Indonesia Research Program

I have only been in Indonesia for about a day and a half at this point, but I’ve noticed something that most urban dwellers in the developing world (or Chicago, Detroit or any other boom city of the 19th century) have noticed: the local government simply cannot keep up with the rapid rate of urbanization.

I’m currently living in a medium-sized city about an hour’s flight south of Jakarta called Jogja (also called Jokjakarta or Yogyakarta).  I have met one person who’s address, the post office assures her, simply doesn’t exist.  I’m not really sure how she gets her mail.  This problem is hardly relegated to Jogja with a little under 400,000 residents: another man in Jakarta, a city of over 10 million and the center of a relatively stable democratic and bureaucratic nation, has the address “the house at the end of the street on the left” written on all mail.

For a city that can hardly keep track of the structures being built, and unlike Jakarta, Jogja’s public transit system is quite clean and safe.  It is, however, not particularly well planned or executed.

One person whom I’ve met has remarked that to get to the nearest stretch of shops and restaurants, she needs to get on at the station across the street from her home, travel north to a terminal and transfer to go back south stopping across the street from the station she got on from.  All this is because the bus system only sells tickets at certain stations.  More than simply poor planning, a problem that many western transit systems suffer from as well, huge swaths of the city are left untouched by the bus system despite the fact that (according to most

One of Jogja’s clean and air conditioned buses.

Jogja residents) buses are sitting in warehouses unused waiting for the right bureaucrats to get paid off (a rumo

r I will speak to in more detail if I can learn more about it).

The lack of options and efficiency means few people take the bus system, especially since it stops running at 10 at night.  Most blocks in Jogja are filled with 1-3 story densely buildings. Though sidewalks on all but major thoroughfares are rare, the hectic, narrow streets are more than pleasant for walking.  Still, hardly anyone walks, instead electing for cars, taxis and (most common of all) motorbikes.  In a city of vast, contiguous and quite walkable density, this preference for driving produces the outcomes one would expect: ever worsening traffic.

The lack of government oversight does lead to some delightful idiosyncrasy, though.  In my opinion at least, these are the things that make cities worthwhile.  While residents of New York spend months arguing over whether a neighborhood zoned “C-2″ (which is light commercial and manufacturing in New York, if I recall correctly) can be

switched to residential without destroying school size, infrastructure, traffic flow and neighborhood character, in Indonesia people seem to just build what the market (or their tastes) demand.  I have been living in what in the states would be an illegal hotel but here proliferates

Maliboro, a major shopping street, filled with motorbikes and few pedestrians.

through the narrow streets (see New York’s attempts to quash the attempts of apartment owners’ attempts to rent out their homes to tourists).  These so-called “homestays” have 5-10 guest rooms usually opening into the home’s courtyard across from the family’s quarters.

Jogja isn’t a chaotic mess (except for the traffic).  Cities, as countless thinkers have pointed out (most notably Jane Jacobs), have a way of self-organizing.  Most shops are on main thoroughfares where people will see them.  Homes fill the quiet, narrow side-streets.  The only real regulations anyone has been able to produce are those that affect either height or (and this is recent) susceptibility to earthquakes.

Structures of governing (and recording changes in) neighborhoods are well articulated though.  When one person I met set up offices for her NGO in her home (something that would only be allowed with proper zoning in the states) she filled out paper work at the sub-neighborhood level.  The registration then traveled through the bureaucracy to the neighborhood, sub-district, district, province and then national government.

In many ways, a strong bureaucracy with a well-articulated chain of command bodes well for the success of Indonesia’s urban areas, though the infamous corruption here certainly raises concerns.  What makes Indonesia’s cities so exciting, though, is the propensity for bottom-up governance.  While zoning in the states is dictated by city-wide agencies, Indonesia’s land-use governance (or lack thereof) begins with the homeowners.  Certainly this sort of governance will prove ineffective in many ways as urbanization slows and governments focus less on accommodating the waves of urbanizing migrants and more on improving quality of life.  To address traffic problems, nothing short of system-wide analysis will suffice.  Moreover, in the US and Europe, small jurisdictions of neighborhoods have increasingly pushed for local interests through neighborhood level governance similar to Indonesia’s, notably the curbing of dense and tall construction to protect view corridors and neighborhood character, at the expense of city-wide well-being.

It may be that ever boring cities are a sign of wealth and prosperity.  In many ways, Singapore is a better city than Jakarta or Jogja.  But the visceral humanity that emanates from the chaos of Jogja and other southeast Asian cities outside of Korea, Japan and Singapore will increasingly be lost as Indonesia, Malaysia, Bangladesh and other nations fight to join the economic successes of their neighbors.  In most ways, this is good.  I just wish that the growing class of Indonesia’s Tata Kota (urban planners) would recognize the mistakes of the west in turning cities into car-oriented Disney Worlds ever tied to the whims of scleratic regulations and caintophobic landowners.

The thin wall separating our rooms in the wisma don’t have echoes of Elizabeth and Tiwi’s voices or computers blaring in the background. Amanda’s bed is empty beside me – it drives home the fact that I am the last person to leave Indonesia on our last day. As I walked our familiar haunts and paths around Sanata Dharma University one last time, I reflected on some of the summer’s achievements, highs, and lows.

We’d finished what we came for: our research projects were presented two days earlier to our NGOs and host institution of PUSDEP. For Jessica and I, researching on public transportation in connection with air pollution in Yogyakarta was fun and frustrating at times. Like interns before me, I’ll give a background to what we did:

In Yogyakarta’s case, seventy percent of the air pollution is produced by the transportation sector of energy users – private cars, taxis, buses trucks, motorbikes (refer to Figure 2) from a report of the Badan Lingkungan Hidup (BLH), the government’s environmental department. This means that transportation is a particularly important contributor to emissions. For example, in the city of Yogyakarta, “[a]ccording to ICLEI [Local Governments for Sustainability] Report 2004, the CO2 emission contributed by transportation sector per capita/year to the city reaches 0,6 ton. It signifies that each people annually contributes 0.6 ton of CO2 from transportation sector. This figure is equal to Surabaya, which is 10 times larger than Yogyakarta. Other air parameters, such as PM10 and Pb, also show dangerous impacts on people’s health. Referring to research undertaken by PUSTRAL (2004) [Center for Transportation and Logistics Studies in the Universitas Gadjah Mada], people’s health cost due to poor environment[al] condition of the city is Rp 466.71 billion or equal to about 9% of PDRB (Gross Regional Domestic Income).” [Can a public bus system be the solution for this?]

Trans Jogja (the public bus system) is managed by PT Jogja Tugu Trans as a manifestation of consortium of four cooperative of managing city and rural public transport in Yogyakarta such as Cooperative of Youth Sleman, Kopata, Aspada, and Puskopkar with Perum DAMRI. For Trans Jogja, a total of 54 buses comprise the system. Routes 1 to 3 utilize an agreed 49 buses of the current fleet. An additional 20 buses have recently been acquired by DISHUB as part of an additional grant from the Ministry of Transport. All buses are high-floor, and have a carrying capacity of 41 passengers (including 22 seated). Each ride costs 3000 IDR, which is approximately $.30; discounts with a regular card are 2.700 IDR ($.27) and 2000 IDR ($.20). There are various options for recharging the cards at specific ticket locations (Point of Sales offices). Motorbikes, on the other hand, cost between 10 – 20 million IDR on average, costs of gas is about 10 thousand IDR, without including maintenance costs.

