An Indonesian Thanksgiving

There was turkey. There was karaoke. There were mangoes. And there was family. The actual turkey day itself did not include turkey but, instead, home-made Indonesian snacks. This was not because it was Thanksgiving – I sort of kept that on the dl this year – but because I was too busy until then to take a teacher up on her offer to cook with her. On Thursday I went after class to Bu Nina’s house and made some sweet corn pudding, bread empanada things and mango salad. No pictures – sorry. Bu Nina, the teacher who refers to herself as my second mom, and I ate as we talked about her Chinese grandmother who taught her how to cook and the four members of her family who have gotten cancer. It was sad but it was nice to be let into her life so much. She is one of the most tirelessly energetic teachers at my school, which is a good thing because she’s always cooking for everyone, inviting me to things and so on. She’s very sweet. I’m often reminded of people back home by the people I meet here, whether by their personality or features. Bu Nina's energy and mannerisms remind me of my friend/music teacher back in the old Athens.

I wasn’t thinking about Thanksgiving too much that day until sometime that afternoon while we were talking about cancer and watching some boys around Bu Nina’s neighborhood play football. My beloved counter-part then texted me: “Happy Thanksgiving day,,,,,!!!! Thanks for being the best part of my teaching experience in my life,,,,,ever,,,,,,We hafta celebrate together ,,,,,tomorrow is “Karaoke Time”,,,”

This set off a long train of thoughts as I walked home later that evening with a backdrop of ominous rain clouds. I am really thankful for this experience. I know I complain sometimes about difficult counterparts and integration woes, but those are such small blips on the canvas of this time. I don’t think it’s necessarily important to travel the world in your lifetime but I do think it’s vitally important, for me at least, to cross cultural boundaries. When I look back on this time I hope that I will remember how every thought and action felt like a beginning. I do get caught up in myself too much sometimes but I’m grateful for the moments of wide-eyed wonder and possibilities in the world around me.

I’m thankful for the hundreds of times a day I feel the support and love of my family back home and here. With them in my mind, I see the world through better eyes and have better thoughts. I carry you with me, I carry your hearts….

I was also thinking yesterday about the kids at the front of my neighborhood and how, at first, it was all “look at your skin and look at mine” but now that we’re past the initial shock they are just sweet and enthusiastic to spend time together, which to me feels like unconditional love. They call out to me every day to stop and look at a baby or a cat, then they crowd around and want to know every little thing about where I’ve been and what I’ve been doing that day and after all that they want to play. Not everyone will take notice of you as a person (though they will certainly notice any differences they see between them and your outer person) and it can make you feel a bit disconnected and lonely. I’ve been feeling that a bit with the older members of my host family lately, like I’m just a friendly presence who sits in the same room as them sometimes and bugs them with mundane questions. But with the teachers at my school and the kids in my neighborhood, it’s a readily-inclusive environment that blows away some of my insecurities and doubts about fitting in here.

 Today, spending time with my BFFs.

They were making a flower maze.

On that note, I’m also glad to be more aware of things like my standard of living. You think you’d be willing to change most things about yourself to integrate with a place but there are still things like food, cleanliness and that happy medium between personal space and feeling part of a community that I’ve realized I might not be willing to change, while it’s still in my power of control. But realizing these small consistencies you require makes you more aware of all else that is transient and non-essential to your life. Every time I travel that second list grows longer.

So, Friday was karaoke day. I went to a karaoke bar with my counterpart and a different teacher and sang “Sakitnya tu di sini”, the hot song of the moment and saw my first Agnes Monica music video (she’s like the Lady Gaga of Indonesia). My fellow teachers remarked that they know more Western music than I do, which was proven to be true. Granted, my counter-part picked hard rock songs and recent pop music like Bruno Mars and Justin Bieber but I know deep down that there is truth to her claim.

On Saturday I went to Jakarta for Thanksgiving lunch at the US Ambassador’s small palace. It was pretty suave. We were ID-ed at the front gate by security and I’m glad my photo-copied passport made the cut. The Ambassador is tall and has a dog named Ciera. As soon as he finished his speech welcoming us all (the Fullbrights, other employees from the Embassy and us Peace Corps staff and volunteers) we attacked that spread like a pack of ravenous dogs. My first moment of transcendence happened as I ate the one and only piece of pumpkin pie I could get my hands on. My second moment of transcendence of the weekend occurred when I took a hot shower at the hostel.

