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.

Why I Love Village Life Part 2

This is a continuation of the last blog about why I love village living.

The first reason that I love living in the village (the one that I mentioned last week ) is the opportunity to have animals. I love animals, and I especially love having enough space so that they can roam around freely.

The second reason is mornings. I love mornings in the village. Folks wake up early and are out getting a quick start on the day. The village kids are in their school uniforms, hair still wet from their mandi; goats and water buffalo are beginning their grazing rounds for the day; everything smells fresh and the air is still cool. As I drive the kids to school, folks from the village smile and wave; occasionally a small child will jump up and down shouting bule! bule! This is the beauty of all small towns – the closeness of the community. Everyone knows everyone and everyone has their place and role in the community.

Space for me and the kids and Su is another reason that I love village life. In Bali, we have our townhouse – shopping is easy because we’re five minutes from “downtown” Singaraja, but the walls of our house are a foot away from our neighbor’s house, and any argument that we might have is heard by all of our neighbors. Our house in the village is large, the yard is huge (57 are), and thus we have the space to do what we want and live how we want.

The fourth reason is physical labor. I spent almost twenty years doing physical labor while I was a student. I miss that, and I need exercise because of the high cholesterol and the prediabetes. I found exercise rather boring, but if I can exercise while I’m getting something done like cutting the grass or raking the cuttings or digging holes, well then I can enjoy exercising. I’ve spent the past weekend cutting over 3000 square meters of land, and that’s been a big job, but really satisfying.

More about village life later.

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.

Health, smoking, irritability, and all those other annoying things

I’m off on another (and I hope last) attempt at stopping smoking. This time the attempt is the result of a recent visit to the Bumrungrad Hospital International Center for a complete physical. The good results were that I don’t have skin cancer; the bad results were that I’m pre-diabetic, am developing a cataract in my right eye, have high cholesterol, and may develop gallstones over the next few years. So the doctor told me to stop smoking, quit drinking alcohol, go on a diet for prediabetics, and get regular exercise.

For those of us who live in isolated places with limited access to resources like doctors and bookstores, the internet is a vital resource. I’ve been doing research on everything listed above. I’ve been able to track down diets, exercises, research, tips for living with diabetes – just about everything that I need to deal with my new health situation.

From my research, there is one factor that connects all of my health issues – smoking. So it seemed fairly obvious that I needed to stop smoking. As my eldest daughter put it, “if you want to see Meredith grow up, you better stop smoking.” So I’m on my seventh day now. It’s somehow easier (although it isn’t easy by any means) than before; perhaps because there is some concrete reason now to stop whereas before it was some abstract (to me anyway) threat of a future problem.

Irritability – my homeroom students (Grades 7 and 8) asked me the other day why I was so crabby. I replied that I didn’t think that I was any crabbier than usual, and they commented that it wasn’t just my usual old man crabbiness, but something special. So I let them know what was going on. Surprisingly they were surprised that I smoked, and all were glad that I was quitting. As I told them about the diagnosis of being prediabetic, they’ve been quite helpful with not offering me sweets like they often do, as well as reminding me not to eat sweets when they see me with a pack of Oreos.

The health issues are one of the main reasons that we are trying to sell the house here in Sumbawa. Once I retire, I won’t be able to access Newmont’s clinic which means that I’ll be at the mercy of the very minimal medical facilities available here. For anything major, I’ll need to go to Mataram (over on the next island) as the closest (a 7 hour car and ferry trip). It makes more sense for us to move to the house on Bali for that reason alone. There are other reasons for the sale as well, but more on that later.

Electronic Portfolios

Here's another set of notes from the EARCOS conference.

Electronic Portfolios

They are a collection of student work that includes reading, writing, listening, and speaking abilities. They can be contained on a CD, a Flash Drive, or a Network.

They also include documented reflections on student work. The work included is not necessarily the best work. It should show the learning process. Students can put the work in by themselves. They put work in that they consider significant.

(note: Student folders on the Network can be reorganized to do this)

Train the students how to do it. Start out with two documents for the first year, 3 for the second, four for the third. Remind students to put work in their portfolios as they often forget to do it.

Formatting can be in doc, pdf, jpg, powerpoint, mp3, quicktime video.

