Indo Journal Tiga

In case you didn't click through to the Beachwood Reporter site, here's the most recent piece.

I thought it might take some getting used to, driving on the left side of the road after a lifetime on the other side of the yellow line. But driving in Indonesia isn't really about sides. It's about space: If there's a space, someone will fill it. Headed to town for a fried rice dinner? Watch out for three motorcycles in your lane, coming your way. Oh, and mind the Toyota Kijang SUV that's swung wide to pass a tottering pedicab. The Kijang's taking up most of your lane, and its driver is closing in at about 40 miles per hour. You'd pull toward the outside but there are six people walking in the street right there and you're boxed in between a Honda Civic with a new lime green paint job and a tour bus with a chrome sun shade that reads "Total Cowboy." The bus driver blasts his horn so people will just naturally drift over and out of the way, only there's nowhere to go to get out of the way. So what? He keeps honking. The Kijang blows by, maybe eight inches from your foot. Normal. And here comes a man with about 100 chickens inside a plastic cage that's balancing on the back of his motorcycle seat. Right at you. And another guy with, I don't know, 50 or 60 pounds of banana leaves bundled on his back. Cutting across your lane, two friends on a little black Honda are somehow transporting a small-but-not-insubstantial refrigerator.

We move together, waves of to and fro, left and right, merge and brake. Exhaust thick in the air. And did I mention the guys in the orange vests? The freelance traffic control guys? They stand in parking lots or on sides of roads and stop traffic for drivers seeking egress; they walk into traffic, sometimes with a little official-looking orange flashlight and sometimes just flailing their arms, and they halt everyone who doesn't swerve around them into oncoming traffic. In return, the egressing driver hands them about 1,000 rupiah, maybe 10 cents. It's very organic, this traffic swarm. And everyone's involved.

I joined the swarm when I recently bought a manageable little Yamaha scooter - in Indonesian parlance, an automatic - so that I could get around my Central Java town without cadging rides or being left stranded by the public mini-bus. The Yamaha is almost brand new, very red, and it gets me back and forth from the municipal pool and the grocery store and several excellent sidewalk food carts. Biking is almost out of the question. The distances are pretty great, the heat at times stroke-inducing, and the roads and drivers simply aren't made for bike lanes. A share-the-road, bike-right-of-way, even if I could describe the idea in Indonesian, would be heartily laughed at. Oh, Brett! That a good one! This is a country, after all, where the state-owned petroleum company dominates distribution and provides a nifty subsidy for all Indonesians (and visitors) who can afford internal-combustion transportation. So, everyday I strap on my shiny new helmet, fire up the scooter, and head out for some harrowing transit. And everyday I see something that makes me think maybe I should get off and push this thing for a little while. Just slow wayyyy down. A visit last week to the local hospital - where I'd be taken in the event of a bike wreck - was all I needed to forever give up any lingering lead-foot fantasies I brought from home. Like jail here, I'd pretty much do anything to stay out of that hospital. The Indonesians call hospitals rumah sakit, which means "sick house," or more literally "house of sick." They're exactly right.

A friend of a friend, a young kid about 17, had been struck by a car and busted his shoulder. My friend was delivering some snacks to lift the kid's spirits and asked if I wanted to see the hospital. Sure. A little local color. Let's go. Well, I wasn't ready for the blood. At least not all over the entryway tile, a splattered trail that we followed into the building. It had dried and turned rust brown and nobody was moving to clean it up. People walked through the blood, or around it, or they stepped over as they smoked and talked and came and went. We followed a group of smoking men back into the hospital, a cluster of white-washed buildings with tall faded-orange tile roofs, all connected by outdoor walkways. Very Javanese. People stood or squatted in the walkways, the yard, and on front porches of various buildings. We arrived about dinner time and several families were actually cooking over charcoal fires in the interior courtyard, dirty smoke billowing across the campus. A couple women were washing pots from an outdoor spigot. Others were sleeping on oily mattresses, or maybe they were eating on the mattresses. The place had a squatter's camp feel and most everyone looked very tired. They were sitting vigil for friends and relatives inside. Who knows for how long. I wasn't ready for the encampment, either.

