God Luck

An hour before my weekly English Club yesterday (a class for adults that I teach at Alam Bahasa),  the skies darkened and then opened into a long-overdue and violent monsoon season storm, completely with bolts of lightening and thunder galore. The god Thor smiled ironically at me as I threw on a jacket and rain poncho and headed out into the flash floods to Alam Bahasa. 


Amazingly, many students were there on time; a great start to the club. Midway through, when the power went out, no one moved to leave. Instead we had a battery-operated lantern and candle-lit session. This week my theme was "Luck and Fortune." We talked about good and bad luck in different countries, played Jeopardy and then broke into discussion groups.  My question: "Is luck or hard work more important for personal success?" I figure this was a controversial question and one that could spur fruitful discussion in any cultural context. Except I forgot to figure in one thing: God.

 The discussion started off well, with most students arguing the side of hard work but a brave few trying 'luck'. One student though, refused the existence of luck, saying that all good fortune is preceded by some action. I offered the example of walking down the street and finding money on the ground as 'luck', but she disagreed. It also had to have been preceded by 'some action'. I was confused until she said, "And the most important thing is to pray."

Although Indonesia is a majority Muslim country, Jogja has several Catholic universities and a healthy Catholic population around Alam Bahasa. In this particular class, I also had two Catholic nuns join, though it was a different student who was insistent against the existence of luck.


Thinking on my feet, I chose to introduce 'fate' to the list of vocabulary: luck, fortune, fate. But honestly, the anti-luck student had stonewalled the activity. It reminded me of my Cross-Cultural Understanding class last year, when there were several conversations about sexuality and gender that just ended because God entered. And I've observed countless discussion circles at the graduate school (in the Cross-cultural and Religious Studies program, no less) come to a impasse because of a statement like, "But the Qur'an says..."


Many of the classes I teach depend on dialogue and creative, open-minded, student-driven discussions to flesh out the course material and to encourage conversational speaking in English. When God is put on the table, there can be no counter-argument without blaspheme, no continuation without offense. And so I ask myself a question that's been asked a thousand times before: is belief in God diametrically opposed to dialogue? 


Over the 20 months that I've been living abroad, I've questioned my own relationship with God many times. Living amongst so many who are so religious, but also in many ways less fortunate than I is a strange paradigm. I can't help but think that some people are just "luckier" than others. 

I'm still not entirely sure on what side I stand. I do, however, know one thing for sure: God is powerful. I have faced nearly every obstacle a teacher may face: reluctant/shy/hostile students, lack of class materials, technological disasters, monsoon rains and lightening, power outages, cultural disconnects... I could go on and on. And yet the only force that can consistently ruin my lesson plan and leave me searching for a way out is that one almighty force. Thanks, God.

Read more...

Karaoke, Revolution, Black Magic

At first glance I'll admit that the words 'karaoke', 'revolution', and 'black magic' don't really seem to have anything in common. But in Indonesia, anything is possible. Here's the story of my weekend.

Karaoke, like in many other Asian countries, is huge in Indonesia. Unlike in some other Asian countries and certainly unlike in the US, people here sing karaoke sober. Yep, stone cold. But we Americans always find ways around this and so a few Bintang beers augmented the already delightful rendered versions of songs by such classic artists like Billy Idol, the Backstreet Boys, and of course, Queen. Because really, what is a trip to a karaoke house without an entirely raucous belting of 'Bohemian Rhapsody'? Walk next door to find that the local Circle K now imports M&Ms (first time in Indonesia)... all is a success.

Fast forward to Saturday night: The crew has decided to go see a concertt being held at UGM. Iwan Fals, virtually unknown in the States, is an Indonesian legend who wrote incredibly potent protest songs during the regime of President Suharto in Indonesia. He was so critical of the government that some of his songs were banned and concerts frequently canceled during Suharto's presidency. For young Indonesians, he has become a symbol of revolutionary fervor and demand for government transparency.

