Same-Same

The incomparable Junot Diaz has written of relationships that “as soon as you start thinking about the beginning, it’s the end.” This is how I too know my Peace Corps service is almost over–besides a few projects I am wrapping up and discussing with my friends, we mainly talk about the days and moments that have already happened.

I reminisce on the time I ate only rambutan fruit for dinner and got sick, the incredibly awkward and wonderful welcome ceremony my school held for me two years ago, the afternoon I spent with a teacher friend painting her house, the insane mindfuck that was my medical separation, the beautiful cakes my students brought me on both my 24th and 25th birthdays. I remember reading Agatha Christie novels on rainy afternoons. Being present when my host sister gave birth. Sitting on a beach with friends and realizing how good a life can be. Laughing with neighborhood kids and doing the hokey-pokey (that’s what it’s all about! Hey!)

Even though the actual in country part of my service is coming to an end, Peace Corps requires volunteers to share our knowledge and experience with friends and family back home. In other words, promote cultural understanding (that’s what it’s all about! Hey!) I think about this a lot. Over the last two years I have discussed at great length the differences I have experienced and the cultural gap between my American-ness and the conservative Indonesian community I have become a part of. At this point though? All I know is what I had hoped to learn from the beginning: that we are all pretty much the same. Complicated, flawed, but mostly decent. It’s an obvious universal truth that should not be overlooked, especially now.

In the last month I have been shocked and embarrassed by the behavior of one Donald Trump and his abhorrent comments aimed at Muslims. He has made my job here that much more difficult–constantly telling my neighbors and co-workers that no, most Americans do not want to turn away Muslim immigrants from our borders. It’s shameful to constantly reassure my community that I do not believe that they are all terrorists.

I am frustrated with the perception I need to dispel about America to Indonesians, but I am also just as ashamed to discuss Indonesia’s recent anti-gay onslaught with friends and family back stateside. In a country that has a vibrant transgender tradition and culture, there recently has been a wave of attacks against the Indonesian LGBT community. One of the most extreme views has come from former communications minister Titaful Sembiring who tweeted to millions of followers that the public should “kill any gay people that they find” because homosexuality is a “mental illness.” He cites the consumption of instant noodles as a cause of homosexuality, which would be more laughable if the consequences of his ignorance weren’t so serious.

To both Mr. Trump and Pak Sembiring I say this: we are entitled to our opinions and beliefs, but we are not entitled to make shit up and then use the shit we make up to oppress other people.

Yet speaking only to these reactive ends of the spectrum discounts all the goodness and decency that exists in the middle ground. Which is where I have learned the most as a Peace Corps volunteer. The majority of people I have met and had the pleasure of knowing in Indonesia are kind, thoughtful and decent human beings. Although we initially seem to come from vastly different worlds, we end up talking about the same things: work, love, family. YouTube videos of cute baby animals are also universally appreciated.

In the Indonesian language the word “sama” means “both” or “same”. The word repeated twice (“sama-sama”) means “you’re welcome”. I’ve always loved this. That when you give or receive thanks the other person responds “same”. It’s sort of like saying the goodness in me recognizes the goodness in you. Many of my co-workers at school like to say certain phrases in English twice to get a giggle out of me. For instance “jalan-jalan” means “walking” but many teachers and friends will say “walking-walking”. I don’t laugh anymore though when someone responds to my thank you with “same-same”. At the almost end of my service, I find it to be a phrase imbued with too many bittersweet feelings. Same-same is the world’s best kept secret: that love and understanding need not be scarce. Recognizing the commonalities we all share is our most powerful tool against ignorance, intolerance and bull-headed prejudice.

Same-same is what I wish Donald Trump and Titaful Sembiring were more cognizant of. Because there are so many things to give thanks for, so many wonderful people who make this world better. We should be showing appreciation for the people who exist in between the right-wrong binary. We are all struggling to do our best and be our best selves. Sometimes we succeed and sometimes we don’t. Mostly, we give each other the benefit of the doubt–we try to acknowledge that we are all same-same. That realm of decency (and occasionally the hokey-pokey) is what it’s all about.

On The Magic of Disenchantment

Fairy tales are about trouble, about getting into it and out of it, and trouble seems to be a necessary stage on the route to becoming. All the magic and golden eggs and dancing slippers and princesses beautiful as the day and talking birds and part-time beasts are distractions from the tough core of most of these stories, the struggle to survive against adversaries, to find your place in the world, and to come into your own.

Sometimes the key arrives before the lock. Sometimes a house falls onto a wicked witch’s head. Once upon a time a bat fell onto mine. It came out of nowhere one dark and blustery night, a crash from above and then a soft, fluttery body careening against the side of my face. It’s never awesome when a bat smacks you in the head but it was especially not awesome as I was convinced it was the latest salvo from my ancient next door neighbor who had cast a spell on me.

I didn’t see the curse coming. Late one night last fall a shadow fell across my face as I slept, and I awoke to the angry Javanese mutterings of my neighbor, her face pressed against the bars of my window above my bed. Naturally, as one does when a scary old lady whisper threatens you from the window above your bed, I freaked. Family members were summoned to take the old woman away but it was too late–the curse had been cast. In the days and months that followed strange things started to befall me; wasps that I hadn’t seen before began descending from the roof above my bed. I was stung six times with stingers the size of a fingernail. Spiders bit my ankles as I slept. I once spent an entire Saturday duking it out with a mouse that had laid siege to my wardrobe. My Javanese curse seemed to be an onslaught of plagues, biblical in sense and stature. Or maybe these were all just part of the Peace Corps package.

The heaping number of wasp nests in my roof made me begin to read fairy tales again. These stories are full of overwhelming piles that need to be contended with; the roomful of straw that poor girl in “Rumpelstiltskin” needs to spin into gold overnight, the one thousand pearls scattered in the forest the youngest son needs to gather to win the princess, the mountain of sand to be moved by teaspoon. The heaps are only a subset category of impossible tasks that include quests, such as gathering a feather from the tail of a firebird at the end of the world, nonsensical riddles and facing overwhelming obstacles. I read about an accursed queen who must spin cobwebs into thread, climb a mountain with a millstone around her neck and fill a pitcher full of holes in order to transform the green serpent to whom she is married back into a human being. Such tasks are always the challenges to becoming, to being set free, or finding love. Carrying out the tasks undoes the curse. Enchantment in these stories is the state of being disguised, or displaced. Disenchantment is the blessing of becoming yourself.

My Peace Corps service has been disenchantingly eye-opening, and therefore a gift. Lucy is never the same once she discovers the world inside her wardrobe, and neither am I now that I have discovered a little more about Java. I possess more patience, I savor the little things and I’m at peace with imperfection. In the fairytale metaphor I’m going for here, it’d be lovely to cast myself as the princess heroine grappling with a curse, but that would be dishonest. I am not always my best self out here. I complain, rage and whine. Some days I hole up in my room and hide (from wasps and scary neighbors and life alike).

Although being a Peace Corps volunteer often radiates an altruistic glow to friends and family back home, the truth is that there’s a bit of a villain in all of us. We cannot be good and kind and optimistic all the time. I have handled situations out here in a way that I am not always proud of. Difficulty is a school, though learning is optional.

The most recent challenge in my Javanese fairy tale is the accursed parasite I am currently battling (although I’m fighting it from a comfy hotel room so I can’t really complain). Being sick in the Peace Corps is particularly joyless because of how isolated and powerless one feels on the road to recovery. But fairy tales are almost always the stories of the powerless; of abandoned children, humans transformed into birds and beasts, princesses punished by stepmothers or jealous queens (why are women especially competitive and evil towards one another in these stories?). Yet power is rarely the right tool for survival anyway. Rather the powerless thrive on alliances, often in the form of reciprocated acts of kindness.

