Family life in Kampung Bugis

So before I fell down the stairs, I had spent the entire day tearing apart the storeroom which was filled with rusty tools, broken toys, old newspapers, love letters from before Su and I were married, and assorted other junk. I enlisted all the little kids and they dragged all the detritus of 18 years in Indonesia and deposited them in the living room of the beach house (which badly needs repairs). Then I started on the library which was full of broken toys, 80 Asmat carvings, and a thousand books. I sprayed all of the statues and put them in the empty storeroom for later during retirement when I hope to sell a few on Ebay.

I cleaned all of the bookcase, put the books back in order, and then we started the hard work. We had to take the statue cases and get them down from the second floor library to the second floor of the beach house. A brother-in-law came by to see what I was doing and got involved. He called his son over, and another of my brothers-in-law and a neighbor. We put a rope around the bookcases that held the statues and lowered them down to the ground floor, then carried them around the block to the beach house entrance, and finally stored them outside the beach house until the second floor is cleared of junk so that we can stick them up there for Su to use next year when she opens another baking business.

It was after all this that I slipped on some oil and fell down the third floor stairs. So I have two badly swollen, cut and bruised feet. Why is it always my feet? Actually I’m fortunate that I wasn’t more seriously hurt; I could just as easily have broken my neck so I guess that it just isn’t time to go yet.

More later on family in Asia stuff.

some fourth of july lessons

July 4, 2007

Watching the sunset from the balcony this evening. A friend called to wish congratulations. I had a difficult time figuring out what the congrartulations were for. I got it eventually. Maybe I have been in Asia a long time. I remember shopping for my wife for some specialized medicine in Singapore 15 years ago or so. I can still remember the route from the hotel to the shop. But then again, I can still remember being at a Cubs game on the Fourth of July, so I guess the remembrance game washes out.

I’m kind of laid up today. I fell down the third floor stairs last night. Kind of embarrassing as I just told I friend who was commenting on the steepness of the stairs that I have never fallen down them in 9 years. Great. Now I have two feet that are somewhat the worse for wear. The lesson for today is not to spray antique carvings with insect repellent while you are walking down steep stairs.

A Teacher's Vacation

Yesterday was my birthday and today was Mercedes’. She turned 16 today. My god, how hard to believe that I have a 16 year old daughter and a soon-to-be 36 year old son and a grandchild on the way. Time turns quickly.

So sixteen is no the big birthday for girls here – 17 is and Mercedes is already coming up with wild plans for her 17th birthday. Today was fairly tame but highly enjoyed by all. I took the kids to the Bali Tree Top up in Bedugal. I’ve been there before when I brought my students on a field trip to Bali almost a year ago, and I figured that the kids would really enjoy climbing around. It turned out that they did, but not just them, six of the adults took part and they didn’t want to stop. It was a rather expensive afternoon, but the kids will remember this for a long time.

I spent all of the time filming or doing ground control work so I didn’t get a chance to do this again. Maybe next time.
So far this vacation is fairly on schedule for what we wanted to get done in a relatively short period of time. Things done: 1) We enrolled our eldest daughter in a good high school. If she does well, she should be able to get in a good college; 2) We got our second daughter a new American passport so she’s good now until she’s 18 and needs to decide on what citizenship she is going to take – Indonesian or American; 3) We bought the eldest daughter a new handphone so she can keep in touch with us, and perhaps more importantly, we can keep in touch with her; 4) We retiled the second floor bathroom and put in a new toilet; 5) We put a new toilet in the downstairs bathroom; 6) I fixed the phone connection on the third floor (after waiting six months for the family to get a repairman to do it); 7) I’ve finished updating half of the cyberbali site; 8) I answered a lot of back emails; 9) We showed our guest, friend, and handyman around part of Bali; 10) We had a birthday party for Mercedes and Rebecca; 11) I bought Sam a new handset for his PlayStation; 12) We bought Meredith some new Barbie things; 13) I managed to see my old friend once so far. Not bad for the first week.

We have another 12 days to try to finish up the rest which includes: 1) renewing and adding to our retirement time deposit account; 2) opening a bank account for Mercedes and getting her an ATM so we can keep her supplied with money; 3) fixing two windows in the bathrooms; 4) fixing a window on the third floor so that it doesn’t fall off during the rainy season; 5) opening a haj account for my wife; 6) opening student savings accounts for three of the kids; 7) talking to a visa agent about what my visa options are next year when I retire; 9) finishing the cyberbali update; 10) finishing some social studies lessons for next term; 11) reading the PEW study on American Muslims which I downloaded and printed; 12) rereading the Nine Parts of Desire and write a review; 13) learning about the physical requirements of setting up a network; 14) and there’s some more but I don’t have my plan book available at the time.