Sri Sultan Hamengkubowono X in a flashy purple number

The anticipation was high, but in classic Indonesian style Iwan Fals himself did not actually come on stage until two hours after the concert began. First, an opening performance to the opening performance, some MC banter (MCs being an integral part of every event here), a speech by the Sultan (see pic) and finally the real opening performance: the Indonesian wind orchestra and the UGM students choir, featuring some of my students! The choir/orchestra set included some psuedo-film soundtrack music, some humorous Javanese numbers that I did not understand at all, and finally juuuust to keep the audience on their toes... Bohemian Rhapsody.

It's at moments like these, when I wish so desperately that I could insert my family and friends from the US into my life for just a minute. Because no matter how hard I try to describe the scene, the total effect is lost: 30-something students singing in the choir with a mic'd wind band and a very young, very skinny, VERY rocking out nasal alto boy singing the solo. Green laser show overtop all. Freddie Mecury done be proud.

The feature performance was well worth the wait, especially when Mr. Fals decided to take a break from the protest music to give a little love ballad. At this moment the laser show turned into two flying hearts that would fly towards each other and pucker into a kiss in the middle of the screen. Incredible. Only at one moment was I unsure that this was the best concert I've been to in Indonesia, and that was the moment that fervent Iwan Fals fans started yelling "Bring down the President!" from the rafters. Were we to have a revolution in the UGM concert hall? Ah someone's bark is worse than their bite... no revolution for now. Put your shirts back on, boys.

The sexy Iwan Fals and the not as sexy flying heart laser show

The night progressed into a multi-language game of Taboo, and finally wound down with some 24-hour Padang (west Sumatran) style food at a little diner up the road. To the background of the most melodramatic TV show I've ever seen (perhaps with the exception of Passions), the conversation turned to black magic. This is just the sort of thing that happens here. The best late-night chatter involves animals born to humans, being possessed and of course, walking corpses.

It seems that everyone has a story about dark powers, and our friend Ganda is from Tanah Toraja, one of the most saturated-with-spirits locales in all of Indonesia. In Toraja, there are elaborate funeral customs that require so much money that bodies are left unburied for weeks, months, and even years until the resources can be collected for the funeral. And that's only the beginning... I better stop before I give myself nightmares.

All in all, a pretty good weekend filled with unexpected twists and as usual, plenty of absurdity... It almost makes Oberlin seems boring.

*photo credits Geger!

Read more...

Love Day in a Land of Laws

Oh, Valentine's Day. Some of us hate it; some of us welcome the sparkles, sweets and sap as a breath of cheer in a long and dreary winter season. Many people choose to boycott the big V, considering it a totally commercial holiday celebrated only for the benefit of greeting card companies. But all in all, Valentine's Day is pretty innocuous. For me it usually passes with the over-consumption of homemade chocolates (thanks Dad) and a nice evening with friends/boyfriend/family depending on the year.

There are some parties in Indonesia who do not see the Day of Love as quite so innocent. Believing that celebration of Valentine's Day might lead to kissing (gasp) or even pre-marital sexual relations, the Islamic political party MUI has proclaimed V Day as haram, or forbidden. Some Muslim clerics also hold that since Valentine's Day is linked to St. Valentine, it is a Christian holiday, making it innappropriate for Muslims to celebrate.

On the 14th, an interactive  section of the Jakarta Post printed letters from readers in response to this declaration. Some comments basically said, "Who cares what the MUI thinks? We also can think for ourselves," while some of the letters agreed completely that Valentine's Day is immoral and should be banned.

Strange that anyone cares, since my Indonesian friends and students informed me that almost no one celebrates Valentine's Day other than middle school students, and what opportunity do 13-year olds have to "engage in sexual relations" in Indonesia? Not much. Definitely less opportunity than 13-olds in the US, I'm guessing.

Then again, I did see several couples out having candlelit dinners on Monday (and wearing matching couples T-shirts), and my buddy told me that on Valentine's Day, the number of condoms sold at convenience stores shoots through the roof. I'm thinking, That's terrific! People are using condoms! But the MUI probably doesn't share my enthusiasm.