We decided to travel the Trans Jogja bus system ourselves to understand its benefits and issues. Coming inside the bus is difficult – the bus stops in front of the elevated shelter, where the passengers have to step off of the bus. This makes it difficult for older and/or disabled passengers, in addition to making it tricky to navigate. The bus itself is comfortable and nice inside, though we could see how in peak hours, there could be a struggle to find a good spot to even stand. The bus door seems like it could open at any moment since there’s just a hook on the top that the conductor uses to secure the door. However, the biggest issue is that even traveling in the afternoons, without much traffic, and in one of the less busy routes, it still took us about an hour to arrive at our destination versus the possible 15-20 minute motorbike ride. We decided to forego our original survey plan since we discovered this is reflected on more formal research.

On SUTIP’s survey, public perception about Trans Jogja is diverse from the point of views. There is poor public perception for the issues of accessibility (convenience of stops) and directness route. Conversely, there is a superior public perception about the issues of speed and comfort (relative to city bus), though it still does not compare to other modes of transportation. In terms of the shelters, there is a widespread perception that they are too small to cope with demand during busy periods. Despite the cheaper alternative of the bus system, lost time and inefficiency are costly to most of the motorbike and car users, which makes it an unlikely mode choice for most people. Therefore, this is not highly effective at its current state.

My partner and I gave a series of recommendations for WALHI to follow based on our paper research – though it was mainly the need for further research. One of the more challenging aspects of the second part of our internship was how to pick a topic and research question that would be useful for our NGO and rewarding for us that is doable with limited time and resources. Everybody was able to pull this off well. Amanda and Tiwi gave their NGO recommendations on possible programs for their kids. Alex and Laksmi conducted a survey to find out the best way (social media) to reach their client base. Colin and Raisa presented about the situation of religious minorities in two high schools in Jogja. Jacob and Brito talked about the mining situation and water allocation of two villages on the slopes of the active volcano Merapi. Lastly, Elizabeth showed a short film of the Tionghoa in Indonesia, and how they culture has been preserved in current times.

The work done behind the scenes would not have been possible without the bonds we formed with out research partners. Throughout the summer, we were faced with inconveniences and pleasant surprises in relation to our researches and in our lives in Indonesia. We helped each other and shared these together – our work merged and emerged into better collaborations. I also speak especially of my partner Jessica and I – we had our ups and downs, but at the end, we understood each other better. How working in groups in the BiCo turns out really depends on the class, but it’s still a very different experience from this internship in Indonesia. I’m very grateful to have had this chance. With our partners, our BiCo family I was also very supportive – we’ve all dealt with issues of race, gender, and other cultural and social assumptions together. Yesterday, when we had our last dinner at Milas together, there were tears. I don’t know whether I’m ready to leave Indonesia behind forever, but the community we’d had will stay with me. I can’t thank our partners enough, the coordinators of our program, our NGOs, our language and institute teachers, our interviewees, my homestay family, even the random people in the street who stopped to help us!

Hi everyone! I am one of the mysterious interns who doesn’t write for this blog, as I’ve been writing my own personal blog, which can be found here: indodenmark.tumblr.com. My fellow interns were kind enough to let me share my thoughts with all of you. You’ve probably seen my name throughout this blog a couple of times but I’d thought I start off by introducing myself. My name is Amanda Beardall. I am originally from Portland, Oregon (my heart breaks a little every time I have to describe my hometown as “it’s above California” since Portland isn’t exactly well-known here in Indonesia) and a rising junior at Bryn Mawr College, majoring in psychology with a double minor in environmental studies and child and family studies.

This summer, I am working with Perkampungan Sosial Pingit or PSP for short, an NGO that provides informal schooling and community development for youth in areas of urban poverty in Jogjakarta. The school portion of our program isn’t actually running while we are here due to it being the Ramadan season so instead we are doing research for them on how children’s behavior is impacted by their environment. We are talking to families, students, volunteers, teachers, and friends as well as observing the children in their family, school, and PSP settings to see how their behavior changes in each environment. We are specifically looking at the issue of discipline and how it changes behavior so that we can give recommendations to the Pingit volunteers on how to improve the way they discipline and reward the kids.

Last week, we interviewed nine families to see what they thought of their children’s behavior and what they do to change it. We discovered something much deeper than just the answers to our interview questions however. One of the families we spoke with makes four-piece puzzles out of foam to sell. As Tiwi interviewed the parents in Indonesian, they invited me to try putting the pieces together to make a “T.” Although I just had seen their first grade son do this exact task, it still took me a good couple of minutes to complete it as they chuckled at my struggles. At the end of our interview, the family gave me one of the puzzles complete with a key of all the different shapes I could make with my pieces. I was taken aback by this ultimate act of kindness. This family lives in a one-room house with only the absolute basic necessities yet they gave me this puzzle that they could have sold instead. I can’t express my gratitude for the hospitality the families we talked to showed us: always offering us snacks and drinks when we came. Everything we received may have seemed insignificant by American standards yet these powerful moments of kindness are the experiences I will carry with me throughout the rest of my life.

Since our schedule is pretty flexible, my partner Tiwi and I took the day off to see JOG12: a display of contemporary art pieces of Western and Eastern artists examining perceptions of the East, organized by Jacob’s original NGO: IVAA. I was ecstatic to have the chance to see how Indonesian artists are interpreting current events through various mediums. Most of the art we have seen so far has been traditional art so it was refreshing to see pieces in a more modern gallery setting. The pieces ranged from video installation pieces to tattoos on pig skins to more traditional paintings. One of my favorite pieces was a large sculpture in front of the museum featuring an elephant on top of a large pile of coconuts, symbolizing the vast amount of resources Indonesia possesses yet the people are unable to access them due to exploitation by their government. It made me uneasy to see that one of the sponsors of the event was a cigarette company and added a twisted irony to the entire gallery.

The tobacco companies here have incredible amounts of power. Everyone here smokes and there are no regulations as to where you can and can’t smoke. It’s very common to see people smoking indoors and even when we were climbing the slopes of Mt. Lawu, we watched people puff their way up while carrying heavy loads on their back. Most people here smoke clove cigarettes, which are illegal in the U.S. Usually the smell of cigarettes bothers me but the cloves makes them almost pleasing to smell. Indonesia is the second largest exporter of tobacco in the world so Indonesians are encouraged at a young age to start smoking as a sort of nationalist way of supporting their country’s economy.  Yesterday we saw three young boys, looking to be about ten, gleefully smoking cigarettes on the side of the road. Cigarettes are also insanely cheap here, each pack only costing about a dollar. If you need money for school, you don’t apply from the government, instead you must send in an application to the cigarette company foundation. It’s intensely disturbing to see how these corporations have so much influence over people here and people seem so unaware of the health risks that go along with smoking.

