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.