We waited a few minutes before a guard would let us in to the patient ward - plenty of waiting here - and finally were waved in. All white, and tile. But dirty. Grimy. No disinfectant smell. Nothing like that antibiotic tang you get when you step off the elevator into even the most basic American health clinic. This place smelled heavily of sweat and dirt, a little of piss and shit, and curiously of fried chicken. We found the boy's room and ducked in. We were very definitely not alone. The kid was in a three-bed recovery room, maybe eight feet wide by about 20 feet long. Each bed was occupied - there were no curtains for privacy - and the guy on the far end wore a thick and blood-stained bandage on his head. His wife and one child sat beside him as he turned over and back, over and back. Right near the door, an adult man lay on his back with a small blanket covering his lower half. He smiled at me when we walked in. The man's son climbed in and out of bed with him and at one point changed into pajamas. He was clearly there for the night. The man's wife bickered with the young boy, who didn't want to change into pajamas, and she produced two plastic stools for my friend and I to sit on during our visit. She did not look at us, just shoved the stools toward us and went back to skirmishing with her son.

My friend's friend, the kid we'd come to see, actually didn't look that bad. His shoulder was slumped and his chin was scraped but he was sitting upright and forcing a smile when I met him. He had an IV but no sling. A shy kid, he mostly mumbled and stared at his feet. His mother and father explained the accident to my friend, who translated just a little bit for me. The boy, Yoga, had run into the street after a ball and got clipped by a van. It could have been much worse. They were upset but glad he would recover. Yoga sat in the bed in a dirty black t-shirt and blue shorts. Nothing like a gown. Nobody had a gown. It was street clothes and children's pajamas, and whatever food people cooked outside or bought and brought to you. A ceiling fan hung still. The night wasn't that hot but the room was close, and fetid. We said our goodbyes and headed back toward the entrance.

On the way out, we passed a bulletin board with pictures from a staff party and what looked like a birth announcement for one of the doctors. And right beside that, we saw some truly grisly images. Of surgery, at the hospital. It took me a minute to recognize what was happening in the roughest one: They were performing knee surgery on some poor asshole whom I swear did not walk again, not on that leg. The entire leg was exposed from about the hip to the shin, like cubic yards of red meat and tendon, and a doctor was standing inside the joint, kind of wrapping the bloody leg around his own waist. When I first saw the picture, it looked like someone was wrestling a skinned alligator. And then I thought maybe someone had been cut in half and a doctor was holding the spinal column in a bear hug. But it was just knee surgery. Or maybe they were amputating it. That would actually make more sense. My friend, though, insisted is was a repair job. Like old-timey sawbones shit. Raw. I thought about the Yamaha and about the traffic swarm. My stomach got very heavy. This hospital . . . ? I asked my friend. Is not a good hospital, is it? she interrupted.

The Indonesians have a sing-song word that means "be careful." Hati-hati, they say. It's on warning signs all over the place and almost every time I head off on the Yamaha, someone says to me, Hati-hati, Mr. Brett. Driving home from the hospital, I could feel the phrase in my marrow. Hati-hati. No, seriously. Hati-fucking-hati. This is a country where I can keep a blog routinely updated with little fuss using a wi-fi router, and where Coca-Cola and Heineken line the shelves of the local grocery store, where cell phones are a total fact of life, and where you can take air-conditioned buses up and down this overcrowded island. You can direct-dial the U.S. from Borobudur Temple. You can take a hot shower, and then another. But that's just part of it. Beneath that modern gloss, there's still an old and sometimes broken, sometimes perilous world under there. Indonesia. Hati-hati.

Hati-hati in the traffic swarm

A new Indonesian Journal piece for Chicago's excellent Beachwood Reporter: http://tinyurl.com/38jd9ne

Have you been to Bali?

Before last night, I hadn't seen a movie in anything like a movie theater setting since mid-August. Way too long. So I made plans with a young couple, both in Magelang for their student-teaching sequence, to travel south to Yogyakarta and that city's Cinema 21 theaters for a late-night showing of Eat, Pray, Love.

