Something I realized this past summer, as I was galavanting around the country with Jon (and i wonder if you've noticed), is the fact that I have unintentionally but, nevertheless, consistently excluded writing about my experiences teaching here. I've relayed some humorous anecdotes from the pesantren, and I've hinted at the character of certain staff members at my current school, but I don't think I've even once mentioned what it's been like for a math major to suddenly change focus, submit the grades of 15 Jefferson Community College algebra finals, and only two days later leave the University environment altogether to begin teaching English in an Indonesian high school. This is my job here. I don't know how, but I guess sometimes I forget about that.
My intentions are not to convey that teaching is an unimportant part of my time hear, but it is apparent that I have chosen to embrace the ultimate goal of the Fulbright Program, rather than thinking of myself exclusively as an English teacher. It's easy to make all my experiences very much my own, especially since AMINEF does very little to monitor my progress or accomplishments. Last year I felt I was put into an almost impossible situation as a conversational English teacher, so I chose to focus on different aspects of the grant. I made life-long friendships with the people in my community and I know almost all the local foods, in which they take so much pride. I could have stressed about planning futile lessons with students who just don't speak English, and I could have taken relieving vacations every weekend; that would have been no problem and likely no less rewarding. My pesantren students very well could have been able to speak better English at the end of 10 months if that was the route I had taken. However, I relaxed, and I used my inherent influence as a foreigner in a village that hasn't seen a white resident since Dutch imperialism (which is very far from a joke). I made impressions in my own way. I coasted through my classes, acting like a clown, relying on my humor and facial expressions, and I passively improved my students' motivation to study English; however, I actively tried to increase their curiosity about life outside a traditional village. Last year, the role I played in Guyangan was very far from “English teacher,” but I felt that I maximized my experience, even though my prescribed title was “English Teaching Assistant.”
That being said, my situation this year is a far cry from what I went through last year. There are plenty of similarities, but I have to deliberately look for them because I'm already used to Indonesian high school norms. There are plenty of defining characteristics that almost all Indonesian schools possess simply because of culture. For example, neither of my schools have a cafeteria; both are built around a courtyard, and they have open-air classrooms, which are consequently subject to an number of regular disturbances. Educators in both environments tend to value quiet mouths, unconditional respect for teachers, and memorization more than they appreciate interactive environments, fostering independent thinking, and problem solving. That's just the culture of secondary education in this country. However, the organization and administration of St. Yoseph is much closer to that of an American high school than Raudlatul Ulum (YPRU), which never pretended to be anything other than a conservative madrasah. There are two assistants to the head master at St. Yoseph, one for curriculum and another who is the dean of students. They both have a significant amount of pull, and their suggestions to Sister Modesta are always taken into consideration. I've seen arguments between administrators arise and then be calmly and diplomatically resolved, leaving no party at any significant loss. At YPRU, I only saw consequences for those who intentionally (or unintentionally) “crossed” Mr. Humam.
Mr. Humam is a brilliant Individual, a moving public speaker, and a convincing politician. I found myself laughing at his speeches before I had any idea what he was saying. The fact of the matter is that he is a highly effective community and religious leader, who just so happens to own and operate a school. And it just so happens that he has some strong opinions on how that should be done. Ultimately, he had total control and no control over the school at the same time. He demanded the obedience of staff, teachers, and students, but he was constantly making presentations in Jakarta, Semarang, and Surabaya to various ministries of religion and local governments for grant money. His presence was seen only half the time at the pesantren, and when he was gone, problems simply went unresolved until his return. If an administrator or teacher were 95% positive that he could handle a dispute on his own, then that 5% of uncertainty was more than enough to forgo the risk of possibly disappointing the Kyai. Consequently, the curriculum was lacking, teachers' schedules constantly conflicted, and the key to the copy room remained in one man's possession, whether he was present that day or not. My students there were raised with the fear of Allah, and rarely did I have anything resembling a disciplinary issue, but the national examination at the end of the year was a collective and excused cheat-fest that I doubt excluded a single sole.
