Back in Kampung Bugis, Part IV, and Life in the Bali Sea

We’ve had guests for the past few days so I haven’t had time to blog, although I have been snorkeling. My friend, Stephen, his son, Oliver, Stephen’s friend, Ade, and Stephen’s driver, Wahid, came up from Kuta to visit for a few days. I enjoyed having them all visit; it’s been a while since I’ve had a friend visit the house. Of course, like most teachers, we talked a lot about school and education, but that’s one of the hazards of the profession – getting wrapped up in what we do.

The kids have been out of school for most of the week; we have family up from Denpasar because of the Nyepi holiday so the house has been very busy this week. Today is Kuningan so prayers from the Hindu temple just down the beach have been going on for hours now.

I let Mercedes and Rebecca drive up to Bedugal today for a treat. Lots of trepidation on my part because the roads can be so dangerous here, but I guess that I have to start to let go some as Mercedes is almost an adult – she’ll be 18 in a few months, and Rebecca will be 16 not long afterwards. Still, I’m waiting anxiously for her to call me to say that she has arrived safely in Bedugal.

I’ve been taking hundreds of photos with my Olympus underwater camera, as well as a lot of short movies. The water has been quite clear and some of the photos have come out quite clear, but I’m still working on how to use the camera. Today’s photo is of a fish that I have always called a tiger barb because I used to have Tiger Barbs when I was a kid. I’ve been going through my Collins Pocket Guide: Coral Reef Fishes, Indo-Pacific and Caribbean, to identify this fish. It seems to be an angelfish, butterfly fish or a damselfish. Based on a drawing on Page 74, I think that it is a damselfish. If anyone recognizes it, I would love to hear if I am correct in my classification.

Today’s anti-work quote is:
“Work is the refuge of people who have nothing better to do.”
—Oscar Wilde

Hermits, Thoreau, Retirement and the Essentials of Life

I’ve been reading an interesting book called Hermits by Peter French. I’m at the section of the book about Thoreau. I haven’t read Walden since high school, but I’ve just dug a copy out in my library here in Sumbawa. I want to go back and read it again after I finish Hermits. French writes that Thoreau, “…distinguished between the activities necessary o maintain life and those on which a free individual would choose to spend his time. The former were drudgery, the latter worthwhile. The good life should be organized to maximize free time and minimize drudgery. In fact his declared aim was to reverse the biblical injunction and labour for one day only, saving the other six for ‘free time’.

Additionally, he notes that Thoreau followed Socrates in seeing how many things he could live without so that he would not become a slave to working in order to purchase things which were really luxuries and comforts that had become to be seen as necessities.

So the point of all this - it’s related to a degree to my planned retirement. I’ve been working on paring my life down to what I see as essentials for me. The idea is to spend time with my family, friends, and myself to rediscover who I am and be available for my children before they are grown and gone.

The issue of what someone needs to retire on and how much that might cost is always a topic of discussion on expat forums. So what is my ideal of the essentials?

Books (this is about one book per month) 180,000

Internet ( I’m estimating this, I hope it’s less) 300,000

Website Server 144,000

Indovision (satellite tv so I can watch baseball) 300,000

Tech Stuff (software, hardware, ink, etc.) 250,000

Car registration (due yearly, saved monthly) 120,000

Motorbike registration (same) 19,000

Motorbike 2 registration (same as car) 19,000

School fees (for the 4 kids) 400,000

Visa (my retirement visa) 500,000

Clothes (for the kids) 500,000

Phone (my phone that I use for the internet) 120,000

Medical (whole family) 900,000

Insurance (me) 1,000,000

All this totals to 4,932,000 per month. It’s not exactly living like a hermit, but it’s what I see as living a fairly conservative lifestyle. My 7^th/8^th grade Social Studies class are just finishing a unit about economics and creating a budget was one of their assignments. They found my budget fairly barebones. More on budgeting for expats later.

The Environment and Global warming

Mercedes seems to be doing well in high school so far other than some problems with money because she has to buy books and new school uniforms, pay for school fees, and pay for additional lessons (known as les in Indonesia). We call her three or four times a day, and she calls us several times so there is a lot of communication going on. We’ll be going back to Bali in another seven weeks.

One of my more recent interests (as those who read this blog occasionally know) is the state of the worldwide water situation. Another one that I’m just developing is global warming. It’s fairly obvious that the weather has changed over the past 18 years here in Indonesia. Generally, environmental issues were never something that caught my interest (with the exception of rainforest destruction), but perhaps because I’m on the verge of retirement, new issues have entered my radar.

I was reading an article about the pollution of the atmosphere from air travel. I didn’t realize that there was so much activity around this area. I took a look at a carbon calculator to see what the cost would be in carbon emissions for a trip from Denpasar to Chicago and back. Well, I’m glad that I won’t be doing this much. Actually since I’ve moved to Sumbawa, I rarely fly: one overseas trip a year for the annual EARCOS conference, and occasionally, I take a short flight from Bali to Lombok, although usually we drive which is more environmentally friendly according to the article in Salon that I read.