Why use them?

For placement in a class.
For academics: prior knowledge, strengths and weaknesses, continuation and transistion.

How to do it?

Provide students with format for reflection and rubric. Provide classroom instruction on the electronic component

Assessment

Collect student portfolios and assess using the rubric.
Have students do peer-review using the same rubric.

Notes from EARCOS

Spotty as they are, I'm posting my notes from workshops at the EARCOS conference. The first entry is from a talk that Ian Jukes gave. Jukes was probably the key presenter. Unfortunately, I can access Jukes' blog because the company that controls our internet access has his site blocked for some reason.

Ian Jukes

From Gutenberg to Gates to Google (and beyond)

People don’t need four year degrees anymore.

People have filters and hear what they want. Many in education think that they are immune to change.

It’s hard to think how inventions will change things. The applications go beyond the original plan. The power of Gutenberg’s press came from the impact it had on the transfer of information.

Gates revolution happened in fast forward. Things are happening even much more quickly now. Change is going on at an exponential rate.

By 2012 information will double every 72 hours. We have to prepare our students to be flexible and creative.

Look up Epaper and see how that works.

Look up Google language tools

The singularity is near. (He has an image of the Borg on screen.)

See his blogs and websites at The Committed Sardine: thecommittedsardine.net or ianjukes.com

The message that Jukes gave us was one that has been going around for a while in various forms. Are teachers ready for change?

Back from Earcos and off to work again

The two week spring break has just ended and it's back to work again. I spent almost a week of the break in Bangkok for the annual EARCOS conference. The conference was excellent as usual, especially for a technology teacher; there were so many tech oriented workshops that I really had to work to decide which ones to attend and which ones to skip.

As I'm updating this page, I'm also noticing what I wrote here in December when I came back from a tech seminar in Jakarta. The message was pretty much the same in both Bangkok and Jakarta, although the depth was better in Bangkok. As I wrote in December: Blogs, wikis, websites, podcast, IM are all tech tools that were mentioned, but I've already used all of them.

During the last term, I started having my students work on this wiki (www.wikiplaces.wetpaint.com) for students to post pictures and text about Indonesia, especially the islands that we spend time on. We're going to continue working on this project over the next term in addition to several other web-based projects which I'm still working on.

As usual, the EARCOS conference encouraged me to keep on working in the direction that I've been moving over the past decade with some upgrades in thought and direction. Ian Jukes was one of the main keynoters at the conference, and I have to say he was impressive. I've heard a lot of what he said before, but it was great to hear it again. He has a very engaging speaking style. Wish I could do that.

We are going to place more student work on our school website, but after some suggestions from colleagues in Bangkok, we will password protect the student work.

I want to do some more podcasting work this term as well as finishing up the movies that we started last term. Our major problem with making movies is that our hardware is too outdated to perform the tasks that we want it to perform. We did buy two iMacs for movie work and the students love them. We're thinking about moving to a Mac base (specifically laptops) in the near future, but we have a lot of selling to do before that large jump becomes reality.

On another track, I did a check on the search terms used for this site and came up with some interesting stats. The overwhelming keyword was "Sumbawa" versus a year ago when the number one term was "Papua." More than half the keywords involved job searches for various schools in Asia. There were a number of keywords relating to math as well. And for the main surprise, there were six searches for my name. Hmm, I wonder who's looking for me.

On yet another track, I'm creating a new page for the Sumbawa.org site for selling our house in Sumbawa. The kids have made it clear that they want to move back to Bali once I've finished teaching here. As much as I love our house in Sekongkang, and as much as I love this village, we just won't be able to afford keeping four houses going during my retirement. So if you want to move to a lovely, somewhat remote island in Indonesia, check out the new page(www.sumbawa.org/houseforsale). We're looking at a sale date of June 2008.

Vacation

This is the last of the blogs that I didn't have an opportunity to post while I was on vacation. Tomorrow back to the present.

Today is the first official day of vacation for spring term. This year, like most years, I’ll be spending about half of that time at the EARCOS conference in Bangkok. EARCOS is an organization for international teachers working in Asia. The conference last four days and is filled with workshops, lectures, speeches, and a few parties. It’s a venue for teachers to do some professional development, as well as catch up with old friends and colleagues. For some teachers who are planning to move to another school, it’s a time for networking. For administrators, it’s a chance to find some potential new faculty members. For me these days, I spend most of my time in the tech workshops, although occasionally I go to one of the math ones.