I don't know yet if rampant cheating is commonplace at my new school or not, as it seems to be pretty normal in most Indonesian high schools, but I can't imagine that it happens to the same degree at St. Yoseph as it does at most others. Of all the schools I've visited in this country, having had the opportunity to travel to other fulbrighters' sites, I've not yet seen a single other institution staffed with a workforce of entirely full-time employees. I've yet to see another school with mandatory time-cards. And I've never seen another teachers' office with personally assigned spaces and desks sporting ornamental name-plates. My fellow teachers all have college degrees and seem to be pretty motivated to plan lessons in advance. This is unfortunately not always (usually?) the case. When teachers put in effort, they are obviously more likely to be disappointed in students who don't take them seriously. But teachers who don't even put in time to plan their own classes don't have the right to be let down by a student's lack of motivation. In most cases, teachers in this country simply don't push their students because they, themselves, were never pushed to excel by their own teachers.
My new colleagues are an entirely different breed from the devout group who sat and lectured endlessly at my old school. I see so much more of a community within the teachers' lounge here. There were over 120 instructors in Guyangan's only high school, and some of them showed their faces just once a week. Few friendships were made in the teachers office at YPRU, only continued.
That's more than a slight contrast to the perpetual “open mic' night”, that is the first door on your right on the ground floor of St. Yoseph Catholic High School. There is always an empty guitar case on top of the history bookshelf, and that's not because the music instructor has stubbornly avoided returning its contents. I can safely say that every single day I will be serenaded in either a tradition Batak tune, Indo-pop, or a common Indonesian rendition of “Hotel California,” which has somehow come to necessitate a three-part harmony. The people of North Sumatra are admired by the entirety of an already musically inclined culture. My counterpart, Mrs. Simbolon, sang a traditional song at our orientation in August, when all the counterparts arrived, and I heard comments circulating the room about this requisite talent of Batak people. I was duly impressed by my students in Guyangan, who could put together an impressive ensemble with virtually no time to practice, but it should tell you something that I no longer even have a reaction when the communal guitar gets passed randomly to the biology teacher (whom I hadn't before even seen whistling to herself), and she breaks out “Bohemian Rhapsody,” while the Chemistry teacher is singing “Unchained Melody” a cappella. People tell me that if I just sang louder, I would impress everyone in the room, including myself – I assure them that my barely audible volume is more than appropriate.
Saturday, October 18, 2008
Monday, October 6, 2008
Spaghetti Really Takes You Places in this Country
I don't think I ever painted a picture of my life in a madrasah, in a small and conservative town away from all things western, as a grim experience; you already know it was quite the opposite. However, there were aspects of my personality that I had to constantly highlight, alter, or even omit altogether in order to assimilate harmoniously in Guyangan. It was never really easy. I didn't feel that I was ever being dishonest with myself or with the people who lived around me, but I soon realized that to reveal certain aspects of my character would not only be shocking , but it would be downright inappropriate considering the circumstances. If I wanted to convey a self image comparable to the open, friendly and joking person I try to be in the U.S., then there were certain behaviors I would have to change, in order to fit in with the local culture. I wasn't really Kenneth Scott Moore in Guyangan, but while I was there, I at least tried to be the equivalent of Kenneth Scott Moore, if that makes sense.
That being said, I have come to enormously value my experience there, and I've come to value it in a number of ways. Today however, I want to discuss only one aspect in which I now appreciate what was an overtly restricted life in Central Java. That aspect is the extent to which my time there has allowed me to relish in the sweet fruits of my now almost totally unencumbered life in North Sumatra! Don't get me wrong; I'm not running a muck every weekend. If fact, I've so far been to only one bar in this entire city, and by no means could they consider me a regular. However, I have been making up for last year's repression in other ways. When female Fulbrighters came to visit me in Guyangan, we were not allowed to walk from the school to the dining hall side-by-side. And of course, they were highly encouraged to wear head scarves, which all of them did except on one occasion earlier in the year before I had truly realized the intensity of my situation. Nothing about my stay in Medan even remotely compares to the severity of Kiayi Humam's rule over his small kingdom within the regency of Pati. So, for a change, I've been spending a completely different kind of quality time with my new headmaster – headmistress actually.