On Saturday, we visited the biggest tourist attraction in Jogja: the kraton or sultan’s palace. We had been told time and time again that we must go here before we leave or else we wouldn’t have really seen Jogja. We had agreed to meet at 11AM but this soon turned into 12PM as some of us struggled to find taxis from our host families or had to maneuver our ways through the crowds of Malioboro to walk there.  After all of us finally arrived, we entered the kraton to great disappointment. I think we were all a little deceived by the name: palace in this case just refers to a really nice, big house museum. All of the descriptions were written in Indonesian, rightfully so, but it seemed as though they had just shoved every thing somehow related to the sultan into a singular place making the whole experience feel pretty meaningless without any sort of background information. We decided to grab lunch, which began our painstaking journey of walking in the unbearable heat and direct sunlight. After what seemed like forever, we figured out there was a café on the top of the batik store that we were planning to go to anyways. After going “ham on some batik” (as Jacob would put it), we made our way back to the art museum for our fellow interns who had yet to see it. Tiwi and I then walked back along Malioboro to return to our home. This whole experience gave me a whole newfound of respect for Muslims practicing Ramadan. I had eaten both breakfast and lunch but had worn long layers and had left my water bottle at home to avoid offending anyone. As we walked back to our house with the time for fast breaking near, I couldn’t help but stare at every stand beginning to prepare food and drinks for the azan to sound, signally the end of fasting. The intense thirst overwhelming my every thought led me to fantasize about chugging the gigantic jars of unidentified traditional Javanese drinks sitting atop the numerous food carts lining the street. I didn’t even fast and I couldn’t imagine going through that every single day for over a month.

I’m pretty lucky in that my host family is Catholic so we can eat at home during the day (though I always feel bad for eating in front of the Muslim housekeepers who work in the house), but stepping outside means no drinking or eating to avoid offending people. I truly admire the determination and self-control that Muslims have during Ramadan. It’s pretty incredible how Indonesia works around Ramadan though. Last Friday, we went to a café for drinks after going to our favorite restaurant Milas. We had only been there for about an hour when the waitress apologetically shooed us out since it was 11 o’clock. While trying to catch taxis home, we watched as store after store closed their doors for the police to avoid attacks by the FPI since Muslims need to wake up at 3 in the morning for Ramadan to eat before sunrise so they must sleep early. It was eerie to watch the normally bustling streets become completely empty in a matter of minutes. For us non-Muslims, it unfortunately means Jogja is lacking in any sort of nightlife, not that it was exactly bustling before. Ramadan has certainly encouraged us to become creative when planning activities so that we are able to fulfill our needs for food and water while respecting our Muslim friends.

After Tiwi and I spent most of Friday frantically trying to make plans for this weekend (planning things becomes extremely difficult when you have no internet access and must use texting instead), everything finally came together on Sunday. Our program coordinators Nissa and Triana helped us to rent a car which picked us all up bright and early to go cave tubing and to the beach. When we reached the tubing place, we slipped into lifejackets and water shoes to walk a short distance to plop into the water on our intertubes. We were led through a dark cave by a guide who pointed out different cave structures such as the phallic shaped “manly rock” said to bring strength to any man who touches it. Although it was a short trip, we had the opportunity to climb a few different rock structures to jump into water. After getting our fill of bats and stalagmites, we loaded back into the car to travel the windy roads to Indrayanti Beach. We were greeted by crystal blue water lapping at the shores of a white sand beach dotted with rainbow umbrellas. The rest of the day was spent exploring cliff sides to discover a spectacular view of the beach from above, graciously taking pictures with random beach-goers eager to forever document the time they saw a group of bules at the beach, and eating an overpriced but nevertheless delicious lunch of seafood.

This past week we have been visiting the formal schools to compare the behavior of our students from PSP to how they act while with their families. We have visited several elementary and junior high schools to interview our students’ teachers and to observe them in class. It’s been pretty incredible to see the differences in regulations as to how we got in the school. In the U.S, you are required to get clearances, a criminal background, and fingerprinted before you can even step foot into a school yet here we just showed up with our supervisor and a letter and we were allowed to interview our students’ teachers and observe them in their classrooms. Talking with the teachers provided a lot of insight. Many of our students are loud and aggressive at PSP yet at formal school they are reserved and rarely speak. It shows how the presence of an authority figure and conformity can influence behavior. Talking to students themselves was also really interesting because children who their parents describe as “naughty”, don’t consider themselves bad and feel like their parents don’t give them enough attention.

Observation in the classroom proved to be challenging. I feel like I wasn’t able to observe anything substantial while visiting the classrooms because my very presence is a complete distraction since most of the children have never seen a bule, especially not a place like their schools. Kids from other classes will run over to peek through the windows to call out the only English most of them know: “Hello mister, what is your name?” (because the pronoun Dia in Indonesian is gender neutral, people tend to use she and he interchangeably which can make conversations very confusing.) All of the students would steal glances. I think this exemplifies the greatest challenge of being a foreigner while doing social science research in another country: who you are as a researcher shapes how people respond to you and therefore the data you collect. If I were here for longer, I could build more rapport with my informants so that the felt more comfortable talking about such sensitive topics of how they raise and discipline their children but I am limited by working with a time frame of only a few weeks. The one classroom where the teacher actually led class was lots of fun to watch though. The first grade students were learning how to count to ten, which I was really excited about since numbers are one of the few things I have down in Indonesian. Whenever the students got distracted and started playing around, the teacher would come by and redirect them without stopping the whole class, which I thought was really effective. The students even included Tiwi and me when they had students stand in front of the class to help them learn to count.

We have also been holding three informal classes at PSP at night on Mondays and Thursdays. I spent all of last semester studying culture and child rearing practices so it has made me notice a lot about the way the youth we work with behave and their role within their families. I saw many similarities from when I was when in Ghana. I’ve seen many older kids walking around with their younger siblings slung around their backs. In many serious meetings that we have had, the children of the people we have talked with have been playing and running around without the parents batting an eye. At the informal classes we have held, the kids run around setting fireworks off while hitting and pushing each other but as Alex pointed out, this is how kids would act at recess in any country. It’s really valuable to let children play and just be kids. The students who tended to behave most similarly in all of their environments were the ones whose parents recognized that kids are kids and their “naughty” behavior is a result of their age. Once we were able to rally the kids together for an activity, they were great so I think with the right amount of structure you can really cut down on the amount of chaos.

The collaborative aspect of our partnership with our Indonesian counterparts has proved to be challenging these past few weeks. Nearly every interview we have conducted so far has been in Indonesian so I’ve been mainly zoning out as my Indonesian is limited to basic conversational skills. People are very confused by us. When we walk down the street together or catch a taxi, we don’t fit into people’s schema of bule and native Indonesian who would normally not be friends. My Indonesian skills have actually gone down since everyone just asks questions to Tiwi instead of attempting to talk with me since people assume she is my guide. No one seems to believe that an American and an Indonesian could have an equal collaboration. Even our supervisor assumed that Tiwi was just there to conduct the research in Indonesian while I did all of the “real work”, bringing to mind images of the corruption of early anthropologists. Tiwi and I do everything together. We both bring different skills and experiences into our research with equal value.

My host dad Mas Ignas took my partner Tiwi and me to the zoo on Friday after our conversation about how much we loved animals. I volunteered at the Oregon Zoo for three years so whenever I go to a new city, I like to go to their zoo to see the different designs and compare it to my zoo. Mas Ignas is a professional wildlife photographer, even taking a photo of a tiger that the Jogja zoo now uses in all of their promotional ads, so he knew many of the commands the trainers use with the animals so that I was able to take some really cool shots. We saw many native Indonesian species: everything from komodo dragons to albino peacocks. It was upsetting to see many of the animals in such small cages, especially the birds. Most zoos in the U.S have several inches of thick glass between you and the animal but the most protection we had was a moat and a chain link fence separating us from many of the animals. This allowed for some close encounters with many of the animals, like when I got to pet an elephant’s trunk and when we saw one of the monkey who had escaped his cage. The zoo had no evidence of supporting any kind conservation and education programs. The focus on making money was highlighted by the numerous types of boats you could pay to ride in a lake that the entire zoo is built around. It’s interesting how something as seemingly trivial as a zoo can reveal so much about geographic and cultural differences: the way the keepers would clean the animals’ exhibits while a crocodile may be sitting only a few feet next to them, the way that construction was happening everywhere around the zoo without any sort of notice so visitors are expected to just navigate around them, and of course the numerous warungs everywhere that surprisingly weren’t overpriced like food at zoos usually is.