We drove down on motor bikes and first stopped by a Javanese cultural festival on Jalan Malioboro that was literally impassably crowded. A parade, traditional dancing, puppets, whatever. Our experience was mostly of shoving and being shoved as they crowd squeezed impatiently into the busy batik shopping district. It was like the worst of Bourbon Street and Taste of Chicago, almost like the Hawks parade this summer--just elbows and shoulders, sweat and heat, someone's foot on your heel for an hour--and we decided not to force our way into the sea of people without knowing how we'd ever get back out. We'll catch some trad dance patterns another time, thanks.


Back to the theater after dinner, we stood waiting for the previous show to let out. On the lobby sound system: The impossibly bad and I'd thought long, long forgotten late-80s/early90s throwaway "I Hate Everything About You" by Ugly Kid Joe. I remembered the song from high school but had to look up the generic hairband's name when I got back to a computer. The song sure sounded like the original but I see it's recently been covered by an Indonesian band, so maybe it was a very note-for-note tribute. Either way, another disassociative moment of pop cultural resurrection here, where people love shitty 80s metal. It's everywhere. Like if the Brat Stop were a country.

We had a few minutes to talk about the movie while waiting for the doors to open. I told my friends that part of the story was set in Bali. They were excited. Have you been to Bali? they asked. The Indonesians have a word for not yet that you hear a lot: belum. It's pronounced bell-um. Not yet, I said. Belum. Well, you should go to Bali.

I hear this a lot. You should go to Bali. I had the sense coming here that Bali was a kind of Western tourist preserve, full of divers, surfers, castaways, hangers-on, maybe art exporters, maybe a few ethnomusicologists, and women like Liz Gilbert--sun-soaked self-seekers snorkeling around in the surf. But my Indonesian friends all love the place. Many go every year. It's not unusual for talk to turn to Bali and for someone to whip out a cell phone loaded with snapshots from this beachfront bar or that scenic ocean overlook. Bali is a source of national recreational pride. But my young friends last night also said I should visit Bali because, unlike the socially conservative and very Muslim mainland of Java, Bali enjoys a unique Hindu culture that is significantly more permissive and open than elsewhere in the archipelago. I know that; you know that. But I thought it interesting that my very devoutly Muslim friends--who took leave for evening prayers shortly after we bought the movie tickets--were concerned about my social and cultural acclimation to Java. You would feel comfortable there, they said. Bali is more like your country.

I feel pretty comfortable where I'm at but I knew what they meant. Julia Roberts-as-Gilbert hits a beachfront party hard shortly after arriving in Indonesia. She orders several shots of tequila while bouncing around a dance floor with a shirtless piece of beefcake and ends up solidly hammered. I watched the movie theater crowd for reactions. I live in a city of 150,000 people and I know of only one place that serves tequila, and they don't do shots. It's the pricey restaurant of the one resort-like hotel in town that caters to Western tourists and businessmen. And even then, if you want tequila you have to buy a bad $10 margarita. Watching Roberts down shots, the crowd around me giggled. Very foreign. Vaguely provocative.


That said, I was watching the movie while drinking a cold can of Bintang Beer, the widely available and pretty bad national beer of Indonesia. They offered cans at the concession stand for the equivalent of about $2.30 and I figured a beer and a small box of popcorn was worth the $5. Beer is available everywhere, usually warm. Booze? Not so much.

Anyway, back to Bali. The island is presented in the film, of course, as a tropical paradise with mystic powers. A wizened soothsayer tapped deeply into said powers helps steer Roberts/Gilbert toward her next, best man and she finally makes the leap for good into the love-hungry arms of Javier Bardem. (Although I'm pretty sure the government censors cut some of the love-hungrier scenes; we saw very, very little skin.) Cue music.

Afterward, I asked my friends what they thought. How did the Bali of the movie compare to Bali the actual place? Both agreed it was just like in the movie. It's beautiful. It's romantic. The architecture is very unique. No objections, only praise. That was good. It was very beautiful.

No doubt. But as we made our way back onto the streets of Yogyakarta, an old and storied city that serves as a gateway for most to Central Java, we buzzed along on our bikes past gutters full of trash, past open dumping grounds for household garbage, and I wondered why other parts of Indonesia aren't meant to be beautiful and romantic too. Why only Bali?