Sister Modesta is perhaps one of the kindest and most benevolent individuals I have ever known. She has been responsible for such efforts as making sure that Mr. Monang is on hand to keep me company at any time when she has the slightest inkling that I might be lonely; going beyond the owner of my house to have the school's repairman fix the leak in my roof; sending bushels of fruit to my doorstep when I was sick; regularly calling me to her office during my breaks so she can get in as much English practice as possible, and frequently making rounds in the school to make sure it is being run in a proper manner. This is one of the those times when I won't even bother to compare my two principles, head-to-head, as far as their effectiveness as educators. Nevertheless, Sister Modesta has taken a keen liking to me and is always thinking up some reason why I should come visit her. My arm has been burned and braised with twist marks, as I've been relentlessly forced to spend hours of my free time within the confines of the all-female boarding house at St. Thomas Catholic University.
Should I find myself already on her campus when a slight shower begins to drizzle from passing clouds, the harem of 35 women will do anything to keep me from leaving and risking getting a cold. But yesterday afternoon, as I had promised to bring 11 pounds of tomatoes and six boxes of pasta to cook spaghetti for everyone, I was pitilessly urged to just put on my raincoat and ride through a torrential downpour. I arrived 15 minutes later at the university kitchen with Indonesia's acid rain dripping from every inch of my body, and I was greeted by two eager nuns and four smiling girls from the English department. I removed all the ingredients and supplies from my over-sized, mountaineering backpack, and we quickly began to mince onions, peel tomatoes, and boil water. It turned out to be a monumental success, as I just let the enormous pot of sauce simmer, while I repeatedly taste-tested it to make sure the proportions of garlic and Italian seasoning hadn't gotten out of hand through the madness of preparing enough food to feed an army.
As all the students made their way down to the kitchen, I climbed the stairs to eat my meal with the eight or nine sisters who were present (Sister Modesta actually didn't make it because she was visiting a friend in the hospital). We joked around, while making comments about how this would have to become a weekly event, and once again, I felt my arm being squeezed red with friction. I was promised the opportunity next week to dine in the student-canteen with the girls if I came back to learn the traditional cooking methods of a Batak dish with the same crew.
...And now the story of Sir Galahad, the pure.
That being said, I have come to enormously value my experience there, and I've come to value it in a number of ways. Today however, I want to discuss only one aspect in which I now appreciate what was an overtly restricted life in Central Java. That aspect is the extent to which my time there has allowed me to relish in the sweet fruits of my now almost totally unencumbered life in North Sumatra! Don't get me wrong; I'm not running a muck every weekend. If fact, I've so far been to only one bar in this entire city, and by no means could they consider me a regular. However, I have been making up for last year's repression in other ways. When female Fulbrighters came to visit me in Guyangan, we were not allowed to walk from the school to the dining hall side-by-side. And of course, they were highly encouraged to wear head scarves, which all of them did except on one occasion earlier in the year before I had truly realized the intensity of my situation. Nothing about my stay in Medan even remotely compares to the severity of Kiayi Humam's rule over his small kingdom within the regency of Pati. So, for a change, I've been spending a completely different kind of quality time with my new headmaster – headmistress actually.
Sister Modesta is perhaps one of the kindest and most benevolent individuals I have ever known. She has been responsible for such efforts as making sure that Mr. Monang is on hand to keep me company at any time when she has the slightest inkling that I might be lonely; going beyond the owner of my house to have the school's repairman fix the leak in my roof; sending bushels of fruit to my doorstep when I was sick; regularly calling me to her office during my breaks so she can get in as much English practice as possible, and frequently making rounds in the school to make sure it is being run in a proper manner. This is one of the those times when I won't even bother to compare my two principles, head-to-head, as far as their effectiveness as educators. Nevertheless, Sister Modesta has taken a keen liking to me and is always thinking up some reason why I should come visit her. My arm has been burned and braised with twist marks, as I've been relentlessly forced to spend hours of my free time within the confines of the all-female boarding house at St. Thomas Catholic University.
