Holiday Plans
So here's the plan for Kunkel Christmas 2006 Indonesia:
December 23: My parents and sisters leave New York
December 25: They arrive in Bali at noon
December 26: We fly on some bootleg little airline to Surabaya and brave the
lumpur panas to get to Malang
December 27-29: Go to my school, get stared at.
December 29: DRIVE back to Bali, arrive in Ubud around midnight
December 30-31: ride elephants, see some Balinese dance and trance, be giant tourists
January 1st: 9 am they leave for New York again
So it's going to be a whirlwind trip. After they leave I'm going to Gili Trawangan in Lombok to go scuba diving and meet up with some of the other ETAs. After that, who knows--I have to whole month off!
"There is a Land Called Passive Aggressiva..."
That’s a quote from Grey’s Anatomy, just in case you don’t watch the best show on TV. Dr. Shepherd is referring to his wife Addison. I’m referring to pretty much every Javanese person I know. It’s unbelievable the lengths people will go to in order to avoid a confrontation—but at the same time, they make sure you know they’re angry.
So in my previous entry, I talked about how Pak Teddy has clearly been not speaking to me and how he’s angry at me about the motorcycle. I mean, there’s no denying it. We used to speak several times a week; he’d give me rides places, pretty much daily contact. Since we had the pseudo-fight, not a single word from him other than a few threats. I say hello to him and he looks right through me. That is the silent treatment.
So today, Suharyadi sends me this text message: pak teddy wants to know why you did not go to his office today.
Me: was i supposed to?
Suharyadi: i don’t know, that is what he said, what do you think?
(This is classic. No one will say anything of any substance until I do. I decide to be a straight shooter)
Me: i think he is mad at me about the motorcycle because he has not talked to me in three weeks.
Suharyadi: he thinks you are sad and upset with him because you are ignoring him. why are you being this way?
I needed a few deep breaths before I answered that one.
Me: ok, well, i’m not, so i guess i will go to his office tomorrow?
No response.
Another example: Tia, a girl with vague ties to my neighbors, did my laundry for me once (she said her mother did laundry, I wasn’t asking random people to do it). She then charged me about 20 times the normal price and I felt too bad about having someone do my laundry to say no. She also borrowed my motorcycle for two days to do the laundry and threw about 200 miles on the odometer. I know for a fact she lives about 1 km away from my house. After an incredibly awkward scene where I paid her, her mother sat mutely and looked disapproving at the huge amount of money I gave them, and my shock at seeing the odometer of the motorbike, I just decided not to let Tia touch my stuff anymore. She must have felt the weirdness, it was definitely palpable. I saw her today for the first time in a few weeks.
Tia: Hi! So I will do your laundry today for you?
Me: um, no, I’m OK I do it myself now.
Tia: No, no I will come to your house now and get it.
Me: no, no, it’s OK I just cleaned it.
Tia: OK, but you will call only me when you want it done again, OK? Just me. Promise?
Me: mumbling something.
Tia: I was afraid to call you because I thought you did not like me.
Me: Why did you think that?
Tia: I don’t know, because you have not called me in so long and I thought we were friends.
Ah, the classic guilt trip.
Me: No, we’re friends.
Tia: OK so maybe next time I won’t be so scared of you.
Me: …sounds good?
When I have these conversations it’s like I’m outside my body watching, just shaking my head in disbelief. The female teachers at my school are the best at it. When I went to an English speaking conference a few weeks ago and missed classes (it was a requirement from AMINEF), I thought everything was OK. Then almost every teacher in the school came up to me and asked brightly how my “vacation” had been.
Ibu X: Oh, you must have had a nice vacation!
Me: It was an English teaching conference.
Ibu X: You know, no one else had a vacation last week (huge smile).
Me: Neither did I, it was not a vacation, I was working.
Ibu X claps me affectionately on the shoulder.
Ibu X: Such a lucky girl! So many vacations, never has to work to make money.
After a few of these conversaations, I just started agreeing with everyone that my vacation was great. When in Rome...or Passive Aggressiva.
