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.