Should I find myself already on her campus when a slight shower begins to drizzle from passing clouds, the harem of 35 women will do anything to keep me from leaving and risking getting a cold. But yesterday afternoon, as I had promised to bring 11 pounds of tomatoes and six boxes of pasta to cook spaghetti for everyone, I was pitilessly urged to just put on my raincoat and ride through a torrential downpour. I arrived 15 minutes later at the university kitchen with Indonesia's acid rain dripping from every inch of my body, and I was greeted by two eager nuns and four smiling girls from the English department. I removed all the ingredients and supplies from my over-sized, mountaineering backpack, and we quickly began to mince onions, peel tomatoes, and boil water. It turned out to be a monumental success, as I just let the enormous pot of sauce simmer, while I repeatedly taste-tested it to make sure the proportions of garlic and Italian seasoning hadn't gotten out of hand through the madness of preparing enough food to feed an army.
As all the students made their way down to the kitchen, I climbed the stairs to eat my meal with the eight or nine sisters who were present (Sister Modesta actually didn't make it because she was visiting a friend in the hospital). We joked around, while making comments about how this would have to become a weekly event, and once again, I felt my arm being squeezed red with friction. I was promised the opportunity next week to dine in the student-canteen with the girls if I came back to learn the traditional cooking methods of a Batak dish with the same crew.
...And now the story of Sir Galahad, the pure.
Wednesday, October 1, 2008
Motorcycle Madness
I love driving. I don't know what it is, but I whole-heartedly enjoy the activity. Destination is secondary if I am behind the wheel. As a kid, I must have regularly complained about mowing the lawn, but when I look back at all my memories of actually sitting on the riding mower, I don't think I have a single negative one in store. I used to humor myself by trying to mow soccer-field-like stripes in the front lawn; I had strategies to trim our amorphously shaped yard in a path that was as symmetrical as possible, even though it undoubtedly took longer; I was thrilled to mow a walkway in our overgrown field one summer when many relatives planned to visit us; it killed me to share the mower with my cousin when it came time to cut down the cornstalks in my grandfather's garden; I begged incessantly for at least a couple years to have a go-cart. And when I was finally given a golf cart, it took only months for it to be driven to an anticlimactic death of smelly electrical smoke.
It's times like yesterday when individual qualities such as this, which have been engrained and nurtured for years, come in markedly handy. My motorcycle trip to Lake Toba, which started only on Monday and ended promptly on Tuesday consisted of over 12 hours of driving. It was supposedly a 4 hour trip in either direction, but as I've discussed before, estimates of time, distance, and speed are seldom accurate here. Indonesian people will consistently underestimate distance and time, but they will always exaggerate speed. This undoubtedly means that the more questions you ask about any particular destination (concerning the three variables mentioned above), the more your travel plans will differ from the reality of your actual trip.
For example, I'd like to share an excerpt from the pre-travel-coordination conversation I had with my friend Chris the night before we left for Lake Toba. Distances have already been converted to miles for your convenience.
“So, how far would you say we're going to be riding tomorrow?”
“It's right around 60 miles”
“Great, how long do you think that will take?”
“It's usually around five hours, but if we tried to average 60 miles per hour, we could easily do it in four.”
“I'm sorry, could you repeat that?”
“Yeah, if we average 60 miles per hour, then we could make the trip in four hours.”
“...and how far did you say it was again?”
“60 miles”
“So... it's going to take four hours to get there?”
“Sure, but only if we average 60 miles per hour”
“Alrighty then.”