The environment is becoming more of a political issue in Indonesia these days although public awareness still is fairly low. At my house in Bali, the neighbors still throw their trash in the sea; and here in Sumbawa, a neighbor still throws his trash in a patch of jungle in front of his house even though we mentioned it to him once. But, on the positive side, there are more public trash bins available, the cities have trash collection, and recycling has taken hold in some places in Indonesia. Eco-tourism is starting to develop as well. There is hope that environmental awareness will develop here. And just as I’m about to finish this, there’s a report that the Pope is committed to making the Vatican green. Good news from the Vatican and the Pope.

Finally, vacation!

Finally on a month long vacation period after what seemed like an incredibly long six months. I definitely do not like the school schedule that this school uses. Now that the school day is longer than most schools and the school year is longer than most schools, we’re essentially working an extra two weeks a year for free. Fortunately this is the last year for me. The extended school year that we have with the new schedule is just one of the problems that comes with working for a company school – they have little idea about what education is and teachers are generally not highly valued in the status system that is a large part of living in a mining community. Well, so much for my end of the year complaining.

Baseball. I get a week of watching baseball in the mornings on ESPN from my satellite connection. Today is the Mets and the Yankees. It’s a day game in New York, and the weather there is great – it’s great here in Sumbawa today as well with a nice 80 degrees at 10:30 am. If Indonesia had baseball, it would be almost paradise. With three weeks in Bali coming up as soon as the kids get their school reports at the end of next week, I’ll have internet access at home so I can follow baseball better. One of the key things that I’m looking forward to in retirement is having internet access everyday. Being able to use the internet at school just doesn’t cut it as I don’t have anywhere near enough time to follow what I need do professionally on the internet, and forget about personal stuff.

So on my second day of vacation (the first was spent as it usually is – playing games on the computer), I did lesson plans for fifth, sixth and eighth grade math classes for next semester. Tomorrow, I’ll do the Seventh grade math and then the seventh’eighth grade social studies class. I’ll do the 2-8 grade computer classes when I get to Bali and have some online access so I can use my del.icio.us account to post links there to go with my plans which will be online at the school’s website. I like getting lesson plans done early in the vacation as there isn’t enough time to do them when school starts. As you can see, teaching in a small school means doing extraordinary amounts of work for lessons. Even more in this school than in the other two small schools where I taught. Compare this to the lesson plans I did at the medium size school in Lahore where I had to plan for three levels of math each week.

The rural/urban divide, mobile phones, and Indonesian dating

Rural versus urban; mobile phones and Indonesian dating

I was watching an interview with the Indian actress Mallika Sherawat this weekend, and in the course of the interview, she mentioned the divide in India of rural versus urban. I got some sense of that during my four-year stay in Pakistan when I traveled to Amritsar for weekends. And, when I was out in the rural areas of Pakistan with my students, I could see the large divide between the folks in the countryside and the Lahoris.

Actually, it’s not often that I think of this in regards to Indonesia, even though I see evidence of it everyday on TV when I catch a glimpse of what my children and wife are watching. Of course, the sinetron – Indonesian soap operas which, like the old American prime time soap, Dallas, show the lives of the rich and warped.

I’m aware of the divide in Indonesia, but my life in this country over the past 18 years has been so non-uban that I have no idea how normal folks in Jakarta or Surabaya actually live. My experience is really here in a small village and in Singaraja, Bali, which is fairly small – I can walk through downtown in ten minutes. And the kids’ lives, up to now anyway, have been lived within the protective confines of the kampung in Singaraja or the village in Sekongkang.

I wrote the three paragraphs above over the weekend. Today I came in to work and checked on my Yahoo email and found an academic paper on Modernity and the Mobile Phone by Lee Humphreys and Thomas Barker. The article is about the role of the mobile phone in the evolution of dating in Indonesia, and the development of the production and distribution of pornography in Indonesia. It was noted that the proliferation of mobile phones, while increasing, is still limited to a defined sector of the population – wealthier, young and urban based. They suggest that as coverage increases and price decreases, mobile technology will spread to rural areas. Rural experience in Sumbawa, suggests, that the authors are correct in their assumptions about the spread to rural areas of mobile technology, but miss the already widespread use in some rural areas. Additionally, I would suggest that the use of mobile technology is a status marker for young people in rural areas as they mimic what they see on sinetrons which they judge to be sophisticated urban behavior.

More on the rural/urban divide later.

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.

Life on the farm, or why I love village life

I was out getting ready to cut the grass in the back yard (a major undertaking) for the first time since I was hit by the rock while cutting the grass which led to the two operations on my ankle when I noticed that we have some new little chicks (10, and how is this for a convoluted sentence). Since our dog, May, died the animals around here have been much safer. Dave, the dog that we have now, likes to chase and bite the chickens and geese and ducks and rabbits, but he doesn’t have the killer instinct that May had. So I’m hoping that the chicks can survive until they are large enough and fast enough to avoid Dave when he’s in his playful mode. As I was examining the chicks, Su pointed out that our female duck has laid eggs. This is the first time that we are going to have baby ducks so we’re all excited to see them hatch.

