Another Dog Down

This actually sounds something like the title of a Hollywood movie, or perhaps a novel. Actually, it was another sad day for us with a pet. May, our young guard dog, slipped out of the gate last night when my wife was off to take a friend home. A half-hour later some neighbors brought May home. She had been hit by one of the lunatics that life to drive at 80 kph through this small village filled with children, dogs, goats and chickens. May died about a half-hour after she was brought home.

While May was somewhat of a problem (she never really changed much from a semi-wild state) in that she killed 12 of our chickens and continually harrased and terrorized our geese, she was an excellent guard dog whose fierce demeanor and angry growl when a stranger approached the gate kept out unwanted visitors and probably scared away several potential burglars.

Dogs here in our area of Sumbawa generally run free just like in Bali. We make a point of keeping ours inside the walls that surround our house. May just happened to escape this time, and she unfortunately paid for it.

Another Trip - Visa Runs

A commonality among expats living in Southeast Asia is the dreaded (for most of us, most of the time) visa run. Check in on one of the numerous expat forums and it’s a certainty that you’ll find at least one thread about visa runs. For the expat who is living on a tourist visa this can mean going out of the country at least every one to three months. For expats with different types of visas, the time frame becomes considerably longer.

For those of us living on a limited budget, the visa run can be a financial hardship – one of those costs that we don’t always factor into our living expenses. Expats in Thailand can leave the country by land and therefore use a bus – generally the cheapest mode of transportation. For those of us in Indonesia, the visa run generally means leaving by plane; a relatively expensive experience even in these days of budget airlines.

Additional expenses are food, a hotel room if you need to be out of the country for at least a day, visa fees, and occasionally the gratuity (otherwise known as a bribe) for immigration officials.

Besides the financial burden, the visa run often is a physical/emotional trial. I’ve often had somewhat uncomfortable exchanges with immigration officials, and the memory of those times tends to stay with me so that I tense up anytime I have to come back into Indonesia.

I still vividly remember an encounter 8 years ago when immigration pulled my whole family into an office in the Ngurah Rai airport, told us that we were entering illegally (it was my first time in Indonesia without a KITAS and I wasn’t aware that I needed to have a return ticket out), and threatened to deport us immediately. I explained the situation as calmly as possible to the immigration official who was quite hostile while my wife and kids were in tears. After a bit of a discussion, I offered to immediately buy tickets out for the whole family, but at that point in the discussion, this was not acceptable to the immigration fellow. No, we were going to be sent out immediately. At this point, he stormed out of the room, and another official came in (the good cop, bad cop routine). He was friendly and sympathetic; he tried to calm down my wife and kids; he offered me a cigarette and some coffee. Once we were all relaxed somewhat, he told me that he’d love to help us since he was a family man himself, and if I could help him some, everything would be fine. When I inquired as to how much help he needed, he replied that the money in my wallet would be sufficient. We ended up settling on $250 (five of us at $50 each, much cheaper he assured me than buying some airline tickets and having to fly all the way back to Singapore. Well, I learned an expensive lesson about being prepared for immigration after that incident.

This trip everything was in order (as it always is now), and I breezed through immigration and customs.

In another few years when I am retired and no longer on a company’s employee list, I’ll have to go back to the dreaded visa runs on a regular basis. But there’s a new immigration law in Indonesia that may eventually benefit me so there’s always hope.

Rain

Finally, the rainy season appears to have come. We now have running water in the house. It's amazing how something that we take for granted in the States can be such an issue elsewhere in the world.

Traveling

My first trip overseas was 1987. My wife at the time was doing fieldwork in India, and I took my Christmas break to visit her. I purchased an inexpensive ticket from a travel agent on Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley. The result was one of the most intense travel experiences that I’ve had in 20 years of travel overseas. The flight left San Francisco and stopped first in Anchorage, Alaska. From there we went on to Tokyo, Seoul, Taipei, and finally Bangkok where I spent two days waiting for a flight from Bangkok to Delhi.

Those were the good old days for smokers because you were still allowed to smoke freely in the back of the plane. That did a bit towards passing the time on the long-haul flights.

Two years after my first trip overseas, I moved to Indonesia and began a life that included international travel as one of the benefits/necessities. During my early years in Southeast Asia, I loved the traveling. Each trip was a chance to experience something new. Southeast Asia was experiencing tremendous growth then, and every trip to Kuala Lumpur or Singapore or Bangkok or Jakarta revealed new buildings, new restaurants, new bars – glimmering urban landscapes that always captivated me.

From 1989 to 1998, I was based in what was then called Irian Jaya on the island of New Guinea. In my early days there, the only way to get to Bali during my vacations was to take the milk run. We went from Timika in Irian to the island of Biak just off the coast of New Guinea, then on to Ambon in the Malukus and then Ujung Pandang (now Makassar). Finally, after a 45 minute stopover, we would leave for Bali. Merpati used the old Folker F-28. These planes were cramped, smoked-filled, and hot. Finding a seat was often problematic as it was generally first-come, first-served. I left the seat-grabbing to my wife after we married (before that I just let myself get pushed to the back of the line and take whatever was available).

Getting to Bali was always an adventure. We would get up at 2:30 and wake the kids up. At 3:00 in the morning we would line up to take the non-staff bus down the mountain to the airport in Timika. The bus had stiff plastic bucket seats and most of the passengers were chain-smoking Indonesian workers. After a three-hour drive down the winding mountain road, we’d arrive at the terminal which consisted of an insufficient number of hard seats and benches set in a fenced-in open-air room. We’d sit there with our small children until 12:30 when the flight left for Biak.

Compared to the Timika airport, Biak was spacious and comfortable. It was decorated with appropriate statuary from the tribes of Irian and, on occasion, you could get a cold beer from one of their small fridges. After a 45 minute wait, we’d shuffle the kids back on board and do a 90 minute flight to Ambon. The waiting room there was barebones in the early days but was upgraded the last time I was there in 1998. We’d do another 45 minutes there which was enough for the kids to get a snack, use the bathroom and then get back on board for the 90 minute flight to Ujung Pandang.

Arriving in UP was almost like being in paradise. The terminal was large, the toilets fairly clean, there was a lot of space for the kids to wander, and you’d see an occasional foreigner there. In the last few years that we were there, they had a little bakery and pizza as well. I actually spent a fair amount of time in Ujung Pandang over the years due to flight cancellations. UP was interesting, and you could never tell when the university students were going to go on a rampage over something so there was always a chance that something interesting would happen. An example would be the time we went to eat at a rooftop restaurant which just happened to have a brothel on the floor below. That was fairly amusing.

After another 45 minutes we would make the hour flight to Bali and then the long 2 hour ride back north to Singaraja. Nothing like the old days of travel.

Seminaring in Jakarta

It’s been ten years since my last trip to Jakarta. I can’t say that the last trip was filled with pleasant memories. The city seemed too large, unmanageable, dirty and one big traffic jam. I do remember the Borobudur Hotel and the Mandarin fondly, but that’s about all.

I’ve just returned from a short trip to Jakarta where I attended a technology seminar. The traffic seems to be as horrible as I remember it – 2 hours from the airport to my hotel with the taxi driver complaining the whole way. The city seems even larger than 10 years ago. The construction that has occurred is amazing. Jakarta seems much more like Bangkok now than it did before. Overall the trip was a very pleasant one.