In the last month a tacit alliance has been formed with my ancient curse-whispering neighbor in the form of my cat, Agatha Christie. Agatha is a scrappy young thing, fond of cockroaches and long naps. She’s very easy to love, so no surprise my neighbor enjoys her company too. I used to worry about Agatha during the short weekend trips I sometimes take with friends, but such thoughts vanished when I came home after Thanksgiving to find Agatha swaddled in a makeshift baby sling, being sashayed around my village against the bosom of my neighbor. That cat has it made. Ever since Agatha came into my neighbor’s and my life, this woman has been kinder to me. This means she has stopped lunging at me when I walk by too close and she occasionally says something friendly sounding as Agatha trots to and fro between our houses. The wasps for the most part have disappeared, although that could also just be due to the rainy season. Maybe I shouldn’t have blamed my neighbor so much.

I recently talked with a fellow PCV friend of mine about regrets, and the things we wish we had handled differently throughout our service. While there are scenarios personal and professional I inwardly cringe at, I wouldn’t give this disenchanting journey back for anything. None of us are immaculate, and isn’t that divine? If I had said no to this, I would have always wondered what would have happened, I would have forever felt that I’d turned down a treasure that could have been mine, had turned down a chance to live–and what matters is that I said yes to adventure, to the unknown, to possibility.

My life on Java has been a fairy tale, but not a fantasy. There has been struggle and adversity and wonder and beauty. I often get lost–there are moments I wish for a mossy log I could dramatically sit down on and cry. Sometimes I do. I don’t have a fairy godmother or ruby slippers or a singing voice enchanting to woodland creatures. But I am lucky to have wonderful volunteers around me who support me in everything I do, whether that be a community project or binge watching a tv show in bed. I can laugh at myself and I know how to be my own best friend out here. I am less prone to throwing myself down on mossy logs these days. More often I am carrying on.

I hope these support systems stay with me once my time in the Peace Corps is over (the fact that I only have 4 months left is another astounding thing altogether). Fairy tales are the roadmaps through which we can trace our own journeys–even if we don’t know how it will end. The stories themselves provide compelling images of exile, loneliness, affection and metamorphosis–elements of a life that are more vividly felt off the page than on. No matter what we are doing and where we are living, we all possess lives filled with magic and madness; we are all facing challenges and curses and we are all doing our best to make it through the woods and be better. You don’t necessarily need a cat named Agatha to tell you it’s all one big, beautiful disenchanting mystery. You need only to look at your imperfect life and see it as precious.

Ibu Sexy Dance Time

Every Tuesday and Thursday I have what I like to refer to as my “Ibu Sexy Dance Time.” A dance aerobics class of about twenty women, we meet in a small tin-roofed studio a twenty minute bike ride away from my house. The dance styles in this class range from full on striptease to Broadway kick-ball changes. It’s a hilarious but legitimate workout. The instructor’s choreography involves a lot of karate kicking our way into sultry split poses, hula hoop sized hip thrusts, and staring at our reflections with pouty seriousness. Sometimes we do all of this while manually moving our breasts up and down like light switches. I’m not sure how that last bit figures into overall calories burned but it makes me laugh which I guess engages my abs?

The best part about this class is that it immerses me in the experience of being female. It might not come as a newsflash to friends and family back home but yes Indonesia, I am indeed a woman. My strangeness as a foreigner makes me sexless. On the other side of my asexual existence is the acutely felt presence of my lady chromosomes.

Indonesia continues to exist and function under cultural patriarchy, a system in which women essentially operate under separate social norms from men. On a day to day basis, I am often ashamed of the attention my body receives. I am required to serve men tea, and then sit separate from them. I must not touch them with my fingertips nor tempt them with my bare shoulders. I am all too aware of being alone with a man and the subtle peril it implies.

Dance class is a safe zone from all that. My internal USA clock means I always arrive at the studio ten minutes early and am able to chat with the ladies as they come in. Walking into class they all look the same in their long conservative clothing and tightly pinned hijabs, but once they are inside it is topsy turvy chaos: hijabs are whipped off and clothes are shedded until the women around me stand in nothing but brightly colored spandex booty shorts and itty-bitty bikini tops. The air inside the studio is like wet wool, and it feels very much like dancing in someone’s armpit. In this extreme heat, leaving little to the imagination is the smartest way to dress for Ibu Sexy Dance Time, and I must say these ladies love to bare all.

Their bodies are beautiful but not in the perfectly toned lululemon-esque way we think the woman on the treadmill next to us at the gym is beautiful. On the bodies I dance next to are the etchings of a hard life lived: one woman’s lower back is pulled tight with puckered burn marks from oil spilled years ago, another’s jaw is partially caved in from being kicked by a young bull. The woman next to me grasps her ample belly flesh and shows me where an operation went wrong. These women revel in showing me their scars. What shines through these wounds is the open love these women have for the bodies they inhabit. It’s lovely to watch them watch themselves in the full length mirrors. You can tell they are lapping up their reflections–imperfections, wounds and all.

Being a part of this class has given me a lot to think about in terms of how I view myself as a strong, powerful and yes, wounded woman. For the last 20 months of service I have felt simultaneously adrift from and honed in on the feminist conversation out here. My fellow female PCV’s and I are constantly complaining about the unwanted attention: touching, whistling, howling, clapping, and the up and down eyeing men freely make at us as we ride our bikes and walk to school. I have been hesitant to write about this subject not because I don’t think gender equality is important, but because I am worried that by complaining about these puffed up men and their social patriarchy, I will be viewed as “just another” hurt woman saying the same things women all over the world have already said. The moment we start talking about feeling wounded as a woman, we risk transforming our suffering from an aspect of the female experience into an element of the female constitution. I’d like to change the tone of that conversation.

It is a great illusion in our Western culture that what we confess to is who we are. Upon arriving in Indonesia last year I was worried that by acknowledging the fear and shame my gender generated from the conservative culture around me, I would be seen as weak and docile. I’m not proud to say that these less than flattering qualities were what I expected in the women I would meet, live and work with on Java. It has been quite the opposite. I have had the privilege of knowing (and dancing with) some incredibly strong and empowered Indonesian women in my community throughout the course of my service.

The source of that empowerment is what differentiates my Western feminism from Indonesian feminism. We American women refuse to see ourselves as anything less than strong and fearless. “Flinty or Die” would be an appropriate slogan I think, if we were ever to slap a bumper sticker on the American female empowerment agenda. We must be tough, or risk losing the power and respect we have fought so hard for. Alternately, Indonesian women accept that the very launching point of female empowerment is in what is weak and in what is wounded. Their power lies within their pain. They seem to understand that the very act of becoming empowered first requires one to have no power at all.

Empowerment. A buzzword for our American generation if there ever was one. Everything from building schools in developing countries to emailing pictures of your boobs to strangers is decidedly “a pretty powerful thing to do as a woman.” It calls to mind a headline I once read in The Onion: “Women Now Empowered by Everything a Woman Does.” The word’s ubiquity suggests how much women want power but how conflicted we are about getting it. Deciding you look great without makeup on is empowerment. Knocking back tequila shots at the bar is empowerment. Having a one night stand and refusing to hurt about it is empowerment. Saying “I love you” first is empowerment. It is all encompassing and all around confusing. This is American girl power: betwixt and between.

There is a TV show called “Girls” about girls who hurt but constantly disclaim their hurting. They fight about rent and boys and betrayal, stolen yogurt and the ways self-pity structures their lives. I remember in one scene they fight: “You’re a big, ugly wound!” And so the other volleys back “No, you’re the wound!” How very American I see now: to call each other out on being weak, raw and melodramatic. This show would never fly in Indonesian culture. Aside from all the promiscuous sex and swearing, the Indonesian women I know would never accuse another woman of feeling something a little too deeply.

This is not to say that Indonesian feminism has it all figured out. The saving face aspect of Javanese culture commands stoicism at all times, and it seems that there are only certain outlets acceptable for these bursts of estrogenic feeling. Sad karaoke songs, for instance. Soap operas, tragic emojis and sexy aerobics classes. It isn’t uncommon for a woman to weep her way through a Celine Dion song but remain stoney faced at the funeral of a close family member. From my American perspective these emotional platforms often appear too basic, and almost cartoonish when compared to my experiences. Like children I’ve babysat who tell me they are in love, female empowerment in Indonesia at times comes across to me as underdeveloped and immature.