On Saturday, Mas Ignas graciously took Tiwi, Laksmi, Alia, Colin, Alex, Elizabeth, and me to the foot of Merapi Mountain to visit a Javanese cultural museum. Before heading to the museum we stopped to take a brief walk up part of the mountain to take some photos and see the remains of the damage done by the eruption in 2010. The Javanese museum was beautiful architecturally with underground caves and buildings dispersed throughout a garden but similar to the kraton, it was somewhat of a disappointment to us bi-co students. A large part of it is our ignorance of Javanese history. We learned some modern Indonesian history but anything before Indonesia’s independence is a complete mystery so we didn’t understand the significance of most of what we saw in the museum. After the museum and a trip to our favorite souvenir shop Mirota Batik, we visited Mas Ignas’s futsal restaurant where we chowed down on nasi goreng and Colin showed off his soccer skills. On Sunday, Elizabeth and I showed Tiwi and fellow PSP intern Glorya the American cultural skill of baking cookies. The oven in our house didn’t actually work so we got creative and used the microwave and a tiny pan to fry the cookies. It made me miss actual cookie dough since we had to improvise from two different recipes and the ingredients tasted differently but the kids certainly appreciated having something sweet to eat.

This past Friday was the marker of two weeks left for us. As I write this, it becomes so easy to lose all sense of place and time as a computer screen creates a space that transcends international borders but then the call to prayer goes off, the motorbikes zoom by, and the becak drivers ding their bells, and suddenly I am back in Indonesia. While I am eagerly looking forward to hunks of cheddar cheese, Indian food, gyros, fresh vegetables, burritos, macaroni and cheese, mashed potatoes, bacon cheeseburgers, and sandwiches (and I guess my friends and family too…), I am desperately clinging on to each moment here as if to make two weeks last a lifetime. As painful as it is, I’ve had to start thinking about getting thank you gifts, writing final letters, and how to say good-bye. I’ve come to love this country, this city, this place, and while it may never truly be home for me, it will always hold a special place in my heart.

Hearing the azan everyday is perhaps the biggest symbol of Islam for me here in Indonesia. Sure, Islam permeates all aspects of life but despite seeing men and women dressed in hijab and wearing Muslim head garb, I believe I hadn’t fully experienced their practices. The coming of Ramadan was one of my highly anticipated events especially since my host family is Muslim.

According to our host brother, there are sometimes various start dates for Ramadan in Indonesia: the one followed by the Muhammadiyah, which is based on the lunar cycle and patterned after practices from the Middle East; and the other is the one followed by NU and the government and is mathematically-based. My family started fasting Friday of last week, which is in accordance with the Muhammadiyah practices, while others started the next day. The night before, we went to eat Javanese noodle (I got something called magelangan, a tasty mélange of noodles, rice, chicken, and herbs). Due to absurdly large portions, my host mom and I weren’t able to finish our meals. While waiting for our di bungkus packages, the azan sounded and across the street from us, white-robed figures assembled to start the nightly rituals. The whole process grounded me and readied me for the next day, when Alex and I were woken up at 3 am to eat this feast of sweet, spicy dishes with rice. We slept again after the meal, and woke up about 3 to 4 hours later to start our day.

I did a semi-fast – I had to drink some water since Jessica, my partner, and I rode a motorbike around and interviewed people. When Jessica went to buy some water, it was a strange experience walking into and seeing food in a grocery store, thinking that I wanted to buy them because I was hungry, only to remember that I wasn’t supposed to be eating. I definitely felt weak during the day, and I can only imagine how it’s like for people who had to do this now on a daily basis. On the way home, Jessica and I passed by so many makeshift stalls, seemingly to rise from the ground only during Ramadan that sells food specifically to break the fast. I had a jolly time perusing and buying some of the various types of vegetables, fish, chicken, tofu, tempe, porridge, desserts, and drinks. That night, when we had our buka puasa, the food tasted much more delicious and powerful – as if the entire day of abstention had changed my taste buds and even perception of the food. Hanging out with the family after fasting and eating all the great food brings you so much closer together, too.

The experience made me want to fast again at some point during in the next few weeks.

This past weekend marked the start of Ramadan, and life in Jogja, which I thought I had been getting a hang of, has been upended.  The chaotic roads are calm since many of Jogja’s residents have left for the holiday. The noisy nights are even louder with the unceasing azan and drums churning from the mosques.  The city in which I had experienced the most intense and unapologetic displays of religious devotion has shown a secular and spiritually-shy American kid how much more room there is to flaunt your faith than what I had previously imagined.

Like Jacob, my (and Alia’s) host family is Muslim and observing the fasting month, puasa.  In their case that means they wake at 3:00 a.m. every day for thirty days, and stuff themselves full of food and liquids before going back to sleep at the command of the mosque’s loudspeaker by 4:30 a.m.  Once they wake up to begin their days, they must fast – no food, no water, not even any swallowed spit – until sundown, around 5:30 p.m.  I have, to a degree, been fasting alongside the family for some of these days.  On the first morning of puasa Alia and I woke with them and ate straight for an hour before heading back to bed and unsuccessfully attempting to find a position to sleep that didn’t push on our overfull stomachs.  Once I was awake and at work, despite the long sweaty bike ride to the office, the fast was not nearly as difficult as I imagined.  Though of course sitting in a shaded office for six hours doesn’t exactly count as strenuous or thirst-inducing activity.  I fasted again yesterday, not by choice, but because I overslept and had to run out the door without breakfast or water to meet up with my waiting partner Laksmi, who was taking me to work.  At work everyone else was fasting, so there was no food or drink and definitely no lunch break, so I ended up breaking my fast with everyone else here at the joglo around 5:30.

Of course for most the act of fasting is much more than a challenge of self-control or a cute way to get in touch with a foreign culture.  The tradition of fasting in Islam, as in Judaism and Christianity, stretches back for centuries and is far more of a spiritual task than a corporeal one.  The idea, I’m told, is to limit the control one’s bodily desires have over the mind, so that one can more closely commune with God.  It’s a beautiful thing, millions of people abstaining from sustenance during the sticky heat of the day.  America is a religious country, but I wonder whether, if Protestant Christianity had a similar observance, we’d be able to muster the kind of self-denial I’m witnessing here.  No one complains, no one even mentions their fast; they work through it and acknowledge their abstinence only through the act of abjuration.  My respect for Ramadan is further compounded by the delcious feast I partake in, whether I fasted or not, at sundown every night.  Ahhh food!