The tech seminar was well worth the trip from Sumbawa. The speakers were generally quite good; the presentations were interesting; I met some friendly teachers from Bogor; and I got a look at what’s going on with technology and education in Indonesia.

It’s always good to talk to tech people from anywhere, but even better to talk to tech people from Indonesia. We generally have the same issues – money, connectivity, hardware and software problems – and one of the main benefits of seminars of this type is to see how other folks approach their problems.

As far as specifics go, I have another piece of hardware that I can lust after – Tablet PCs. They seem to have all the benefits of laptops with the cool added function of being able to write on the screen. What a great tool for students and teachers.

Microsoft Learning Gateway is another cool thing that I learned about. It seems to be an excellent platform for interactivity between teachers, students, and parents. Virtual Learning also appears to have these features. For large classes these platforms could make a huge difference. For a small school, the benefits might not be so great. Obviously the ability to work on assignments from school or home is one major benefit. Classroom collaboration would be another.

Blogs, wikis, websites, podcasts, IM are all tech tools that were mentioned, but I’ve already used all of them. I started playing with podcasts last spring and found them interesting, but they involve a lot of work without the cooperation of the classroom teacher. I also started working with blogs and they were very popular with students, but I didn’t have much of a plan on how to use them other than try to see how they would work. The interactivity is good, but there has to be more than that.

If we look at all of these platforms as being part of the constructivist approach, then it follow that they are relatively interchangeable with the exception that each platform and application has special features that make it more suitable for specific educational tasks than others.

During the early years of the educational use of the WWW, teachers were hungry for contact with other teachers who were using the Web. I’m at a loss right now to remember what the group was, but I believe that it still exists. I tried several joint projects and because of the connectivity problems during those early days of the Web the projects were never quite successful although we did end up collaborating with a zoo in St. Louis to make a video on the rainforest.

Now, despite the great advances in the infrastructure of the Internet as well as more advanced software, it seems that internet based projects are not quite the thing that they were years ago. But, maybe I’m just out of the loop on these sorts of projects.

I remain convinced that tech coordinators need to be relieved of most of their teaching duties so that they have time to work with teachers on setting up cooperative programs as well as working on professional development. They also need time to set up and maintain platforms like blogs, wikis, websites, and podcasts. Some schools have realized this, but, unfortunately, most have not yet.

Blog Indonesia

I'm having trouble getting this blog to show up on Blog Indonesia, so this is just a test. Tomorrow there'll be some thoughts on my recent trip to Jakarta.

Another list - food

More favorites today. I’m not a big food person. I eat to live not the other way around, but occasionally there have been meals that remain with me even today.

Here are some of my favorites. And like yesterday in no particular order.

1. A Chinese place on the edge of North Beach and China Town in San Francisco. They had incredible food that I still remember even though the last time that I was there was 1989. I was particularly fond of the prawns.
2. A place just off of Orchard Road in Singapore in an outdoor food court kind of setup. They had this prawn dish with greens and lots of chillis. It was wonderful. My wife makes an identical one now that I love just as much. More actually because I don’t have to go to Singapore to eat it.
3. A little Mexican grocery store across the street from my apartment on Armitage Avenue circa the mid-70s. They had these great burritos that were incredible and cheap. I’d have two every Saturday morning after my ex picked up my son for the weekend.
4. The Hungarian Goulash at the Red Baron in Chicago in the mid-70s.
5. The Chicago style hot dogs that I used to buy from a cart just off campus when I was a student at U of I.
6. Uno’s deep dish pizza – the original. There was nothing like it.
7. Any seafood dish that my wife makes. Her steak cutlets come right after that.
8. The Jambalaya at Bourbon Street Restaurant in Bangkok. Spicy and filling. They make a pretty good pizza as well.
9. The Chicken Tikka in the Diamond Market in Lahore, Pakistan. It would have been even better with a few cold beers. Mix the tikka with some nan and it was heaven.
10. Jimmy, my cook in Pakistans, spicy meatballs with nan. I had these once a week for the last year that I lived in Pakistan and I always looked forward to having it.
11. Novi’s beef sandwiches with green peppers. Slightly greasy and delicious. Novi’s was an Italian beef place that I worked at in the 60s.
12. White Castle hamburgers at 3:30 on a Sunday morning before I used to do my shift at the News Agency during my teen years.
13. The stir-fried shrimp from this sidewalk restaurant in Singapore just outside of Chinatown. Some of the most succulent that I’ve ever had.
14. The stir-fried shrimp from a Chinese restaurant across the road from Washington State University in Pullman. Enormous portions for almost nothing. Perfect with two ice cold beers.
15. My mother’s dumplings. Perfect. I could eat them for hours. Mixed with bacon and hot dogs.

Water

Water. The overwhelming importance of water really becomes clear at this time of the year. With the rainy season still to come here, we are going through another year of severe water shortages. We’ve been lucky to get a trickle inside the house most evenings over the past seven weeks. Several times we’ve gone two or three days with absolutely no water, and most of the time, we have to fill up pots and pans in the front yard and use them to fill up the bathtubs and sinks. My wife has been doing laundry in the river across the road. The floors haven’t been washed in weeks. I regularly go without a bath during the weekends so that the kids have enough water to wash before they go to school. I’ve gotten used to be grubby all weekend. The plants in our garden are beginning to die, and we struggle to keep our many animals supplied with water. With all this in mind, I just happened to catch an interview on Asia Talk with the rapper Jay-Z. He’s involved in working to be clean water to poor countries. It was interesting to hear him talk about the fundamental importance of water. As difficult as our water problems have made our lives over the past seven weeks, we’re fortunate enough to have the money to buy bottled water to drink. I can only imagine what it’s like for people who have our water problems and aren’t able to obtain drinking water.

I’m going to be doing some research on water over the next few weeks and see what I can come up with.

Lists- Favorite bars around the world

Lists of favorite things. Most people have them. This has been one of those periods in my life when I just start wondering about things in the past.

Here are some of my favorites. We’ll start with bars – in no particular order.

