Village Life Again

Living in a village – that is, really living in a village not visiting one for a few days or weeks as a tourist – is a source of constant amusement, wonder, and irritation. Let me explain. Last weekend I’ve had a three-day weekend, and so I decided to cut the grass over at the 30 are garden that we have across the road from our house. To do that, I had to walk about 30 meters down the main road to the path that leads back to our garden. Walking over there on Friday morning, I came across a few of my neighbors sitting around at the local motorcycle repair shop. Like always in Indonesia, I was asked the usual question, “where are you going?” However, this time, I had my lawn cutter strapped on my back. I replied that I was going to cut the grass. That response was met with a lot of laughter. A little while later, a few neighbors wandered over to my garden to watch me cutting the grass – we make our own entertainment in the village. I sat down for a bit to chat.

Ali, the bengkel owner, announced to the little gathering, “Mommy (what my wife is called in the village) is really clever – she has a bule (white person) who gets paid in dollars (a reference to my job as a teacher) as her gardener and all she has to do is pay him at night with a little madu (honey).” That bawdy comment brought peals of laughter from my neighbors. With the humor over and done, my neighbors wandered back to the bengkel to wile away the afternoon.

After completing my grass cutting for the day, I returned home to correct some papers and work on the cyberbali website. Later in the day, a friend stopped by the give me a foot massage to try to fix the damage to my ankle from getting hit by a rock once again. Amazingly, the massage is working; after two days my foot is half the size it normally is when swollen.

So for a three-day weekend: I did a lot of grass cutting, spent some time every day bottle-feeding our smallest baby goat who is very friendly with humans unlike her siblings, helped my children with math, spent some time photographing and staring at a snake (which I think is a viper) in our mango tree, did quite a bit of work on my websites, graded a lot of papers, and finally got around to doing my US tax return. A good weekend. Was there a downside – yes, I’ve gotten back to the mental space where I don’t want to sell the Sekongkang property and house. We have a three-day weekend again in two weeks time. I plan on going over to our property on the Newmont road and doing some cutting there to see just what it is that we have.

vipers and testing photo links

I keep forgetting to bring in new blogs from home - it's one of the problems of not having a phone at home. Monday I will upload something more substantial. In the meantime, I'm working on a better way to post photos here to complement articles, and I would like to use up some of the space that I am paying for at my webhosting service. Here's a beautiful small viper that we found in our mango tree a few days ago. He/she seems to be quite comfortable in the tree and just moves daily from branch to branch.

Googling

I read an interesting article in the Wall Street Journal yesterday about the importance of googling well. Some of the more interesting points of the article were: 80% of recruiters said that they used search engines to find more information about candidates for employment. 40% of individuals use search engines to look up friends and acquaintances that they’ve lost touch with. Since having a high position on a search engine has become important for careers, prospective parents think about search engine placement when naming their child.

The article got me to thinking that this is something that I’ve never discussed with my students when working on websites, blogs, wikis and podcasts. I did think about search engine placement when I created my first domain, cyberbali.com. When doing a search using the key word Bali on Google, I gave up trying to find cyberbali after looking at 200 results. Obviously cyberbali is fairly far down the list. However, when I did a search for my site Sumbawa.org using the keyword Sumbawa, my website came up ranked #2 both on Google and Yahoo. So one site seems well placed on the main search engine. What about my name? When I googled my name, I came up with an email to a forum written 11 years ago. This is a good lesson for our students about what kinds of tracks a person leaves when they use the internet. Despite this interesting find, there were a lot of articles that I have written on the internet that didn’t appear. But, if someone was looking for me, it would be easy to find me.

Next I checked on my site stats over at cyberbali. The most popular page was the employment page, followed by the papua page, the home page, and then Sumbawa. Some surprises were Islam and Pakistan in the top 20.

So what are some more lessons that I can draw from this little exercise other than be thoughtful when you create a domain name, and think before you publish on the internet, you can never tell when something you wrote may come back to haunt you.