Laksmi and I are also well into our second week of research and work with the Youth Center of PKBI-IPPA, the local branch of Planned Parenthood.  PKBI’s services are usually quite cheap, by both American and Indonesian standards.  Pap smears are $5, HIV is only testing $0.70, and the kondoms are free and plentiful, poking out of every drawer and box.  It seems like every time I open a manila folder looking for patient data, out pop a few condoms, as if the act of filing puts one at risk for STIs.  Despite the affordability of the services – not to mention the fact that they are free if patients demonstrate an inability to pay – there are far fewer patients and customers coming to PKBI than they have the capacity to treat.  Laksmi and I are trying to figure out why this is, so for our research we are creating an outreach campaign aimed at attracting youth, ages 12 to 24, to the clinic.  We have been throwing up posters all over town, handing out stickers to teens at art shows (making the universal assumption that the spiked-hair, artsy-fartsy crowd is more likely to be sexually active), and even went on the radio last night to plug our cause.

We got to Radio Anak Jogja (Jogja Youth Radio) – housed, inexplicably, in the basement of an aquarium – right before the start of “Yulia’s Hour,” a talk and music show on weeknights from 7 – 8pm.  The first half hour of the show was devoted to the show’s host, Yulia, chatting away with two guests in the fasted Indonesian I’ve ever heard, interspersed with top 40 hits from across the archipelago.  I knew that the second half of the show was ours, and Laksmi had accordingly prepared remarks for our sales pitch to Jogja’s youth.  My role was to be the token foreign guy, maybe say a few heavily accented Indonesian words, and let Laksmi do the heavy lifting.  Even so, I was very nervous, and as we were waved into the booth I tried to distract myself from the elephant-sized butterflies in my stomach by playing the Clash’s “Capital Radio,” and R.E.M’s twin broadcast-themed classics, “Radio-Free Europe” and “Radio Song,” over and over in my head.

Once we were seated, the red light switched on, and I had mustered the best sounding “selamat malam” I had, Laksmi stole the show, breezing through her points and building a strong rapport with Yulia.  The only hiccup came when Yulia furiously motioned for me to stop nervously humming into the live microphone.  During song and commercial breaks we’d joke around in Indonesian (well, Laksmi and Yulia would) and I grew very comfortable with chilling in the booth as these two women put on a great show.  With ten minutes or so left and my mind wandering to thoughts of my mom’s apple pie, Yulia turned to me and sprang a question about the importance of our work with PKBI in perfect English that she had hitherto declined to inform me she spoke.  After what was surely the longest on-air “uhhhhh” in Jogja radio history, I (somewhat) recovered from the surprise of being so suddenly addressed and rambled on about reproductive rights as a human right with Laksmi duly translating for me.  We ended the show by answering a few questions from listeners and then, just as I was deciding that I really had the hang of this radio thing, it was all over and we were heading home.  It might not have been the most fun thing I’ve done here – that honor still goes to climbing Mount Lawu – but I feel truly lucky to have gotten the opportunity to have gone live on-air and promote cause about which I feel so strongly.  Hopefully we got some new patients for the clinic!

I meant to post about my project at Satunama on Wednesday evening, but thanks to James Dolan, I’ve been busy mourning the loss of Jeremy Lin to the Houston Rockets. Enough said on the matter. More importantly the Yankees are 9.5 games ahead of the Red Sox (#sorryimnotsorry Colin).

But my life in Indonesia revolves far less around sports than my life in America does. Britto and I have been busy at work at Satunama. We spent Tuesday reading about the history of Mount Merapi and researching the impact of sand mining on the livelihood of communities living on the slope of Merapi. The sand mining industry in Indonesia rakes in about 3 billion Rupiah a year, which is approximately $300,000. $300,000 is a lot of money in America; enough to comfortably pay for a Haverford education. But in Indonesia, it is a large fortune. In order to mine the sands of Merapi corporations must have a permit from local and regional authorities. In the past, the Indonesian government has sent the military to shut down illegal mining operations. In 2009, over 3,000 miners lost their jobs when the government shut down an illegal mining site in order to protect the environment.

On Wednesday, Britto and I went with Pimbo and Metta (another member of Satunama) to the site of a mining operation located on the banks of the Pabelan River at the base of Mount Merapi. The villages of Sengi and Kapuhan are located next to the river: Kapuhan to the North and Sengi to the South. They draw their water resources from the same reservoir, which happens to be located in the middle of the mining operation. The mining site donates sand to the two villages (and many others) to help them rebuild their homes, which were damaged by the 2010 Merapi eruptions. Satunama has helped implement irrigation programs in Sengi and Kapuhan, and is concerned about the impact of the mining operation on the villages’ water reservoirs. The sand mining operation is helping the villages rebuild their homes for free, but Satunama is worried that the miner’s will destroy the water reservoir if they continue to dig. In the upcoming months and years, the villages are going to have to make a complicated choice: rebuild their homes with free, high quality materials, or protect their water resources. Next week Britto and I will spend a few days in Sengi interviewing members of Sengi and Kapuhan about this situation, and how their lives have been effected by the Merapi eruption in 2010.

My host family official begins fasting for Ramadan tomorrow. I think I am going to try and wake up at 3am to eat breakfast with them. Or maybe I just won’t go to bed. Even though I have a propensity for staying up late when I am at Haverford, I haven’t really had to many late nights in Indonesia. The semester is coming up though, so perhaps I should start getting back in the late night groove. Anyways, tomorrow (Saturday) I have the day off. I plan to sleep late (9:30am is late here!), and then explore Jogja. Jalan Malioboro is 4km away and I hope to spend some quality time with the Batik vendors. In the afternoon Britto and I plan to visit Satunama’s youth empowerment program in the villages near the landfill. I am not really sure what to expect, but I promise to take and upload lots of pictures of the visit!

That’s all for now. It’s dinnertime in Indonesia and I have a delicious meal of tempe, rice and soto waiting for me.

My first day at Satunama was short, but successful! Britto and I met with Budi, the chairman of Satunama, Stella, one of Budi’s assistants, and Pimbo, the project manager of Merapi water pollution conflict that I will be working on over the next few weeks. Tomorrow, Britto and I will spend our day reading through Satunama’s files on the Merapi conflict and on Wednesday we plan to visit the site of the conflict at the base of Merapi. We will hopefully have some type of research framework set up by Thursday. Next week we plan to spend some more time at the base of the mountain conducting interviews with members of the villages involved in the conflict. From my conversations with Budi, Stella and Pimbo, I have realized that the conflict is much more intricate than I previously thought, so hopefully I will be able to explain it in greater depth later in the week.

Another project that Britto and I might have the opportunity to work on for a few days is a youth empowerment program in the villages that surround the landfills of Jogjakarta. Over the next ten years, the landfills are going to grow and potentially spill over into the villages. Satunama is training youth in the villages from ages eight to fifteen to feel comfortable speaking out in society. Whether it is through theater performance and writing, or music and painting, Satunama hopes that these children will use different expressive mediums to advocate for proper pollution control and waste management in Jogja. I think Satunama and many other NGOs are also working through traditional mediums of government to fight the spread of pollution, but I think that this is a really innovative way to prepare young Indonesian citizens to effectively participate in society.

