of people to mental illness
around here. They all recognize the cases as depression, as
psychological problems, and they believe it's a serious form of
illness. It's not as I expected, that they don't take mental illness
seriously or that they don't understand how one's mood and
psychological well being can also turn ill. They also believe that
mental illness is treatable, so it's not that they don't have hope for
these people. They also recognize the importance of family and friends
in offering support to bring the mentally ill back to health. Their
limitation doesn't seem to be knowledge, but rather money and the
inability to change their situation. They can't afford psychiatrists
nor the medications available. They also have little choice but to
live at home and go on doing the farming that they do. In the states,
people could move away for a while, get a new job, get a divorce, etc.
But here, these changes are nearly impossible. There have been 5
divorces in that village. Before each one is official, the village
officials and all the friends and families try to help the couple make
amends but after the actual divorce, friends keep their distance from
the recent divorcees, in particular the women. One of the questions on
our suvey is 'does the mentally ill person face so much difficulty at
home that they can't live at home?' People answer: 'the difficulty is
great, but where would they live if not at home?' People here don't
choose their jobs. They work so they can eat. It's astonishing to me
every time when I ask for their yearly income and they respond "what
income?" They grow things and eat them, and if they stop growing
things, they wouldn't have anything to eat. I'm still getting over
this concept.

I somehow imagined peasants to be contently working, whistling and
singing as they work, and laughing and spirited and having a great
time. But I have heard little singing and whistling and there's no
time for idle talk and play. They work from 5am till the sun goes down
and in the winter they look for firewood or go to the city to work
construction or other odd jobs. They're constantly working. There's no
sense of the weekend or a vacation. They eat potatoes, noodles, and a
god-aweful tastine sour vegetable until they're bellies are full
because they know they have a lot of labor ahead of them. I imagined
them to be thirsty for knowledge, until I spoke with a man who told me
otherwise. I asked him what illnesses he would like to learn about
most, and he answered 'why would I want to learn about anything until
I get sick with it?' I got angry at first at his apathy, but then I
realized that this was probably the best information I've gotten all
afternoon. 'That's how we think here in the rural places,' he said,
'we don't care to learn things. We just want to get better after we
get sick.' I thought about it and I thought, of course they wouldn't.
I wouldn't either if I had to work so hard just to make it through
another year.

There's a lot of obstacles for all of here to achieve what we'd like
to do with the RMHC. People don't know how this health insurance
works, they don't know they have a say in how it runs, there's no one
outside of the one health official who is running and education people
about it around here, and there's no money to hire any others. It
looks so much bleaker than the beautifully structured power point flow
charts I saw back at my professor's seminar on this program.

I think we will finish our project far ahead of schedule. The three of
us Americans are all homesick and listen to rap and country to ease
our pain, not much different from what soldiers must have done when
they were away at war. We dream of McD sundaes, steak, driving on long
stretches of high ways with wind in our hair, sitting on a real couch,
going to see movies…Those of you in the states, think about what
you're doing right now and we'd probably be envious. It's not a matter
of money or material things. It's a matter of home.

Until next time,

Beverly