An Indonesian Day
I had one today. Complete with all the frustrations and inconveinences. I woke up around 5 am when my counterpart at my school, Suharyadi, sent me an SMS. This is what it said (remember, this is a co-worker):Hi, how r u? I need your help. I need to borrow one millions rupiah. I will give it to you in April. I need today.
I rolled over and went back to sleep. One million rupiah is more than $100 and double his monthly salary. There was no way.
7 am: Johanna sends me an SMS saying she's throwing up and can't come to my school on Monday for a workshop. I send out messages to the people at my school and go back to sleep.
10 am: a spider bites my leg so I get up to put ice on the bite. I SMS Suharyadi and ask what he wants the money for. Response:
"My baby is very sick. I need to buy him extra milk."
I felt guilty about that. What if his baby was dying? But still, milk costs about 50 cents for a gallon. $100 was a little excessive. I asked him if he has taken the baby to the hospital, and he said no, he wasn't that sick. Well, OK then. I said no, I couldn't loan out money to co-workers. His response?
"OK, I hope Alpha lives."
THAT just made me angry. I sent him a terse message explaining I wasn't responsible for his baby's health, and if the baby needed to go to the hospital that was one thing--but I wasn't giving him $100 for milk. He didn't respond. This irritated me because the week before, Suharyadi had begged me to tell him how much I made per week. He said he wanted to understand the conversion rates between American money and Indonesian. Apparently he forgot to factor in that I've lived in Indonesia for seven months now and I know how much things cost here.
After that, I got dressed and realized my house was in sorry, sorry shape. I hobbled around (I fell hiking the other day and may have sprained my ankle, x-rays tomorrow) and surveyed. A power surge three nights ago blew out all my light bulbs except for two, so I have to read with a flashlight. The ceilings are too high to replace them myself, so I'd have to locate a ladder. The floors were dirty and needed to be swept and mopped. The front garden was extremely overgrown since I'd been gone the whole month of January. The night before the taxi driver told me he saw a snake in there. Something needed to be done, and not by me.
So I called this guy that my friend knows (real safe, right?). He helped me clean up perhaps the worst kitchen disaster I'd ever seen in January. When I went to Bali with my family in December, in our rush to leave Malang my fridge came unplugged. Unfortunately, there was a huge watermelon inside. When I came home three weeks later, the watermelon had been rotting and cooking in the sun. It smelled like a combination of stomach acid, extremely dirty socks, and burning trash. I had to move into Layne's house for a week while it aired out. So this guy (I don't know his name) cleaned the watermelon up for me for an exorbitant price of Rp. 50,000.
So he came over at 1. Now, I never had a maid or anything in the US, but I believe the point of paying someone to do something is that you, yourself, do not have to do it. Apparently he didn't prescribe to that school of hired help. He asked where the brooms were, and then handed me one and told me to sweep while he cleaned the garden. So I hopped around on one foot sweeping the bug corpses, volcanic ash, and general dirt out of the house. When he finished with the garden (no snakes to be found! hopefully they aren't already in the house) we went shopping for light bulbs.
This was another large part of a typical Indonesian day. Two women in a tiny shop sold me six very expensive light bulbs, reassuring me they worked. We get home and...surprise! Three of them were broken. They were also all in 100 watt boxes when it turned out they were only 40 watts. Now, I ask you, why would they do this? I clearly wanted to buy light bulbs, I wanted to buy them there...why not just sell me functional, appropriate wattage lightbulbs? But three was what I had, so I held the ladder while nameless helper replaced the bathroom, bedroom, and kitchen lights. That still left the porch, front bedroom, and back in darkness, but it was better than nothing.
Then nameless helper filled up a bucket and gave me a mop so I could mop my own floors while he toted the grass from the driveway across the street and lit it on fire. He came in and finished the job, and I moved into washing my own clothes in my mandi. It took me about two hours, and when I finished he had eaten two candy bars and a piece of pizza out of my fridge.
Five hours after we started, I escorted him out and paid him (when I picked up my purse to get the money, I realized it was, for some inexplicable reason, completely full of ants). Nameless helper seemed to want to hang out in my house, but he smelled and I wasn't amused. At least I got some exercise--mopping on one foot is pretty taxing!
I returned the ladder and machete (to cut the grass) to my neighbor's house. Their dog had just had puppies, and I went to see them...only I got too close and the mother, Stephanie, attacked me. Luckily she didn't break the skin and everyone laughed nervously and motioned for me to leave.
Now it's 8 pm and I'm sitting, sweating, and trying to think of a lesson plan for tomorrow. I have to appreciate the symmetry of this day--I was just biten by another spider and SMSed again by Suharyadi. He wanted to know if I was sick. I said I was fine, how was Alpha? I waited anxiously for the response, scared he was going to say the baby had died. Instead, I get this:
"Oh, he is so fine, thanks for asking!"
Oh, no problem. All in a day's work.
Labels: just one of those days
posted by Caitlin @ 8:35 PM
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