You can see the logic just completely break down right in front of you if you ask too many questions, and I honestly don't know why I still bother. First of all, I'd like to note that we likely traveled over 100 miles in each direction. And secondly, there's no possible way anyone could average 60 miles per hour riding on mo-peds in Indonesian traffic. I've never even gotten my mo-ped up to 50 miles per hour going down hill, and if I could, I wouldn't have any desire to do so. To make a lazy comparison, driving in Indonesian is like a constant game of Frogger – a game of Frogger in which the roles are reversed, and instead of a frog trying to avoid many cars, it's a motorcycle trying to avoid an amalgam of other motorcycles and a plethora of other randomly shifting objects. There are four chief differences, though, that add four new dimensions to the game. The first is that driving here is, in fact, not a game at all, which tends to amplify the gravity of the situation. The second is that actual gravity does, indeed, play a role. Helmets are flying off people's heads, shoes are coming off people's feet, and unsecured furniture is falling off people's trucks. Next is that, contrary to frogger where individual lines of traffic move at constant speeds, people in Indonesia are always accelerating, decelerating, and switching lanes altogether, at totally unpredictable times. And hey, what am I saying? There never really were lanes here to begin with. And lastly, in Frogger, you only have to worry about cars moving perpendicular to your path. In Indonesian traffic, you must avoid drivers who commonly head the wrong way down one-way streets, pedestrians crossing at inopportune times, carrying gigantic, vision-obstructing boxes of tofu, and let's not forget stray farm animals of all sizes, running in all directions.
I can't imagine how naturally adept at games like Need for Speed Indonesian children must be. When driving here, my awareness peaks, and I feel like I've inherited some sort of Spiderman-like super power, where I know exactly what's happening behind me as I follow multiple other simultaneous events in front and on either side of my motorcycle. I've always been one to analyze my soccer game, and even at age 23 and not playing on a team, I still can't help but do it. The last few times I've played pick-up games in Medan, in some aspects, I've been playing better than ever before. This made no sense to me until I started writing this entry, but I'm now pretty sure that even though I hardly played in Pati after Christmas, and though I didn't play when I went home this past summer, I have had numerous grueling practice sessions on Indonesian streets. It's not that I'm running faster or doing any impressive ticks, but my concentration on the ball and on my teammates has jumped to a whole new level over the past six months. I'm sending one-touch passes to people making runs behind me that I would have never been able to do a year a ago.
Amidst all the confusion on the roads here, there is one thing you can always count on though, which adds an undeniable element of safety that does not exist on American streets. You can always take for granted that no other drivers are taking anything for granted. People drive more slowly; they are constantly scanning their surroundings (because they absolutely have to), and road-rage just isn't a factor because, guess what, shit happens, and it happens a lot on Indonesian streets; people just don't get angry about it. The phenomenon of over-correcting because you made a mistake and became panicked doesn't really exist here either. Indonesian drivers cannot afford to drift into a state of complacency and controlled cruise, where being startled is even an option. You can't do anything resembling “cruising” in Indonesia. Truth be told, you're sort of always panicking on the roads here, and while that may seem super dangerous on the surface, I think it actually falls into the category of, “if you emphasize everything, then you emphasize nothing.” What I mean to say by that is if you're always in a state of panic, then after a while, panicking ends up not being so bad.
So even in Indonesia, I still love driving, and again, that served me incredibly well last night when I found my way home against all odds. Chris, who I knew was going to be a fast driver from his personality, ended up totally ditching me only an hour into our drive home from Lake Toba. It was dark and rainy, and I simply wasn't going to step out of my comfort zone to try to keep up with him. There are certain things I am just not willing to do. One of those things happens to be driving entirely too fast in adverse conditions, risking the remaining years of my life, in order to save an hour. So, not paying enough attention, Chris kept the pedal to the medal, and he lost me. When I talked to him later, I found that he had made multiple stops to wait and watch for me, but since it was at night (cloudy and rainy), the only thing that was clear was that I did not see him. It would have been so convenient if we could have just called each other and figured out our respective locations. However, last night happened to be the year's biggest night of celebration in the whole country, the last night of Ramadan. And as to cater to nostalgic families, Telkomsel deemed it appropriate to make all calls free. Consequently, the air-space was completely clogged, and you couldn't make a call if your life depended on it. And so, Telkomsel entered my life in yet another area to inconvenience me again.