I’m sure it wasn’t standard protocol for guests of the Ambassador but we utilized his trampoline and ping pong table as we digested the delicious memories of lunch. After this, many of the PC people headed back to the hostel. The hostel is run by an Indonesian lady and her Australian husband. They have lived in Europe some and she has a distinctive Australian accent and wore t-shirts that said things like “I love England”. It was obviously very frequented by Peace Corps volunteers because she showed her appreciation for our faithful business by providing us with a very cheap bar-b-que dinner on the rooftop garden. The environment had all the elements in place for a good night - AWESOME food (real hamburgers guys – real salad with lettuce too), drink, good company, music, so most people stayed there all night instead of going out, which was great because the weather was drab and drizzly.

These are in no particular order:

The ambassador's backyard, complete with trampoline, gazebo and badminton court. Not pictured: a pool and gardens.

Some artwork at a hotel I met some other volunteers at before the banquet.

On Sunday night when I returned from Jakarta my fam and I shared some mangos. Umi cuts off pieces and hands them out. Everyone gets one before she starts again. We went through two mangos.

One last look at the pumpkin pie in all its glory.

What makes the desert beautiful is that somewhere it hides a well

It’s hot and there is a big fat roach in my bathroom. I put a towel under the door and left the room. Hopefully it’s too fat to go through the little vent in the door. I can’t remember sweating so much in my entire life. After 23 years of living in Georgia I’ve only just now learned the touch of humidity. I used to think I had some magical immunity to it but being in Indonesia a month into the rainy season set me straight. I don’t realize I’m sweating that much until I feel the drops of sweat falling down my back as I’m sitting still in the prayer area. It’s oppressive being inside. Umi took her kid’s prayer group outside onto the porch for the first time tonight. They don’t sound like they’re all that focused on reading/recitation. I walked around for a bit out there but it feels just as hot to me as inside.

I think the only cool place is in the upstairs patio where we hang our clothes to dry, but from there the drowned rice paddies look so ghostly with the florescent lights reflecting off the black of the water. Nights like tonight make me believe that I was meant to spend some years of my life in Indonesia. The sounds of singing, the wild shapes of trees in the dark and steady pulse of dangdut music coming up through the floor feels oddly cyclical and familiar. If and when I look back on these nights I will remember the sharp texture of the colors and trees illuminated by the glaring light bulbs covered in cut-off water bottles, hanging from the palms.

Earlier in the evening my host sisters randomly asked me, “Miss Fiona mau masuk ke Islam?” (Miss Fiona, do you want to enter Islam?) Although my host mom Umi tried to swat away their questions with a knowing smile I fancied I saw a gleam in all of their eyes for a second which gave me insight into how tolerant they are to welcome a stranger into their home who is admittedly, “not really very religious at all.” In the beginning I committed all my friends and family to Buddhism or Christianity because I thought that in such a religious country where you have to claim a religion on official documents, my lack of religious sentiments would be met with the same blank stare I sometimes still receive in the classroom. I know I must seem strange on many other accounts, but to live with someone and even let them watch you pray when they only have a general non-committed interest in your activities must be especially hard to grow accustomed to. This is the first time they have broached the subject of my interest in Islam and….it made me feel loved. It made me feel like they care for my spiritual well-being in a way that I haven’t quite felt before. After accepting me into all other parts of their lives without so much as a discussion of whether I want to join (in a spiritual sense) the most important part of their lives, the random timing of this question after we had just finished running around putting grass down the back of each other’s shirts felt bred of love rather than religious zealotry.

The other part which I know worries them about me is that I don’t wear the veil. They seem to adore my hair and love to play with it and are infinitely fascinated that it is red and blonde (no, not brown) but the two times that I’ve worn a veil they seemed ecstatic by comparison. My own female family members and close neighbors (who are counted as family) often don’t wear the veil around the house except when there’s company or men outside of the family who stop by. When my sisters asked me if I was going to enter Islam they immediately followed that question with, will you wear the veil? After wearing it twice when I first got here I thought I’d set a precedent that in my eyes it was disrespectful to wear the veil as a non-Muslim. My logic was immediately accepted by my host mother but not by anyone else. Other ladies in the neighborhood and the other teachers (men and women) at my school tried to convince me that it was not only a religious symbol but also a matter of fashion - that I would look more beautiful if I wore the veil. Despite hearing these words I still perceived that these arguments were more playful and not to be taken in a serious light. I consider this another point of everyone's tolerance.

