Indonesia: Life In The Islands

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.

posted by Caitlin @ 2:47 PM