Sungai Telang, on the other hand, is lovely.

It is harvest season, and the fields are all green and yellow, heavy with grain. People are now living in their farm huts- small houses built on the sides of their fields, so that they can see what is happening to their field and fend off the paddy-eating pipit birds. The kids catch fish in the sawah and get all mucky in the mud. Neighbors pass all the time on the way to their own fields.

Unlike Lubuk Kambing, where I lived a little outside of town and was therefore disconnected to the people in the village, Sungai Telang is small enough that everyone at least knows who I am. This meant that coming back was a chorus of, “Hey! Bria’s back!”, instead of curious glances. It also meant that when I went to get the house keys from the people from the village head’s wife, the seven-year-old Fadilah cheered and the four-year old Fadili followed me around for the rest of the day, insisting on sitting on my lap when I sat down, and holding my hand when we walked. I had printed some baby pictures of the neighbor’s six-month-old and all the people from the houses around came to look at them.

So, because the family is in the farm house, I have the village house to myself. I think this is one of the main reasons why this visit to the village has been so nice. I really value having some space to myself, so I can just collapse or dance around the house, or read, or do whatever anyone else would be hard to explain to a nice family from Sungai Telang. For the last few nights I have been staying up late and reading articles by Arun Agrawal (a possibility for my M.A./ Ph.D supervisor??!? maybe) by lantern light. I have also begun to take a crack at the grad school application proposals by lantern light. If I bring the light up close to the papers, the light is bright, and a lovely yellow color for reading. The nights are cold in Sungai Telang, and in my empty house, it is silent and lovely for working.

For every meal, I walk through the village, past the houses, past the hanging bridge, into the woods, and clamber over a fence between the woods and the rice paddies, and to the newly constructed sawah hut. I cook with the Village head’s wife. She now trusts me to cook, almost by myself. I think that means I have graduated to the age of a 11 or 12 year old. Still, so much better that before when I had no idea what to do. The village head gave me the nod yesterday and told me that, indeed, “you can cook now. huh.”. He is remarkably unverbose (terse seems to have negative connotations). I was proud.

Also, for the first two days I was there, I had time to devote to the sawahs and got mucky myself going into the fields with my sabit (curved blade for cutting paddy stalks) to harvest. It is not hard. Paddy in sawahs is planted in hand sized bunches. To harvest, you just grab the bunch, and chop with sabit. The process is called ngabit— verbs are often created by adding “ng” to the beginning of the relevant noun. Of course, by evening, everyone in the village knew that I had been harvesting. Luckily, I had worked hard and well, so I heard people telling each other that I was “strong and doesn’t get tired easily. she is capable”. Wheee! It is also to get another chance to dig in muck and get honestly physically exhausted. FYI—paddy leaves are really sharp. They hurt.

So, for the moment, the village life is good. I honestly, at the moment, don’t have much of an urge to leave. And -- if I ever get that point in my life—it might be a cool site to do more long-term research. Hmmmmm.