In other news....
School is winding down and I am still trying to get the guts to tell one of my counterparts how useless and used it makes me feel when he is absent (either mentally or physically) from our classes. I've succeeded in getting him to help me give instructions to the students, but after a whole semester I feel like I should have made more headway on that count. Otherwise, the students are really getting into the review games we’ve been playing. I found out on Friday that our exams have been pushed back a week so instead of doing two more weeks of review we need to come up with another week’s worth of material sandwiched in between our two review weeks (we being my female counterpart and I.)

Today two students came into the teacher’s den, one with a big box marked Holland Bakery and the other with two bags of lunch boxes. This is a custom I’m still getting used to: whenever it is someone’s birthday they buy food, cake, snacks, you name it for everyone. The amount of food that was brought in today (for the all the teachers – I didn’t see if she brought stuff for her friends as well) was staggering. I worry that these students, some of whom have told me don’t have money to buy lunch, go broke when it’s their birthday. In addition to emptying out your piggy bank (or your parents’ piggy bank?) to shower your loved ones with gifts on your birthday, these same loved ones will often play tricks on you all day long like throwing eggs at you or splashing you with water. Not two weeks ago another student came up to me before English club with a wet skirt and her veil askew. I asked her what happened and she explained to me, laughing, that it was her birthday and her friends had splashed her with water. I dig the giving of gifts to those who have helped you become the person you are on that day but the tricks are not a custom I will encourage my friends back home to adopt any time soon.

I have been thinking of home lately, in the abstract mostly, as if from on my own small planet looking at it from afar. This is perhaps both because of my nearing visit to the States and my having been at my site for more than six months now. I wrote this the other day:
A home is a place where you are so integrated with your environment you notice every small change. When, in the midst of weekly routines, you can spot a new shaft of sunlight somewhere, or can tell the difference in the changing skyline by the way a shadow falls differently at 4 o’clock in the afternoon; otherwise stated, when the subtle changes a new day brings quickly pierce your consciousness, then that place can be called home. Whereas, in a place you have not yet internalized, the shadows and sunlight patterns are uniform in their differentness. Every Wednesday at Tajemalela practice the practice field looks the same to me. That is, until two Wednesdays ago when I was staring off towards the parking lot and was suddenly struck by how clearly this bold strip of sunlight fell across the lawn. I hadn’t realized before that the leaves parted in such a way as to let the sunlight through like that.

 Perhaps there had been other moments like this before but none that stood out so starkly in my memory. It was a disruption to my comforting generalization of the place. Its little things like that that make you realize how much you rely on this broad categorization of a new environment to cope with change.

 But the de ja vu feeling of awareness has come in waves at different stages of my internalization. It hit me not even a month after moving to Karawang. I was walking with my host sister down a road that couldn’t be more different than any road I’ve ever walked down before. Here we passed fruit stalls, motorcycle shops and batik shops, with the the call to mahgrib prayer falling around us with the violet twilight. As we walked home, I was on that street but I was also in many similar moments that had been forgotten, remembered and forgotten again and then shaved down to a memory of a feeling, only to hit me now with the feeling that I was undergoing one of the first stages of internalizing a place – relating it to my past.

 I also wrote this a while ago, when the rain was starting up back at the end of October, around Halloween.

They stand on a rise, a colorful funeral party
Holding a moment of well-timed silence before the maghrib prayer.
Some people wait watching by the gate,
Minding their rightfully-owned business.
Schoolgirls shuffle by, hand in hand, unaffected by the wind, the people and the sun burning ribbons Through the field.
The majority of the landscape is a stretch
And then a group huddled conspiratorially together against the dim gray.
Down on the road, people are actually outside, in the warung, on the road, boys leaning on their parked motorcycles.
No one is holed up inside with only the light from the tv to illuminate the walls.
They mill around the food stall
As flocks of chickens claw through blooms of translucent trash
Growing wild like weeds in their black beds of ash.
In this vast undisrupted space you are never alone,
There are always voices beckoning and cajoling you forward and back
Away from that peaceful in between.
The scenes fit together seamlessly:
When the chatter finally fades beyond the receding bend
And you sit to take out your pen
Another scene starts up again
With hardly a wind's breath in between.
Even through the muted green of the second season’s rain,
The relaxed busyness continues with daunting pace.
Even the ghosts hanging around above their pink-tiled graves
Hold their ears out for something to talk about. 