1. Billy Goat – when I drank there in the 70s it was just a little hole in the wall institution that was immortalized by John Belushi’s Saturday Night Live skits. Back then, it was just a place that Chicago Tribune and Sun-Times workers used as a place to have a few drinks at lunch or after a shift. It was unpretentious and quirky. I ate a lot of cheese and egg sandwiches there over the years.
2. Oxford Pub – a place on Lincoln Avenue that was popular with the artsy crowd during the 70s when I lived in Lincoln Park in Chicago. It was a fairly big place with decent food. It was a 4 am bar so when the 2 o’clock places closed, everyone gathered there.
3. The Red Baron – just a few doors up from Oxford’s. It was a smaller place run by a German, Herbie. It was my favorite place for years partly because I lived across the street, and partly because Herbie made this great Hungarian Goulash. It had an odd assortment of folks who hung out there.
4. Weiss’s – another Lincoln Avenue bar from the same period. It was right on the corner and fairly big. I used it as the place for a few hard-boiled egg breakfasts when I was working the night shift at the Tribune and going to U of I during the day.
5. Biu – a small open bar in the Lovina area of North Bali. The owner, Ngurah, was friendly and an excellent host. He’d get tourists together and have these impromptu parties. The only place in the north that had Bintang on tap. He kept a bottle of scotch hidden in the back for me.
6. A place on Orchard Road just south of the Hyatt. I never knew what it was called, and it was mostly a place to eat, but they had a bar where I’d sit and watch the folks walking down Orchard Road while listening to the Singlish of the staff.
7. The Timika Yacht and Swim Club – I was the Vice-President and spent a lot of time there during the years that I lived in Papua. It was in the jungle and that made it all worth it.
8. The old smoking bar in Don Muang International Airport in Bangkok. It was a haven for me during the years that I lived in Pakistan. I’d do a Saturday morning transit and sit there for an hour or so and suck up four double scotches at 7 in the morning while chain-smoking Marlboros before my flight back to Bali. I met some interesting folks there.
9. Larry Blakes on Telegraph in Berkeley, California. It had two floors; the ground floor was a restaurant and the bottom was the actual bar. I hung out there during my Berkeley days. There were many times when I stopped by for a hamburger, a beer and three or four shots of scotch before heading off to Anthro 240. I just checked the internet and found that it has been changed a bit from the old days, but then so is most everything.
10. Sri Homestay – actually a restaurant in Anturan, Bali. I drank there for years, occasionally having something to eat, under the watchful eyes of Ibu Sri. My drink of choice there was Three Star arak along with Bintang beer.

Blog Indonesia

Since I've switched to the Beta version of blogger, my new posts are not showing up in Blog Indonesia. If anyone has any ideas about this, I'd be happy to hear why its happening.

Another face change

I decided to switch to the beta version of blogger and have yet another face change. Actually, the popcorn graphic was driving me crazy even though I liked the color scheme. The beta version seems, at first glance, to be easy to work with.

The Return Home - Conclusion

2:45 P.M. Our little group climbs aboard the bus. I’m given the front seat possibly as a sign of respect for my age, possibly because I’m the only foreigner on the bus, possibly because it has the least legroom. Just as we’re about to depart, an old man climbs aboard clutching his two chickens tied together by their legs. Well, I’ve made my peace with bird flu worries so our new addition is welcomed as far as I’m concerned. He has a good laugh when he sees me scrunched up in the front seat.

2:50 P.M. We pull off the road into a dusty parking lot in front of a small bengkel. Pak John and the boy get out and pump up the tires. I lean out the window and watch the operation, giving my sign of approval when they’ve finished. Everyone laughs. At least, I’m providing some amusement for my fellow passengers; they’ll all have a good story to tell the family at home this afternoon. It’s a lovely day with clear blue skies, and I’m looking forward to the drive along the coast.

3:50 P.M. We reach Maluk after an uneventful journey. No one threw up, and I had a few more bananas from the high school girl who giggled each time she offered me one. Pak John drives each person to their home. As they get down from the van, they wave good-bye. Lovely folks – one of the many reasons why I’m still in Indonesia after 17 years. Pak John pulls up at the bus stop in Maluk and tells me it’s time to get down. He apologizes for not being able to take me home. Just as I’m about to answer, he jumps out on to the road and flags down an old man on a 125cc Honda. Where are you going Pak? he asks. Sekongkang. Alhamdulillah, Pak John exclaims, just where my friend here is going. Can he come with you? The old man takes in this request as if it was an everyday occurrence. He motions for me to get on the back. The only problem is that he has two chickens tied across the back of the motorbike. Hmm, must be chicken day. Could you hold these? he asks. I try to match his nonchalance with a casual nod. I grab hold of the chickens, shake Pak John’s hand while he whispers in my ear, Just give him a few thousand rupiahs for petrol. Sure thing, I reply. Thanks for the entertainment. He laughs and climbs back in his van and drives off. My new driver, Pak Ali, tells me to hang on as we climb the hills that separate Maluk and Sekongkang. They’re actually quite steep, and the Honda struggles to climb the steepest incline, but we make it. The chickens in my hand are surprisingly docile; I can’t imagine my hyperactive chickens taking this type of journey so calmly.

4:20 P.M. I’m about to ask Pak Ali to pull over at the gate to my house, but he’s already in the process of crossing the road to do so. I give him a quizzical look as I get off the motorbike. I’ve seen you at school board meetings, he says. You’re the American Muslim schoolteacher, Dr. Sulaiman. Hmm, nothing like village life for maintaining anonymity. I remember living in an apartment building in Berkeley once for a year and never knowing my neighbors’ names. I pull a 10 thousand rupiah note out of my shirt pocket and hand it to him. He shakes his head. We’re neighbors, he says. For cigarettes, I suggest. He takes the note with a nod and drives off down the road. My gardener opens the gate. Where did you meet Pak Ali? Fredi asks. In Maluk. Do you know him? Sure, his wife gave your wife a goat last year as a present for giving her some medicine for her arthritis. Ahh, my wife the village witch doctor strikes again. As I enter the yard, Dave and May, my two dogs come running up to greet me. Back at The Farm once again.

The Return Home

Now that I’ve written about driving to Sumbawa, this is the way that I get back (as my wife and kids usually stay on for a week or two after I’ve had to return to work). I’m actually leaving in the morning, but I’ve done this trip a number of times before so I expect it to be somewhat the same.

3:30 A.M Get my wife, the kids, and the nephews and nieces up for morning breakfast before another day of fasting. Have some cereal and toast. Because I’m leaving soon, I have some coffee along with the usual apple juice and water. My eldest daughter asks why I’m leaving before Lebaran (she asks this question everyday for some reason that escapes me and probably her as well). I take a quick shower after I eat. I have my backpack ready with all the work that I’ve brought with me – who ever said that teachers have easy jobs? We tend to spend most of our working life grading papers and getting ready for a new term.

4:30 A.M. The kids and sisters and brothers in law are waiting by the car to say good-bye. Two of the brothers-in-law are driving me down to the airport, and they are ready to go. We take off into the early morning. Singaraja is nice and cool at this time of the morning. I keep thinking about what could possibly go wrong when we reach the airport. The last time that I did this, Merpati cancelled the flight to Mataram, but got me in on a Lion Air flight. Indonesian air travel is always problematic.

6:45 A.M. We reach the airport. I thank my brothers-in-law and tell them that I’ll see them again in December when I have my next break. I check around the airport which seems to change everytime that I come here. They’ve moved the entrance to the domestic terminal some. I quickly slip into an interlude of years ago when the oldest kids were still toddlers and we would arrive at the airport with grandma in tow along with several other relatives and all of our suitcases. Good memories because I’m on my own and don’t have to worry about the kids, and thus I can idealize what was always a stressful experience. (We were flying back to Papua in those days and the early morning check-in was just the prelude to a full day of travel with the little ones getting tired as we moved from one island to the next on the old milk run of Merpati from Denpasar to Timika.)

7:00 A.M. Waiting in line to check-in, I spot the usual list of characters: the Indonesian businessmen, the Euro backpackers on their way to Sengiggi, some Balinese families who live in Lombok and are returning from family ceremonies in Bali, and two overweight foreigners who sound like they are American, but are rapidly discussing business deals in a southern drawl.

7:45 A.M. Sitting around the waiting room with a boarding pass, I have an intense desire to have a cigarette, but push it away as I’m planning on keeping my fast even though technically since I’m traveling, I’m exempt.