Usually forty minutes into aerobics class a remixed version of Leona Lewis’ “Bleeding Love” moans around us as we do squat pulses. “You cut me open and I / Keep bleeding, keep, keep bleeding love/ I keep bleeding, I keep, keep bleeding love.” In the states I found this song to be dramatic and trite, the lyrics coagulated with sentimentality. My Indonesian ladies don’t see it that way at all. “Isn’t her voice beautiful?” one woman tells me when I mention the song, “so much sadness and feeling.” For these women, the song is pure truth, whereas for me, the lyrics are mere bathos; transforming actual feelings into the funny and the ridiculous, a song to wail comically into a hairbrush. But why does my inner American feminist refuse to love these kinds of basic expressions of hurt? Why can’t I accept that there is beauty that dwells in the hurting itself?

We wear the evidence of our neglect and hurt on our bodies at once like armor and a scrawled “kick me” sign. I look at the Indonesian women who dance around me, and they are very aware of the stories their scars reveal, as if the wound itself marks the threshold between interior and exterior; a physical flagging of the things that can only be felt. Case in point: the scabbed mottling on one woman’s face after she tried to bleach her skin whiter. Why did she do this? I overhear her talking about a man at work who made fun of her dark skin. We hurt and yet we dance. The Indonesian women in this class seem to understand that hurting now doesn’t mean we will hurt forever–or that hurt is the only destiny we can own. Case in point: the way this semi-bleached woman is always ogling her cute lil’ tushy during our twerking interludes.

There is a way of representing female empowerment that can witness victimization but also witness a larger self around that victim–a self who grows larger than its scars without disowning them, who is neither wound-dwelling nor jaded, who is actually healing. We have the capacity to redraw the lines between our powerlessness and our power. The women I dance with have shown me that suffering is interesting but so is getting better.

I worry that American women (myself included) think they no longer have the right to scars and flaws and pain the way Indonesian women do. I worry that we think our fight for equality is old news, and to dig up old arguments implies we are hurting and in hurting we are embodying the weakest, most loathsome parts of our sex that we are so hellbent on disproving. We are thoroughly obsessed with not being the victim, so we play the fun and fearless female card instead: cutting our hair, sexting an ex and laughing at the recently dumped woman who sings Adele’s “Someone Like You” a tad too unironically. I know the hurting woman is a cliche but I also know lots of women who still hurt. Sometimes the wounded woman is a stereotype, but sometimes she’s just true.

Indonesian women have taught me not to be afraid of being broken, something I think American women would never admit to being afraid of in the first place.Yet there is a certain kind of brokenness that cannot be fixed with burning bras, raw juice cleanses and nights spent in with girlfriends raucously validating the shit out of each other. Women are broken and wounded all over the world. But maybe women within this patriarchal culture are better at extracting power from what hurts, because they must use their strength more directly against the maelstrom of accusations telling them their worth is less. They are not afraid of the painful journey to empowerment because they are not afraid of inhabiting that pain. No matter how overly performed and naive those channels may seem to me (i.e. any Kelly Clarkson song taken too seriously, a tearful selfie posted on Facebook), they do as the adage goes “get them where they’re going.”

We Westerners like the quick fix, the ripping off of a band-aid to avoid too long a sting. The empowered women of my generation often seem to be afraid of too much feeling and thus have insulated themselves against this kind of broken-trauma through casual sex, topless selfies and anger-driven self-defense classes. We believe we no longer have the right to hurt, as if in hurting we are doing a disservice to the “fuck yeah” backbone of the feminist movement. Unlike our Indonesian female counterparts, we Western women want to feel empowered without acknowledging that sometimes that power is begotten by pain. American women like to think they are powerful in spite of their hurt, while the Indonesian women I have met believe they are powerful because they hurt.

The notion that women who are not empowered in the Western sense of the word are struggling and helpless must be banished. These fierce Indonesian women I have come to know and love are not struggling victims in need of total Western rescue. It all turns on the ownership of that hurt, and these women own it and refuse to be beaten by it. Go to any karaoke bar: they are women, hear them wail.

Being a female Peace Corps volunteer on Java has taught me to embrace my gender not only for what makes it strong, but also for what makes it weak. The feminism that stems from vulnerability is just as powerful as the feminism that stems from strength. You can be broken and fearless at the same time. That knowledge in itself is empowering. Whether you feel like laughing or crying, go ahead and bust a move.

Ghost Stories

Returning to my life in Indonesia has been like walking on hot coals and sinking into a warm bath wrapped into one. Either way you look at it, I’m hot and sweating. I’ve been in my new community for almost seven weeks now, and I can’t believe how much I had forgotten about this crazy Java life while I was away. I forgot how much I loathe dangdut music (a strange and unrhythmic combination of Bollywood and House music) but love the low budget, creepy music videos the genre puts out. I forgot that to call another person an animal name is deeply offensive, and therefore insulted many a teacher at school my first week back when I taught them the phrase “see you later, alligator.” I also didn’t remember the ghosts, and it appears those Javanese spirits are on a mission to make sure I never forget about them again.

In writing this post I took the opportunity to talk to my fellow teachers and neighbors about the ghost stories that permeate everyday life here. From what I can gather, the religion of Islam that arrived around the 16th century was simply combined with already existing Javanese practices. Rather than eradicating those local customs altogether, as one teacher explained it “all beliefs are same belief now.” So while my friends, neighbors and fellow teachers are all practicing Muslims, they still adhere to the Javanese customs and beliefs of long ago. It’s a strange and lovely mishmash I’m still navigating.

According to traditional Javanese lore, the human soul (semangat or spiritual essence) is roughly the size of a thumb and appears as a miniature form of the body in which it resides. Because the soul can “fly” it is often compared to and addressed as if it were a bird. It temporarily leaves a person’s body during sleep, trance and sickness, before departing permanently at death. When the soul leaves the body it assumes the form of a sort of homunculus, and thus can feed on the souls of others. So to use Harry Potter jargon, there is a tiny Dementor inside all of us. At death, the soul usually passes into another person, animal or plant. The spirit (called the anitu) continues to linger and may be harmful to its survivors, depending on the manner of it’s death.

On a hot and hazy Monday morning, it was like any other weekly flag ceremony. All the teachers lined up in their beige civil servant uniforms and the children assembled into their class formations wearing blue checkered scout vests (Indonesia loves it’s coordinated clothing). I’ll come out and say that I am not the biggest fan of flag ceremonies. We stand for a very long time while the Vice Principle says a few short prayers, gives a long speech on studying hard and motions the student body to sing the national anthem with a bored flick of the wrist. A standard ceremony lasts between forty-five minutes to an hour. It’s a hefty dose of pomp and circumstance that keeps the students out of the classroom and standing in the glare of unforgiving tropical sunshine. I do enjoy high-fiving my kids as they trek back inside when it’s all over. It’s a hurdle both teachers and students alike have to get through; and the ceremony brings us closer together in it’s mutually felt misery.

Expecting the same that Monday, I resigned myself to an hour of zoning out when halfway through the first prayer there was a scream. A girl standing in the middle of her group had crumpled to the ground, taking down one or two other kids with her flailing limbs. She began writhing on the ground as if her brain had been removed and her skull had been stuffed with something like microwaved aluminum foil, dinted, charred and shorting with sparks. For a moment, everybody stood stunned and staring. As her screaming grew more pitched a few teachers rushed forward. No sooner had they lifted her up, another young boy on the opposite end of the field collapsed in the same way. Pandemonium ensued. I wouldn’t have known what to do, but in the midst of this madness, I heard my Vice Principle cry into the microphone “women and students get back to their classrooms immediately!” I’m well versed in the film “Titanic” and so understood that phrase to mean our school was goin’ down.