Confessions of a Batik-aholic

I can’t hide it anymore. I’m in deep with the wrong threads. Despite my sartorial upbringing, I always thought, “it will never happen to me.” I'm a comfort above style kind of person, not on principle but because I'm completely and hopelessly fashion-blind. A model could be wearing the most expensive magical clothing made of diamonds and rainbows and my first thought would be, "is that comfortable?" I think this is something that has slowly driven my mom, a brilliantly-gifted costumer and regular connoisseur of all things clothing-related, to the brink of her sanity. However, I am here today to report that apparently nurturing does win out over nature.

It all began quite recently, when my laptop was in the shop in Jakarta for a few weeks in September and I was looking for another hobby besides reading to fill that 3-5 pm time slot when all the students had cleared out and I wasn't ready to go home and play with my younger siblings just yet. I didn’t call it ‘retail therapy’ at first, because this is a term my mother has often used and it has much deeper connotations for her than for most people.

The backstory: A man owns a batik shop just around the corner from my school. My counter-part took me there before the fated laptop-less period and I found he had a lot of pretty and cheap batik (even on a volunteer's budget). From this rather innocent beginning things went downhill very quickly.

In September I went in there again and this time the bright colors and wild designs whispered to me in a rustling, course language of their own. Forty-five minutes later I came out with a new batik and a feeling of reverential awe for the gorgeous work of art in my hands. Things only got worse from there. After that, I found myself scanning a crowd for interesting batik. This was the first thing I noticed about someone who was wearing batik: what were the distinctive designs and what new mixtures of colors were there? I loved the bright colors and varying degrees of detail, from the cartoony-style of Cirebon batik to minute detailed lines of Sukabumi batik. I loved that I finally found myself in a place where matching purple and orange and gold and yellow was not frowned upon. The clouds of doubt parted and a resplendent new world opened up before me.

Our dress code for teachers is batik, so at first it was excusable for me to discuss my interest in batik with other teachers. They, sweet souls, offered to show me some other places to find batik. I started doing some online research into the history and different styles of batik.


Everyone wears batik - even the president! Uniforms for everyone from bus drivers to teachers are usually batik.

Saturday:
I was feeling a little restless in my teaching routine since about two weeks ago so I jumped at the first opportunity to go to Jakarta with the biology teacher at my school. I told her I had a yen for the Textile Museum and she kindly offered to accompany me on this morning jalan-jalan before meeting her daughter in the afternoon. We took the train at 6 am and arrived in the Big Durian* (not it’s real name….at least I don’t think it is) roughly two hours later. You can actually take the train right to Tanah Abang, a sub district in Jakarta which has the largest textile market in Southeast Asia, and walk from there to the Textile Museum. The biology teacher, Bu Dila, asked around and we found the museum very easily.

Things weren’t really popping yet so we walked around outside and through several workshop stations set up... I'll have to come back when they have a workshop going on.


You have to heat the wax to put it on the cloth (for your design) and again to take it off later.




I guess this is around step 5 or 6, after several dye baths.


This is a different cloth-making process called Tenun Ikat Flores. The tradition originates from the island Flores and symbolizes a woman's maturity. It takes many months to make and each piece is supposed to tell a story of that woman's life, love, relationship with God and their family and/or how they've upheld their dignity....much more history behind this that I'll have to read up on.


Process for making batik (bahasa Indonesia above, bahasa Jawa below): 1. Make the design 2-4. Apply the 1st, 2nd and 3rd wax (over the pencil design. In between the different wax applications you dip the cloth in the dye bath and apply more wax depending on the level of detail you want 5. Color and boil (after a couple of wax applications all the wax that has been applied thus far is removed. This is done by heating the wax and scraping it off and also by applying hot water and sponging off the remaining wax.) There are other steps but I guess this is the basic overview. You basically keep adding wax to areas you want to remain white and keep submerging the cloth in different colored dye baths until you've got the design and coloring you want.


You can still see the pencil lines on this one.


The Obamas follow us Americans everywhere here. 