8:15 A.M. The plane is off and crossing the straight. I’ll be in Mataram soon and then the real adventure starts. The plane is full and everyone seems in great spirits except for me as I keep thinking that I wish Scotty could beam me up and put me down at The Farm in Sumbawa posthaste.

8:35 A.M. I enter the arrival terminal in Mataram and as I have no luggage I tell the guys waiting to grab my baggage that I have none. A fellow from the Executive Lounge who I know slightly asks me if I’m taking the seaplane back to Sumbawa. No, I reply wearily, I’m traveling overland to Kayangan and then the public ferry. He’s seen this before so he just laughs and shakes my hand.

8:40 A.M. I go to the taxi stand and pay for a taxi to the harbor across the island. The price has gone up again, and I have this fleeting feeling that I’m pampering myself by not taking the bus, but the extra twenty bucks is worth it at this point. I find my taxi and tell the driver not to take me to the Newmont ferry but to the public one. We have a short exchange about why I’m not taking the Newmont ferry which is free and fast. Somehow, Newmont people stand out, even though I technically work for a yayasan, but I’m too tired and thirsty to explain the difference in detail.

11:00 A.M. We’ve reached the harbor and had a nice conversation while driving across the island. I give the driver a tip (once upon a time, many years ago, I was a taxi driver in Chicago so I always give drivers tips), and am immediately surrounded by folks wanting to sell me a ticket for the ferry. I pick out the guy who I know actually sells tickets and ask if there are any free seats on the bus going to Sekongkang or Maluk. He tells me that they’re full but if I wait for another hour, the bus going to Sekongkang will arrive and I might be able to get a seat there. I’m feeling slightly giddy from the fasting now and decline. I tell him that I’ll take an ojek at the harbor.

1:15 P.M. The ferry docks and I wander off having spent two hours thinking about the travel possibilities ahead: will there be an ojek available? How far will he take me? How much will he want? There’s no set price here, and I’ve paid wildly different amounts in the past decreasing each time as I get to know the system. I stand in the parking area looking somewhat lost and confused – it’s a good way to get someone to notice me. A driver shows up and asks, “You go where.” Sekongkang! Always a good response because it generally shocks most of the drivers to hear a foreigner tell them that they want to go to Sekongkang in Indonesian. He tells me that he can only take me as far as Taliwang because he’ll get beat up by the Taliwang ojek drivers if he goes through with me as a passenger. Ah, turf wars, I exclaim. No problem, just get me to Taliwang.
2:00 P.M. We reach Taliwang after a somewhat hazardous drive on his old beat up Honda. The driver, Pak Achmed, keeps up a steady flow of conversation, most of which I can’t hear, but I can tell when he’s finished with his monologue, because he always completes it with a “What do you think about that, bule?” Yes, sounds good, I reply by formula. In Taliwang, Pak Achmed takes me to a small warung where a few people are sitting around drinking coffee in front of a battered red 12 passenger van. You can take this to Sekongkang, he tells me. He negotiates a price of 17,000 rupiahs for the trip to Sekongkang. Sounds fair to me, I say, and hand over the money to the boy who works with the driver. The driver, Pak John, tells me that we’ll leave in 30 minutes. I order a coffee from a rather robust woman wearing a jilbab and a faded sarong and t-shirt that reads Chicago Red Sox. Hmm, I tell her, wrong team but a good city.

2:20 P.M. After a long silence Pak John decides to find out my specifics – marital status, kids, nationality, the usual Indonesian conversation. I see a twinkle in his rheumy eyes as he launches into another mode of discourse. Are you looking for a woman? Hmm, I just answered that I thought. I explain that my wife, daughters and son wouldn’t approve of me coming home with another woman. But, you say that you’re a Muslim, Dr. Sulaiman, so you know, of course, that you can have many wives. Not if I expect to survive the night, I say. Suddenly a very quiet man with short mustache and very clean, pressed clothes, leans over towards me and asks, You’re Rebecca’s father, aren’t you? Well, yes I am, I reply wondering who he is and why he knows my daughter. Ah, she plays with my niece. Very chatty and quite beautiful. Yes, she’s quite naughty, I laugh. With this recognition, I instantly become part of the group. A high school girl in her school uniform offers me a banana and her grandfather gives me a clove cigarette. Pak John, decides to confide in me that he can’t take me to Sekongkang because I’m the only one going there and the trip over the mountains between Maluk and Sekongkang is too difficult for his old bus. He instructs his helper to give me back 4,000 rupiah. But, I’ll get you a ride home he says. Don’t worry.

New Face on the Blog

My blog has looked pretty much the same for the past two years. So I looked around for some new ones and found one that I like except for the popcorn image which I'd like to replace, but I need to figure out how to do that first. Maybe soon, but generally I think that the blog looks much better than before.

The long, winding road - conclusion

8:00 A.M. We reach the harbor at Kayangan in Lombok. My goals are to get petrol at one of the stations that has nice bathrooms and isn’t crowded, to get to the harbor at Lembar before 11:00, and to not have an accident while crossing the island.

10:25 A.M. We reach Lembar, but they’ve changed the harbor, and I can’t figure out where the car line is. After asking several official looking folks, we find that they have a small parking area for sedans. All the cars that are waiting are lined up in the front of the small space. I see that if I move behind one of the cars in the front, I’ll actually be in the back. I take an Indonesian approach and park in the last front spot effectively making it impossible for any incoming cars to park in the lot. The fellow that took our money when we entered the harbor told us that the next ferry would depart at 11:00. The kids are wide awake by this time and fan out among the small warungs looking for snacks. I light up a cigarette and chat with the three guys in the Fuji Photo truck. Their coming back from a tip to Sumbawa. We talk about the weather in Sumbawa (it’s really dry isn’t it; yes I haven’t had water in our house for three days now). They somewhat unobtrusively sniff the air. Apparently I don’t smell all that bad as we continue our conversation. They suggest going up to Singaraja (how do you know I’m going there? Your plates!).

11:30 A.M. We’re on the ferry. Trucks and buses get on first. I’m the last sedan that they let on and it takes 15 minutes to maneuver my car in so that it fits. I have to crawl out the back window due to an inability to open the doors. I’m silently hoping that my car won’t be the extra weight that sinks the ferry. My wife, ever thoughtful, rents foam mattresses for us to lay on the floor so that we can sleep. The kids run around for ten minutes and then immediately fall asleep. I lay down to rest my back, but stay wide awake for the next five hours of the trip.

5:30 P.M We reach Padangbai harbour in Bali. As we decamp, we’re pulled over by some officals. They want to see the car’s registration and my license. Which license, I say, in my most friendly tone. Your international one the short pudgy official responds. Sorry I don’t have one. Can you take one of my Indonesian ones? Apparently they don’t get many bules with Indonesian licenses. We enter into a conversation about how long I’ve been in Indonesia. He’s amused and sends us on our way.

6:00 P.M. We pass through Candidasa and stare at the few tourists on the street. We still have a long 2 plus hours to go before we reach Singaraja, but everyone is thrilled that we’re back in Bali. The kids are looking forward to seeing their cousins and aunts and uncles. I’m looking forward to a scotch and a shower and some sleep.
7:00 P.M. It’s dark and there’s traffic which makes a lot of demands on my diminished night vision. I take a left turn because it seems like that’s where the main road goes. Fifteen minutes later we’re up in the hills and obviously in desa land. The road suddenly disappears, and my wife makes the astute observation that I’ve taken a wrong turn. I carefully try to turn the car around without driving off the dirt road that has suddenly taken the place of the paved one.