The magnitude of this particular holiday in Indonesia is far beyond Christmas Day in the U.S.; it's like comparing President's Day to Easter. The Christmas season as a whole in the U.S., however, is much more of an affair than the Ramadan season in Indonesia. We have decorations that we keep up for over a month; there are tons of Christmas songs and movies, and we even have a season change that adds the image of “a white Christmas.” There's virtually nothing like that in Indonesia. However (and this is a big however), the last night of fasting is the most impressive collective societal event I've ever conceived of, and no other culture on earth has a comparable holiday, even in other Muslim countries. Last year, locked away in the confines of an Islamic boarding school in a small village, I couldn't really appreciate it. This year however, I found myself driving alone, through villages and cities, at prime time (6 pm – 12 am), through some the most intense insanity I'd ever experienced.
Indonesians are very proud of their unique holiday, Lebaran, which marks the end of Ramadan and the beginning of Idul Fitri. It's a nation-wide migration, where nearly every person in the country leaves their home. Traditionally, you go back to your childhood town or village, where your parents are from, but families generally take turns visiting a different prominent family member each year. It transcends religion, so even Christians join in on the madness. I've been told that nearly 80% of the residents of Jakarta's metropolitan area (that's over 16 million people, but don't quote me on that because I just talked about how people exaggerate) leave the city to head home. It's the only time of year when you can drive freely on Jakarta's infamously crammed streets, and every plane and train ticket in the country is booked weeks in advance, and of course, travel agencies jack prices 3-fold. Frankly, it's extremely difficult to find a single person who's not going at least somewhere for Lebaran, even 15 minutes away. Indonesians love to get together to hang out, and no other country can boast a nation-wide migration even remotely close to the world's 4th most populated country.
On any saturday night, at any given city center in Indonesia, you'll find something comparable to the proportions of an annual county fair in America. Tents are set up; people sell produce and food from carts; stands are available where you can buy music and DVDs, and kids have every kind of entertainment they could ask for. So, to put this terms we can all hopefully understand, my journey home last night, during the biggest holiday of the year, was like driving through miles and miles on end of Thunder over Louisville, the Kentucky Derby, or within a half-mile radius of the racetrack parking lot directly after the checkered flag of the Indianapolis 500. Fireworks started as soon as the sun went down yesterday and hadn't stopped by the time I got back to Medan at midnight. Every mosque in the area was sounding it's call to prayer. Trucks everywhere were decorated like floats in a parade with people playing music in their beds. Countless gangs of motorcycles road together, revving their engines in synchronized rhythms. Policemen and other security were directing traffic at every stoplight. Makeshift stands, selling fried goodies lined the streets. Kid's carnival games were at every big intersection, and probably 90% of the population was outside. I've always heard people talk about Lebaran and how many people go out at night to celebrate it, but last year, circumstances prevented me from seeing what really goes on. This year, circumstances allowed me to see Lebaran from farm to village to the 3rd largest city in the country.
All this was admittedly quite nerve-wracking for me, considering that I had no clue where I was (except that the road signs kept saying “to Medan”) and that it was pouring rain the whole time. It is currently the most intense part of the wet season in North Sumatra, and at one point around 10 pm I was riding through six inches of water with a legion of other motorcycles. Despite the chaos though, from the moment I lost sight of Chris, I had already decided that I wasn't going to be angry with him. I know Indonesian people well, and I was positive that the extent to which he was going to be worrying about me, once he realized that he had lost me at night, in a monsoon, hours before arriving in Medan, on the last night of Ramadan, was going to far and away surpass whatever combination of emotions I could possibly be feeling about the situation. I also knew that if he had started to make calls to people at my school about his losing me, then they were going to be so angry with him, that there was no need for me to add any more negative feelings to the equation. In fact, I was hoping in my heart of hearts that he had not already begun to make calls (that is if he could have gotten through to anyone in the first place).
The fact of the matter is that I would have never agreed to go on an epic motorcycle journey if I wasn't already 100% confident that I could have done it by myself. I know how to handle myself here, and I know how to talk to strangers. After more than a year of constantly traveling in this country, I'm also much better equipped to deal with unpredictable circumstances in unfamiliar environments. If something to the degree of losing my only guide in the middle of nowhere had not happened on this trip, truthfully I would have pretty surprised. I may not willingly put myself in positions of needless risk, such as driving like the MotoGP champion on pothole-laden roads; on the other hand, I have come to the point where I seek adventure at virtually every opportunity.