Fact or Fiction
While playing “50 States Trivia Jeopardy: Extreme Version” in my classes this week, my students managed to come up with these illuminating answers:
Missouri is a Northern state
The Civil War was fought over the Indians and their headdresses
Miami is the largest state
Vancouver is the smallest state
John F. Kennedy was the first president of the United States
Abraham Lincoln was the second
New Hampshire? That’s not a state!
Abortions are illegal in the US
Cocaine is most definitely legal
Alaska was the first state to sign the Declaration of Independence
George W. Bush is from Hawaii.
U.C.L.A. is a famous Ivy League university in Boston
True or False: in America, you can have free sex with anyone you want, all the time.
Forty voices: TRUUUUUEEE!!!!
Carry on kids, you’re doing just fine.
No Matter What the Languge, Money Spells T-R-O-U-B-L-E
There’s been some tension the last few weeks with my school. Back in September, the school budget bought a motorcycle that I was going to rent for the year for the astronomical rate (in Indonesia!) of $500. After I left, the school would keep the bike and use it. They were clearly getting the better end of the deal. The only things I asked for were lessons and help getting a license.
Flash forward three months: I have received exactly one lesson on how to shift gears, and there is no license in sight. Pak Teddy took the registration papers from me so I’m not legal to ride the bike on the road. For all intensive purposes the bike sits in my house and does nothing—except for the weekend Pak Teddy “kept it safe for me” while I was in Bali and added 300 miles onto the odometer.
Despite the fact that I’ve never driven it on the road, Pak Teddy repeatedly asked me for the $500. Money is an extremely touchy subject here. Everyone assumes that because I’m American, I have lots of it—and most people feel a weird entitlement to it. I get charged 20 times as much as other people to get my laundry done, and Layne and I have been told numerous times that we’re paying absurd prices for our motorbikes. It really irritates me because when you try to haggle with someone over a price, they just put a blank look on their face and refuse to negotiate. And since I DO have more money than them, I always end up feeling bad and paying Rp. 100,000 to do my laundry when I know my neighbors pay Rp. 8,000 for the same amount.
However, $500 is not the same as eighty cents. I told the school I wasn’t paying them anything until they got me the license and gave me lessons. They dragged their feet for another three weeks, still asking me every day for the money. The breaking point came when I realized that the school treasury had paid for the bike, not Pak Teddy himself. It was pretty clear that when he asked me for five hundred dollars, “in cash only” it would at least partially be going into his own pocket. And the thing is, that’s fine here. No one would see a problem with Teddy overcharging me so he could keep a $100 for himself. To put it in perspective, $100 is how much a teacher at SMA 3 makes in a month.
This is a dilemma for me. I feel bad that I have more money than the people I work with. I feel bad I can afford to travel. I even feel bad that I can eat at McDonald’s whenever I want. But at the same time, it really hurts me when I realize that people I trusted, like my school contacts, are essentially trying to steal from me because they think it doesn’t matter to a rich American.
I finally said I was returning the bike and not paying the money since the school had not held up its side of the bargain. That’s when I was really surprised. Pak Teddy has treated me well since I’ve arrived—some strange comments and offers to give me “reflexology,” but nothing too bad. But after I put my foot down, he lost it. He tried intimidating me for a few days—demanding the money, staring at me angrily while speaking to me through a translator. It didn’t bother me so much as demonstrate the kind of tactics men use on women here. If I was an Islamic woman, I probably would have been expected to defer immediately. I’ve never seen a female teacher at the school oppose anything a male teacher says, even when it’s obviously they didn’t want to do something like cover all the male teacher’s classes. That Teddy dared to try those tactics on me just made me sure that he had been trying to scam me all along. After a few days he stopped speaking to me all together. Someone should tell him that the silent treatment only works if the person you’re ignoring actually cares if you like them or not.
The second part of the Teddy problem came to a head when it turned out Nelly, my coordinator at AMINEF, had been calling Teddy for two weeks trying to confirm my schedule. He’d been screening her calls the entire time and refusing to call her back. Finally, she had to call the principal, Pak Tri, to get to Teddy. Once she had him on the phone apparently he yelled at her, told her about the motorcycle (which I hadn’t) and generally bitched about me. I talked to Nelly afterward and said I would work things out myself.