A New Site

There's a new site up by a friend of mine with some brilliant portraits of Indonesians. You might want to check out his work at the link on the side. It's called Faces of Indonesia.

Ceremonies and getting things done in Paradise

Living in Paradise. It ain’t that easy. Why? Because it takes forever to do small things that tourists think are easy everyday things to do. One example: I wanted the box on the wall that I plug the phone in to, to be changed so that I could have the phone and the computer plugged in at the same time. No one knew what I meant even though I thought that I explained it fairly clearly. I found the little box today down in the south of Bali in the first store that I entered. I can do the installation myself, but the whole issue of purchasing it has taken six months (well I’ve been gone for six months so maybe it’s only taken me a month.

It’s called wasting time in Paradise. I asked for some mosquito curtains and there’s a person that makes good ones, but she’s off to ceremonies. I forget about it and expect that when she returns in a few days she’ll give me a call or my wife will call her. Six months down the road, we still don’t have them because she forgot to call my wife and my wife forgot to call her because …there are always ceremonies, regardless of religion in Bali there are always ceremonies. The Hindus have theirs, the Muslims have theirs, the Buddhists have theirs, the Christians have theirs. When you add them all up, the island seems to be on holiday or preparing for a holiday almost all the time

Impressions and wandering identities

Impressions are not easy to gauge and usually we don’t want people to give us their real impressions of us. It’s one of the little joys of teaching Middle School students – they can be brutally honest if they like and trust you. And you can see how people can have wildly different impressions of you even though they may be interacting with you in the same environment.. So they are probably working with a different cognitive map. But we act differently depending on our environment as well. That’s probably pretty much accepted wisdom these days, but actually “getting” it isn’t always the easiest thing to do.

Case in point. Here I am in Bali now with a friend from Sumbawa who knows me only based on what he sees of me in Sumbawa. He came with us to Bali to check out a girl that he might be interested in, and he apparently (I say apparently because I am never sure what my wife is up to) agreed to come and do some remodeling work our house in exchange for a tv for the bungalow that he lives in that we own. (Lots of stuff here to digest for those who are only reading this blog because I mentioned sex and Indonesian women once in a title.)

So my friend says to me the other day that I’m different here than in Sumbawa. Hmm, I’m interested in this. Just what does he mean? He says that here there are masses (yes, there are masses) of people coming and going throughout the day – especially children as we live in a somewhat extended family situation here which means that we often have as many as 20 “children” (saying this as a 58 year old means that some of my children are actually adults in their early 20s) running around the house. Then there are the adults which sometimes number up to 15. So in this structure that we live in, we sometimes have from 30 – 40 people wandering around at various times throughout the day. (If we get a little more specific in an anthropological sense and ask who sleeps here – we have six adults and 11 children for the most part although sometimes it gets much more crowded.

In Sumbawa, I have a fairly large house which sleeps my wife, me and four kids (I’ll leave out the animals because they sleep outside.) During the day we may have a few more kids wandering through and maybe another six or so adults. Basically, it’s a small group if we compare it on a person per square meter basis.

In Sumbawa, I spend a lot of time on the computer doing school work so I have limited interaction with the people there. Here in Bali, I wander around, occasionally coming down my sanctuary on the third floor. The kids make little pilgrammages up to the third floor to ask for money so I can say, “What! Do I look like the Bank of America?”

So to get back to the main point. My friend sees me as a shy person who is somewhat reluctant to interact with people (somewhat similar to my own perception of who I am). But he was somewhat amused by all the interaction I have with people here and how I deal with all the comings and goings.

The big kids (10 -30) see me as a teddy bear with a big bark and a small bite. The little kids are afraid of me because I’m the American with the big voice and sarcastic deameanor who call them on their spoiled behavior (Indonesian kids tend to be terribly spoiled, but I think that American kids are spoiled too so this perception might be a function of age).

Umm, main point is that our identities are flexible to a degree (although diehard Freudian that I am), I think that the basics of our personality are formed as children and we only negotiate minor variations on the theme as we age.

Back in Bali

Back in Bali after six months. It’s nice to be back as much as I love Sumbawa. The house here always seems smaller although it not that much smaller in terms of square meters than the house in Sumbawa.

We’re making the beginnings of the move next year when I retire. The last few days we’ve started renovating the second floor bathroom. Living on the ocean is lovely, but you pay a price in damage to the house (and electronics) from the salt air. And, the house is been empty for most of the last four years and built as it is to be as open as possible, the house does take in water during the rainy season. While we’re here we can clean it up quickly, but as there’s no one here most of the year, the water sits and ruins all the tiles on the floors. So we’re replacing them. I have a friend from Sumbawa who has incredible skills with building things and fixing things and just generally getting things to work right. He’s been doing most of the work for me along with my brothers-in-law, nephews and me.

