Life and Death

The raw red orb bleeding light into the rice paddies at the ungodly hour of 5:30 AM was visually befitting of the occasion that brought us on the road at that hour. 

Mind you, 5:30 is practically afternoon here, as it is two and a half hours after everyone has woken up - everyone including me, because after subuh prayer my family watches very loud tv programs right outside my room that are quite difficult to sleep through.

So, as I was saying, at 5:30 we all cheerily embarked to perform a korban, or sacrificial slaughter, as part of an Islamic celebration known as Aqiqah. I had not heard of Aqiqah before today. It is a ceremony performed for a new-born by one of the child's guardians 7 (or 14 or 21) days after it is born. Aqiqah is both a tradition and an act of charity that, in so doing, will ensure the safety of the child. 

A few minutes into our drive we stopped. Yes, just like that, in the middle of the semi-busy road. My host father called home and asked for my host uncle. He forgot the knife. 

We waited. 

My host dad pulled over and went to use a restroom at a mosque we had stopped in front of. 

Uat, my uncle, appeared minutes later on his motorcycle. From the depths of his jacket he produced a sheathed knife and passed it to Umi through the window. 

All was well and we were off again, the sky now an unforgiving white. 

Once we arrived at my host sister's in-laws' house, we all crooned over Queenara, the newewst addition to the family. I wandered through the house and found a beautiful garden out back. A group of women sat on the tiled patio in a circle chopping and grinding up rich spices to prepare the goat with for buka puasa (break fasting). 

As it is Ramadhan now, the holiest month when Muslims do not eat or drink from dawn to dusk, roughly 15 hours here because they eat before the first prayer, the feast will not be enjoyed until after 

Maghrib prayer this evening at 6 o'clock. 

This is Queenara, the ignorant recipient of this bloody blessing. She was born last Friday, June 19th. An interesting fact about Aqiqah is that baby boys recieve two goat sacrifices, instead of one. Not that I'm advocating more slaughter to even out the gender disparity, I'm just taking note. More blood and more celebration in the name of baby boys.

The neck is cut over a hole in the ground to let the blood drain out. This is part of halal custom.

I picked the wrong time to read Lord of the Flies.

I don't know if this is the tradition, but the father, Deni, bought the goat. Cost was around 2 million rupiah, or 150 USD.  

Abi (my host father, pictured above making the sacrifice) enthusiastically encouraged me to take a photo with the recently slaughtered goat. If you're gonna watch, you might as well get up close and personal with the proceedings. 

My host family and I left after some more crooning and will return for the feast tonight. Although things slow down A LOT during Ramadhan (no school, people don't want to travel because they're fasting..etc) I am happy to be spending the first half of Ramadhan here in my community (before traveling around Indo with my dad!) because I actually feel relaxed at my site for once. Its amazing what less traffic and fewer people hanging around in the heat of the day can do for your aimless jaunts out of the house. I can go a whole day without people shouting "foreigner" at me in "my" own neighborhood! It feels like the best of lazy days in summers past when I could watch the unfrantic world around me with an inner smile. 

Future sailors

It is rare these days to meet a person who lives outside of time. Ma Ai, a woman who lives next door and does the housework for my host family in the place of my busy host mom, is one of those rare people. She has the warmest, prettiest smile and, apart from when she's scolding my naughty host brother, she is calm and even-paced in all she does. She irons, cooks and washes clothes without rushing, day in, day out.

Ma Ai and my younger sister, always the hamster.

At any given time, I have four pieces of electronics in my backpack - a cheap disposable Indonesian phone, a smart phone, a laptop and an ipod. Ma Ai has one piece of technology: the exact same cheap Nokia cell phone I have. She uses it for one purpose: to recieve calls. One time my host mother Umi left her blackberry at home after leaving for work and then called it to check on its whereabouts with Ma Ai. I was still at home that morning so Ma Ai called me over and handed it to me, asking "how do I answer it?" By then Umi's cell had stopped ringing and so Ma Ai went to get her phone to call her back. She didn't know how to search the contacts or do anything but press the green telephone icon when the phone was ringing, so it was up to Generation Y to navigate the waters of communicating in our modern age.