Last year’s conference was in Manila; the year before it was in Ho Chi Minh City. As it’s in Bangkok this year, I have made some plans besides just attending the conference since I’ve spent a fair amount of time in Bangkok over the past 17 years. I have a complete physical scheduled, as well as a visit to my dentist whom I greatly prefer over the dentists in Bali. There’s also some shopping, of course, for the family and myself. Being in Bangkok gives me a chance to visit Asia Books and stock up on books for another year. I’m also hoping to find some software for my iMac.

While I’m looking forward to the conference, I’m not looking forward to the travel to get there. I really enjoy living on a remote tropical island for the most part, but getting from one place to the other is not one of the benefits of living in Sumbawa. The itinerary for this year is: 6 am leave for the airport; 7 am take off for Mataram (the next island over) and wait for a 9 am flight to Bali: 9:30 arrive in Bali and hang around Kuta and Legian until 2:30 pm when I can check in for the flight to Bangkok; 5 pm leave for Bangkok; 8 pm arrive in Bangkok; 9 pm arrive at the hotel. So the whole trip will take15 hours. But, as many people have said to me over the years, including my teacher friends back in the States, what’s wrong with that, it sounds cool that you get to go to Bangkok for a conference and have most of it paid for by the school. And really that’s just really true. The whinging just means that I’ve gotten jaded a bit being over here, and that I’m getting old and tired of traveling. Well, this kind of traveling anyway. I actually still like the long, 15 hour drive from here to Bali when we have enough time to go. I think partially because I’m doing something for a lot of the time (with the exception of the five hour ferry to Bali), and I’m with my family and the kids’ excitement gets me jazzed up for the trip.

The key to the trip over to Bangkok will be occupying myself during the wait time. While I’m waiting at the company airport here in Sumbawa, I’ll have a few smokes and read a paper on archaeology. I’ll have about 90 minutes in Mataram which I’ll spend on the computer if no one is on it (the lounge only has one). When I get to Bali, I’ll stow my suitcase and take a taxi in to Kuta where I’ll go hang out at an internet café for a while and then probably stroll over to the Matahari department store to see what they have there now as it’s been a few years since I’ve been there. If I get really ambitious, I might go to the Ace Hardware store and check out what hardware I can buy in June when I’ll be in Bali for a few weeks when the kids and I have a vacation that coincides. I’ll check in at about 2:30 and buy a book and have a few drinks while waiting for the plane.

I’m staying at my old hotel from the Pakistan days – Tai Pan. It’s close to my dentist, the Asia Books outlet that I like, and the Robinson’s department store that I also like. Plus, I’m within walking distance of two restaurants that I like. I will be across town from the conference, but I can take the skytrain and take some photos of Bangkok. I’ve managed to lose all of my Bangkok photos over the years just like I lost a lot of my ones of Pakistan and India.

As I write all of this sitting here at my new iMac in what is commonly referred to as “The Big House”, it really is clear that the 18 years of teaching overseas has been good to me: a wonderful (well mostly) wife, four great kids, a few houses, a bunch of electronic toys, animals, an eclectic collection of friends (most of whom I rarely get to see unfortunately), a chance to live in Indonesia and Pakistan, and an interesting and generally gratifying career where I’ve been able to teach a wide variety of subjects: 2nd grade, computers, math, social studies, pe, high school anthropology, as well as spending almost four years being a principal.

There have been downsides as well, but that’s for another post.

And it’s a lovely day in paradise.

Living in and writing about another culture

I was skimming a blog written by an American living in Vietnam who was addressing the question of how much a Westerner can know about an Asian culture. This got me thinking about my own blog and websites. I wonder just how authoritive I end up sounding. After almost 18 years of living overseas – all but four of them in Indonesia – I should know something about this culture, but something always pops up that reminds me how much I really don’t know.