Retro-tactile and stuff

Since we're talking about cultural exchange, a couple notes from this week.

1. One of the English teachers asked after school the other day if I'd accompany him to the bank. He actually said, Will you accompany me? I needed to do some shopping in town and was at least curious to see his bank--a special institution owned and operated by the Magelang government as a kind of credit union for civil servants--and so off we went. I didn't ask why he needed to visit the bank, and figured it was probably to drop off a check or something. When we got there, my buddy disappeared into a back office and I was left to contemplate the three-story polished marble lobby. Handsome but very gray. The place, like many places here, felt transported from the 1960s or 1970s, maybe because you can still smoke in public everywhere and because Indonesians still use an unbelievable number of hand-written receipts, usually in triplicate and always stapled to something. It's very retro-tactile, the receipt thing, and I like it. I grabbed a newspaper from the old-fashioned newspaper reading rack in the corner--more to like!--and took seat in the lobby. Twenty minutes later, I began to wonder what happened to my friend. Thirty minutes later, I sent him a text message saying I was heading to the store without him. "Ok," he texted back. About 45 minutes later he called to ask where I was. I'm waiting for you at the bank, he said, sounding a little peeved. I'll be right there. So I walked back and he met me in the doorway and said I should take a seat. He was almost done. Almost done? Almost done, he said with a smile. Maybe 15 minutes later he emerged from the back office with a black plastic grocery bag that was, of course, stapled shut. I think he'd torn the receipt off. On the ride back, my friend asked if I'd store something in my backpack for him. Sure. He reached below his seat and grabbed the grocery bag. Take this. I got a loan. I took the bag and stuffed it in my backpack. You got a loan and the bank paid you in cash? Yeah. I needed the money right away. How much is in here? Fifty million rupiah. That's about $5,000, or a year's pay for a teacher with my friend's experience. So we drove around town with a pile of cash and even stopped for lunch. I set the backpack down next to my chair as we ate and my friend gave me a very concerned look. Don't forget the bag. Of course not. I didn't ask but he eventually told me he was using the money for an investment with a friend. I need to make some money. I need to buy a house. I've been living with my mother-in-law for 16 years. An investment? I don't want to say.

2. My Internet went out yesterday for the second time in about a week, and my counterpart teacher got involved in trying to fix it. There's a little Internet room for the students near my house and the 20-something guy who runs it was trying to get me back online by monkeying with my computer settings, which never seems like a good idea. He was having no luck and trying to explain this to me but I wasn't getting it. I called my counterpart to translate and he popped in about one minute later. We all convened around the desk in my small little bedroom and the two of them got to talking about the machine. I could follow the conversation for a couple minutes--router not working, need to change router, maybe the principal should get involved?--but lost them at about the five minute mark. They kept talking, literally non-stop, for about 35 minutes. My counterpart did no actual translating, and I finally excused myself and ate an apple. Eventually the tech guy left and my counterpart joined me in the kitchen. He sat down, silently. So what's up? Uh, he's trying to fix it. And? We can say he is trying to fix it. You guys just talked for a half-hour. What did you say? Oh, that he might not fix it until Monday.

3. We had some fun at English Club today. About 40 students crammed into an over-warm classroom, a good mix of boys and girls from the 11th and 12th grades. Couple fun games and then we did some singing: Country Roads, which is popular among the teachers, and Lennon's Imagine. Kids really got into the chorus of Country Roads, just belting it out, and on our third time through we were pulling some Keillor-like communal singalong oomph. Songs every week, I think.

Paying respects

In an effort to improve my Indonesian, and in part because I miss fussing with an actual newspaper everyday, I'm now "reading" the national daily Kompas. I skim the stories for words or phrases or even simple sentences I can understand, and I try to make sense of the cutlines and kickers. I look for items I've seen reported in the English-language press, where I'm sure to understand at least something, and I check out the sports pages, which are filled with stories about volleyball (?!), Formula One racing, and European soccer. I also linger over the photo essays, many of which celebrate new toll roads and high-speed interchanges in this country of two-lane roads.