8:00 P.M. Air Sanih, almost home. The kids who have been sleeping wake up and notice where we are. The littlest one sleepily asks if we’re home yet. Soon, I tell her, go back to sleep. She kicks her brother’s leg that he has draped over hers and goes back to sleep.

8:15 P.M. We reach the Singaraja city limits, and I start to relax. The traffic is heavy but the streets are lit so I can finally see where I am. The kids name off all the shops that we pass that they know. Yes, I say, almost home.

8:20 P.M. I take a right off of Jalan A. Yani and head on north to Kampung Bugis. I pull the car into the little parking space in front of the house. The kids are out of the car before it stops. Cousins and neighborhood friends all gather around. Everyone runs into the house. I open the back to unload all the goods that we’ve brought from Sumbawa. Despite my requests that my wife not pack a lot of unnecessary items, among the things that I have to carry in to the house are a 25 kg sack of rice, five black plastic garbage bags full of mangoes from our garden, and five dozen eggs.

Total traveling time 16 hours and 20 minutes. When I lived in Pakistan, it would take me 13 hours to get from there to Bali. Traveling in an archipelago – never a dull moment.

The long, winding road

Yesterday, I mentioned that I am in Bali. Today, I'll write a bit about the intricacies of the travel from Sumbawa to here.

Traveling. It’s a large part of Indonesian life. It seems like people are always traveling. The gardener has to go back to Flores to see his sick father. The maid needs a month off because her sister is having a baby. Your child needs to see a dentist that is only available in Bali. Your visa is about to expire and you need to run off to Singapore. These realities (well except for the visa example) are pretty common everywhere in the world (ok, I never had a gardener or a maid when I lived in the US), but everyone has family emergencies that they need to go home for. When I lived in the States, I needed to attend a wedding or a funeral, but I could get a plane and be there and back in a few days.

I read on a popular blog about Bali today that getting to Sumbawa was an easy thing, just get on your motorbike, hop on a ferry, cross an island, hop on another ferry, and you’re there. Well, there’s slightly more to it than that. I have to make this trip every ten weeks or so when the kids and I have coinciding vacations. They like going back to Bali which they consider home. So we make the long, winding trip back home. I’m going to work backwards from the direction of the bali blog. You can just reverse the process if you happen to be coming to Sumbawa from Bali.

3:00 A.M. We wake all the kids up so they can eat something before we leave. Being the organized expat, I’ve packed everything in the car four days prior to leaving which only slightly irritates my wife who has to work around our personal items for four days while she shops and takes care of her normal business. Our teenagers are cranky and want to shower in case they meet a good looking boy on the ferries. My ten year old son is willing to go without changing his bed clothes because it’s still night and he’s planning on sleeping in the car anyway. The seven year old cries because she stayed up late watching her favorite sinetron about lost love and the sexual perversity of the rich and famous in Jakarta. My wife has to run to the gate to let our gardener in who will be repacking the car with the real essentials for the trip while I’m showering and having a quick breakfast.

4:00 A.M. Everyone is packed in the car. Freddy, our gardener, has all the keys to the house and tool shed and he packs May, the dog, in the tool shed so that she doesn’t follow the car out into the road and become another casualty of the Indonesian road races. We wave goodbye to Freddy while I tell the kids to quit fighting about their seating positions and who smells. Despite my vows of not smoking in the new car, I light up a cigarette as we leave in the hope that it will help me stay awake until we reach the harbor at Poto Tano in the north of the island.

4:30 A.M. I swerve wildly to miss a musang in the road and everyone wakes up and asks what music is on (Jimi Hendrix to keep me awake and remind me that once upon a time I had a life without significant others) and have I fallen asleep at the wheel.

5:45 A.M. We arrive at Poto Tano and are first in line to board the ferry. There are two overloaded antique trucks waiting in a different line. The drivers look wide awake and watch the show as all of the kids decamp from the car and debate about whether we’ll get in the ferry at the dock.

6:00 A.M. The ferry unloads and we drive in first. The kids are excited. I’m relieved that the ferry is going to be fairly empty. The kids run up the stairs and find that we are on the ferry with the slides and children’s playground set. I light up a cigarette and take a photo of the sun rising over Sumbawa. My wife immediately starts pulling out food for her and the children. She’s brought me two packs of Oreos.

Tomorrow. The ride across Lombok, the ferry to Bali, and the ride up the east coast to home.

Back in Bali

We've been in Bali for the past few days for the Ramadan holiday. I wasn't planning on making a trip here this vacation due to only have two weeks. The trip is a fairly strenuous one because we cross three islands and two straights of water. Total time is about 15 hours. By the time we get to Bali, we're all exhausted.

The trip is interesting because of the ferry crossings. There is generally a somewhat different type of passenger. More about that later. We're still in the fasting month, and I need to take a sort nap.

Expat bloggers in Indonesia

A few weeks ago Treespotting ran several columns about miserable expats. I found it rather amusing, especially the heated exchanges that took place between Tree and a number of expat bloggers. There were some interesting issues being discussed, but the discussion kind of degenerated. Anyway, seems like some people have way too much time on their hands.

You might note that I’ve added a few more links to Indonesian blogs here. I don’t get to read them all that regularly, but they offer an interesting take on life in Indonesia as seen by the foreigner.I'll add some more as I come across them.

Another Side of Paradise

It seems like a long time since I last posted anything in this blog. Just one of those “life gets by you” things. Since I last posted, we returned from Bali and started school and work and got back to daily life here in Sumbawa. There just seems to be no time to do anything personal when school is in session as we go flat out most of the time.

The term “paradise” gets thrown around a lot by expats living in tropical locations, and this includes, of course, Indonesia. I’ve used the term myself a number of times both in my websites and this blog. I’ve also written several magazine articles using the same term, although I always use it in a tongue-in-cheek manner. A close friend of mine who doesn’t always get what parts of my writing are tongue-in-cheek and which parts are not, once suggested that I write something about what life is “really” like over here. This would include power shortages, water shortages, poisonous insects and snakes, earthquakes and such. Another topic he specifically mentioned was the home invasions that have taken place here in the last year.

There actually haven’t been that many, but the ones that have happened (about 8 in the last two years according to my count) have been scary and have on several instances involved violence done to the occupants of the homes that were entered by the bad guys. One of the joys of living here in my small part of Sumbawa is the small nature of the community and its somewhat remote location. The bad side of this is that we have no police force here, and thus are basically unprotected.

So a week ago, someone began knocking at the gate at close to 2 am. The dogs started barking (well, May, the small one did; Apple, our big German Sheperd, just jumped around wagging his tail). We didn’t leave the house, turned off the lights, and then waited for the person at the gate to go away. Turns out that the next morning our neighbors tell us that there were three people (two hiding behind the wall with their car parked down the road), and they tried to gain access to two other houses in the neighborhood. This approach (by the bad guys) has been the m.o. in all of the home invasions in this area. A bad guy or girl asks for help, the homeowner opens the door, gate, etc, and a group rush in armed with machetes and steal everything they can get. A few folks have been badly beaten for offering resistance. Thus, no one here opens up the doors to strangers anymore.

