Indonesia: Life In The Islands

These Are A Few Of My Most Hated Things

Two, to be exact. Daily life as a bulé in Indonesia has its annoyances (see, “An Indonesian Day,” below), but I’ve been able to get used to/basically ignore a lot of them—like the tendency for people to be an hour late for meetings, the staring, the comments about my weight, skin tone, and outfits—but these two are quickly growing to be unbearable.

1. Ants

Part of the reason they make me so upset is because there’s a certain mystery to them. I can’t find their main hole, I can’t eradicate them, and I sure as hell can’t spot them coming. I’ll be drinking a Pocari Sweat, put the can down for ten minutes, and when I look at it again it’s swarming with ants and there will be a trail of thousands of them stretching across the floor. I follow the trail back, but there isn’t really a point of origin. They don’t seem to be coming from inside the wall or under the door; occasionally I catch them coming in through the windows, but more often than not I can’t find anything.

If they were just on my food it would be one thing—but they seem to want to eat me as well. One thing I’ve gotten quite skilled at is plucking ants off myself, crushing them between my fingers, and flicking their carcasses onto the floor. I take a certain sadistic pleasure in this activity, almost as much as when I go ant stompin’. Ant stompin’ is a fun little game I’ve created where I put on my sneakers, throw on some beats, and dance around the house until I’ve crushed all the ants under my feet. A fellow ETA recently wrote on her blog about the joy it gives her to spray Raid Floral Fresh when she’s ambushed by swarms of insects. I experience that same joy every time I go ant stompin’.

The worst is when they crawl on me when I’m sleeping. Have you ever woken up covered in two hundred tiny black ants? Because I have and I wouldn’t recommend it.

Last Sunday I devoted the entire day to cleaning my house top to bottom. Mopping, bleaching, sweeping, dusting—I’ve never cleaned so much in my life. I went to bed satisfied that the ants would not find a crumb of sustenance.

Even though I’m not going to a cubicle, when I get up at 5:30 am and it’s already 85 degrees, I usually have a little case of the Mondays. My one small joy is Honey Stars, a delicious Indonesian cereal that is way sugary. My box of Honey Stars is one of my most treasured possessions, so I quarantine it hoping the ants go for the other food in the kitchen. This Monday I gleefully removed the box, with its cheerful Honey Bear, from its seat of honor on top of the TV and poured myself a big bowl. I sat down with my coffee and lifted my spoon—only to realize that there were hundreds of ants teeming in my precious bowl of deliciousness. There were so many I couldn’t even consider picking them out and eating the cereal anyway. I had a low food moment in October when I paid $7 for Philadelphia cream cheese only to unwrap the silvery foil to reveal maggots and mold—but this took the cake. Seeing my Honey Stars defiled reduced me to tears and made me 30 minutes late for school. I think I need to do some extra ant stompin’ this week to release some major endorphins.

2. The second thing is even more trying than the ants because unlike insects, I can’t kill Pak Teddy when he upsets me. Pak Teddy (as some of you might know) is the vice-principal of SMA 3. The thing that makes me most upset about him is that he’s a stereotype of a Muslim man. He continually makes comments about me becoming his second wife, since his first wife “is very fat now and no longer good.” I’ve met her, and she’s a beautiful woman who has gained weight because she’s given Teddy five children in seven years. Teddy repeatedly asks me to sleep at his house, even though I’ve refused and told him it makes me uncomfortable. He insists that he is incredibly holy because he fasts on Mondays and Thursdays and had made the haj to Mecca—yet over the course of the last seven months he’s lied to me, threatened me, made inappropriate comments on a daily basis, and called me an infidel. If I only met him and then left Indonesia, all stereotypes a lot of Americans have about Muslim men would remain intact.

Here’s a classic day with Teddy. I was sitting in the English office reading a dictionary since it was the only thing I could understand. A man came into the office and wanted to know my name. Like he does with all male visitors, Teddy told him I was single and looking for an Indonesian husband. He laughed uproariously and left the room. OK, good one Teddy, except then I had to spend an hour sitting next to this man, having a broken English/Indonesian conversation, while he hit on me and kept touching my arm and leg. I try to be polite most of the time, but when he started asking me about sex I got up and left. Like I’ve written before, not only would these things be wrong in the US, but an Indonesian man would NEVER talk to an Indonesian woman like that. So the fact that I’m working and having to deal with this is, at least partially, Teddy’s fault for bringing it up in the first place.

After I switched seats the man got the message and left. Teddy then came bounding back into the room and over to me.

Teddy: Can you tell me in English about sexual intercourse?
Me: What?!
Teddy: I do not know what it is. Please describe to me.

