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.