Animals

How many animals can you have? We have ducks, chickens, geese, birds, goats, dogs. I turned down an offer of buying baby sea turtles yesterday because they’re protected. It was one of those decisions of whether you buy them to protect them or not buy them to discourage people from selling them. I went with the not buying them.

A few years ago when I spent a lot of time swimming in the ocean here, I came across one territorial sea turtle who seemed to always be in the exact place on the beach where I wanted to swim. I’m someone who has a thing about sharks (think 10 years of living in northern California where you regularly get Great Whites who like to take chunks out of surfers), and I would think the turtle was a shark. Eventually we got used to each other, and (s)he would let me get within a fairly close distance and then swim away. It was one of those beautiful things about living out here in the “jungle” that you rarely get elsewhere.

I’m not sure how I’m going to get used to not having animals around when I retire to the house in Bali next year. The house is relatively small (compared to this one) and we have no extra land like we do here, and our neighbors in Bali are of the Muslim variety that think that dogs are haram. Dogs here aren’t haram; dogs in Pakistan aren’t haram – check out President Musharraf and his dogs.

One lovely story from the vacation in Bali. One of our neighbors is an excellent fisherman. He was out getting his boat ready to go out the next day and he saw a fin moving up close. He took it to be a shark at first glance and was about to spear it. Then he realized that it was a baby dolphin. He took the little guy up and put it in his boat and dropped it off 500 meters from shore because most fisherman in Bali won’t kill a dolphin. Why? Some interesting stories of dolphins saving guys who have been washed off their boats and have been saved by dolphins dragging them to shore.

More on Daily Life in an Indonesian Village

We’re deep in the dry season and the weather has been clear and cool lately. Last night it was 64 degrees F, and even now at 7:30 in the morning it’s only 68. As usual during the dry season, water is at a premium, but it’s something that you get used to here in Sumbawa.

Despite the lack of rain and water, we have some crops growing: our cauliflower in the back is doing well as is some green, leafy vegetable that tastes like spinach. We also have hundreds of tomatoes, which are doing well, and dozens of cucumbers that we have already started eating. Five of the banana trees and five of the papaya trees are bearing fruit. It’s not mango season yet, but it will be soon.

We continue to have baby animals arriving here on the farm. Six baby ducks hatched last week – two mysteriously disappeared, so we have four left. We had to use one of our hens to hatch the duck eggs because the mother duck destroys her eggs after she lays them – we don’t know why she does this, but she always does. So, this time we placed her eggs with one of the chickens who sat on the eggs until they hatched. They follow her around (was it Lorenz who did that experiment with the baby ducks?) like she is their mother which she is in a way. She in turn protects them, but our two geese have entered the picture. They have adopted the baby ducks for some reason – they don’t adopt the baby chicks so somehow they sense some affinity with the ducklings. Having the geese protect them gives the ducklings a lot of security because all of the other animals are afraid of them including Dave the dog. Whenever Dave or the puppies get close to the ducklings, the geese attack. It’s quite humorous to watch.

On other local events:

Little League baseball started again yesterday. This will be my last time coaching a team after 30 years or so of doing this. Hmm…a part of retirement that I won’t particularly enjoy. We lost 19 -15. Not too bad. We had two innings of sloppy fielding, but otherwise did well. Anyway, it was fun to be out there.

Four more weeks until vacation and a chance to see my eldest daughter in Bali.

Rural Life in Indonesia

Well, I’m just about over the nasty case of flu that I’ve had for the past four days. I actually took two days off work which is fairly unusual for me. Last time I took a day off work was in February after an operation on my ankle. I took two days off to recover from the surgery. Anyway, it’s nice to be able to breathe almost freely now.

I went over to the kebun with Su and the kids today for the first time in a week. The puppies are still hanging around and are still little chubby things so their mother is obviously still coming by to feed them at some point during the day or night. Bush, the daddy goat, saw a few young females pass by and he set about trying to destroy to fence so that he could get out and hang with the young ladies. It seems like Veronica, Bush’s mate, is pregnant again, and she’s keeping Bush away so he’s out looking for action. Hmm, goats remind me of some humans that I know.

So Sunday was pretty much of a garden day. I did correct some work that I had taken home when I thought that I might not be back in school for a day, but mostly I’ve been out in the garden across the road where we have the goats and the puppies and some of our fruit trees. All of us except for Rebecca went. Sam messed around with the puppies and built them a shelter; Meredith watched Sam for a while and then went in the bungalow and watched tv; Su started a number of fires as she likes to do; and I played with the puppies and searched the trees for snakes – there weren’t any.

Later in the day, Su and I went out and inspected the gardens in the backyard. We have a number of bananna trees which are producing fruit now; the problem will be to keep the monkeys away from the bananas until they are ripe enough for us to harvest them. Our cucumbers, greens and tomatoes are growing well, but again we need to keep the monkeys away.

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.

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.