The only crowd we had to fight with was a bunch of curious children who paid to come in while we were there looking around. They didn't look at the textiles that much and took some pictures for us when Bu Dila asked them.



This building has been used as a private residence for a Frenchman, as headquarters of Barisan Keamanan Rakyat ("Front of People's Safety") during the struggle for independence period and later as a retirement home. It was built in the early 1800s.

A sign at the front of the museum said “No Pictures” but, as with our previous experience at the National Museum where selfies specifically were "not allowed", this rule was not enforced so everyone took them anyway. Both of these signs were a complete waste of ink and placard if you ask me.

I, however, was worried that this time the rule might be enforced so I ran around madly snapping photographs for the first five minutes until I realized that no one cared. At this point my excitement had reached critical levels.




Batik Pesisir from Cianjur.









We took another turn around the room, at a slower pace this time, and Bu Dila explained to me the two different names for Batik from different regions in West Java. There is Batik Pedalaman and Batik Pesisir. All of the batik in the textile museum was Batik Pesisir. This is only a general regional distinction to my knowledge. I don't yet know about East Java distinctions. Batik Pesasir comes from Sukabumi (which was very detailed), Garut (a mix of styles), Cirebon (cartoon-ish, generally-speaking), Tasikmalaya (where the above pictured sunflower batik is from) and Cianjur (which looked more detailed to me than, say, Cirebon batik, but the lines were still not crisp). Bu Dila told me that Batik Pedalaman comes from Solo and Jogja, in Central Java.

There is a wider distinction between all batik, however, and this is batik tulis (literally "written batik") and batik cetak ("printed batik"). Batik tulis is the handmade wax dye-resistant stuff that's more expensive. Batik cetak is made with the wood/metal stencils above. Potentially other methods of printing as well. Have not read that far yet.

After the museum we set out for the Tanah Abang market.

I believe I mentioned before that the interwebs have claimed that Tanah Abang is the largest textile market in Southeast Asia. Well, large doesn't really begin to cover it. Since it's in the capital city, the market goes up and not out. The market only covers about a block but then goes up. And up. And up. Imagine floor upon floor (12 to be exact) of only clothing stores with crowds of people clogging up the thin spaces between shops and people standing out in front of their tiny shops saying "boleh masuk, boleh masuk" (meaning "you may enter" - not exactly the aggressive hawkers I'm used to...) A food court was squished in on the 11th floor and there we ate a brunch of noodles, vegetables and gross-looking fish for Bu Dila (she even said it was gross.) Baby roaches crawled around our feet and on the table.

The trip home was eventful in that I took the train to a stop that did not have a bus station nearby, as I had been informed, and only made the trip back in under 5 hours because of an extremely charitable soul named Kristie who happened to be going to the exact place in Karawang as I was (it’s a very spread-out city). This, thankfully, is the norm in Indonesia, not a random act of kindness.

*Durian is a famous yet foul-smelling fruit that I have not worked up the courage yet to try.

This is my backyard ya'll

 

My house is behind the school on the left. You can see the front a little.




Pretty pollution.














Neighbors fieldside.


The flower below came from this tree.


Someone's porch




Taking out the trash.


Waste management = trash burning

Groupthink and Fear of the Unknown

The ID8s out west went to Bandung last week for our first In-Service Training conference. It was refreshing in many ways. It was nice to see the other westies, talk about bule problems and feel somewhat insulated when we went out. It goes without saying that if you’re living in a town where you’re the only Westerner for miles around you’re going to stick out like a sore thumb. I’ve visited countries where I’d rather lie and claim another nationality because news that I’m American is ill-received. However, that is not the case in Indonesia. Everyone is ecstatic to hear that I come from America and most everyone I’ve met so far makes me feel very welcomed once we get to this point in the conversation. Have I met Obama? Am I aware that my president likes bakso? Do I like bakso? It’s like watching a child on Idul Fitri morning.

 But, sometimes people are a little....too nice. Or, by my standards, rude, as the case may be. I've harped on the obsession with taking selfies and lack of personal bubble thing on here before. I think it’s cool to complain a little about this with other bules. It helps keep you sane. At my site, most of the people I come across on a day to day basis are no longer shocked by my presence (people used to point to me and sometimes exclaim fearfully that I was a ghost. This was one of the most extreme reactions I've received). I think everyone in my immediate surroundings accepted rather quickly that I’m an unmarried 24 year old girl whose finished her undergrad and is looking for a little something different at this point in her life. I know it’s different at everybody’s site and every time you meet someone new you sort of go through the whole floored reaction process again and have to look in the mirror later to make sure you haven’t turned into the Elephant Man or something.