A Birthday Weekend

This weekend we had a birthday party for my second son, Sam. He turned 11 this weekend. We had about thirty-five kids here. I had to work (on a Sunday morning!), but when I got home, I did a quick run to Maluk to buy some balloons for the party and searched around for some party hats, but Maluk isn’t exactly brimming with party shops.

I did the usual this weekend – cut the grass, raked up some of it, corrected math papers, spent some time working out how to get around the company’s blocking of websites until I can get us on an independent provider.

We had some visitors from Bali today (adult children of neighbors), and they did a tour of the area. They were going on about how beautiful the beaches are here. They sure are, and it’s a shame that I rarely get out to them anymore. One of the things that I’m going to do during my last year here is spend some time at the beach because what’s the point of living on a remote island if you don’t spend time at the beach.

Overseas Workers in Southeast Asia

I read an item in the Jakarta Post yesterday about an Indian migrant worker who was tortured and eventually died from his mistreatment by this employers and their son. This happened in Malaysia, something that happens all too frequently there. The article noted that around 1.8 million foreigner workers are legally employed in Malaysia. This does not include the many illegal migrants mainly from Indonesia.

I’ve written about this issue before. It’s one of those issues that interest me because it affects my family here in Indonesia. A brother and sister-in-law have both worked in Saudi Arabia, and had less than wonderful experiences there, but they put up with the indignities because they wanted the money to start a small business and put their children through school. Unfortunately the economy in Indonesia isn’t sufficiently developed to provide sufficient employment for its citizens (but that’s another topic).

I’m in the process of reading a book about Indonesia overseas workers, Dreamseekers. It’s a detailed piece of journalism written by a veteran Indonesian journalist. The book fills out much of the background data on Indonesian women as domestic workers, as well as offering some case studies. This is an excellent reference if you’re interested in this issue.

Another Physical Weekend

One of the realities of having a lot of land is having to take care of it. Because we don’t have a gardener anymore, and because I need to have regular exercise for health purposes, I’m regularly doing yard work every Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. Fridays, I spend an hour cutting grass when I get home from work. Saturdays and Sundays I spend about an hour and a half cutting the grass and another hour raking up the cuttings. Good exercise and it gets me out of the house and away from the computer.

Physical labor is special because of the internal space that opens up during the act of engaging in something that is mechanically demanding, but intellectually effortless. Somewhat like the internal space that is opens as part of long distance running, routinized manual labor seems to alter the brain chemistry in a similar way so that it’s possible to exist on several planes at once. Well, enough for the mystical aspects of physical labor.

While I was doing this, my wife was working on one of her egg trees for the second anniversary of the creation of West Sumbawa as an administrative entity. The camat, the administrative head of our area, stopped by to ask us to take part in the regional ceremonies in Taliwang, about 45 minutes from here. Because my ankle is still not healed properly, walking around for a long ceremony was not the best idea so my wife volunteered to make an egg tree. She spent Friday and Saturday doing that while I was out doing the yard work.

The kids spent the weekend doing homework and hanging around generally. Mercedes spent part of Sunday helping me with the yard work.

Another nice normal weekend in Sumbawa.

Hyper stores in Bali

Carrefour opened in Bali yesterday, and a number of expat sites were gushing over the opening - how great the store is, all the things to be bought, etc. Great for the expats and wealthy Indonesians, but as yesterday was Labor Day what about the workers? As these giant stores are built which cater basically to the tourist/expat/wealthy Indonesian population what happens to the local stores that just squeek by? I just happen to be old enough to remember the mom and pop corner stores in Chicago when I was a kid. They were great because of the personal relationship that existed between the shopper and the owner. If you didn't have enough money to pay for something, you'd be carried over until tomorrow. Want something special. They'd do their best to have it for you.

No, I'm not thrilled about this recent development. I see it as another step on the road to the depersonalization of Bali.