It was clear that our school situation was in dire straights. Within an hour, seventeen students had been taken down by an evil spirit and possessed by it. Screams and cries echoed throughout the classrooms. We were all sent home. The next morning was the same, students kept collapsing in class and led (if they could stand) or carried to the nurses office. I did my best to teach over the wailing around us. Our local shaman (your everyday exorcist) was called in but his purification ceremony did little to hold back whatever had grabbed ahold of the student body.

In high school I was part of the choir program, and every so often a chorus member would faint under the hot stage lights during a performance. Once one singer sank down, it was always more likely that a few more people would sit down, lightheaded as well. It’s thought that if one person becomes ill, others around him/her will begin to feel sick as well. I don’t particularly believe in ghosts or evil spirits. I do believe in the psychosomatic herd-mentality of feeling ill. None of my students or fellow teachers carry bottles of water with them. Many of my students wake up for 4:30am prayer and do not drink or eat anything until the 10:15am break at school. This would make me feel weak and sick too.

And yet for all that science and psychology can say about this phenomenon, the Javanese believe in something beyond what my Western perspective can explain. It is a culture that believes in the mystery that shape-shifts at the edge of the senses. When a person is stressed, scared or sick, their souls are at risk of becoming possessed by bad energy, or angry anitu.

We have a lot of bad energy at my school as September progresses. In total, forty students have been possessed this month. Each time it happens, all classes are disrupted as everyone charges outside like kamikazes with poor navigation. My American upbringing has little patience for such behavior, and I have continued to hold my classes and come to school. I go to class even after a few male teachers tell me they would understand if “as a woman, you preferred to stay safely at home.” My feminist bravery was slightly undermined later that day when a female teacher literally fled the school after a possession happened in the classroom next to hers. She has a new baby at home and “couldn’t risk anything bad happening.”

While it used to be titillating to me, I am now annoyed when teachers come into my class supporting upright a wobbly, blank-staring student who delivers a prophesy in tongues to a solemn classroom. I’m short with the kids who have been possessed too. I tell them tersely to drink water and eat breakfast, convinced hydration solves everything. It has also crossed my mind that these sweet kids have taken a turn for the sneaky, putting on an act to get out of lessons. I look at my students one afternoon though, after a particularly scream-filled episode and they do not look like they are faking. They look scared.

Halfway through this past month, after another frustrating day of canceled classes, it dawned on me that even though the events at school were completely unreal to me, everyone around me believed in it (a simple but staggering light-bulb moment). Didn’t that alone on some level make it true?

When somebody tells us something that would be disturbing or inconvenient for us to believe, we reflexively scrutinize that person for some excuse to discredit him/her. We do it all the time with politics, with religion, and with that friend who reads Tarot cards and carries crystals in her pocket. It is what I had been doing with my counterpart when he explained to me what was happening with the spirits. I needed a different approach. I started listening to what the teachers and students were telling me and did my best to accept it as the truth. Living on Java is often like living in an alternate universe, where it is acceptable to blare dangdut music at all hours of the day to soothe the flighty nerves of chickens, where white rice is a filling meal and ghosts exist. Just because those things are not true for other parts of the world does not make it less so on this island.

Now that I’ve grown accustomed to my little corner of the twilight zone, I almost think it’s a nice gesture if, after one student falls pray to an evil spirit, a few others follow suit. It means no one has to go through that undoubtedly freaky experience alone. My students have a lot going on in their lives, beyond the two hours I get with them every week. There are Islamic holidays and Javanese celebrations to participate in. There are responsibilities in the home and in the community to uphold. The school curriculum has changed. Again. They are growing up at a unique time in Indonesia, a country that has modernized quickly in the sixty years it has been a democracy. The Indonesia of their parents’ generation is not the country they will come of age in, but nobody knows what that Indonesia will look like yet, or how to get there. All of this would make me stressed and more likely to be possessed with negative energy too. In a culture that is built squarely on the notion of “saving face” I wonder if my students’ possessions are a silent acknowledgement of the difficulties that can’t be talked about openly; a haunting call and response that communicates the common problems they are all grappling with but cannot talk about.

We still have students “taken” every few weeks, although things are improving. Instead of sitting bitterly in the corner chugging from my Nalgene, I’m working on accepting the spiritual activity for what it reveals about the people I live and work with. What the Javanese spirits reveal is that we don’t have to go through difficult things without the support (or possession) of others. I understand now that mass possessions are, in a way, the sum of everything I love about this communal culture. Nobody has to go it alone. When I had the flu a few weeks ago, neighbors and teachers came to sit with me so I wouldn’t be by myself. Your sickness is my sickness. My stress is your stress. Or in the words of recent alt-pop sensation Vance Joy, “this mess was yours/now this mess is mine.” Perhaps he was singing about Indonesia.

After a rough few months on my end recovering from a bike accident, and fighting for my reinstatement to Peace Corps (an experience I felt very isolated in), the haunting of my school has been an eery reminder of the obvious: we all want to believe our pain is singular–that no one else has felt this way–but our pain is ordinary, which is both a blessing and a curse. It means we’re not unique. It means we’re not alone. Maybe this is what the Javanese spirits are trying to tell us; that inexplicable sorrows and frustrations and difficult moments await all of us, and while I can’t feel your pain, I feel mine, and through it I understand yours all the better.

This Month In Photos!

Standard Supper

Afternoon Homework Help

Birthday Baking

My Backyard

PC Hike

Dos Amigas/Dua Teman

Cultural Exchange

A Wild Patience Has Brought Me Here

While you are waiting for back bones to heal it is discovered that there are a limited number of activities you can accomplish to help the time pass. You sleep in with no call to prayer to wake you up. You spend all day strapped into your pajamas by your back brace. You gorge on copious amounts of dairy disregarding the carnage it will inflict on your digestive system later. You spend an entire day binge watching Keeping Up With The Kardashians and silently judge their life choices. You eat brownies. You eat brownies while judging the Kardashian’s life choices.

It has been four months since I was sent home to recover from a freak bike accident I sustained while playing with kids in my community. Four months of healing, waiting, wondering and grappling with how it feels to fail unexpectedly. Sitting at home watching tv and chowing down brownies made me feel like the ultimate failure. This was not what my 24th year was supposed to look like! At age 24 I was meant to be in the thick of my Peace Corps service. I wasn’t supposed to be reading People magazine while getting a pedicure! I needed to be doing something that was gritty, gratifying and life changing! My poor off-road biking skills I was able to come to terms with, but what made things worse was the internal ringing inside that clanged “go back to Indonesia” and “don’t” simultaneously.

As these conflicted emotions grew stronger, it seemed as if fate had nailed another nail in the proverbial coffin in May, when I learned from my counterpart that my host family was no longer able to host me should I return to my community. With Ramadan’s strict fasting and praying schedule looming, there was no way my counterpart would be able to find me a new house until it ended a month later. Without a place to live, I would not be able to return to work. I put my reinstatement paperwork on hold with relief, grateful I had more time to think about what I wanted to do and waited. Was returning something I really wanted for myself at this point? Was moving on to something different a cop out? What was the right thing to do? The ringing grew louder.

While my bones began to calcify, my self-image started to crumble. If I couldn’t be a Peace Corps volunteer, who was I? In the life blueprint I had drawn up for myself, there was a big blank space post Peace Corps. Thoughts of graduate school, alternate jobs, relocating to different states and different countries raced through my brain like slides on a projector. I applied to a job in West Africa. I mapped out an 8-week hike across Colorado. I seriously considered medical school. All these options felt like desperate attempts to whip up a new version of myself. None of it felt right.

In May I went out for Indian food with a beloved family friend. Over naan and curry and all the delicious foods I lamented I wouldn’t eat if I went back to Indonesia she told me “you already know what you are going to do. The decision is buried somewhere inside and it is up to you to dig it out.”

