Glimpsing Life Outside the Bubble

This week we attended a conference of Fulbrighters at the sumptuous Alila hotel, where we met a lot of people I wish I’d met many months ago. In particular, we met a handful of American scholars who have been living very different lives than the ones E & I have found in Jakarta.

I’ll tell you about some of them in more detail in separate posts. What the 3 who told me the most stories had in common was a tremendous gratitude for running water & that they are living in tiny, rural & predominantly Christian towns on different islands of the archipelago. Some were a little dazzled at finding, after months in the bush, that a majority of American Fulbrighters here are studying Islam in various ways.

Islam? They don’t know from Islam. Some had never even been in a mosque or heard the calls to prayer. Where they’re staying, the Indonesians they know largely & loudly project: Muslims = terrorists, & it’s the Americans who argue for shades of gray.

The fight against terrorism here, after all—almost always reported, even when it IS a terrorist, as a nameless, faceless, motive-less “terrorist” guilty of vague acts or plans for “terrorism”, (today’s very best terms by which to condone disappearing objectionable people)—is front page news every week. But those 3 are the minority.

Among the American Fulbrighters, E is the only historian, looking at Indonesia from 1928 onward, but also & frequently consulting historical documents from the first written records of the land, centuries back. Every one else, be they political scientists, earth scientists, economists, musicians, students of high fashion (really), religious scholars, businessmen or artists, is looking at the very exciting development of Indonesia as a democratic nation in the last 2-10 years.

I’m running out of time here & I must finish my last chapter & pack. Before I head off to Singapore, I want tell you about 2 people in particular—the brave woman studying palm oil plantations in 2 Dyak villages in Kalimantan. And the only other “dependent” from the American program, the only other istri (wife), who may be at the end of her rope in Southern Sulawesi.

!And about sitting in on a live broadcast of Jak-TV’s version of “The Daily Show” (so claims the producer & host), a political satire on the dangerous forefront of testing Indonesia’s freedom of the press. And the Ringling Bros clown cum Fulbright scholar writing about it.

!And about watching a sea turtle laying eggs on “Heavenly Nymph” Island, which used to be called “Sickness Island” when it was a leper colony.

!And about witnessing a friend cheerfully pulled up onto the outdoor stage with a popular political, Islamic artist-guru figure, then seeing her handed a microphone before the huge crowd & asked if, as an American, she might tell us all her thoughts on religion & democracy in Indonesia, as compared with America, & then comment on why the US, for all its superior technology, spends so little time considering the afterlife.

!And about how I’ve met people named: Titi, Tata, Toto, Yoyo, Nana, NiNi, Zhizhi, & Fifi. And how Tata, a man charged with the monumental task of monitoring pollution emanating from Indonesian smokestacks, blew off his due-today report to shepherd MF & I all the way up the Taman Safari in the Bogor hills on public transportation. And how teenaged ZhiZhi & Nini know my voice on the phone & laugh, Hello, Miss Ana, when I call down for breakfast at 11 or lunch at 3, already knowing my order.

!And the Burkini! And Izzi’s Pizza! And Gratitude. And You Say Bigamy, I Say Polygamy. And the Economy Class Train & the Ukulele Boys. And the Swallow Nests men will kill for. And being asked to head a panel on How to Behave Like An American. And the brick ruin of Martello Tower fort, not much smaller than the island itself, torn apart in hunks like a gingerbread cake by waves following the eruption of Krakatoa.

So many good stories.
Stay tuned.