At least Indonesia's practice of religious tolerance prevents the federal police from taking drastic measures like in Malaysia, where under Islamic law, 100 couples were arrested for celebrating V Day. The Jakarta Globe article talks about the public campaign, "Mind the Valentine's Day Trap" set up to encourage people not to celebrate the holiday and engage in "vice activities."

Signs that say "Beware the Valentine's Day trap!" in Malaysia, courtesy Times of Pakistan

Doesn't the Malaysian special police have more important things to worry about than some red construction paper and chocolate-flavored smooches? But we aren't the only ones thinking that the show of force on a day meant to celebrate caring is ridiculous. As the human rights lawyer Malik Imtiaz Sarwar tweeted, "Happy V Day. Am so happy for a government that micro-manages my life and does all my thinking."

If I were the government, I'd be worried that my people would go eventually go brain-dead from not ever having to exercise decision-making skills. A country without creative thinkers = a country without entrepreneurs. That can't be good for Malaysia's 'Tiger Economy,' now can it?
All because of a little love.

Read more...

Word Association Game

Everyone's played some incarnation of the old word association game, where a word is thrown out by one person and the other has to say the first thing that comes to their mind:

Peanut butter!  Jelly!

Winter!  Hot Chocolate!

Infidelity!  Tiger Woods!

Ok, so we all know the basic format of the game. Well, in Indonesia, things get a little topsy-turvy, since objects that we associate with one thing in the US often have other functions here. For example, toilet paper is rarely available in bathrooms, but often sits in plastic dispensers on top of restaurant tables, subbing for napkins. Still serving a 'wipe' function, I guess. A better one is chickens. In the US, I imagine the word association game going like this:

Chicken!  Egg!         or

Chicken!  Farm!

But here, chickens are commonly seen tied together by the feet in bundles and hanging off motorbikes. Additionally, the phrase ayam kampus, or 'campus chicken' means a college-campus whore. Definitely a game-changer.

Chicken!  Prostitution!

This same-object-different-function phenomenon has occured to me before, but after so many months, I start to forget that these things "don't belong" in the framework of my mind. So the other night when I was driving home and approached two enormous potted plants sitting in the middle of the road, I didn't quite know what to do.

Two potted plants, so large that they were almost trees, sat one in front of the other, completely obstructing the middle of the road. Riding a motorbike, I could go around, but for a car it would have been completely impassable. Upon closer examination, I realized that they were 'guarding' patches of wet cement. Turns out the potholes in the road were being fixed and they were fresh out of orange cones! Totally brilliant, if you ask me; there was no possibility of me driving over the fresh cement. But how mammoth potted greenery was easier to come by than a reflective piece of plastic, I'm still not sure. I am sure, however, that in the case of...

Potted Plants!

...I will now always think...

Asphalt!

Hopefully I can find a different association for 'chicken' as well. Indonesia is giving them a bad name.

Read more...

Two Days Ago triumph

I’ve been waiting to use this one for a long time. Today I figure, I have pink eye, swollen lymph nodes (still not sure why), and can’t sleep. It’s too cold to take a cold shower and there’s no gas to heat water… my moment is here.

There’s no one on the road at 6am on a Sunday, and it’s relaxing to cruise along with little need for rear-view mirrors. I park, proceed into the Jogjakarta Plaza Hotel and down the stairs to the Kirana Health Club—my gym. The attendant greets me with the usual: Selamat pagi! Good morning! Fitness? But before he can hand me the small-size sweat towel, I say, Sebetulnya, airnya kosku mati, jadi saya hanya mau mandi. Actually, the water in my house is broken, so I just want to take a shower. Mutual laugh. These things happen.

And I stroll right on by the treadmills, weight room and scale, straight to a hot shower.

Read more...

Eggers, etc.

My body is under assault again. Evidently, no matter how much I like being back in Indonesia, my immune system disagrees. While I’m awake waiting for an appropriate hour to head to the pharmacy, I figure I may as well crank these pink and puss-filled eyes open, and do some writing. I would rather wait for the sun to come up before heading to the pharmacy.