Once I arrived in Medan, I went straight to Chris's house, and despite his having stopped to looked for me (as well as having asked locals if they'd seen a white guy wearing a silver poncho) at every intersection in each subsequent city before Medan, he still managed to get back before me. Truth be told, not too long after I lost sight of him, I decided that since I wasn't going to be mad at him, I would make up for those feelings in another way and just relish in the fact that he should have been more responsible and that he was certainly going to be feeling intense sensations of guilt. Accordingly, I slowed down, pulled over, got my iPod out of my bag, safely secured it under my rain jacket, and fed the headphones into my helmet. I reduced my pace to a speed that would ensure my utmost safety, and I drove happily in the rain for hours, listening to my favorite music, through the craziest bedlam Indonesia has to offer. I then cruelly enjoyed the desperate expression on his face when he burst through his front door to meet the motorcycle pulling into his driveway at 12 am.
Did I mention that Lake Toba happens to be one of the most beautiful places on Earth? Well, it is.
It's times like yesterday when individual qualities such as this, which have been engrained and nurtured for years, come in markedly handy. My motorcycle trip to Lake Toba, which started only on Monday and ended promptly on Tuesday consisted of over 12 hours of driving. It was supposedly a 4 hour trip in either direction, but as I've discussed before, estimates of time, distance, and speed are seldom accurate here. Indonesian people will consistently underestimate distance and time, but they will always exaggerate speed. This undoubtedly means that the more questions you ask about any particular destination (concerning the three variables mentioned above), the more your travel plans will differ from the reality of your actual trip.
For example, I'd like to share an excerpt from the pre-travel-coordination conversation I had with my friend Chris the night before we left for Lake Toba. Distances have already been converted to miles for your convenience.
“So, how far would you say we're going to be riding tomorrow?”
“It's right around 60 miles”
“Great, how long do you think that will take?”
“It's usually around five hours, but if we tried to average 60 miles per hour, we could easily do it in four.”
“I'm sorry, could you repeat that?”
“Yeah, if we average 60 miles per hour, then we could make the trip in four hours.”
“...and how far did you say it was again?”
“60 miles”
“So... it's going to take four hours to get there?”
“Sure, but only if we average 60 miles per hour”
“Alrighty then.”
You can see the logic just completely break down right in front of you if you ask too many questions, and I honestly don't know why I still bother. First of all, I'd like to note that we likely traveled over 100 miles in each direction. And secondly, there's no possible way anyone could average 60 miles per hour riding on mo-peds in Indonesian traffic. I've never even gotten my mo-ped up to 50 miles per hour going down hill, and if I could, I wouldn't have any desire to do so. To make a lazy comparison, driving in Indonesian is like a constant game of Frogger – a game of Frogger in which the roles are reversed, and instead of a frog trying to avoid many cars, it's a motorcycle trying to avoid an amalgam of other motorcycles and a plethora of other randomly shifting objects. There are four chief differences, though, that add four new dimensions to the game. The first is that driving here is, in fact, not a game at all, which tends to amplify the gravity of the situation. The second is that actual gravity does, indeed, play a role. Helmets are flying off people's heads, shoes are coming off people's feet, and unsecured furniture is falling off people's trucks. Next is that, contrary to frogger where individual lines of traffic move at constant speeds, people in Indonesia are always accelerating, decelerating, and switching lanes altogether, at totally unpredictable times. And hey, what am I saying? There never really were lanes here to begin with. And lastly, in Frogger, you only have to worry about cars moving perpendicular to your path. In Indonesian traffic, you must avoid drivers who commonly head the wrong way down one-way streets, pedestrians crossing at inopportune times, carrying gigantic, vision-obstructing boxes of tofu, and let's not forget stray farm animals of all sizes, running in all directions.