Now, Teddy is a BIOLOGY teacher, so he damn well knows what sexual intercourse is. I put my head phones and gave him a heinous look, which he ignored. All the other men in the office were laughing, but the one woman, God bless her, was horrified. She went up to Pak Teddy and talked in rapid-fire Javanese for a while. That’s how I knew he was way over the line—the women at my school never criticize Teddy. When she was done he came over to me, still with that stupid smile.

Teddy: I am so sorry I asked about the sex.
Me: No problem.
Teddy: The sex is funny, yeah?
Me: No.

He saw I wasn’t going to play along and went back to his desk. Next thing I know he’s asking me how to pronounce the phrase “female reproductive organs” and wants me to look at diagrams of both sexes. I said no, THEN he drew a picture of a female chest, and under the pretense of “learning vocabulary” asked me what the various English words for the parts of the female breast were. I’m sure he was legitimately teaching the reproductive organs, but since he teaches the class in Indonesian there wasn’t really a reason for me to have to sit and write the word “nipple” on a piece of paper because he has terrible listening comprehension and couldn’t understand when I just said it.

Teddy also claims that because he is a biology teacher, he’s an excellent masseuse. I sprained my ankle last week and he continually grabs my foot with his hands and tries to massage it, on his hands and knees, in front of me. He always wants to give me reflexology on my hands for my “stress.” Again, not anything he offers to ANY women at the school, just me.

After the motorcycle incident (too long to recount, I wrote about it my entry, “No Matter What The Language, Money Spells T-R-O-U-B-L-E) I told Suharyadi I didn’t want to talk to Teddy anymore. After a series of text messages (see, “There Is A Land Called Passive Aggressiva) I relented and said I would deal with him on a professional level. That worked for about a month and now we’ve backslid to the same old shit Teddy used to pull.

This Saturday, I was doing a favor for Teddy by going to visit SMA 1 Bangil, a school an hour and a half outside of Malang. It wasn’t so much for him as the other school—they were trying to become an international school and wanted to motivate their kids to speak English. So I agreed to go on the condition that we not leave early in the morning and that I would not go alone with Teddy.

The day before, Teddy called me five times and sent me three messages saying that we’re leaving at 8 am (a relatively late hour) and I CANNOT be late. Fine, I can wake myself up, I’ve been doing it since I was 10. I set my alarm for 7:30.

7 am: Teddy calls.

Teddy: Are you awake?
Me: No, you said 8.
Teddy: Get up and eat breakfast right now. No late!
Me: FINE.

So I get up and eat breakfast, get dressed, and sit on my couch waiting for Teddy.

8:30: I SMS him.

Me: where are u? u said 8. i am ready now.
Teddy: have meeting. there in 10 min.

After I watch an entire Amazing Race episode, I text him again. No response.

10:00: I send Suharyadi an angry message.

10:15: Teddy calls.

Teddy: Hello! You must be ready! No late!

**Note** Jam karet, or rubber time, is an accepted part of Indonesian culture. But I’ve asked around and making someone wait more than an hour or two is pretty rude, even by their standards. And I wouldn’t really have been mad at all if he hadn’t called and woken me up so urgently. So I felt justified yelling at Teddy a little.

Me: I AM ready, I was ready at 8 when you said to be.
Teddy: Oh, are you mad?
(the answer to this question, in Javanese culture, is ALWAYS no.)
Me: Yes!
Teddy: Oh, I sorry. I come now.

10:30: He gets to the house. I stomp outside and get in the car. There is no one else.

Me: Um, are we getting the other teachers?
Teddy: No, all sick. Just us!

Greeeeat. Teddy then proceeded to put on the Avril Lavigne cassette and “sing” along to it. And by sing I mean he keened like a hurt puppy in a way that wasn’t relevant to the tune or the words of the song. In between whines he screamed into his cell phone, sent text messages while going 80 miles an hour, and shifted gears in such a way that his hand was always on my arm. No matter how many times I shifted away from him and looked out the window, the arm always made its way back.

Bangil was great—I was sweaty and grumpy as all hell when I got there, but the kids spoke fantastic English and had lots of questions. We only stayed an hour then hopped back in the car since I had “a conference at Layne’s school” I had to go to at 3 (I always have to have an fake event after something with Pak Teddy, otherwise he invariably drives me to his house and tries to make me sleep there). Even though it was monsooning all the way home and the roads were flooding, Teddy continued to text message and look at everything except the road. When I got home I promptly checked myself into a hotel and got a massage.

Teddy, you make me crazier than ants in my favorite cereal. And that’s saying a lot.

Labels: you make me hate teddy bears

posted by Caitlin @ 11:37 PM