So something new popped up a few days ago. When I returned home from school, my eldest daughter was waiting with two pieces of news. She gave me the bad news first: our dog had killed one of our rabbits while playing with him. He apparently decided that it was like his stuffed rabbit, and he decided to throw it around for a while. We buried the rabbit out in the back next to our two dogs who are no longer with us – one poisoned, the other hit by a car.

The second piece of news was “happy” as Mercedes informed me. She said that we had adopted a baby. Imagine my surprise.

Sure enough, there was a little fellow in the kitchen being played with by my children. He’s a cute little guy. I have a hard time remembering his name, but he’s cheerful and receptive. It’s been a while since I’ve had a baby around, and it was kind of nice to hold one again, although being as we were only “temporary” parents, I was as worried about breaking him as I am when I borrow someone’s car or motorbike.

So what is the new cultural knowledge? I’m still processing this because I just found out that one of my kids was in the same situation once. According to my wife and children and some Indonesian colleagues, this is a common practice on a number of islands – just one of those things that I’ve missed while I’ve been obsessed with a career and keeping bread on the table.

The child that I “adopted” was given to us by a village family because the baby boy looked a lot like his father. This can cause conflicts between the two as the child grows up (I’m not sure what the theory is behind this- I’ll do some checking later), so the family gives the child to another family to temporarily adopt (the time frame seems to be fairly flexible according to the people that I’ve talked to). Eventually after the time period is finished, the adopting parents take the child to the natural parents and offer to let them adopt their (the adopting parents) baby. The natural parents adopt the child and everything is ok.

I find this practice immensely fascinating and plan on looking more it, but my baby “son” was here today and he kept everyone busy.

Besides mentioning some new cultural practice that I was unaware of, the main point here is that no matter how long a foreigner lives in another culture, they will always be a foreigner, and there will always be things to learn.

World Water Day

World Water Day was March 25. As those of you who regularly drop by here know, the water issue is near and dear to my daily life. (I’m posting this on April 9th because I’m on vacation and don’t have a phone at home.)

Water here in Southwest Sumbawa is an issue because we routinely have problems with access to water. Our village pump regularly breaks, and thus we don’t have running water until it’s fixed. Digging wells helps some of the villagers, but in our case, our land is situated where the water table is so low that digging a well has proven extremely difficult, and the workers that we hired for our two attempts quit after getting down 25 meters and finding no water.

At one point two years ago, we went five weeks without running water. Because the mining company that’s located next to our village has a tap outside their gates where the local community can access clean water, everyone in the village was able to have water for bathing and doing laundry and dishes, as well as for sanitation. We did have to drive the 15 minutes to the tap and fill up all of our containers and get them home everyday. If we hadn’t had the mine’s facility available to us, I’m not sure what we would have done. It was during that time, that I really first started thinking about the water crisis for a large part of the world population.

I read a statistic the other day that an estimated 1.5 million children a year die from diarrhea which is associated with a lack of water for drinking and sanitation.

Here’s an excerpt from a Salon.com article on water:

Here is a description by Caryn Boddie, an American writer who traveled to Kaikungu, Kenya to assess water-treatment issues and found that local women regularly walked 11 hours to fetch water for their families: "...during the dry season, the women have had to wake up at 2 A.M. on many mornings, leave their husbands and children still sleeping in bed, and go off to fetch water in the dark. They have walked to the Watumba River or have gone to buy from others who have wells. After they access the water, they carry it home, not returning home until 1 P.M. When the women complete the journey, they are too tired to do anything else in their homes or on their shambas (farms). Sometimes, they have walked to get water and back without any breakfast or lunch."

It's not just a matter of sheer neglect that has kept so many families without safe water, but also the fact that many water projects -- spearheaded by governments and non-profit groups -- don't work for the communities they are supposed to serve. (Sometimes wells are drilled but not outfitted with pumps, or wells which would require residents to pay for water are drilled close to a natural (and free) water spring and end up endangering it.) Women continue to travel to ensure their families' supplies, and water engineering has become an explicit feminist issue.

With retirement looming on the near horizon, I’m looking at ways that I can get involved in the movement to develop solutions for the water problem both in Indonesia and in other developing countries.

Road Trips

I'm in the middle of a week road trip to Bangkok, and am sitting at a broadband computer in the Emporium on Sukhumvit. What an incredible experience to be able to ask for a website and then receive it almost instantly.

