Indonesia: Life In The Islands

Making Friends?

I went out with Rima tonight, a girl I met at Brawaijaya University when I went to visit the law students there. She’s eighteen and really a sweet girl, but she exemplifies one of my biggest problems with making friends here—she’s terrified of me. She’s scared her English isn’t good enough to speak with me (she actually speaks fantastically well), scared that I won’t be happy, and scared that she is irritating/bothering me.

She called the other night to ask me about American Corner (the AMINEF office at Mohammadiyah University) and she could barely speak on the phone. I asked her to go to dinner with me so we could talk face to face and maybe she could calm down.

She sent me two text messages confirming that I was actually going to go to dinner with her (people really see me as a paragon of unreliability, which I think it odd because I have yet to miss a single appointment of any sort) and when she picked me up in her car she couldn’t look at me. The more nervous she is, the worse her English gets, so it was rough going for a while. Eventually she calmed down and stopped referring to her father as “she” and talking about “her work as an architect” (Bahasa Indonesia uses the word “dia” for both he and she, and so the most common mistake people make is arbitrarily using he or she to describe men or women. Some people always use he, some prefer she).

I like Rima because she answers all my questions. She doesn’t wear a jialbab because she feels she isn’t a pious enough Muslim to wear it yet. She has a boyfriend who is older than her that she lies to her mom about. She doesn’t dislike Chinese people, but there is a definite prejudice against them in Java because they’re so wealthy. Her grammar wasn’t always perfect, but she understood everything I said which is better than 99.99% of the people I meet here, including all of my students.

I wonder though if I can ever really have a friend here—like a true friend. One of us would always be speaking a language that isn’t our native tongue, and that makes things difficult since it’s so hard to hold conversations in a language you’re still trying to learn. Rima seemed like she was walking on eggshells with me the whole time—when honestly, I was just happy to have something to talk to and eat dinner with. She asked me very seriously if it would be OK, not a problem, not a burden, if I would go to her house for dinner and meet her mother. Maybe her mother would want to give me presents too? Is that OK? I was like, girl, anytime you want to give me free food and presents that is way more than OK.

We went and had our pictures taken in one of those photo booths (on HER suggestion, I would never do that on my own volition) and that girl was so happy. Is it possible for us to be friends if I’m this exalted figure to her? I know she’s going to flash those pictures around to show people her American buddy, which is fine, but am I really her friend, or am I some kind of status symbol?

By far the most interesting thing Rima said tonight was when we were waiting in line to get ice-cream. I was talking about my favorite movies and I mentioned Schindler’s List. She said, “Oh ya, that was very bad what those Germans did to the Jewish people,” and I was like, “yeah the Holocaust.” Then the girl says, “What was the Holocaust?” I thought she just didn’t know the phrase so I explained the Holocaust, but no—she had never heard of the Holocaust. In fact, she said that Holocaust is not taught in Indonesian high schools or middle schools. I was horrified. I told her it was one of the worst events to occur in the history of humanity, and she just looked at me blankly. This a law student at one of Malang’s largest universities. If that’s true, and they really don’t teach the Holocaust here…then I really don’t know what to say. I know the books were censored in the Sukarto regime, which ended in 1998, so maybe that’s why Rima doesn’t know anything about the Holocaust—but I was so shocked I almost dropped my McFlurry.

posted by Caitlin @ 10:22 PM