After the orientation, I returned to my new home. Despite my best efforts to be productive, I fell asleep. There really is nothing better than napping from 2pm to 4pm. It is one of my favorite activities, especially during the school year. I woke up refreshed, and went for a jog around the neighborhood. When I returned, I was surprised to find a fourth member at the dinner table along with Agus, Bayu and Ratri. It was Tami, my host mother who has just returned from a trip to Bali. Tami works for an environmental advocacy NGO in Jogjakarta, and has spent the past few weeks working in Jakarta and Bali. Tami is fun to talk with, both in Bahasa Indonesia and in English, and it already feels like she has adopted me as one of her own children. She brought home some delicious wheat bread from one of the finest bakers in Bali as well as some mint flavored, multi colored marshmallows. At some point I am going to have to teach Bayu and Ratri how to make S’mores, because THEY HAVE NEVER HEARD OF S’MORES- imagine that, growing up without ever eating a S’more!

Compared to the neighborhood surrounding Sanata Dharma, which is a Catholic University, Agus, Ratri, Bayu, and Tami live in a much more Muslim neighborhood. The call to prayer is louder here, and seems to last much longer. Ramadan is coming and I am excited to experience it. This is the first time in my life that Ramadan will significantly impact my lifestyle. I do not think I am going to fast the entire time, but I might try it for a couple of days with my family. One of my friends posted a link to this article on Facebook today and I think that it provides a really interesting perspective on travelling to a foreign country. Basically the article says that we as individuals often get restless and anxious with life so we decide to travel to different places. Travel, though, is not just about being a tourist and seeing the sights. We know very little about other cultures because we have had very different life experiences compared with people of other cultures. Perhaps we do not know that much about other people in our own culture, and maybe we do not even know that much about ourselves. Travel is an opportunity to experience and explore new perspectives and different lifestyles, and learn something new about ourselves while we are at it. So when Ramadan begins next week, I am definitely going to take advantage of every opportunity I have to experience it. I do not really know what to expect, or what I am going to learn from my upcoming experience with Ramadan, but that is the beauty of traveling and trying something new.

…but let’s talk about something less gross. It seems like I operate on a two-week schedule with these blog posts, so I’ll try to limit this post to two fun things we’ve done in the past two weeks.  I’ll save you all from my research stuff because I fell asleep reading about Jacob’s research below and since his project was more interesting than mine, I doubt I’d be able to write about my own for more than twelve seconds.  Instead here are two occasions when I think we all had a great time together.  They help paint a picture of how we’ve spent our hours outside of research, time that will be in short supply in these final, research-dominated, weeks ahead.

Through the maze of its motorbike-packed streets and diverse throngs of people, Jogja seems a larger city than it is.  A quick Google search reveals that Jogja is only the 28^th most populous city proper in Indonesia.  Despite its small size – in population roughly equal to Colorado Springs – it is by common assent the most culturally influential city in Java, the island in which the majority of Indonesians live.  Djoko Pekik is Jogja’s most successful cultural export, a 75 year-old painter best known as Indonesia’s first “billion rupiah” painter, routinely selling his paintings at around the equivalent of US $100,000.

Two Tuesdays ago we got the chance to visit Pekik in his home on the southwest edge of Jogja.  In Jogja they have a saying – more snappy-sounding in Bahasa – that translates roughly to this: “if you want clever people, head to the north, if you want rich people, head to the south.”  The least I can say is that Pekik’s home was correctly situated on the southern edge of town.  As we left the university-saturated north and headed to Pekik’s house, the buildings grew larger and spread farther apart from each other.  We found ourselves heading downhill on a long dirt road hedged on either side by 80-foot high bamboo.  At last, we came to his house – really a series of buildings grouped together on 4 hectares of land – settled next to a river, the cleanest (though still nicely filled with plastic flotsam) in the city.

Djoko greeted us himself as we pulled into the driveway.  He is a frail 75, age compounded by his chain-smoking and the seven years of abuse he faced at the hands of the Suharto regime in the aftermath of the 1965 massacres.  Pekik’s fame is due not only to his skill and style – to my uneducated artistic eye, something approximating social realism – but also to his biography.  He grew up in a poor village in central Java dominated by foreign teak loggers and escaped to Jogja as soon as he was able to study art.  By this time it was the early 1960s, and socialist student movements were gaining force all over the world, from France to Latin America.  He quickly fell in with the cultural wing of the local communist party, participating in their public art works and visual publicity projects and forming relationships with some of the most influential socialist leaders in Indonesia.  Then came 1965, when Suharto ousted Sukarno and paved his way to the capital with the bodies of millions of Indonesians, many of them socialist sympathizers.  Pekik was arrested and sent to prison for the better part of a decade.  He was released, after considerable maltreatment – torture, isolation, and starvation – under the condition that he silence his voice and shelve his brush if he wished to remain free.  Pekik became a tailor and didn’t take up painting again until the mid 1980s, when the threat hanging over him had somewhat subsided.

It was not until 1998 however, with the reformasi and the ouster of Suharto, that Pekik’s fame truly started to spread.  To honor the upheaval he created a series of giant two-meter high panels depicting the various stages of a boar hunt, from the initial sighting of the beast till to its final slaughter.  The boar – cruel, violent, and absolutely haraam in Muslim Indonesia – is intended to symbolize Suharto, and the boar’s euphoric butchers, the Indonesian people.  The central piece of this series sold for the then unheralded price of one billion rupiah.  Fourteen years later, his paintings routinely sell over that threshold, mainly to domestic collectors, and he freely admits that he sometimes churns out works for no purpose other than to reap the profit, which he often gives to friends (some of them former allies from the halcyon days of Indonesian socialism) in need.

Despite the success he has wrung from the aftermath of his detainment and abuse, Pekik is still haunted by his time in the hands of the government.  As he led us through his compound, threading our way between multiple garages and studios down to his personal exhibition gallery, Pekik indicated the army green hue of all of his buildings, which, he says, he picked specifically to help rid himself of a nightmare-inducting military phobia that still keeps him up at night.   In the basement of the main house is the gallery in which many of his works – and copies of his more famous pieces housed in the homes of Jakarta’s rich – are aligned in chronological order along the oval curve of the room.  Over a spread of bean curd, coconut pastries, spring rolls with chilies and pickles, and teh manis, the favored local preparation of tea – sickly sweat and lukewarm – we were seated with Pekik and invited to discuss his work and political philosophy.

The first thing you notice about Pekik, after his long white wisp of a beard, is his chain-smoking.  He carries, clutched in his left hand, a gold cigarette case and aluminum lighter wherever he goes.  Like an inexperienced smoker unable to pace himself, he blows through each cigarette in under a minute, his right hand ready to light the next before he finishes his current one.  His voice, consequentially, is nothing more than a grim croak, and he spends a lot time waving vaguely in the air when trying to express his thoughts on a topic that neither his throat nor his memory have much of an ability to recall.  Between the beard, his bright eyes magnified by a set of never-in-fashion coke-bottle glasses, and the perpetual eddy of smoke swirling around his head, Pekik presents somewhat of a deranged and mystic figure.

Unlike many artists of his generation, Pekik has largely eschewed the moderate politics of his peers, avoiding the seemingly compulsory shift to the middle that characterizes so many former radicals and activists in their twilight years.  In our brief time with him, Pekik denounced the influence of international industrialists and their “rat money” fueling the Jakarta corruption machine while praising Indonesia’s marginalized workers, the nation’s “only hope.”  As leftist thinkers and artists tend to do, Pekik romanticizes and generalizes about the dignity of the working class in his paintings.  The paintings themselves lack any subtlety – a rat or bulldozer is intended, without any ambiguity or gradation of possible meaning, to stand in for government corruption or the corrosive clutch of foreign capital.  Government ministers are clowns and charlatans, workers are angels and saints, abused but unbroken.  There is of course nothing wrong with this perspective – it is one that largely mirrors my own political predilections – but it raises, in the case of Pekik, interesting contradictions.