I just finished a three day EARCOS conference and will post my notes on the workshops for those who are interested. (I have to write them up anyway for work.)Friday I went and had a laser tooth cleaning done at my dentist in Bangkok. It's been hard for me to see much of a difference, but when I showed up at the conference the day after, my colleagues noticed. So that has been nice. Unfortunately I have four cavities which need to be filled Monday night. Monday during the day, I have my first complete physical in many years; I want to see how the old body is doing, and the visit will give me a chance to get my ankle checked since it still isn't right.

Time to get out and eat and finish up the days work. I'm planning on spending a quiet evening in the hotel tonight eating, reading, writing and watching tv.

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.

One More Time

I have just finished my first week back at school after the second operation on my ankle in the past month. This time I followed everyone's advice and bought a cane in Bali which I have been using fairly religiously until today. The ankle looks good, but as the doctor here said, it looked good last time until the stitches were taken out. I'll see how things go on Monday when the stitches are taken out.

Things Men are Afraid Of

I read a short article by David Zinczenko the other day on Yahoo about the things that men are afraid of. The article was one of those list articles that people love to read (and write). As I’ve written occasionally about issues surrounding being a man, the article gave me a good excuse for a mid-day laugh. There were a few points that resonated with me:

1. Her tears. Like a lot of men, I have difficulty with women crying, especially my wife or daughters, but also students, mothers and just the occasional distraught woman in an airport waiting room. Why? I guess it’s related to not being much of a crier myself, but perhaps even more because I’m never quite sure what to do – give the distressed lady a hug (ok for my wife and daughters, but generally not ok for the other women), get her to talk the problem out (I’m generally unsuccessful with this approach but occasionally it works), explain why their problem isn’t worth crying about). You can see why I fear this.

2. Not being a god to his kids. Eventually every dad gets to the point where his kids realize that dad is just a flawed human being like everyone else (maybe even more than everybody else). Zinczenko says that men get to the point where they don’t care what co-workers, friends, in-laws, strangers and everybody else thinks about them, but having your kids verbally recognize your flaws is an emotional killer. As I tell my students occasionally, I’ve reached that point where I’m comfortable enough with myself that the opinion of others is fairly irrelevant to me, but I dread the day when my young children get to where my adult son is and see me as just this flawed person that lives with them.

3. Not seeing his kids grow up. As I get closer to 60 and my body begins falling apart like an old and loved junk car, I worry that I won’t be around long enough to see the littlest reach adulthood and be there to help her navigate her way through all the complexities of modern life in Indonesia. With my one child who has already grown up, his career and my career work to keep us from seeing each other, and I’d love to have some time to sit down and see what he is like as an adult.

4. Living paycheck to paycheck. As I wind my career down, I spend an inordinate amount of time worrying if my savings will be enough to carry me and my family through my old age and their remaining childhood years. For someone who has been working since I was 10, the idea of having no money coming in is scary.

5. Public humiliation. I’ve made my share of really stupid mistakes in the past 57 years. The ones that were public have stayed with me and pop up occasionally in the late night hours. I keep hoping that I can get through the rest of my life without making any more public mistakes.

Zinczenko listed 10 other fears, but most of those have either passed me (a father’s death), or aren’t relevant to someone who lives in the jungle (Super Nanny, speedos). One fear that he didn’t list, but which has become an issue over the past few years is not being able to take care of myself. I’ve had a number of accidents since I’ve moved to Sumbawa which have disabled me for a certain amount of time, and I just hate being dependent on others. The idea that I may end up being too ill to function independently gives me the chills.

So one more blog about being a guy.

Macs and Windows

Last month I bought my first Mac in over 8 years. The switch from Macs to PCs was originally done because of the difficulty with getting Macs serviced in Bali, as well as the difficulty of buying software and connecting to the Internet. The Internet connection problem no longer is an issue in Bali, nor is getting the Mac repaired if need be. Software is still an issue, however, as I've yet to find Mac software in Bali.

But...I do love my new Mac. I purchased the 20 inch iMac, and it's great. It just seems to run much more smoothly than my PCs. Of course, I do still have the software problem, but I'll be in Bangkok next month so I'm hoping to find Mac software there.

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.