Yesterday, Apple died of poisoning. The family was heartbroken as they had taken Apple to be a member of the family after being with us from puppyhood to adulthood. We suspect that he was poisoned as he’s not in the habit of eating bugs, snakes, and the poisonous frogs around the house. Our leading theory is that the bad guys came back (someone was knocking on the gate again the night before Apple died) and poisoned Apple as he would take food from anyone. It’s lonely here without Apple, the kids (who were terrified and repulsed by having a dog when we first bought him) talk about him like he’s still here, my wife who used to wear plastic gloves when she touched him has been morose since Apple died yesterday. Well, here’s the other side of paradise.

RIP Apple, you were a friend to all of us.

Bali in July

It seems like a log of Indonesian bloggers are in Bali this month (probably due to school vacations and such). I've been here with my family for the past two and a half weeks. Mostly it's been a time for me to get a root canal which has somewhat clouded the vacation, but other than that the weather has been wonderful up in the north. My wife and the kids have enjoyed being back home visiting with their aunts and uncles and cousins and friends.

I was able to get my laptop repaired at Rimo Mall which is just a great place for a techie. They have just about everything that you need there. I just wish that they were located up in the north rather than in Denpasar.

I'll write some more about Singaraja with a few photos in the next blog.

What I've found interesting is that in just the past 17 days the number of tourists seems to have exploded. When we were returning from Denpasar on Saturday, there seemed to be tourists everywhere on the road. Good for the local economy, but in terms of getting around the island, they just clog up an already overcongested traffic situation.

Well, time for breakfast. More on Bali later

The End of the School Year

We're finally at the end of the school year - only four more days to go.I'm looking forward to this vacation for the opportunity to write some more, the chance to get to Bali to see friends, and a long-awaited break and time to just do some resting.

I'll be back posting next Monday. Cheers.

On Being a Man

I'm a fairly compulsive reader of Salon.com. Actually, I'm compulsive enough to pay to read it. I liked it better when it was all free, but the writing is good enough (for the most part), and the subjects interesting enough, that I will cough up my $25 bucks a year or whatever it is, so that I can read it. As I've said before, we don't have telephone service so I have to download as much as I can and take it home to read. Not having lived in the States for the past 17 years, I use Salon and a number of the other online magazines and newspapers that I regularly read to try to keep up on what's the cultural trends are in the US.

I've just finished reading an interview with a guy who wrote a book about manliness, The Alphabet of Manliness. This interview is just one of a genre of articles about gender issues – some of the others being about why women can't get dates with good guys, the old anti-feminist screeds in new (and old) clothing, articles about sexual dysfunction, guys wondering about what women want (like this is something new?). So how does this navel-gazing pan out here in the jungle?

Last month my family and I were in Mataram shopping for the usual things that are badly needed in the jungle – dog bones, sleeping bags, shoes, pencils and more mundane things like good batteries, a powerful flashlight, and books. While we were strolling around the bookstore, my wife and I came across a book written by an American and translated into Indonesian which was about how to have an orgasm. My wife idly leafed through it and asked, “is this what American women are worried about?”

Out here, gender roles are fairly traditional – women are mainly responsible for the kids, guys work, or try to find work, women may make some extra money running a small shop or warung, or have a full-time job and the kids are watched after by the grandfolks or a younger sibling, or some other family member. So I go to work and teach everyday, my wife stays home with the kids and takes care of the house and the land and does all the social/political hobnobbing that you do when you live in a small town anywhere in the world. I get home and we talk about the day; I help the kids with homework; water the lawn; do those kinds of traditional dad things. There's nothing very special about all this – we're just a family in a community of families all trying to get along the best as we can, enjoying the little pleasures of life – kids, pets, friends. Topics of conversation center around our kids, village gossip, a little bit of politics, and discussion of day-to-day problems like who has a functioning generator or what are you paying to get the guy from the general store to deliver your groceries. I can't recall a conversation in the past three years with any of the men here that centered around trying to figure out what it means to be a man.

I'd think that with all of the surprises that the Bush administration throws at Americans (and the rest of the world), there'd be a lot to talk about other than whether doing the dishes makes a man a pussy, or asking your wife to make you a sandwich makes you a Neanderthal. So what is going on in America these days?

Satisfying the Book Jones in the Jungle

I've been an avid reader since I was a child. One of my favorite events as a child was shopping for books that my parents would buy me for Christmas. Years later as a high school student, I discovered the great little, Barbara's Bookstore, in the Old Town neighborhood in Chicago, and Kroch's and Brentano's in downtown Chicago. Generally, I am not a shopper, but put me in a bookstore, and I can spend hours shopping for books.

One of the pleasures of my four years in Lahore, Pakistan, was shopping for books. The selection was somewhat limited, but there were still enough books that interested me that I could spend several hundred dollars each time I entered one of Lahore's bookstores. One of my main regrets about leaving Lahore was that I never did make it to the used bookstores tucked away there that were rumored to have a stash of old and rare books left over from the days of the Raj.

During my Lahore years, I spent a fair amount of time in Bangkok as I needed to overnight there in order to catch the flight to Lahore the next day. I became familiar with Asia Books on Sukhumvit. Wandering up and down between the floors, I would always end up with more books than I had planned on buying. I particularly enjoyed searching for new books on the Southeast Asian region.

Life on a remote island has many pleasures, as well as a number of drawbacks. One of the main drawbacks for me is the lack of bookstores. The closest bookstore is on the neighboring island of Lombok, and that bookstore has a very limited selection of books in English. That leaves three options: 1) purchasing books during my annual teacher's conference when I get to travel to one of the ASEAN capital cities; 2) purchasing books in Bali during one of my two annual trips there; and 3) ordering books online. The first option is great, but I'm limited to ten books or so, by the luggage allowance. The second option has possibilities, but I've yet to find a good bookstore in Bali that is comparable to Asia Books in Bangkok, or the Times Bookstore in Singapore. The third option offers the widest selection of books, but has the drawbacks of paying a significant shipping cost, as well as the possibility that at some point during the four month journey, the books will disappear. I've only tried the Amazon option once, and I was very happy to receive my books intact after four months.

I recently finished an excellent book on the Silk Road which, while somewhat dense, was filled with fascinating information about the history of the Silk Road. Last night I completed William Gibson's book, Count Zero. While Count Zero is not Gibson's best work, it was nonetheless a joy for a techie like me to read. I'm about to start on several Graham Greene novels that I bought a few months ago in Manila.

Development in Sumbawa

This was one of those good weeks when we ended p with a three-day weekend. Having Friday off, I decided to drive up to Maluk (the next village north of here) to get my motorbike serviced. On the way home, I noticed a large billboard announcing a new hotel called Supersucks (after the famous surfing spot). Driving down a long, narrow rocky road (one of the worst roads that I have ever been on in Indonesia or anywhere else), I came upon the hotel which is under construction just off the beach.

Two of the owners where there, and I had a chance to talk to them about their plans for the hotel. It seems fairly amazing to me that some Americans would end up building a hotel in what's basically the middle of nowhere (although not exactly nowhere if you're a surfer). It was interesting to have a long discussion about the future of tourism in Sumbawa, land prices, construction issues, and cultural differences between Bali and Sumbawa.

The hotel should be up and running in a few months. I'll add some more information on my Sumbawa website as it becomes available. Best of luck to Matt and John on their venture.