Pekik is, of course, unimaginably wealthy by Indonesian standards.  His home is the one of the most luxurious I’ve seen in my six weeks here (the only competition keeping it from the top spot is the crucifix- and altar-filled home of the Catholic owner of Kompas, Indonesia’s most popular daily).  On his compound there is a building designated solely for the performance of gamelan music, he has more mountain and motor-bikes than you can count, and with the eccentric flare found almost exclusively in the wealthy or creative (in his case both), his driveway is flanked by a curious mixture of life-size Ronald McDonald statues and busts of ancient Javanese and Roman gods.  His home, taken all together, looks like it was furnished by an 18-year old with wealthy absentee parents and a blind disregard for established conventions of interior design.  In short, Pekik is living the life of anything other than a communist revolutionary.  His repeated claims that the proceeds from his paintings are required to continue his “struggle” are, I’m sure, grounded in truth.  But there’s no denying that he has also embraced the norms and ideals of a distinctly bourgeois kind of comfort, one of flat-screen TVs, all-terrain-vehicles, and well-stocked artificial fishponds.  He even has a pet eagle.

I spend a lot of time calling people out for perceived hypocrisies and contradictions.  As my sisters know all too well, I often see it as my primary job to criticize and badger them (and everyone else) on any point where I perceive a weakness or failing in logic or judgment.  Which is not to say that I’m anything but lacking in both categories.  I have nothing but respect for Pekik, and left his home lucky to have had the experience of speaking with so notable an artist.  We all thoroughly enjoyed our visit.  Rather than making me lose respect for him, the contradictions and struggles Pekik embodies make him more appealingly human than any disconnected Marxist painter living off of breadcrumbs and anti-capitalist acrimony.  He is appealing in his everyman sensibility, described by our translator as “the typical Javanese village gentleman charisma.”  The incessant stream of cigarettes and fried food disappearing into his wealthy mouth make him a more interesting and relatable.  Likewise, the plebian warmth and vigor of his paintings, not to mention their underlying humor (Pekik paints himself staring at a young woman’s cleavage in the background of many of his paintings), make his art accessible in all its unadorned charm.

Then the following weekend we got to head to the home of our program coordinator, Sari, and her husband Bram, in a village on the outskirts of Ngawi, a town far smaller than even Jogja.  Our train ride out on Friday afternoon was two uneventful hours of newly harvested rice patties rolling by our windows.  The only excitement came from some bunched-in chickens issuing loud and indignant squawks at the woman two rows over who stuffed them in a crate under her seat.  When we got to Ngawi, Bram greeted us with his van pulled alongside the tracks. We had to jump the considerable gap between the train and the rails, luggage in hand, before the train rushed off to more populous and profitable locales where, presumably, they wait for passengers to disembark before moving on.  With the light fading, Bram drove the sagging minivan – carrying nine passengers and the luggage of six Americans prone to over-packing – on the gravel roads winding back to his home.  In the last few minutes of daylight, Bram pointed me (I generally ride shotgun by virtue of whining the most about legroom) to Mt. Lawu, which at nearly 11,000 feet in an otherwise flat and featureless terrain completely dominates the local aspect.  In addition to being a holy site for Hindu pilgrims and a large tourist draw, Bram was highlighting Lawu’s presence because our weekend trip was centered on our foolish desire to climb the damn thing.  At first, being both near-sighted and altogether unused to big rocky things, I couldn’t see the mountain.  After a few moments of eye-adjustment I widened the scale of my sight line and the Lawu massif became apparent to me.  By mountain standards it’s pretty average in size, and by climbing standards absolutely tame, but for someone whose first thoughts at hearing the word “mountain” are the bunny slope Poconos of central PA, it was a monster.

Once we got to Bram and Sari’s and set our luggage down, we explored their home, a beautiful centuries-old model of the red-tile Javanese style.  We squabbled over the two beds with mosquito nets, puzzled at the traditional Javanese shower (a bucket and a ladle), marveled at the dizzying number of phallus-themed paintings on the walls (a disconcerting number including dogs), and lathered ourselves in bug repellent before we sat down to a dinner of soto ayam.  This chicken soup concoction, with self-served portions of bean sprouts, Thai basil, green chilies, blue ginger, sweet soy sauce, coconut shavings, peanuts, and sambal, is one of my favorite foods.  I’ve had it in Suriname and at home, cooked by aunts and my mom and since I’ve come to Indonesia it’s become a consistent lunch favorite.  I’ve always enjoyed it, even at the sketchier street-side stands we’ve visited, but nothing, nothing, compares soto at Sari and Bram’s house.  Imagine the a rich, clear, chicken broth, load it up with fresh organic vegetables and rice and chicken all picked or killed that day in your backyard, now add a couple heaping spoonfuls of unadulterated bliss and maybe you can get an idea of what the soto was like.  Sorry Mom, I think they’ve got you beat on this count.

Saturday Morning, 4 a.m., Bram drove us to Lawu and we began our ascent.  I don’t think I have the adjective firepower to describe the climb and its views; I’ll let the great photos in the posts below do the talking.  I can say though that the act of climbing Lawu was amazing.  I’ve rarely felt so intimately grounded (pun intended) with my environment.   Every step we took was another kick by the mountain, calves screaming, quads shaking, Jacob and I slobbering over our packs while Colin and Alia pushed hard and unfazed ahead.  But it was beautiful in so many ways.  It was clear to anyone who could see the maniacal glint in my eye that I fancied myself a young American Tenzing Norgay.  I sure acted like I had reached the summit of Everest once we reached the top, but in truth, between my whole list of physical limitations – being out of shape, sweating truly astounding amounts of fluid, recovering from elbow surgery – and the allure of food at the bottom of the trail if only I turned back, I barely made it.  Only the thought of Colin’s gloating face if I didn’t make it (he didn’t break a sweat and took half as many stops for rest as Jacob and I – Alia was similarly indefatigable, but infinitely less obnoxious) kept me going.  After we hit the summit and headed down, my shame was further compounded on our descent by the sight of a local man, aged at least 50, carrying a massive load of rice on his back while trudging barefoot up the mountain at a rate at least twice of what I did.  I’m going to add a visit to the gym, along with taking a warm shower and eating pie, to the list of things I need to do when we get home.

I’m falling asleep again, and it’s only 2 p.m.  Time for a nap.  Just got back from a meeting-shortened first day of my internship at Planned Parenthood, and I look forward to talking about that some more once it gets underway.   So long for now!

We just moved into our homestays yesterday. It’s strange to realize that we’d already been in Jogja for about six weeks now, and we only have a few more weeks left. I’m starting to think about missing this place already. Not to mention the fact that all six of us are now in separate places, except for Alex and me. We’re living in a Joglo, a traditional Javanese house, with a bunch of artists and musicians. I’m so excited to be here – it’s very peaceful. I woke up today to the sounds of birds and crickets chirping in the early morning – it’s like being in a farm in the middle of the city. Honestly, though, since last weekend, everything’s gone so fast. From our daily activities and encounters, we’ve discovered so much about Indonesia in the meantime.