So. My pre-dawn insomnia offered me some extra time for reading, and the book of the week has been Dave Eggers’ Zeitoun, a biographical account of a Syrian-American’s personal nightmare in the aftermath of hurricane Katrina. It seemed almost serendipitous that I be awake, reading passages from the Qur’an (because Eggers includes certain passages as the main character looks to faith to give him strength) when the morning call to prayer began.

I’m not sure if I’ve described the morning call before, but it is one of the stranger sensations of living in a Muslim-majority country. The “call” is a musical recitation (through in Islam it is not considered music) of verse, amplified from neighborhood mosques over a loudspeaker and quite literally calling people out of sleep and to the mosque for prayer-time. The first prayer happens after “first light” and before sun-up, which is around 4.30am here. Throughout the day there are four more mandatory prayer times: mid-morning, noon, mid-afternoon (pre sunset) and after sun-down. All of these times are based on the sun and so vary depending on where you are in the world.

(Incidentally, I asked one of the teachers in the office how they knew what time to pray when they were in Oberlin, where there isn’t a proliferation of mosques. He told me that initially he was unsure, but realized that you can get the exact times for your location on the internet, along with the weather. I love technology).

As my friend Anna described it after a trip to Turkey, the call is the one thing that breaks through the day and gives you the shivers every time. It’s beautiful, and never quite loses that exotic feeling of being very very far away from your native land.

In any case, it was during this pre-dawn dissonance—because there are several mosques in my neighborhood all reciting at slightly different moments, with different “melodies” in different keys—that I was reading about Abdulrahman Zeitoun, and thought that I would share an extended excerpt from the book.

During one of the more biographical chunks, Eggers relates the experience of Abdulrahman’s wife Kathy when she was first learning about Islam. She converted from Christianity before she and her husband ever met.

The excerpt is a bit long, but it’s crucial stuff. Eggers (or perhaps Zeitoun in her testimony) is spot-on in what he includes to bring a non-Muslim through the murky water of misconception to relate to this Muslim New Orleans family. About Kathy,

“At first she was simply intrigued by the basic things she didn’t know, and the many things she’d wrongly presumed. She had no idea, for instance, that the Qur’an was filled with the same people as the Bible—Moses, Mary, Abraham, Pharaoh, even Jesus. She hadn’t known that Muslims consider the Qur’an the fourth book of God to His messengers, after the Old Testaments, the Psalms, and the New Testament…

She was frustrated that she hadn’t known any of this, that she’d been blind to the faith of a billion or so people. How could she not know these things?

And Muhammad… She’d thought He was the actual god of Islam, the one whom Muslims worshipped. But he was simply the messenger who related the word of God. An illiterate man, Muhammad was visited by the angel Gabriel (Jibril in Arabic), who related to him the words of God. Muhammad became the conduit for these messages, and The Qur’an, then, was simply the word of God in written form. Qur’an meant ‘Recitation.’ ”

The next part captures exactly what I’ve tried for months to articulate about Indonesian (and Jogjakartan) Islam:

“She’d assumed that Muslims were a monolithic group, and that all Muslims were made of the same devout and unbending stock. But she learned that…there were the same variations in faith and commitment as there were in any church. There were Muslims who treated their faith lightly, and those who knew every word of the Qur’an and its companion guide to behavior, the Hadith.

There were Muslims who knew almost nothing about their religion, who worshiped a few times a year, and those who obeyed the strictest interpretation of their faith. There were Muslim women who wore T-shirts and jeans and Muslim women who covered themselves head to toe. There were Muslim men who modeled their lives on the life of the Prophet, and those who strayed and fell short.

There were passive Muslims, uncertain Muslims, borderline agnostic Muslims, devout Muslims, and Muslims who twisted the words of the Qur’an to suit their temporary desire and agendas. It was all very familiar, intrinsic to any faith.”*

This reminded me of an opinion piece printed in the New York Times a few months ago that offered up this idea: the greatest variance of ideas does not come up between Muslims and non-Muslims, but within Islam itself.** I think if that were a more widely accepted notion—that moderates of any faith have more in common with each other than with fanatics of their own religion—there could be a lot more tolerance in the world. Might be something to think about in a country built on the principle of religious freedom.