My deepest condolences to the victims of this weekend's earthquake in Jogja.

Technology Blues

After doing a fair amount of research in order to complete my article on overseas workers, I put the whole thing on my flash drive and brought it to school so that I could upload it to this blog. I ran out of time and figured that I would do it the next day - what's one day after all? On my way home, the drive fell out of my pocket, and there's goes four days of research. I have to get into saving these articles in other places than just the flash drive.

Overseas Workers

The Philippines are known for their overseas workers. For those of you who have spent some time in the Middle East or even within Southeast Asia, you’ve almost certainly come across a Filipino band, a nanny pushing her small charge down Singapore’s Orchard Road in a stroller, or a Filipino cabbie in the UAE. The Los Angles Times online edition recently ran a story called The Overseas Class about the exodus from the Phillipines in search of employment at a decent wage. The article noted that almost 12% of the GDP in the Phillipines is accounted for by workers abroad.

Those of us who follow the local Indonesian news have become used to reading stories about young Indonesian women being beaten or sexually abused by their employers whether in Singapore, Hong Kong or Saudi Arabia. Most of us know at least one Indonesia who has spent at least part of their life working overseas. In my small kampung in north Bali, there are three men who have worked overseas in one capacity or another – most of them in manual labor positions. I know of two expat men in Sumbawa who met their wives (from the same village, but apparently not known to each other) while they were working overseas.

A brother and sister-in-law of mine have worked in Saudi: the brother-in-law as a driver and the sister-in-law as a seamstress. The money that they made enabled them to open a small business when they came back to Bali. While they were working in Saudi, their children’s grandparents and my wife and I raised their children. A fairly common scenario. I spent four years working in Pakistan while my wife and children stayed behind in Indonesia living on the money that I sent each month. So where is this going? Check back on Monday for the conclusion.

Anti-Americanism in Indonesia?

I’m occasionally asked about anti-Americanism by readers of my travel articles or websites. The questions come from Americans who are considering visiting Indonesia, or increasingly, planning on moving to Bali for retirement. For those of us who live in Indonesia, life here doesn’t seem very dangerous, but apparently the press coverage from America paints a different picture of Indonesia.

Unfortunately, too many people (including some clueless expats who reside in Bali) section off Indonesia into Hindu Bali and the rest of the country which is filled with Muslim terrorists or sympathizers. Fortunately for those of us who reside outside of Bali, the reality is somewhat different. While there is what appears to be an increase in Indonesia in the activity of what we can call “fundamentalist” Muslims, the majority of the folks here are more interested in making a living and raising their families than in trying to establish a state based on Shariah. I’ll leave the discussion of this issue for another post. What I want to address here is the perception that there is a tide of anti-Americanism among the common people.

Sumbawa is an island that is overwhelmingly Muslim, far from the urban centers of Java, and populated mainly by people who work the land in one way or another. The level of education is not very high; in the area where we live most of the adult women wear a jilbab when they are outside of their home. It would seem that this would be an ideal place for an anti-Americanism to develop, but in fact residents are very welcoming of all foreigners, and as the resident American, neither I nor my children have ever been involved in any incidents where our nationality became an issue. Similar to my experiences with Pakistanis when I lived in Pakistan, local residents dislike President Bush and his policies, but have favorable feelings about American citizens. We are often given gifts from our less fortunate community members such as goats, bushels of fruit, etc. The few expats whom I know that live in Sumbawa report similar interactions with their neighbors. The bottom-line: folks in Sumbawa are a friendly and warm as any that you’ll find in Indonesia.

The Guru Goes to The Farm

For someone who was raised in an urban/suburban environment to enter the intellectual sector, life in Sumbawa has been one continual round of revelations, frustrations, and discoveries.

A three-day weekend is a good chance to catch up on some school work as well as see what work has been done around The Farm. We recently purchased a 30 are plot of land just across the road from our house for investment purposes (and because my wife liked the fruit trees growing on it). While we were checking out the orange, mango, and coconut trees on the new land, I realized that I hadn’t checked our back yard recently to see what our new gardener had done to it. Besides cutting all the grass on the 65 are, he’s planted 16 banana, 15 papaya, and 12 coconut trees.

For someone who grew up in Chicago, all of this green is quite enticing. We added another dog over the past week as well. Our animal count is now up to 2 dogs, 2 geese, 9 chickens, two birds, and 2 goats. As Su and I were sitting on the veranda last night discussing plans for The Farm, our noisy neighbors, the monkeys, showed up in the jungle. Now before I moved to Sumbawa I loved monkeys. When I lived in Pakistan, I had two rather large ones as companions. I had one for years in my house in Bali and she was a lovely pet. These monkeys are loud, irritating, nasty and dangerous. You’re your worst nightmare of the bad neighbor. Nothing like living in the jungle.

Birthday Parties in Indonesia

This past weekend we had our 39 birthday party for our children. That’s the total for all four of our children here (not counting my son from my first wife who lives in the States). Forty-three birthday parties. That’s quite a few. If I average out the cost at about two million rupiahs per party, that amounts to a staggering 79,000,000 rupiahs over the past 15 years. In dollar terms we can say that it’s about nine thousand dollars. When I attempt to figure out where the money has gone over the past 16 years of marriage, parties are one thing that I never thought of.

When Su started having birthday parties for the kids (our eldest daughter, Mercedes, had the first one when she turned one), they were fairly small events – a few friends and all the relatives (a sizeable group in itself). Somewhere along the line just about everyone in the neighborhood turned up being invited along with all the relatives, and as the kids entered school, their classmates. As the number of guests increased, the venue moved from inside to outside. As our Bali houses are on a small amount of land (200 sq. meters), we had to hold the parties out in the street.

We live in a small, fairly self-contained Muslim neighborhood in the north of Bali. I don’t know much about the actual logistics of how my wife goes at getting the street closed (it’s not really a unique event as most folks in the neighborhood do the same when they have a wedding), but she does it and ends up with a tent placed over the street to keep out the sun or rain. Chairs are set up, food is cooked, decorations are placed everywhere. In the early days of the street parties, the festivities were restricted to a few party games, a cutting of the cake, a few prayers, and then a distribution of food at the end. The kids would take their food home to eat – something common in Indonesia. However, at some point, Su started providing entertainment – Balinese dancers, Javanese dancers, Balinese clowns.

I still haven’t figured out this party thing although Su’s example began to be followed by other mothers in the neighborhood, although not quite as extravagantly as our parties. Just one more slice of paradise.

Hazards of Life in the Jungle

Hazards of Life in the Jungle

I’ve developed a fondness for saying that I live in the jungle even though that statement is only partially true. It probably is more accurate to say that I live in a small village that skirts the sea and is surrounded by forest or bush (depending on where in the world you hail from). Whatever term is used, life here in Sumbawa is somewhat different from life in Jakarta, Surabaya, or Bali. A few examples might illuminate the realities of everyday life. The examples today are drawn from what my homeroom students call my “near-death experiences.”