She was as usual, right.
I once watched a TedTalk on hard choices. I don’t remember much, except that the speaker talked about chocolate doughnuts and the way tough decisions define who we are, and who we become. I also remember I thought that the thirty-something year old speaker had already forgotten what it feels like to be a twenty-something year old.

I think what my elders say I will miss about this time in my life is the very thing that drives me mad. What I will miss later and don’t miss now is the feeling that nothing has started yet; that the future towers over the past, that the present is merely a planning phase for the rest of my life. What an overwhelming privilege it is to choose to go back to Peace Corps or move to West Africa or apply to medical school! What I don’t want to forget about this age is the loneliness of it all. If everything is ahead then nothing is behind. You have no ballast. You have no tailwinds either. You hardly ever know what to do, because you’ve hardly done anything yet.

This is why the choice I had in front of me was a difficult one–I had no prior “hard” life experiences to draw on to back myself up. By having no former knowledge of what to do in a situation like this my decision would become a characterization. What kind of young woman did I want to be? Was I a person who returned to Indonesia because she stuck to her guns and followed through on her commitments? Or was I a woman who understood that sometimes it is better to let go rather than to hold on, and move forward in a different direction?

Wondering if I was returning to my Peace Corps service or moving on has been a lesson in growing up. Probably no one ever feels like an actual grown up, except for certain high school math teachers or members of Congress. These past few months have taught me the importance of the progressive, the “ing” ending on grow. It was realizing that most of growing up is an exercise in being something other than what we used to be while remaining fundamentally–and sometimes maddeningly–who we are. It was noting that all of us on a gut level already know the answers to the questions we ask. How difficult. How divine.

24 has been a big year for me, a painful, wonderful, deeply necessary year. A long relationship I was in ended and continued forward simultaneously. I trimmed my hair with a swiss army knife, met interesting people, butchered a cow, and could feel the engine of my life quietly revving up beneath me. I took a pottery class. I tried listening to jazz music. I couldn’t afford books on Amazon but sometimes I bought them anyway.

My decision to return to Indonesia is at the same time surprising and not to me. That both could be true is the very mystery of becoming that Rilke so beautifully writes of; the notion that you can know and not know yourself at the same time. There is a sense among many of my friends and peers that these next couple of years are the precious few we have to make something of ourselves. To grow into the people we want to be; to manifest the vision we have for our lives. The most important lesson this injury/recovery has taught me is that transformation is often quiet and sans big revelatory bangs.

We grow into the people we want to be and also already are. Looking back, I wish I had trusted more in my ability to make the right decision. I should have felt for the quiet blossoming of truth that would ultimately be the choice I always knew would take me to where I need to go. It was not the frantic transformation of growth but a wild patience in myself that has brought me here. And so I am returning to Indonesia to finish my final year of Peace Corps service. I am nervous about the traffic I will have to once more navigate on my bike (my back can’t take another fall!) I am jittery about laying down a foundation yet again with a new host family, and rebuilding the relationships I left so quickly back at site. My language skills need brushing up on. All of this is simply an indication that there is more grow(ing) and learn(ing) to do.

Out of Indo

In 1913 a young Danish woman followed her new husband (who also happened to be her second cousin) to Kenya to establish a coffee plantation. The Baron and Baroness Blixen started life in the Ngong Hills well enough–many a hunting safaris and coffee planting days were had, until Karen Blixen contracted syphilis from the philandering Baron and returned to Denmark to recover.

There have always been aspects of Karen Blixen’s life that I have loved and admired. I like the idea of Ms. Blixen arriving in Kenya not quite understanding what she is entering into, yet embarking anyway. Karen allowed herself to be shaped, and ultimately transformed by Africa itself. Her stories of plantation floods, bankrupt businesses, cultural faux pas, disease and an affair with an intriguing safari guide are the kind of redemption stories and silver linings we readers love.

I reread her memoir (published under her male nom de plume Isak Dinesen) two years ago when I accepted my Peace Corps invitation to Indonesia. At the time, it was the grandness of her experiences abroad that struck me the most. This past month I picked up her book again. This time, the only thing I could think about was the syphilis.

Thinking about syphilis became almost a sickness in itself. I thought about Karen Blixen and syphilis in hospital waiting rooms, on x-ray and examination tables, and propped up in a hotel bed. I had been biking with some of the kids in my neighborhood when a few of us collided over a pot hole and I landed flat on my back. Sustaining four fractured vertebrae while casually biking in my village post giant bike trip to New Zealand is almost too ironic to even mention.

“But at least it’s not syphilis” I told myself as I hunched my way to electro-stimulation therapy in Surabaya. And when Peace Corps informed me they were medically evacuating me to the states I read the words of Karen Blixen with renewed fervor. “God made the world round so we would never be able to see too far down the road” she writes. I hold these words in my head the first day I learn how to walk in my back brace.

Being sent home to heal has been more complex than I thought it would be. The prematurity of my homecoming in itself has left me in a strange position, like a sheepish party guest who has made a great show of saying goodnight to everyone and then finds she must return to retrieve her car keys. I understand now, what Ms. Blixen must have, upon her return to Denmark: the feeling of having left something behind only to realize that what you left behind was your life. To have left my life in Indonesia, which is so beautiful in its complexity and so maddening in its mystery leaves me with a feeling of buzzy muzziness unrelated to cracked bones.

There’s no way to know what makes life go in one direction and not another. I could not have foreseen that the breaking of my back would rebuild and reinvigorate my sense of purpose as a Peace Corps volunteer. As Ms. Blixen notes, “difficult times have helped me to understand better than before how infinitely rich and beautiful life is in every way, and that so many things that one goes worrying about are of no importance whatsoever.”

It is true. The love and support that has been revealed to me is a gentle reminder of how lucky and enriched my life both here in Colorado and back in Indonesia is. It’s the kind of love that is almost tangible. It makes me feel fierce and humble and gathered up inside. This accident has left me trembling, but glad.

In the end, Karen Blixen is able to take back her life from syphilis, and return to the hills of Africa she loves so much. Later in life, she will write a memoir about her experiences there. In 2015 I will reread “Out of Africa” for the third time and wait and hope for the day in the not so distant future when I too will return to the country I love and cherish so much.

The Known Unknowns

Every three months the Peace Corps sends out the infamously bureaucratic Volunteer Response Form (VRF). Essentially a survey to collect data on the activities, classes and projects each volunteer has been working on, the question that causes me the most angst is the following:

Question: Finish the sentence. “If I could share one thing about my host country with my friends and family back home it would be ____.”

Only one?

Last month I had the privilege of joining my family on a long and jolly jaunt around New Zealand. My first time out of Indonesia in 11 months, I fulfilled every self proclaimed prophesy of cheese gorging, hot shower reveling, and marveling at all the traffic law abiding citizens who fully stopped for pedestrians. What I hadn’t anticipated was how closely Indonesia would shadow me as I did my best to forget it for a while. It’s also hard to put such a multifaceted, multi emotional experience on the back burner of attention when it is what people most want to discuss at cocktail hour.

“Tell us about Indonesia.”
“Tell me about the Peace Corps.”
“What’s it like living out there?”

What IS all that like? Answering a few of those VRFs should have prepared me better. The truth is that I know both more and less about this amazing country since moving here one year ago. A conglomerate of cultures, languages and religions, I love Indonesia because it is still so unknowable to me. Certainly I have come to understand some of the customs and traditions my community is so deeply steeped in, but other aspects remain clouded to my sense of logic.

Now, I’d rather be sodomized by a plastic lawn flamingo than vote for a Republican, but as I consider that VRF question, I can’t help but quote the former secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld, who quite wisely said: “There are known knowns. There are things we know we know. We also know that there are known unknowns. That is to say, we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns, the ones we don’t know we don’t know.”

Let’s start with the known knowns.