These interactions between Ma Ai and me happen frequently when it's only us in the house together - and not just with technology. The other day she asked me when my dad was coming to visit. In July, I said. This didn't register for her so she asked if July was before or after the Haaj season. I knew from experience last year that a popular time for making the Haaj, according to the Islamic calendar, is September until October so I said it was before or, more specifically, one month from now. 

Ma Ai didn't go school, she will sometimes ask me to read her the time from the clock in the kitchen as the numbers carry no meaning for her, she doesn't know her age or birthday (we agreed early forties) and she asks me sometimes to read the grocery list Umi writes out for her or a name in her phone contacts. Her measurement of time is completely centered on relgious happenings, like the daily prayer or when someone will go on Haaj, or else just morning, afternoon or night. 

For instance, if I ask when Umi will be home she will say, after Duhur prayer. This is a habit of most people here though, so I am no more in the dark as to when events will take place with Ma Ai than I am with the general person I talk to.

She moved with her husband to live near and work for Umi "many years ago". She has three children, already grown and with families of their own. She lives with one of them and his wife and new-born child. The others live nearby, in this neighborhood. She adores t-shirts from neighboring cities like Bandung. This is to say that the only times she leaves the house are at the end of Ramadan, when it is customary to return to your family's hometown, see the family still living there and visit the burial grounds of deceased family members, and to accompany her extended family on a trip (my host family is included in her extended family). 

It isn't phenomenal to meet an adult in my neighborhood whose general literacy is surpassed by their children - I know a few others. What is novel for me to think about is the completely different sphere of time Ma Ai moves in. I suppose she isn't outside of time, as I originally said, but has a different way of measuring it, a mixture of internal and by the schedule of her religion. 

When I moved to this side of the world a little over a year ago I began to equate physical travel with time travel. As we cross time zones we aren't just going backward or forward a couple of hours, sometimes we're leaping through time by the decade. As we were discussing Karawang the other day, a man said to me that he thought Indonesia was approximately 60 years "behind" the United States in terms of progress. He gestured to the pot-holed main road for emphasis. Also, just five years ago - in some places even less - all of this was rice field, he added, referring to the bustling intersection along an irrigation chanel. I have heard this before about Karawang's history of development. 

Politically and economically, Indonesia is setting an example for its neighboring Asian countries. Socially-speaking, I have often heard the comparison made between Indonesia today and the United States pre-sexual revolution, pre-Clean Air Act, pre-Civil Rights Act...etc. I see the community of friendly, waving neighbors who stop to chat while carrying their babies in batik slings and all pray to the same god, where sons and husbands sit down expectantly waiting for a woman to bring them their plates (and aren't jumped by a brigade of feminists when they say that if you're a women you must also wash the dishes), where consuming alcohol is illegal and being gay is equated with being mentally handicapped and therefore you have no protection under the law and I feel as if I've stepped into the movie Pleasantville. If Pleasantville were an Islamic community filled with youngsters constantly checking social media on their blackberries. 

Having lived in Indonesia for a while, I've stopped keeping track of how many hours I spend in transit when taking the angkot home at night or how long I hang out with someone on my way out of my neighborhood. My measurements are sunlight, my stomach rumbling and my need for a bath. It feels like a lost Utopia.

As my loved ones, exes and former bosses can attest to, I don't keep the strickest watch on time. Maybe my interest in time as a general, abstract notion can account for some percentage of this natural affinity for jam keret or, rubber time as it is here called (and my tendency to procrastinate the other, larger percentage). I don't know if my town or the country as a whole can be compared to the United States 60-odd years ago but it's really beautiful to meet someone who doesn't live under the rule of this monarch Time who controls the lives of so many of us.