We went to visit Sari’s village in Ngawi. With amazing bahasa Indonesian, we’d successfully purchased our own tickets, and got ready to leave with Sari and Rose. On the train ride, we saw the beautiful countryside and the setting sun touching the tip of Gunung Lawu, a sight forever tattooed on my mind – because the next day, we climbed it.

Gunung Lawu is one of the sacred mountains in Java. According to Bram, it’s a property of the Queen of the South Seas, just like Parangtritis beach (so, we can’t wear any green since that’s her favorite color; nor can we kill any of the brown feathered, yellow-beaked birds that inhabit its forests). Many Indonesians climb the mountain as a sort of pilgrimage. Near the top, there’s a well that, supposedly, if you bathe in its water or even just wet your hair, you will achieve high status in your career and life. When climbing it, though, this is the farthest thing from your mind. We had to wake up at 5 am to drive up to the mountain and start climbing at around 6:30.

Setting a goal of reaching the top at 10 am (Colin, you beast athlete) was probably setting the standards high, especially for Jacob and me and our first mountain-climbing experience. The first two hours were quite charming, seeing all the different kinds of flora and fauna and views on the way to the top. Despite my layers of clothing slowly getting soaked in sweat and dew, I happily snapped photos of anything interesting, and proudly took about 300 during the whole climb. To the top, there are 5 posts (Pos), and then the summit. And between Pos 2 and Pos 4, the grueling, brutal work suddenly and gleefully tortured us. In our many pauses, I could hear my heartbeat pounding in my ears, and my panting breaths puffed out small clouds in quick bursts. My legs weren’t burning, but I developed a weird tick on my left thigh that moved every time I raised my foot – uh oh, thanks for introducing yourself now, cramp. My photos were few and far between in this period, but once we reached Pos Empat (4), everything melted away when we saw clouds interspersed with the mountain’s body, so near that we could touch them. Cool wind soothed us, bringing with it the pungent smell of sulfur from the far reaches of the mountain. The climb was much easier after this point – and the sights were absolutely breathtaking. At the summit of 10,217 feet, we discovered this hidden path between some bushes that led to a ridge overlooking several other mountains in the distance, the valley down below, and the hills around the mountains, clouds and fog covering their bodies but the tips, the shining sun seeming so near. Needless to say, it made me wanna climb another mountain.

The next day, I witnessed the blessing of Bram and Sari’s rice fields before harvest. It’s a traditional Javanese ceremony, more pagan than related to any religion, wherein a piece of dried coconut husk is burned, an offering of flowers, herbs, leaves, and an egg are prayed/sung over and scattered around the area where a few stalks of rice are harvested and tied together to be protection in Sari’s house. A meal of tofu (the best I ever had in my whole life), chicken, tempe, rice, and spicy vegetables awaited all the men and women who will go and harvest – I was lucky enough to partake of this supremely enak meal. I loved how the tradition created a time to be thankful for family and food and to share this moment together. I felt like a part of the community, even though I knew only my hosts and the children who learned computer science from Sari. I walked among the grass and trees with the children, listening to the swish of the scythes through the rice stalks, resting under the cool shade of bamboos and trees, and listening to the water from the flowing river. My heart was in two places at once – there in Ngawi and back home in my grandfather’s fields in Libas, Tantangan, Philippines.

When we got back to Jogja, our research took over. For the past two to three weeks, Elizabeth, Shandy Jessica (one of the Indonesian participants), and I have been working on a project involving waste management and perception in the city. We began by interviewing a bunch of warung owners and students around the USD about their waste management practices and whether there’s a waste management system in Jogja. We also wanted to know whether we could find some form of environmental awareness (as defined, perhaps, by segregation and proper disposal of waste) in the city. It’s been a lot of fun, since we got to practice our bahasa, make friends with the cooks of our regular haunts, and take loads of photos of kitchens – the production processes. Most kitchens boil their water and keep their surroundings clean, no matter how unpolished they are. They also had very strict practices of isolating their clean food from their waste and other harmful materials. Field research of this type makes it feel so much more real and human than the paper research we do in university – you’re talking to actual people, learning about them, interacting with them, and seeing their reactions to your questions and responses. The best part is how open and kind our interviewees were. I especially adore the cooks at Bu Bagyo’s lotek and gado-gado place, where I still get a squeeze on the arm every time I order. Though we’re not saints, it’s gratifying to know that we’re working to know about something that might benefit them in the future.

We also interviewed a government representative for their environmental department, an academic, and the director of WALHI. Each of them detailed their own programs for reduction of trash.  The government itself has its own waste reduction program. However, we found that overall, there is little management. In addition to this, perception of trash is localized – more aesthetic. There’s a general feeling of disgust for trash but once it’s ‘out of sight, [then] out of mind’. Since we were ‘following’ the trajectory of trash, we found (and took photos of) several agents of waste. Within the city, there are small-time collectors: some who collect certain objects such as bottles, cardboard, metal, etc. to be sold to companies for recycling; some who collect trash in the streets to be taken to focal points in the city where the dump truck picks them up to be taken to the dump; some wait for the dump truck to collect their trash; while some simply burn their trash or throw it in the river. However, all trash collected is usually just brought to the dump – segregated or not, organic or not, etc.

One of the most interesting parts of the research was when we’d followed dump trucks to TPS (Tempat Pembuangan Sampah) Piyungan – the landfill. We had to go twice, since the first time we went, they would not let us in not interview any of the officials without a letter. They allowed us to go around the dump, however, and I secretly took photos. It was a sight – but far from the beauty of Lawu. When we opened the taxi window, the smell of decay was so strong I almost choked. There were houses and rice fields around the area as well, and I could not imagine even staying there for more than a few hours. There were hills and valleys of trash, and walking among them were cows and calf, eating plastic and who-knows-what-else. With the animals, people roamed here and there – scavengers or pemulung, bending down to pick up a piece of plastic or cloth or metal that may be useful and sold later. The ones leaving the landfill were bent under humungous hand-made backpacks of ‘useful’ loot. The landfill had 3 zones, but trash overflowed into the forest and houses at its sides. Determined to get out interview, we came back on motorcycles and talked with the head of the landfill’s office. We learned that clay and sand are dumped on the landfill every three days, and that approximately 150-200 trucks come from Bantul, Yogyakarta, and Sleman to dump 350-400 tons of trash daily. Significantly less than Jakarta 6000 tons of trash, this amount should still be addressed when there’s no other waste management practice.

Admittedly, I became more interested in the scavengers during this time. We learned that about 450-500 pemulung live there, and that they need to get permits from the government to be able to scavenge in the landfill. They sell the trash to their pengepul, the head of a group of scavengers. Many of them own cows, which will be sold to markets. This is quite a creepy idea. Elizabeth said, “The cows are like a symbol of the cycle.” Without proper waste management, all this trash becomes a direct and indirect health concern, and not only for environmental sustainability.

On Thursday, we presented all this with the GMU students, where the topics ranged from the family perspective of waria (males with the souls of women) to domestic violence in Indonesia to the Prabowa, one of the candidates in the upcoming elections, and his many human rights violations to the process of making art in Jogjakarta. I’m ready to start the next phase of the internship – working with my NGO. Though I’m missing Amanda, Elizabeth, and Tiwi’s little quirks that you only know once you start living with them and all the daily lunches and dinners that our group of 7 (with Jacob, Alex, and Colin) usually have, I’m excited to get to know the people in my new community in the Joglo and WALHI.