So towards the end of last week I was feeling a little OD-ed on the bule solidarity. I love all these people individually or in small groups but as one big group I start to feel like I’m burning a little in the spotlight. Especially one night when several groups converged and we set out to find a venue to dance and listen to music in. One club had a policy (written in English on the wall) that people with flip-flops and shorts would not be allowed inside. This made perfect sense to me and the person in our small group who was wearing flip-flops and shorts so we decided to look for another place. At this point some other groups of volunteers arrived until we were a buzzing swarm of about 30+ bules standing outside this club. Everyone was waiting for a consensus on what to do. We were there, we were attracting attention and the more fluent among us were trying to convince the security personal to let our improperly-shoed friends in.

This is the part where I felt the mood change and it turned into an us vs. them thing. The better course to take would have been for the few of us who just wanted to leave should have just left, but for some reason we didn’t. I don’t know, it was like watching a train wreck. The wreck part being that we weren’t being discriminated against, it was just a safety policy and yet, someone felt they should let us in anyway and that thought spread and spawned bitter feelings towards the manager, towards the people who were being let in with flimsy footwear and so on. So, by way of providing a conclusion to this thought, just by standing there I felt like I participated in groupthink and it was an unpleasant feeling. It was definitely not my opinion that we were being discriminated against. This experience hit it home for me on how the few really do represent the many. I saw the video below recently and it is what inspired me to write about this experience.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xeukZ6RcUd8

So whether you're being discriminated against or you're misreading the situation, letting yourself get caught in the heat of the moment is never a pleasant feeling in my experience. Associating the fault of one person with a group of people is the product of anger or fear and only results in more anger and/or fear. Common sense, yes? My point isn't to point fingers and say "we done bad." It's to reflect on this experience by saying that yes, we will always stand out but a certain amount of the attention we draw to ourselves is self-wrought.

I personally have not received a lot of discrimination in Indonesia so far (besides the odd over-charging taxi cabby or not being let into a mosque or random people asking me for money and/or gifts) and those situations where I haven't been let in somewhere or have been asked quite a lot of questions by officials, well....I've understood each of them so far. They're just curious and/or cautious but no one I've met so far who I've interacted with directly has come across as having bad intentions specifically because I'm an American. In fact, I'm surprised by that.

On a somewhat lighter and only slightly-related note, here is something I wrote earlier this month in my digital journal when I was feeling a little exasperated by some of the questions I was receiving about America.

 Fear of the unknown: is there cheese in America? Are there cockroaches in Indonesia?

It goes both ways really – this whole great unknown thing. You can spend an astounding amount of time in a place and, by not asking the right questions, never come to know that place. I get the strangest questions sometimes from people on both ends of the cultural exchange spectrum (and as often as this I-can’t-believe-it-until-I-see-it phenomenon is observed amongst travelers, I think it still bears expatiating upon). Of course, the people I’ve spoken with here so far in Indonesia want to know if there are Muslims in America and if people eat rice there. I feel like saying “duh” to these questions, but I can sort of see where they’re coming from. My favorite question so far has been: “is there water in America?” This stunned me into silence. I waited for my host mom and sisters to laugh but they never did.

I realize as I write this that I’m the pot calling the kettle black. On the eve of my departure for Indonesia, amid friends and well-wishers, one solitary question floated to the forefront of all the other important questions I had about this unknown place I was to move to: are there cockroaches in Indonesia?

This recollection made me realize something. The unknown will always remain a black hole for common sense. It’s like my phobia of cockroaches; there’s no sense to it, it’s just a gripping terror that controls all other parts of my brain when I’m in its presence. I think there is something to be said about an age of globalization where all the information in the world at our fingertips is not enough convince us of the truth. Maybe that's the way it should be. I'm a stout believer in experiential education. Shakespeare may be great but you are the living breathing person occupying this world today and to respect the value of your own experience is to be your own teacher.

 

Sorry this post was all over the place. That's sort of how I've been feeling lately.