1) I know I will wake up at 4:30 when the call to prayer goes off at mosque.
2) I know I will be plied with rice and hot, sugary tea multiple times a day.
3) I realize my students’ sweet smiles are the greatest gift.
4) I’m quite sure buying large quantities of exotic fruit for under a dollar will never get old.
5) I understand the freedom that is the muumuu dressing gown and I’m never going back.

Which brings us to the known unknowns.

1) Status nails.

Here on Java it is the custom (fashion?) for a man to grow out one or two of his fingernails to an extraordinary length. I have been told that a nail of such length indicates that the gentleman enjoys a certain amount of status and privilege. Perhaps he works in an office rather than a rice field and can afford to keep a fingernail long and manicured. I understand the general idea, but there’s something about witnessing a full grown man daintily cleaning his lovely french-tipped nails that bemuses me.

2) Karaoke power ballads.

I can barely get my students to raise their hands in class, or speak above a whisper when called on. I’ve come to understand that Indonesians are not fond of direct, personal attention (a characteristic that fits within a culture that values the communal over the individual). But hand any one of my kids a microphone and suddenly they are prancing around like Mick Jagger for all the world to see. “Timid karaoke belter” is an oxymoron in itself, which is why I’m always shocked when my students, fellow teachers and Indonesian friends select the saddest, most heart-breaking of power ballads to rock out to. I’m talking Celine Dion, Whitney Houston and Mariah Carey. There’s a lot of Bruno Mars and Eric Clapton as well once the vocal pipes grow weary.

A few months ago my amazing counterpart and I had to drive the six hours to Surabaya for a training. Renowned for his love of karaoke, he had prepped the car for a karaoke-singing-road-trip-marathon. With not one, but two flash discs full of background melodies and a compiled book of more than 50 song lyrics that car ride was one of the longest (and one of the best) road trips I’ve ever taken. Pak Zen and I will challenge you to a Sad Song Sing-Off any day.

3) Ghost culture and black magic.

Last night my house was broken into and a laptop and some jewelry were stolen from my Bapak’s desk. A theft inside my own home has been very unsettling, but it has been heartening to hear the outpouring concern and compassion from my fellow teachers and neighbors. I have been told multiple times today that naturally, the thief (like many thieves, of course) was practiced in the art of “sirep” which is the ability to charm people into a deep sleep while you sneak into their house and rob them. This is not the first time my community has insisted that magic and spirits are at work. There is a particular rice paddy in my neighborhood the kids will not bike past because that is where three ghosts reside. I have come to love the voodoo-esque spirituality of Java, even if I’m not fully convinced. Hey, I was sleeping deeply last night when my house was broken into so what do I know?

And finally, the unknown unknowns.

1) Because Peace Corps has forced me to face problems I didn’t even know existed, I can only imagine what the next 15 months have in store for me.
2) And yet,
3) And yet!
4) I love how unknowable it all can be.

Joy, Actually

Tis the season for sugar cookies, twinkly holiday lights and that annual viewing of the amazingly saccharine film “Love Actually.” Little pleasures I would most certainly be reveling in if I were stateside this time of year. But because I am not, I find myself humming little ditties like “Joy to the World” to the baby in my house and doing my best to convince myself that I don’t need that peppermint latte to feel fulfilled. Which is a lie. No amount of fried tofu can ever come close to a delicious holiday beverage. I was griping about the lack of such wintry customs to a friend a few weeks ago on Skype when she asked me if, in spite of it all, I was happy. Such a simple question gave me pause, and as it is the season to cherish life’s happiness, and to wish even more “joy to the world” I can say with absolute certainty that while I am happy in Indonesia, it is a happiness hard won. I’m basically Emma Thompson’s “Love Actually” character if the sequel were to take place in a humid Indonesian village. Like her character I’ve been listening to an inordinate amount of Joni Mitchell lately too.

For the purposes of this post it might be useful to distinguish between pleasure and joy. A lot of people seem to feel that joy is only the most intense version of pleasure, arrived at by the same road–you simply have to go a little further down the track. That has not been my experience. And if you were to ask me if I considered my Peace Corps experience to be a pleasure or a joy, I would answer the latter. And if you asked me if I wanted more joyful experiences in my life right now, I wouldn’t be at all sure I did, exactly because it proves to be such a difficult emotion to manage.

Perhaps the first thing I should say is that I experience at least a little pleasure every day. I wonder if this is more than the usual amount? It was the same even in adolescence, when most people are miserable. I don’t think this is because so many wonderful things happen to me but because small things go a long way. This has proven to be helpful as a lone volunteer. A squishy mango from one of the fruit venders on my road has the genuine power to turn my day around. All day long I can look forward to a glass of es degan (my favorite Indonesian drink: shreds of coconut meat in fresh coconut water). The persistent microstresses that fill the rest of my life are calmed for as long as I have a delicious flavor on my tongue. And though it’s true that when the glass is empty the microstresses return, we volunteers do not have so many reliable sources of pleasure here as to turn up our nose at the ones that are so readily available. A juicy mango. Even the burden of the relentless Indonesian heat can be lifted for the eight minutes it takes to eat a mango.

My other source of daily pleasure is–but I wish I had a better way of putting it–staring into space. A cool breeze, the crowing of our roosters and that delicate tropical sunlight that arrives only at the very beginning and very end of each day here. I can sit on my back patio sans book, music or company and enjoy the nothingness of it all for hours.

I think it’s important to note that I am enjoying my Peace Corps service, but not necessarily finding pleasure in it. Occasionally Peace Corps is a pleasure, though it mostly is a joy, which means in fact it gives me not much pleasure at all but more that strange admixture of terror, pain and delight that I have come to recognize as joy and now must find some way to live with daily here. I’d imagine parents feel the same way about their young children.

Living with daily joy–this is a new problem. Prior to embarking on my service I had known joy only four or five times in my life, and each time tried to forget it soon after it happened, out of the fear that the memory of it would dement and deform everything else. Let’s call it five. Twice I was in love, but only once was the love viable, or likely to bring me any pleasure in the long run. Once I was in water, once in the back middle seat of a crowded car, once sitting on a high mountaintop, once on a rollercoaster, and once in a tent.

It is hard to arrive at generalities in the face of such a small and varied collection of emotional data. What all of my pre-Peace Corps joys do include however is the great struggle that tends to precede joy, and the feeling–once one is “in” joy–that the experiencing subject has somehow “entered” the emotion, and disappeared. I “have” pleasure, it is a feeling I want to experience and own. An ice cream cone is a pleasure. Winter vacation is a pleasure. But here in Indonesia as a Peace Corps volunteer I AM joy.

At the neural level, I’m sure explanations can be given in very clear terms as to why the moment after giving a speech to a hundred Islamic middle schoolers can feel ecstatic, or swimming in the Indian ocean with somebody dear to me. Perhaps the same synapses that drugs falsely twang are twanged authentically by sea water, and sweaty pre-speech palms. We certainly don’t need to be neuroscientists to know that wild romances–especially if they are fraught with danger–do something ecstatic to our brains, though like the pills that share the name, horror and disappointment are usually not far behind. I used to have a wild, dangerous crush on Indonesia. My first few months in this country I couldn’t take enough of it in: the colors, the smells, the cadence of speech. Even laughter sounds different here. I remember climbing a high, steep hill in PST with a few of my fellow trainees simply because we could. We climbed so high and for so long that we did not consider how we would get down. When it came time to descend we weighed our options: a bruised ass or a long evening inching down as mosquitos swarmed. In the end we decided on a strategy that applied both, and eventually my prosaic infatuation with this country fizzled out. But what a wonderful thing, to stand on a hill with good people, dizzy with joy, thinking nothing of bruised asses.

I’d say my real love for this country came months later. It lay at the end of a long and arduous road, and I think the road will be longer yet at times. I was so surprised by its arrival, so unprepared, that on the day this love arrived I had already had a grumpy morning with canceled classes and was biking to what I was sure would be a pointless meeting while people on motorbikes hassled me with cries of “hey Mister.” But then it snuck up behind me and intermingled itself with the sweat on my skin. I was heading toward the intolerable, feeling the only thing that makes it worthwhile. That was joy.

