Transitions: Kuala Tungkal, Muara Bungo, and Beyond

I’m sitting in the offices of the Adaptive Collaborative Management program in Muara Bungo, Jambi. It is a CIFOR project, so I get to use their internet connection and now get to sit in their bright blue living room and type. It’s calm, a nice place to sit and write.

For the last week I have been traveling with Yulia, Heru, and Nety, the Bogor-based management of this project. They have come up here for these few days to visit the districts where our programs are running and run workshops for district-level officials to explain our work and get suggestions.

The first such workshop was in Kuala Tungkal, the capital city of Tanjabar province, which includes Lubuk Kambing. As I mentioned in the last blog, the town is lovely. It is on the eastern coast, slightly to the south of Malaysia. The feel of the city, however, is incredibly Malay. The food being sold in the stalls is as Indian and Chinese as it is Indonesian—roti canai, teh tarik, bak pao. The language is also very Malay, even more so than the language in Lubuk Kambing. The market on stilts and the many bicycle rickshaws are somehow more Putussibau, the small town in rural Borneo where I spent a lot of time growing up, than anything else. And the kites! I think the tiny birds that fly in great whooshing, raucous clouds are called kites. Burung Walet they are called here. They fill the sky every morning and evening, both by flying and by making their loud shrieking cry.

The workshop in Kuala Tungkal was a success, I guess. A lot of officials in batik shirts came and chain smoked through speeches on how to save the “lungs of the earth”. I gave my presentation on Participatory Action Research, which I have since improved drastically. With decentralization there have officially been many changes to the ways that the Indonesian government interacts with the people at the village level. The people who ran the top-down intensely bureaucratic programs of the Suharto-era, however, are the same. It feels like they can talk the talk, but walking the walk is not something they find pleasant. Still, we got our information across, and they had more suggestions about the work that they want us to do.

And now I am in Muara Bungo, the capital city of Bungo province, which includes Sungai Telang, my next home. The city seems non-descript and quiet. It is being developed into the next big city in Jambi Province, though, so there are some strange incongruities. This includes the hotel I am staying at right now-- simply luxurious. It has running hot water, a good air conditioner, a big TV (that oddly enough gets an all- French channel), and generally is just very clean and fancy. There are also large malls that are about 50% filled with stores—the rest still empty. It is ready to be a big town—it just does not have the people to fill it yet.

What it does have, however, is a gubernatorial campaign. All over Jambi there are banners, buttons, and stickers for the gubernatorial candidates. And today, the forerunner is staying at my hotel, meaning that the place is full of people with Zulkifli buttons, Zulkifli hats, Zulkifli shirts. It is shockingly like the campaigns in America—you can see the stressed out organizers and the big name officials. And the candidates all travel with their own troupes of supporting comedians and actors. It reminds me *shudder* of the Kerry campaign and all the pain and suffering that went with it.

The meeting with the government officials is tomorrow. Until then, I hang out with Nety, Yulia, and Heru, having massages and cream baths (scalp massage with good stuff for your hair), eating good food paid for by the CIFOR budget, and watching TV in the hotel. Or, like now, reading and answering emails, posting to the blog, and preparing my PAR presentation for tomorrow.

Then, on Wednesday, I head to Sungai Telang. What I have heard: It is smaller than Lubuk Kambing, and in many ways less developed. The electricity is patchy— people turn on their generators a couple times a week, or not at all when oil prices are high (oil prices are currently high). The river, however, is clear and fast running. The village is on the hills leading up to the mountains that form the backbone of Sumatra. It is cooler up there, almost cold at night. They tell me I need to bring socks. The views are lovely, so they say. It sounds pretty good to me. The plan is to stay up there until the end of the month, and then come back to town when Yenti needs to send his report. Then back to the village until the 11th. Then to Bogor. Then back to the villages. Then, who knows.