We’re also getting Mercedes enrolled in a high school here in Bali. A lot of the students who graduated from Junior High in Sekongkang are moving to other islands for high school as a high school close to us just opened but it doesn’t have a very good reputation, and we were advised by several teachers to put Mercedes in high school in Bali. I’m not really thrilled about sending her off, but we don’t have much of a choice as I still have another year to work.

We all came over on the ferries as usual. The trip took 17 hours this time as we had several long waits for ferries in Sumbawa and Lombok. I’m fairly impressed that I can still make what is a fairly grueling trip. Most folks here thought that I overnighted in Lombok, but I hate spending money on a hotel when we can just gut it out some and make the distance in one trip.

The ferry rides were really different this trip. I had a number of extended conversations with folks – high school kids wanting to use English, older folks just wanting to chat about my kids, where I was going and the usual. It passed the time. The ferry from Sumbawa to Lombok was packed because there were four buses on the ferry. There weren’t enough seats for everyone so a lot of people sat on the rather dirty floors. I stood the whole two hours. The ferry from Lombok to Bali was only half full, and I laid down on a mattress on the floor for a few hours which helped pass the time and give me a rest.

So here we are again. I’m looking forward to the next 14 days.

Finally, vacation!

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

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

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

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

Rural versus urban; mobile phones and Indonesian dating

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

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

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

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

More on the rural/urban divide later.

Technology, Teaching, and Retirement

Well, eventually, I was going to get around to this topic as it is one of the main areas of focus for me right now. As I’ve mentioned on my websites an probably here, I plan on retiring at the end of the next school year. I’ve been teaching on and off for the past thirty years – continuously for the past 20 – and I’m at the point where I’m ready to hang it up.

I love teaching. I always have. Back when I was in high school, I planned on being a high school history teacher. Later in college, I was going to teach university level anthropology (and picked up a Ph.D. along the way). Eventually – during a fieldwork stint in Northern California – I decided that I was going to become a regular classroom teacher. I was thinking about Fourth Grade; I’m not sure why Fourth Grade seemed to be the right level (it might have been Miss McNamara my Fourth Grade teacher), but it was the one that I fantasized about when I imagined having my own classroom.

So, let’s take it as established that I love teaching. Why quit? I’m finding that teaching just dominates my life now whereas it didn’t seem to do so before. I find that there is more to do in the same amount of time. When I taught math in Pakistan, I taught six periods a day, but to just three grade levels thus there were three lessons to prepare for each day. When I taught computers in Pakistan, I taught four levels. Right now I teach four levels of math, a level of social studies, and three levels of computers. That gives me 8 levels to prepare for. Class size is somewhat irrelevant here as I do more work with my small classes here than I did with my much larger classes in Pakistan. Add to this trying to keep a school full of aging computers functioning, I spend most of my waking hours working during the week, along with a significant amount of time on the weekends when I do grading that I should have done during the week.

So I have less personal time than before and more that I want to do than ever before. More to do? What’s the hurry? Well, the obvious answer is age. I’m at that age where friends, colleagues, and acquaintances have started dieing. Dealing with mortality is something that I may work on a little more, but death itself is not the worry. I’d just like to get a few more things in while watching the kids grow up. There are some things that I think that I could contribute to the educational community and teaching a few kids in a small school is getting to be at the bottom of that list of contributions.

Once upon a time, in the Pre-9/11 world, I had one of those dream jobs of Technology Coordinator where all that I had to do was teach a few classes and then teach teachers how to integrate technology in with their work. Wow! It was ideal, and kind of frightening. After all, I had wanted a job like that for several years, and suddenly I had it. But then it was what am I going to do? I took a few breaths and started slowly. It was going to be interesting, then 9/11 happened and the job was history. Having a tech coordinator who teaches full load just is not getting the best of the deal for the classroom teacher who wants to learn about technology, and wants to use it in their classroom.

So what can I do if I’m not teaching? I’ve been thinking in terms of being an online mentor , a virtual fairy godfather, for teachers who want to do things but don’t have the time and resources. That might mean extending what I do now (on a limited scale) with giving advice and hints to folks who email me based on reading one of my websites. It might mean developing some more easy to use lesson plans along with justifications for their use and cross-curricular references and connections. It might mean…Well who knows? I’ll be flexible, free, and willing. I’m looking forward to the possibilities.

More on retirement in the near future.

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.