The thing no one ever told me about joy is that it has very little real pleasure in it. And yet if it hadn’t happened at all, at least once, how would we live? Joy is such a human madness. The fantastic writer Julian Barnes once wrote, “it hurts just as much as it is worth.” For months after reading that book these words stuck with me, so clear and so brutal. It hurts just as much as it is worth. What an arrangement. Why would anyone accept such a crazy deal? Why would anyone agree to eight hundred days of pure, painful, beautiful, ever present joy? I don’t know, but for what it is worth, one third of my way through this twenty-seven month commitment I am so happy that I did.

A Bus Full of Grace

On Thanksgiving before we tuck in to our turkey, pies and stuffings we take a few moments to say what we are thankful for, or in a more Anglo-religious sense, we say grace. Grace is not only something we talk about, it is also a skill we have to learn, like playing the piano or forgiveness. This month has been a lesson in honing my grace. It was a difficult lesson to learn, but I am thankful for it. So here is where I bow my head gratefully and say a little grace of my own:

When I was twenty-three years old I became a kind of daughter to an older Muslim couple who called me their baby. Now, I am twenty-four years old and I have spent eight months growing up in my adopted Indonesian home. I laugh, cry and celebrate with them. Under Ibu’s instruction I can make a mean pecel sauce. Bapak takes me out to the field and shows me how to spot a ripe dragonfruit. My students write me notes of love and admiration and will walk me home if it gets too dark. I’m happy, healthy and safe here.

Since I arrived at my permanent site in June, I have experienced nothing but love and warmth from my community. I suspect a lot of this is due to the respect my host parents garner here. Aside from the fact that people in my desa are ridiculously wonderful and kindhearted, nobody dares cross my Bapak. My host parents look after me with laser like concern. I can’t speak yet from experience, but I’d assume that as a parent (or host parent) you want to shield your children from the darker and harsher realities grown ups know are out there. But eventually the babies have to leave the nest where they will learn for themselves that sometimes life turns dark and you have to find your way out on your own.

Because my community has been such a bubble of all that is good and glowy, it is always jarring when I leave my village. People are pushier, motorbikes are more reckless, even the air feels hotter. Let me preface this by saying I am not a small town Pollyanna naive to the workings of the world. I’ve been blessed to have done a fair amount of traveling in which I’ve seen and experienced some things that still press down sharply on my memory. I read news articles that repeatedly demonstrate how badly people can treat other people. I wasn’t born yesterday. Yet on a deeper level I am of the belief that when we encounter others, we make a basic human promise to be decent, and to be respectful as we explore and circumnavigate each other.

That is what I expected when I boarded the bus back to my site earlier this month. A quick aside on public transportation here: it’s hard to put across the sensory effect of that many people breathing heated exhaust and dust while shifting around in a crowded tropical space: part bouncy school bus part train to internment camp. A tad militia, but cheerful. My Indonesian bus riding strategy is as follows:

Step 1: The bus will not come to a complete stop to pick you up at the side of the road. Reach your hands up to the “doorman” and allow yourself to be swung up and on quickly. Do not dawdle. The bus does not like this.
Step 2: Keep your balance as the bus rolls forward. Scan for seats that a) are near an open window away from any smoking passengers b) are near any itty bitty old women who will take pity on you and tell you what you should be paying for bus fare so you are not cheated later on.
Step 3: All eyes will be on you. Rattle off as many Javanese greetings as you can as you make your way to your seat. This is a surefire bus crowd people pleaser.
Step 4: Put on your sunglasses and watch the rice paddies zip by. Watch out for live poultry that can get underfoot and enjoy the ride.

These were the steps I was prepared to take on that bus home from Surabaya. I boarded the bus well enough (Step 1), but found that this bus was too crowded for any seat scouting. Bodies pressed on bodies, as I did my best to balance in the back.

I should have known that the man collecting fare was going to give me a hard time when he hauled me on board and did not call me the polite “Mbak” (Miss) but “bule” (white foreigner). I should have turned around and given him a piece of my mind when he edged up behind me and started whispering obscenities in my ear. I should have immediately gotten off the bus when he started rhythmically pushing his crotch into the small of my back. But I didn’t. I couldn’t. I was too surprised to act.

It’s a special kind of privilege to be born into the body you wanted, to embrace the essence of your gender even as you recognize what you are up against. Unfortunately, as a white, female volunteer this sometimes means that I am up against a lot. Being a woman in a conservative country has not quashed my feminist tendencies, but rather redefined them. I expect men here to treat me with respect, maybe not because I am a woman, but because here, women are considered with care and reverence from a distance. Men will not sit next to me, shake my hand or allow me to eat before they do. This gap between the genders, while frustrating at times has up until now acted as a safety buffer. How can a man hurt me if he will not touch me?

The end never comes when you think it will. It’s always ten steps past the worst moment and a weird turn to the left. I demanded to get off the bus a few moments after the fare collector began grinding into me to the beat of a Bollywood song.

A few mind numbing bus rides later, I arrived back at site. I wanted to tell my host family what had happened but I didn’t know how to begin. Instead, I walked into the orchard behind my house and had, for lack of a better term, a major going to pieces. I sat for a long time under a cacao tree thinking about what I should have said, and what I should have done. I reassured myself that I had done nothing to provoke that man into doing what he had. But that isn’t how it works is it? When someone shows you how little you mean to them, your own self doubts creep in. That is the real tragedy of harassment. People are not made up of compartments. What is done, or what is said to you gets said and done to all of you. Being treated like shit is not an amusing game or a transgressive intellectual experiment. It’s something you accept, condone, and unfortunately sometimes believe you deserve.

But I didn’t deserve that. You expect harm from some things but not others. As the sun started to sink I thought on all the things we need that can also hurt us: knives, motorcycles, men who collect money on buses. I thought on women and men alike who have experienced harassment and hurt on a far more serious plane than I did that day, than I ever have in my life. I spent a lot of time sitting under that cacao tree trying to make sense of all the shit things people do, and alternately go through. I couldn’t think of a good explanation. There are some things that are so sad and wrong and unanswerable that the question must simply stand alone like a stick in the sand.

Since that afternoon there is one clear answer I have found buried behind my sternum: within the chaos of my shame and rage and fear there is meaning, and within that meaning is the possibility of grace. My anger and sadness is tremendous, but the love I have in my life here in Indonesia is bigger. I remember reading somewhere that the word “obliterate” comes from the Latin “obliterare.” Ob means “against”; literare means “letter” or “script.” A literal translation is “being against the letters.” It was impossible for me to truly talk about what happened so I wrote a blog post instead. The darkness we harbor within ourselves is both equal parts destruction and creation. It is both black as night and bright with light. It is the rainy season and it is the drought. It is mud and it is manna. When dark things obliterate our lives like bullets blowing out bits of our hearts, it is impossible to go on as we did before. So we must carry on as we never have. It’s wrong that this is what needs to happen, but it is what has to be done. And I think it is in this place of healing and acceptance that we discover true grace.

In the past few weeks I have found that there is a certain beauty to having my heart sucker punched the way it was on that bus. I’d give it all back in a snap, but the fact is, that bus ride broke me open and taught me things. It showed me shades and hues I couldn’t have otherwise seen. It required me to suffer. It compelled me to reach for my grace and light it up as I would a torch in a tunnel. It has cast a light on my wonderful life here and all the people I am grateful for this Thanksgiving.

On a lighter note Happy Thanksgiving to all my fantastic friends and family! Eat an extra slice of pumpkin pie for me 🙂

A Tale of Two Women

How do I talk about my host sister except that I mention Charles Dickens? A stodgy, long winded writer, Mr. Dickens and I have spent quite a bit of time together this past month. Every afternoon when the atmosphere sags under the heat of the day, I retreat into his dark, and melancholy stories. In his books, it is usually cold and raining. I find this refreshing. If I am to be honest, I have also been using these books as a literary Irish exit of sorts, allowing me to circumnavigate stilted interactions with Wilda.