We’ve decided to sell the goats. They’re just too much trouble to take care of the way that we want to. Most people around here just let them wander around the village grazing here and there. We’ve always keep ours in the back yard (moved now over to the garden across the road) which has meant that we have to get food for them everyday. We’ve also usually had a gardener to take care of this. Now that they boy we were paying to do this has gone back to Bali, I’ve decided that we need to sell the goats just to give us less to do on a daily basis. Su says she agrees, but I know from past experience just how hard it is getting here to sell something of ours. We’ll just have to see how that goes. I’m going over to the garden to check on them today.

So the title is why I love village life; the animals are one of the main reasons. Tomorrow a few more.

Earthquakes and the Ring of Fire

Over the past four days we have had three earthquakes here in Sekongkang. They've been relatively mild, but we certainly felt them and they stirred up a lot of talk among my students. Indonesia is located in the Ring of Fire which is an area that frequently has earthquakes and volcanic activity. We found a cool website that my students had a great time with - www.iris.edu/seismon. More on earthquakes in Indonesia later.

Wiki link

This is the link to the wiki that we are playing with right now. We are just starting to play with a Sumbawa page.

Surgery in Bali

The first surgery on the swelling on my ankle didn't work in getting rid of it, so the doctor sent me out to Bali to have it looked at by an orthopedic surgeon. I ended up at Kasih Ibu hospital in Denpasar. The hospital is very modern and seems to be fairly complete. The doctor did some cutting and took a few cysts out of my ankle. I left the hospital as soon as I recovered from the anaesthetic. Right now I'm back in Sumbawa hobbling around but getting there. The stitches should be out in another ten days. So far, so good; but, I think that I'll be a little more careful when cutting the grass from now on.

Tech and Magic in Indonesia

An Adam Air flight went down on Monday somewhere around Sulawesi. The Indonesian authorities apparently lost the plane on their radar. Singapore and the US are assisting in the search, but so far nothing has been found. But, just to cover all the bases, this is what the Jakarta Post had to report today about the search.

Searchers slaughtered a buffalo in a traditional ceremony and consulted psychics Friday, the fourth day after an Adam Air jetliner went missing over Sulawesi.

It's nice to know that somebody is on the ball.

In additional Indonesian disaster news, the search for the missing passengers of a ferry that went down off Java has now been expanded to cover the waters around Bali. It seemss that we are in for another year of tragedy.

In Bali once again

We’ve been in Bali for almost a week now with just a week left to go before we have to head back to Sumbawa for work and regular living. We’re working on getting the kids Indonesian citizenship. That’s one of the major things for this trip. We went down to the American consulate yesterday, and the officer, Josh, was really helpful and quite friendly. I had to have certified photocopies of the kids’s passports and mine made for the Indonesian government. It was rather costly – over $300, but in the long run it will be worth it.

Then we went over to an Indonesian office to find out what all we needed. The lady, Ibu Desa, was helpful, but not very friendly. So we found out what we needed, stopped at McDonalds because that’s where all the kids wanted to go for lunch, and finally we headed home.

The chance for the kids to have dual citizenship is something that we’ve been waiting for for years. It means, among other things, that we won’t have to pay for a KITAS (a document that lets them stay in the country) for each of them every year. We’ve probably paid over $15,000 over the past 8 years for all of their documents. So that’s the first issue. Second, the kids will be able to inherit their mother’s property which is where a large part of our money is. Third, they won’t be in danger of being deported because of some foul-up on our part or our agent’s part, or just a change in the government. Fourth, the kids will be eligible to pay local fees when they enter college which will save us a lot of money when I’m on a limited budget due to retirement.

Today, Su went out getting documents photocopied, and arranging things with local authorities. I stayed home and ftp’d some stuff for the school website, and then tore apart the second floor bathroom. That was good. It will save us a little money with the guys who will put in the new floor and fix the shower. Plus, there’s nothing like some manual labor. I spend too much time on the computer, and I need to know what it is that I’m asking someone else to do for me. In this case, ripping up all the ceramic tile on the floor and the rotted-out vanity, the work was considerable; it took me and one of my brothers-in-law four hours to complete it.

Tomorrow, I’m going to take out all the fixtures on the windows on the third floor. They’ve all rusted and need to be replaced. People think that living on the ocean is really cool, but keeping up a house on the ocean requires a lot of work because everything gets corroded eventually from the salt air.

The other big event, as of today, is that I bought a new computer; my first Mac since 1998. This is a killer machine: an IMac5.1 with a 20 inch screen and 1 gb ram and 250GB hard drive. When my son first saw it, he kept looking for the cpu. I said that it’s all in the monitor, but he couldn’t believe it.

Only problem- getting Mac software over here.

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.