Anak Kampung (?!)

This, as you will soon be able to tell, was written a few days ago. It turns out that Neldy, who I am working with in the village, had to come out to Jambi, the capital city of the province to send his monthly reports, and I caught I ride on the back of his motorbike. So, Internet! before I expected it.

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It is the time of afternoon rest, my second full day in Lubuk Kambing. Outside my bilik, my room, there are a group of guys, permanently hanging out, while Neldy, the person I am working with, fixes his motorbike.

I got here two days ago, in the early evening. I caught the plane from Jakarta, and I was met in Jambi by Neldy. The way the project is currently set up is that there are two villages where this program is running- Lubuk Kambing and Sungai Telang. In each village, there is a village level facilitator, who is working on fulfilling the goals of the program in that specific area. Neldy is the facilitator in Lubuk Kambing. He is in his early thirties—he has been working with NGOs for a long while. He is getting married in a month. He loves his motorbike.

An hour after I got in to town Neldy and I caught the public bus to Lubuk Kambing, which is actually some person’s van. The territory that we drove through was perfectly flat at the beginning, rolling into hills as we reached near the village. The land- that used to be forests- is now almost all plantations, mostly rubber and oil palms. When you get to the top of a hill, you can see the palm oil (kelapa sawit) plantations roll over all the surrounding hills. We arrived in the village in the evening. I am staying in the school teacher’s residence, which is also where Neldy is staying.

I am staying in one set of rooms of a three apartment house. It was abandoned until the teachers from a two room elementary school needed a place to live. There are actually five elementary schools in the five hamlets that make up this village. There is not, however, a middle school. Any child that wants to study beyond 6th grade has to leave this area and move away from all family and friends. This was the way it was in Kalimantan 10 years ago, and I find myself somewhat shocked that it is still that way. Most people do not graduate elementary school.

Anyhow, I digress. The rooms I took over were Neldy’s rooms—he moved in next door. I have a front room, where Neldy’s bed used to be, and a back room, where my room is. Meals are cooked in the apartment next to ours, where one of the teachers cooks. We give her money—about $20 a month. I have no idea if she is able to keep any left over after buying our food. I hope she does—she does all the cooking, shopping, preparing. It is perfectly decent—clean, and with more privacy than I expected. But the ceiling is about to fall in- it is plywood rotted through with water. The walls are pieces of plywood, and there is no auditory privacy. I have a bat that flies through my ceiling and hangs out directly above me. The shower is either the well next to the house, or the river, which is slight farther away. The bathroom is a small stream, hidden by bushes. So much for the backpacker’s oath of never going to the bathroom within 200 ft of water. There is electricity. Lubuk Kambing is not yet on the grid, but many people have their own individual generators. The house across from us does not have electricity, but we do, for about 4 hours a night, and 2 hours in the morning. It makes all the difference to how people run their lives.

In front of the house is the road. This is a new village, meaning it was built to follow the road, and not the river. We are near the river, however, but the houses look towards the road. The road is the main road between big cities—I am still working on figuring out the geography. This does not mean much—the road is partially asphalted, where it has not been torn up by logging trucks. Illegal logging is the number one source of income in the village. But there are so many motorbikes! Every family has at least one. You can buy them on credit—supposedly it is quite normal that people will have their bikes until they cannot pay for a month, and then the bike will be taken away. But it seems everyone has to have one. Neldy has one, of course. His is a large black motorbike- in contrast to the motorscooters that most people have. I must admit—it’s pretty cool. In that machismo is cool kind of way.

As for the work: (This has been updated since I first wrote this entry) For the moment the work feels like paddling a canoe through a river of mud. Sticky, and difficult. Occasionally, very successful, but you can’t know before hand how. Not bad. Neldy has not been working with women’s groups at all—perhaps that has something to do with the machismo seen in the motorbike. He has been working with the men’s group- the farmer’s group. In fact, he has gotten on quite far with them. He definitely seems interested in the work they are doing. Not so much with the women with their cake making parties. But I have a couple of concrete tasks that I need to complete before I leave the village—get things going with the women’s groups, start with individual discussions, get Neldy to start working on writing papers of his work. And I think these will all be able to be achieved. I am enjoying it, but it is hard, especially at the beginning.

(not edited—written two days in) But I don’t want to make things sound bleak—and certainly not bleaker than they actually are. Last night we went to mandi sungai, to bathe in the river. The river near the house is downstream of the village, so the water that gets to us has the soap, the dirt, and everything else that people run in their water. But ten minutes away, by motorbike, is a lovely little river, still perfectly clear. So, we went to bathe. And really to bathe- not to swim- people brought their washing, people brought their shampoo, their washing, all of it. And was beautiful. I swam out into the middle of the river and caught on to a branch, and was pulled along in the water. Like flying. And today, we went to a hamlet about 10 km away, on motorbike. The road, for the last 6km, was a mud track that is impassable in times of rain. But it was beautiful, and smelled so good. And everyone is very nice, and taking care of me, and all you would expect.

But the hard part, right now, is not coming from the research. I am still dealing with the basics right now. I have not spoken English to anyone (besides telling the guys outside the answers for their crossword puzzles) for three days. I am coming off a serious caffeine addiction, and somehow, over-sweet tea is just not doing the trick. I am trying to ignore my internet-addiction (currently being satisfied), and how much I would really like to check my email and be in touch with everyone, everywhere. I am not sure how much time a day I should be working on the project to make myself feel productive. I want to hang out and read my books in free time, but I need to balance that with time spent sitting around and talking to people. I do not want to be thought strange because I spend so much time with my books. Gah! This will all become easier, I know, but as for right now, it is being wrestled with.

And before I send this out to the world, two anecdotes: ONE: On day three in the village, I went down to the river to go to the bathroom. Before I had any chance to do anything, I heard a loud rustle in the bushes near me. I stopped, and looked around. Suddenly, out of nowhere, a huge water buffalo came charging towards me. It stopped about 30 feet away and looked at me. I jumped to the other side of the river. I figured I was OK. No. The water buffalo charged again, to where I had been standing before. Gaa! Now it was blocking my way back to the house. And it was still making weird noises. So, I decided to run for it. I threw myself through some buses, hoping to make a large circle back to the house. By this point, the water buffalo had crossed the river. I ran over some thorns (barefooted), and clambered up a cliff into the neighbor’s house. I was safe. TWO: Going to the river to wash clothes. I had my big bucket of clothes, and I had to get down a small, wet, wooden ladder to the river. Good chance to prove that I was both a child of Kalimantan rivers and Ithaca gorges. Not gonna happen. While trying to get down, I tipped my bucket, so half my clothes (including the ones to change into) fell into the river and got wet. Ok. No problem. A little embarrassing, but no problem. So, I climbed onto the ladder. I have no idea what happened, but I slipped, caught my leg in the ladder, and ended up upside-down, hanging by one leg, on the ladder. I was perfectly fine, but everyone for miles got to see or hear about it. Blarg.

Here is a fact that will help me to fight a bit longer; things that don’t actually kill me outright make me stronger.

P.S. Another fact of interest: As of TODAY I have officially been out of college for one year. Totally unbelievable.