My host sister Wilda and I are the same age but the similarities stop there. Aside from the obvious (she is married, she is pregnant with her first child, a girl) there is a gaping cultural divide between us. Wilda acts her age within her Indonesian culture, and I act my age outside of it. This often leaves us at a loss for what to say to each other. We talk too much about the weather and count down the days until Ibu and Bapak return home. Our parents (her biological and my host) have been gone for a month and will not return until the end of October. They are making the pilgrimage (or Haji) to Mecca. It is one of the five pillars of Islam and it sounds to me both very important and incredibly boring. (Note: when I ask my host parents about Haji before they leave, they sum up the 40 day pilgrimage as “just walking around in circles and praying”). Wilda has moved into her parents house while they are gone for two reasons: she needs to be closer to her older sister as her due date draws near, and someone needed to babysit the American while Mom and Pops are away.

It is awkward to say the least, because we can’t quite figure each other out. From Wilda’s perspective, there must be something wrong with me that I am not married yet. There is something strange about me that I am here in Indonesia on my own, and more over, that I chose to be here independently. On my end, my Western liberal and feminist upbringing makes me wrinkle my nose at marriage and kids at this time in my life. The family jokes that Emily is afraid of nothing, and Wilda is scared of everything. While I have managed to move to the other side of the world, Wilda will not cross a busy street without her father or her husband holding her arm. One time she asks me to hold her elbow while we sidestep traffic, and I do my best not to laugh. I sleep with the lights turned off. The dark scares Wilda. In all things she seems to be the Charles Darnay to my Sydney Carton. Or something like that. And so it happens that we really don’t have much to say to each other. We are alone in the house, but don’t spend too much time together. Most evenings, my nose is buried in a book about orphans and pickpockets, while Wilda sends Whats App messages to her husband.

I like Wilda’s husband, Khusul. He speaks with the soft cadence of a boy who works in a crafts boutique, and for the longest time I affectionately referred to him (in my mind) as “Lady Butt”. He is not chubby, but curvy in a masculine way. He is quick to flash a smile, but rarely speaks. He spends long periods of time out in the yard, with a cigarette between his fingers, blowing lazy streams of smoke into the sky. I love it when he is here on the weekends. I like watching them together, hoping to catch a glimpse of the reason they got married. I want to see them in love, because Western tradition and Rachel McAdams rom coms have taught me this is why people get married and have babies. I am a little disappointed when I ask Wilda how they met, and she says they met in school and they texted a lot. That’s it. That is their story. I have grown up thinking love and marriage is the product of a fantastic meet-cute encounter. Wilda was raised to see matrimony as a necessary and practical step in becoming an adult. I ask her how he proposed. She says her parents talked to his parents and they set a date.

In contrast, my Mom and Dad met in their late teenage years. Their love story is the kind you hope for when you ask people how they came together. There are cheesy pick up lines, initial misunderstandings, red sneakers, love notes on gum wrappers, break ups, pizza in the park and Carole King love songs. I love imagining them then, knowing no more than I do, just that they liked the way it felt to be together. I try and imagine Wilda and Khusul, sending texts back and forth, the high “ping” of a message received making their hearts jump with anticipation. I wonder if Wilda’s daughter will be disappointed to learn that her parents’ marriage is built on emoticons, or if she will privately thrill at how her parents were brought together as I do with mine.

I give up on trying to find common ground with Wilda towards the end of September. I finish reading “A Tale of Two Cities” where Dickens writes “that every human creature is constituted to be that profound secret and mystery to every other”. When it comes to my host sister, I think no words could ring more true.

Around 3am on October 4th, I am roused from sleep by the bright kitchen light outside my room. I think Wilda has turned it on again after I’ve gone to bed (she is afraid of ghosts, so likes the lights on at all times). I can’t sleep with the glare, so I groggily rise to shut it off again. In the kitchen, I find Wilda pacing in circles. She has felt a few contractions and can no longer lie in bed. I proceed to privately flip out. I’m trying to recall anything I know about emergency home births and labor breathing techniques. For some reason, I can only think about Dennis Quaid. I remember seeing a movie with him as a kid where he must deliver a baby on the side of a highway. I forget the name of the film, and wish my eight year old self had paid more attention. Luckily, this baby isn’t on Dennis Quaid time, and we walk around the kitchen for a few more hours, until Wilda is exhausted and needs to rest. For a woman who is wearing Hello Kitty pajamas un-ironically, she shows immense maturity in these early moments of labor.

I have one class that morning so leave Wilda and Ninin (my other host sister) after a sleepless night. I can’t concentrate at school. I think about all the ways the date October 4th will be ordinary for most people, and how it will completely transform Wilda’s life. I rush home and catch Ninin and Wilda as they are heading out the door and I am hustled into the car with them. It is unclear as to whether my going with them was part of the initial plan, or if they are worried of what I will do if left at home unattended. Either way, I am pressed as far against the side window as I can be, giving Wilda a wide berth for her ever expanding and quickening contractions. I believe I whimper “oh man oh man oh man” all the way to the hospital.

The hospital is painted bright green and yellow and there are no waiting rooms. I am led into the delivery room with everyone else and promptly move to cower in the farthest corner. “Everyone else” at this point includes Khusul who has left work to meet us, and another female neighbor. We’re crowded into this sterilized space and I can see each of us are breaking down from the excitement and the trauma of it all. There are spazzy hand motions, raised voices, and nervous laughter. Everyone is freaking out. Everyone except Wilda. Wilda, who is afraid of moving traffic, geckos and the dark is the bravest soul in the room. She is a planet of calm, and slowly we all gravitate into her orbit, taking big, deep breaths.

What follows is an experience I can never give back. To say that “labor” is labor is an understatement. To be honest it looks fucking terrible. As the baby crowns I think that this is the way we get sexually active teens to use protection. Stick em’ in the maternity ward and I guarantee girls will never let boys “forget” a condom ever again. I think there is no way I will ever put myself through this unless I am positive I really want the baby I push out of my body. I become radically pro-choice standing by Wilda’s head.

Every time I freak out in that delivery room though, all I have to do is look at Wilda’s face. I am ashamed, adding to the nervous energy around her as she (not me) undergoes something so profoundly world shattering. Wilda is with us, but not with us. She is with herself on a different plane. We all could not be there and I don’t think she would notice. She seems to have gone to some place deep inside herself and alternately rests and draws energy from this point of focus only she can feel. Her strength is awe inspiring.

My host sister gives birth to a beautiful baby girl at 3pm on October 4th. She has a mass of dark hair and sweet puckered lips. They wrap her up like a Chipotle burrito and put her in a baby “health box” while the mother naps. The rest of the day and into the evening, family members come and go and sleep in the room with Wilda. I stay, because no one has taken me home yet. I stay because I can’t take my eyes off of the baby and her mother. Wilda looks the same, but she also looks different. She has undergone something I can’t even imagine. She is twenty four years old and she now has a little person who depends on her. We are the same age, but now I think she looks older than me, like she knows something I don’t.

Later that evening, everyone leaves for evening prayer and it is just Wilda, the baby and me. I pull out my copy of Charles Dickens and my host sister watches her daughter sleep. Quite suddenly, she breaks the silence. “Thank you for being here”, she says. I look at her, and she looks at me. I don’t have the words in Indonesian to tell her how moved I am. I don’t have the words in any language to tell her what she did this afternoon inadvertently changed me, and has changed how I view her. I don’t have the words to tell her I am sorry I held up her life and compared it to my own. I can’t communicate how much I admire her. Instead I simply say “Anda sudah sepurnah”. You were perfect. She smiles at me and drifts off to sleep. I go back to my book, where the following words leap off the page and hover over me in this hospital, over this experience, over my life here: “Electric communication will never be a substitute for the face of someone who with their soul encourages another person to be brave and true”.