Example 1: When we first built our house here, the local power company (PLN) wanted 35 million rupiahs to hook our house up to the grid. We opted to buy a 10,000 watt generator. At the time, it seemed like a good move financially: 11 million for a generator versus the 35 million to get hooked up to a supply of electricity that was, at the best, sporadic in terms of delivery. The generator became a source of daily jokes at school as it broke down almost daily. One evening, just as the sun was setting over the ocean, we switched the generator on and a belt snapped on the flywheel. In order to get a new belt on, the wheel had to be taken off the generator which involved a long, tiring process which required the work of several men. Living in the jungle means that you can’t call a local electrician – we had one electrician in the village even though several other men like to claim electrical knowledge. We set out in the dark to find the electrician. After 30 minutes we found him at a friend’s house. From there we picked up three more men to assist him in changing the belts. By 10 p.m we had the belts off and replaced, and had changed the batteries on the two flashlights twice. I was covered in mosquito bites hoping that they were malarial mosquitoes. We gathered around the generator while the electrician cranked it up. A loud pop and something whizzed past my eyes. The electrician shut off the generator, and we focused our flashlight on a piece of the flywheel embedded in the concrete wall. A few more inches and it would have been embedded in my forehead.

Example 2: With the generator on the blink, our electrician ran a line from the hotel next door into our son’s bedroom. That connection somehow gave us enough electricity to power a few lights and a fan so that we had some semblance of power during the warm nights. One evening all the power in the neighborhood shut down. I went to disconnect our hotel hookup so that we wouldn’t get a spike when the power went on. Just as I grabbed the cable, the power went back on. The surge shot me backwards across the room with the cartoon-like frizzing of hair. It would have been a good experience if I had been in cardiac arrest.

Example 3: The generator (once again). I went out one night to check the generator and noticed that water was leaking from the exit pipe. I climbed up on the platform where we had our water cooling system, and despite my wife’s urgings, I tried to tighten the pipe while the generator was running. End result – the pipe broke loose and I was showered with boiling water. The force of it knocked me off the platform and on to the ground. The boiling water burned all of the skin on the right side of my face and my right arm, missing my right eye by 2 millimeters. The doctor later said that I would have been blinded if I hadn’t fallen backwards on impact. My children called my the monster for the next week as the skin on my face and arm blackened and then fell off.

Example 4: Driving to work down a gravel road a few days ago, a dog sitting in the middle of the road suddenly ran in front of my motorbike. I hit the brakes in an attempt to avoid hitting him, lost control of the bike and bounced off the dog. As I lay on the road bleeding, a car which was driving too fast behind me just missed running over my head. The driver was nice enough to stop, ask if I was ok, and then get in his car and drive off to work leaving me bleeding on the road.

I’m leaving out encounters with mad monkeys the size of dogs, cobras and vipers, scorpions (I’ve only been stung once, but it was an experience I’ll remember forever), and a month long water outage. But, hey, it’s paradise the rest of the time.

Sex, Indonesia, and Mail-Order Brides

The Websphere was buzzing last week with comments (see aangirfan for one take) about the global survey (29 countries, 27,500 people aged 40-80) on sexual satisfaction by University of Chicago researchers. The survey showed, among other things, that Westerners get more enjoyment out of sex than do residents of Asia. A gender gap exists as well: men across the board show a 10 point difference when rating their sexual satisfaction. Age also apparently had little impact on the feeling of sexual well-being. A comment by the lead researcher suggested that in male-dominated cultures (Indonesia being considered one - this fellow has obviously never met my wife or her friends), sexual satisfaction for women is not considered important, and thus Asian women are less satisfied than their Western counterparts. One of the reasons listed for the low ratings from Indonesia was the lack of foreplay: women just aren't having relations long enough to get satisfied.

Indonesia ranked 27th out of the 29 countries surveyed. 33.9% of the folks said that they were satisfied with their sex life. This is compared to Austria, the first ranked country, where 71% of the respondents reported satisfaction with their sex lives.

In a somewhat related story in the Chicago Tribune, Cheryl Lavin, a relationship advice columnist, ran a letter from an American woman whose brother is involved in a mail relationship with an Indonesian woman. The brother is getting ready to travel to Indonesia for the first time, and his sister wanted to know what she should do about it.

I found the reply quite interesting in the way that it perceived Indonesia, and as a subtext, Indonesian women. Ms. Lavin writes:

“Considering the differences in age, religion, nationality, race, culture and education -- and the fact that she lives half the globe away -- I don't blame you for being concerned. Does your brother know that there's a U.S. State Department warning against traveling to Indonesia? And that bird flu there is a real threat? You have an obligation to point these things out.

But if your brother is determined, please advise him to check with the State Department before he goes, visit his doctor, meet with men married to Indonesian women and fully inform himself about the country. Once he's there, I hope he insists on meeting Rena's family and visiting her place of employment and checking out any details she shared with him.

Best-case scenario: Rena is everything she says she is and has no ulterior motives. Then what? They have a zillions strikes against them.

I'm curious: Did Sam find Rena on an Asian brides Web site? There are millions of American women who are looking for partners. Life would be so much easier for him with one of them.”


Maybe it’s that I’ve been here too long, but Ms. Lavin makes Indonesia sound like a fairly suspicious place. Her tactic just might make the brother dig in and travel over to the land of terrorists and bird flu. Ms. Lavin could probably have saved herself some work, if she had just sent the sister the results of the University of Chicago survey, and told her to forward them on to her brother. If he’s looking for a good time, maybe the survey results would have sent him off in a different direction (like Austria).

The Indonesian Playboy Controversy

I've been avoiding saying something about the issue of Playboy publishing in Indonesia, but I've read and seen just about enough idiotic and hypocritical statements and actions. Today's Jakarta Post ran a story about the groups trying to get Playboy out of Indonesia. Sorry, brothers, but it's a about time that you put your energy into helping people rather than smashing up office buildings.

I'd don't read Playboy, but if I want to find pornography in Indonesia, it's easy enough to find. You can buy BFs (blue films) in the main cities in Bali, so I assume that it would be even easier to buy in Jakarta or Surabaya. How about the Internet? And the expat men trolling for young boys and girls in the major cities and tourist areas? This is not to mention the fairly sexually explicit magazines and newspapers that you can find in news stands and bookstores.

In the meantime, there are kids running around the street begging, doing street singing, washing car windows, and stealing. If the Islam Defender's Front wants to do something worthy of Islam, let them get some social programs going for these kids. Perhaps I read the Qu'ran incorrectly, but my reading tells me that no one (no human that is) has the right to tell me how to live as a Muslim. Perhaps it's time that Indonesian Muslims stood up and told these misguided gentlemen just what they could do with their time to serve the people and Allah rather than getting their names in the paper and their mugs on tv.

Forum work

I post fairly regularly on one forum and am a member of four others. Generally I just lurk on the others unless there is a topic or question that directly concerns me. I find the Bali Expat forum interesting and informative, but a bit too specialized for my interests and particulars. So I've been playing with the idea of creating yet another forum about Indonesia and Southeast Asia - to see if it will fly and generate some of the discussions and ideas that I would like to be involved in.

Right now I'm in the testing phase of how to set up the forum - that is all of the tech stuff. I have a working version at cyberbali.com/cgi/phpbb2. Stop by and see if it works for you. I'll be adding things over the next few weeks.

Return to Blogging

I just returned from a conference in Manila for international teachers and administrators. It was a great conference. I went to several workshops about blogging and have gotten excited about it again. Right now, I'm in Lombok shopping with my two oldest daughters, but I'll add something more substantial in a few days.