Educational wiki use

My students started their first wiki work today. I found the wikiplaces wiki a week or so ago and have been thinking about how to use it, and which classes to use it with. If I remember correctly, I found the site by following a link from Susan Sedro's blog which is listed here in the links section.

We decided to go with the encyclopedia format and add some photos and text. I do have a question about photo use. The students are looking for photos that aren't copyrighted. I think that according to fair use, students can use photos if they give credit to the photographer. Anyone who can comment on that out there?

More on the wiki work later

Another One of Those Annoying Tropical Maladies

After five weeks of having a golf ball sized lump on my ankle after an encounter with a flying rock while cutting my lawn, the doctor here in townsite decided that it was time to do some cutting. So we’re waiting to see how things work out. Just one of those little things that happen when you live out in the jungle using less than safe equipment to do what is generally a routine job back in civilization.

So today I’ve been laying around the house resting the foot. Everyday now we go without electricity for at least a few hours, and often for most of the day. If there is no electricity then we also don’t have water because the town water system needs electricity for the pump to work.

With no computer access and no electricity to watch tv, I spent the day doing some reading. Today I went through the book, To the Spice Islands and Beyond. The book is a collection of excerpts from travel writings from the 16th century up through the 20th. I love historical travel writing partly because it gives the reader insight into some of the prevailing social and ethical values, as well as a take on what the culture was like at the time. Reading through each extract, I wanted to buy the books that they came from. I found an excerpt from a book that I read 18 years ago in Tembagapura, In the East My Pleasure Lies. That book was written by an English aristocrat who traveled around Indonesia in the 30’s. She was fairly unusual for the time – taking buses with the locals as well as hanging out with government officials, scientists, and other interesting characters. I always wanted to steal the book from the Tembagapura library as I figured that it wouldn’t be read much and the chances of me finding the book anywhere else would be slim. I let my moral scruples get the best of me though, and I didn’t steal it. Hopefully, I’ll find it around somewhere.

Driving in Bali

I just came across a new plan by the Bali police to get motorcycle drivers to use their headlights both during the day and the night. They are doing this in hopes of raising the safety consciousness of the driving population. In addition to the use of lights, the police are also planning on stressing the use of helmets, rear-view mirrors, and driving in the left lane.

I hope that this plan succeeds, but I have this feeling that it's going to be a long haul for the police when you consider that many drivers in Bali do not use lights even at night (for fear of depleating their battery).

Driving on the left lane? People in Bali driving on whatever side of the road is most convienent for them. So you often have cars or motorcycles coming at you from both the left and the right at the same time.

Mirrors. People rarely have mirrors on the bikes, but they do know what's going on behind them because they often drive forward while looking backwards at friends that they have just passed.

Helmets. If the police are around, people will throw a helmet on, or if they don't have one, they will pull off the road and wait for the police to go away, or just turn around and look for a road without a police presence.

What about driving licenses? How many drivers don't have licenses? How many kids (and I mean small kids)drive around regularly with the permission of their parents.

Well, good luck on the driving reform. If it succeeds, I may actually start driving again in Bali.

Back to Work, No Water Once Again

Well, back once again in Sumbawa for work. Most of my students arrived back on time which is somewhat unusual, and they are all smiling and ready to go.

We were welcomed back to Sumbawa by yet another water shortage. You really can tell that the climate is changing just by looking at the weather patterns here over the past four years. Each year we get less and less water. But, I'm sure that doesn't affect those countries and industries who continue to contribute to global warming. As I've said before, we (that is my family and I), at least, have an economic safety bubble around us. What happens to those folks who have none? How are they going to survive as the water gets harder and harder to come by?

New links to the blog

One of the great things about being on vacation is that I have time to surf the internet and find out what's going on in the blogging world. Living in the jungle with no phone means that I have to rush to put something on the blog while I am at school. Usually there just isn't enough time. But, I've come up with some interesting blogs that you'll see in the sidebar. Two of the new blogs are by teachers, Adventures in Educational Blogging, and Dreaming of Hanoi. The third blog is written by an Indonesian woman and is about Islam and other issues affecting Indonesia. It's called 100%INDONESIA. Lots of good stuff out there, but how do you keep up with everything?

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 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?