Now there's something you don't see every day

On Monday morning a cow and a sheep stood quietly, tethered beneath the cool shade of the mango trees in the school courtyard. It’s a very narrow courtyard, usually crowded with students’ parked motorbikes. The cow and sheep didn’t do much except try to eat some leaves on the bushes that grow just outside the school fence. I was there a few minutes before 7 and the school was quite empty, save for a few students taking pictures of the nonplussed cow and sheep.

I skyped a bit and signed off at 8:30 because several screams in the courtyard alerted me to the fact that things were starting. The students stood around this end of the courtyard with their camera phones out, capturing footage. The cow had been laid low with its hooves tied together and harness over its mouth. I looked around and realized the sheep had already lost its head.

If you’re thinking this sounds vaguely like a scene from Alice in Wonderland there are some similarities - one in particular, I felt I had stepped into a topsy-turvy world. The main difference, however, was that the world was upright and there was no line between myth and daylight.  

According to the tradition of Idul Adha, affluent Muslims must purchase a goat, sheep, camel or, usually, a cow to sacrifice as a symbol of Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice his only son to God. One third goes to the family, one third to friends and the other third to the poor, although this division varies (almost all of our cow/sheep went to some 250 poor families in the surrounding community). I’ve read in articles since Sunday that more than 100 million animals are slaughtered worldwide in the two days of Eid (10 million in Pakistan alone). All holidays are costly, that is to say, where there’s a holiday, there’s a thriving business scene behind it; but this may be one of the more expensive ones. For a somewhat funny article about how one cattle trading family feels at this time of year (among other topics about Idul Adha) see this article: http://indonesianow.blogspot.com/2013/10/idul-adha-no-place-for-squeamish.html

In my ignorance last Saturday I assumed that my principal would be paying for the sacrificial animals. As it turns out, each student contributed Rp 30,000 (about $3) beforehand. The teachers also contributed an unspecified amount. The sheep cost Rp 2,575,000 (~$200) and the cow cost Rp 15 million (~$1,200). Another statistic: Muslims worldwide shell out about $3 billion USD for these 100 million animals slaughtered on this holiday (all of this from Wikipedia btdubs).

I’ve changed my opinion about all this over the past few days. It’s easier to speak in numbers. It’s harder to grasp the meaning of Idul Adha from a Western perspective where slitting the throat of an animal who is fully conscious would be considered brutal, archaic or inhumane. Indeed, according to Pisani, Australia stopped exporting cattle to Indonesia two years ago after they saw some scenes aired of animal brutality in Indonesian slaughterhouses. I don’t know what was going on exactly in those slaughterhouses but my teachers at least spoke to me about how letting the blood from the neck wound pour into the hole and the whole ritual with all the prayers and singing is in fact their way of preparing the meat to be halal, or prepared according to Muslim law. Although watching the cow’s final distraught moments was terrifying, I have to admit that it is more than I have ever done for any meat I’ve eaten.

 

When I started talking about Idul Adha being about sacrifice my counterpart cut in (I do apologize for the puns - this whole experience really is affecting me and my way of dealing is by making light of it) and said “that is the story but the most important value is community”. There’s that word again. The atmosphere surrounding Monday was similar to Idul Fitri and to our Christmas: a religious ceremony, feasting and the spirit of giving. Although a lot of people celebrated Eid-al-Adha on Sunday (like my family), many schools, excluding public elementary schools*, hosted a sacrifice on Monday. Some students stayed to bag the meat which would then be distributed to some designated poor families. Today one of the teachers made beef soup and a yellow rice cake and so so much more food for all of the teachers.

After the sacrifice was over, the students laid out some plastic school banners and an assembly line was started from the tree to which the cow was still tied. The students, in their pristine white shirts and pale blue pants, separated the meat into neat lines of 1 kilo amounts - only the boys actually.

 

Portions of meat also go to students whose parents or close family members have died. They got tickets and handed those tickets in for bags of meat. I am constantly surprised at the level of attention the school/teachers pay to the students.

 

*Acting Jakarta Governor passed a controversial decree on July 17^th prohibiting the sale and slaughter of livestock on elementary school property because of the potential psychological effects on students (http://beritajakarta.com/en/read/3408/Governor_Decree_on_Slaughter_of_Sacrificial_Animals_Misinterpreted#.VDIpB7scSW8 )