*[pg61-62 of Zeitoun by Dave Eggers, McSweeny’s Book: San Fransico, 2009. Random House ed.]

**For a good contrasting book, I would recommend The Bookseller of Kabul. Arne Sierstad uses a similarly intimate and engaging but no-frills journalistic prose to give an account of a family in Afghanistan. It’s unsettling, but is interesting as an example of Islam on the other end of the spectrum from that depicted in Zeitoun.

Read more...

The Perfect Day

Gde and Geger being silly with chopsticks

Just like some days are “wrong side of the bed” days, some are destined to go down in the books under “absolutely wonderful things could not have been better” days.

Just to preface this account, I’d like to say that this was my first whole day back in Jogjakarta after almost six weeks of being gone. Six weeks! Yes, taking a cold bucket shower after all those hot showers was difficult. Yes, my room was full of mold (all my fabrics are at the cleaner). Yes, my bike did not want to start. Yes the gas is out in the boarding house kitchen and no one is taking the responsibility to get a new tank (I did it last time, just for the record). And yes, my house is suffering from a massive plumbing mutiny because someone decided that their women’s-time-of-the-month items needed to be flushed down the toilet. Come on, people, even I know better (so yes all three bathrooms downstairs are full of shit, like, literally).

Friend Dia's soon-to-be-dorm-style-hostel house!

So maybe it was springing off of yesterday’s mild disappointments that made today so wonderful. But I have a feeling that it was written in the sunshine. Today IT DID NOT RAIN. So wonderful was the not-rain that after a delicious breakfast out on the town (see above note about no gas) with my dear friend Gde, I returned to the house and decided to get out the ol’Honda.

Now Honda Supra Astreas, though marvelous specimens on the road, do not take kindly to six-week abandonments, and Betty (yes, named after January Jones) is especially sassy towards me when I return from abroad. You think you can just leave me in the garage, covered in dust for weeks and I’m just gonna START UP right away? Nuh-uh. So after a few failed kickstarts, my sensitive side told me that maybe Betty just needed a little love. Luckily, there is a lovely patch of pseudo grass and a water spicket just next to the house, and a cleverly stashed away sponge in my possession.

I must have looked like the equivalent of a cheerleader bikini car wash, since I decided that shorts and a tank top were appropriate for my front lawn. But actually my outfit was less strange than just the fact that I was washing my own bike. Queenie (my Taiwanese next-door neighbor who studied at Oklahoma University, married a Jogjanese man), after squealing and doing the regular, “How was your break?!?!” stuff, asked, “Why are you washing your bike? You can do it around the corner for 2000!” This is the equivalent of 22 cents USD. I had a good laugh at myself and a good defense: “It’s a time-honored American tradition to wash the car!”

And wouldn’t you know, a little love worked… Betty is back.

And this was only the beginning of my glorious, wonderful, very perfect day. I’ll compress it into a list:

The master chef and host, Astrid

1. PERFECT weather. I know I should pretend to not gloat about 83, dry, breezy and sunny with cotton-puff clouds to those of you buried under snow in the NE US, but it would ring false. So this is me gloating.
2. Chinese New Year! Or as they call it in Jogja: Imlek. Gong xi fa choi!! Gde, Geger and I went to our friend Astrid’s house and helped her (marginally) cook an amazing Chinese meal and then shared it with friends down the road.
3. What could be more beautiful than the late afternoon sky reflected in young rice paddies?
4. Visit to Geger’s “countryside” house and meeting his parents (obviously this means drinking tea and eating MORE).
5. Return to JAMU! the bitter herbal medicinal drink known to cure everything from hangovers to heartache and high cholesterol to boot. Keep posted for an in-depth blog coming up about my new favorite jamu joint.
6. No work tomorrow. ‘Nuff said.

Welcome back.

Read more...