I understand what happened—I made Teddy lose face when I refused to pay for the bike. That I feel bad about. But the thing that is so different from American culture is that he didn’t see WHY I had refused. When I brought up the lessons and license, he repeatedly said it didn’t matter and only the money mattered. I don’t think he ever planned on getting me either.
So we don’t speak anymore. I was really scared the school was angry at me too. But today I had a meeting with Principal Tri and Suharyadi. Turns out they’ve actually seen the problem from my side and just cut Teddy out of the line of communication. I no longer deal with him and just clear things with the principal. They were very concerned that I was still happy, and as a gesture of goodwill gave me the entire month of January off. So now I can use some of my surplus American dollars to travel to Sulawesi and Sumatra. .
Finally, I told Teddy through a translator that as his coworker, I could not be disrespected and threatened. I asked Suharyadi to tell him that I am no longer going to associate with him outside of school, but that message probably didn’t get passed along. I’m a little glad things worked out this way. No matter how normal the other teachers said it was, I was always creeped out every time he suggested I “sleep over” at his house with his children. I’m trying to be culturally sensitive here, but sleeping at a male coworker’s house when you have a perfectly good house of your own in the same city is never going to be OK with me.
I Hate Brownies
I am STILL trying to turn in my grad school apps. Working frantically this afternoon (well, as frantically as one can claim to be working after a three hour nap), I reached a wall. My neighbor's puppy, Brownies, would not stop whining. Having seen the size of the cage they keep him in, I couldn't really blame him, but nevertheless it was incredibly annoying. The dog clearly wanted food, attention, or more than two inches to move his body parts.
Now, I am very patient with my neighbor's animals. I deal with the parrot who cat calls me and imitates a train whistle and car alarm at two o'clock in the morning, I'm apparently the only person who likes their flea-ridden older dog Stephanie, and I have been coaxed into feeding their birds on numerous occassions. I didn't even make a fuss last time Brownies and I hung out and he peed all over my "Rhode Island: The Best Little State in the USA" t-shirt.
But this high pitched whining was driving me crazy. Finally, I went over with one of the delicious maple syrup cookies my grandparents mailed me (and I very much wanted to eat myself) and fed it to Brownies. He kept crying. I offerred to "play with him" in my house for the rest of the afternoon since the 18 people who live at my neighbor's house were too busy lounging in the road to take care of him. So over he came.
I don't know if they abused him or what, but this puppy WILL NOT shut up. I've given him the Indonesian version of a dog toy--old pieces of newspaper twisted together--and he wasn't amused. I let him sleep in my bed, but then he wet himself (and incidentally my only pair of sheets) after less than five minutes. After I chastised him for his lack of bladder control he started passive aggressively eating my disgusting boat shoes.
My neighbor just called through my window that maybe I should
feed him a brownie. That would be valid if I had ever seen a brownie in all of Indonesia, nevermind Malang. Right now he's locked in the back bedroom (which looks like a room in a mental hospital, complete with blueish lighting). He's been quiet for almost 30 seconds, which is long enough that I should probably check to make sure he's not dead from eating an ant trap. Since you get the death penalty for dealing drugs here, I can only imagine what the penalty for murdering isolent puppies is. I miss Patches Kunkel! R.I.P. 1993-2006
Delicious
POSTED: 6:42 a.m. EST, December 6, 2006
JAKARTA, Indonesia (AP) -- Villagers discovered two human hands, a leg and a T-shirt inside a 500-kilogram (1,000-pound) crocodile they trapped and killed in eastern Indonesia, a media report said Wednesday.
The five-meter long reptile, suspected of eating a 59-year-old fisherman last seen a week ago near a river in East Nusa Tenggara province, was hacked open by residents after it got caught Monday in a nylon snare, The Jakarta Post said.
When the villagers got over the shock of finding human body parts inside its abdomen -- together with skull fragments, strands of hair and a pair of shorts -- they cut the beast into pieces and divided up the meat.
It was unclear how many people the crocodile had eaten, but the paper said at least three have disappeared in recent months, all while fishing at the mouth of the Dusan II River.
The crocodile -- and at least two others believed to be still at large -- are also suspected of devouring dozens of cattle, pigs, goats and poultry.
Copyright 2006 The Associated Press.