So paging through the business section today, I was struck by several half- and quarter-page ads all memorializing the recently deceased Brigjen Pol (P) Dr. H. KRH Chanrda Suharto, MBA, SpJp. A former national police official, General Dr. Suharto went on to head the very large and very dominant Blue Bird Group taxi company. He died recently in a hospital bed in Holland. Gen'l Dr. Suharto appears in no less than five ads--paid for by Mercedes-Benz, a couple large Toyota dealerships, and one big bank--in his police uniform, sometimes with a baubled-and-banded-and-eagle-crested hat and sometimes not. All of these big and powerful players wish to honor the late police official/Ph.D./MBA/cab company boss and to thank him for his contributions to Indonesian life. They compete for the most honorific offering, the biggest ad, the wordiest ad, the ad with two-tone color!

No doubt this is good form and very good business. I'm sure Pak Suharto (any relation to the late strongman is unknown to me) was a decent fellow and a regular customer, and I'm sure his family and former business associates and underlings will appreciate the encomiums.

But two things:

1. I have seen nothing like these ads in the English-language papers, and I can't help but thinking they represent some kind of window into How Things Work here. Fealty is paid, relations maintained, and it's kept among the Indonesians.

2. How 'bout the absurd laundry list of supposed academic accomplishments? MBA and Ph.D. on top of full-time work as a police bureau "general," and as the boss of bosses in the largest and most profitable cab company in Indonesia? Of course. Why not? I mean, everyone in higher office here has a Ph.D. as far as I can tell. I'd like to read, or maybe just skim, their dissertations. Wonder where I could find them.

There's a lot of noise in the English-language press here about the almost tragicomic abuse of courts and the law by well-connected movers and shakers. Justice can and is clearly bought, so why not some sheepskins? Just pile 'em on! The wordier the paid memorial ad--the wider and stemwindinger the tombstone inscription--the better.

Class dismissed

A group photo after one recent class. And, yes, that's a photo of Indonesian President Dr. H. Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono in the corner. He and his deputy president watch over all our classrooms.

Special thanks to Tom Popelka for asking.

Boro by morning

We were up at 4 a.m. today to get over to Borobudur for sunrise. Access to the temple for this time of day, considered primo picture-taking time, is controlled by a hotel near the temple site and they of course charge a king's ransom for the privilege of joining about 75 other Monday morning tourists for daybreak over Mt. Merapi. Like yesterday, the weather was exactly right and we got there in time to find Merapi smoking listlessly into the dawn, the light shifting in slow motion from red to orange to amber. Fog in the valley, birds and songs of birds in the air.


By morning light, Borobudur appeared more reddish yellow than gray, and its color and mood changed as the sun rose higher. The building became more stolid. It darkened and grew weightier. In the early morning it was less massive, more sleepy.


I'd hired Aris the Guide for two days and he joined us again, bright and early. Mostly the same drill with a mix of historical imprecision and outright fabrication, all delivered in good cheer. Aris, can you tel us about the terrorist bombings in 1985 that targeted Borobudur? Who carried out the bombings? They say that the same man who did that bombed Bali in 2002. Aris, that can't possibly be true. I've heard it said.

He was showing us around the intricate narrative carvings that ring much of the temple. In one series of panels that wrap around the building, we learn the story of Buddha's life, Aris told us. These images sit above another story-in-pictures that also wraps all the way around the building, so there are two concurrent stories happening on the inside wall of the temple--Buddha on top, the other story on the bottom.


Aris, what's the other story? It's a Javanese story, Mr. Brett. And what happens in the story? It's very long, Mr. Brett. Here, Buddha is sitting beneath a Bodhi tree.

So we walked around the temple and Aris told us the story of Buddha and we watched the Javanese story scroll by without comment. About three-quarters of the way around the building, hundreds of images into the walk, Aris told of Buddha's search for a spiritual teacher. And Aris, what's happening here in the Java story? Um, not much. Not much! I doubled over laughing. Not much? I guess not.

In fact, all of the narrative carvings at Borobudur are about Buddha. Who was not Javanese.