I can't imagine how naturally adept at games like Need for Speed Indonesian children must be. When driving here, my awareness peaks, and I feel like I've inherited some sort of Spiderman-like super power, where I know exactly what's happening behind me as I follow multiple other simultaneous events in front and on either side of my motorcycle. I've always been one to analyze my soccer game, and even at age 23 and not playing on a team, I still can't help but do it. The last few times I've played pick-up games in Medan, in some aspects, I've been playing better than ever before. This made no sense to me until I started writing this entry, but I'm now pretty sure that even though I hardly played in Pati after Christmas, and though I didn't play when I went home this past summer, I have had numerous grueling practice sessions on Indonesian streets. It's not that I'm running faster or doing any impressive ticks, but my concentration on the ball and on my teammates has jumped to a whole new level over the past six months. I'm sending one-touch passes to people making runs behind me that I would have never been able to do a year a ago.
Amidst all the confusion on the roads here, there is one thing you can always count on though, which adds an undeniable element of safety that does not exist on American streets. You can always take for granted that no other drivers are taking anything for granted. People drive more slowly; they are constantly scanning their surroundings (because they absolutely have to), and road-rage just isn't a factor because, guess what, shit happens, and it happens a lot on Indonesian streets; people just don't get angry about it. The phenomenon of over-correcting because you made a mistake and became panicked doesn't really exist here either. Indonesian drivers cannot afford to drift into a state of complacency and controlled cruise, where being startled is even an option. You can't do anything resembling “cruising” in Indonesia. Truth be told, you're sort of always panicking on the roads here, and while that may seem super dangerous on the surface, I think it actually falls into the category of, “if you emphasize everything, then you emphasize nothing.” What I mean to say by that is if you're always in a state of panic, then after a while, panicking ends up not being so bad.
So even in Indonesia, I still love driving, and again, that served me incredibly well last night when I found my way home against all odds. Chris, who I knew was going to be a fast driver from his personality, ended up totally ditching me only an hour into our drive home from Lake Toba. It was dark and rainy, and I simply wasn't going to step out of my comfort zone to try to keep up with him. There are certain things I am just not willing to do. One of those things happens to be driving entirely too fast in adverse conditions, risking the remaining years of my life, in order to save an hour. So, not paying enough attention, Chris kept the pedal to the medal, and he lost me. When I talked to him later, I found that he had made multiple stops to wait and watch for me, but since it was at night (cloudy and rainy), the only thing that was clear was that I did not see him. It would have been so convenient if we could have just called each other and figured out our respective locations. However, last night happened to be the year's biggest night of celebration in the whole country, the last night of Ramadan. And as to cater to nostalgic families, Telkomsel deemed it appropriate to make all calls free. Consequently, the air-space was completely clogged, and you couldn't make a call if your life depended on it. And so, Telkomsel entered my life in yet another area to inconvenience me again.
The magnitude of this particular holiday in Indonesia is far beyond Christmas Day in the U.S.; it's like comparing President's Day to Easter. The Christmas season as a whole in the U.S., however, is much more of an affair than the Ramadan season in Indonesia. We have decorations that we keep up for over a month; there are tons of Christmas songs and movies, and we even have a season change that adds the image of “a white Christmas.” There's virtually nothing like that in Indonesia. However (and this is a big however), the last night of fasting is the most impressive collective societal event I've ever conceived of, and no other culture on earth has a comparable holiday, even in other Muslim countries. Last year, locked away in the confines of an Islamic boarding school in a small village, I couldn't really appreciate it. This year however, I found myself driving alone, through villages and cities, at prime time (6 pm – 12 am), through some the most intense insanity I'd ever experienced.
Indonesians are very proud of their unique holiday, Lebaran, which marks the end of Ramadan and the beginning of Idul Fitri. It's a nation-wide migration, where nearly every person in the country leaves their home. Traditionally, you go back to your childhood town or village, where your parents are from, but families generally take turns visiting a different prominent family member each year. It transcends religion, so even Christians join in on the madness. I've been told that nearly 80% of the residents of Jakarta's metropolitan area (that's over 16 million people, but don't quote me on that because I just talked about how people exaggerate) leave the city to head home. It's the only time of year when you can drive freely on Jakarta's infamously crammed streets, and every plane and train ticket in the country is booked weeks in advance, and of course, travel agencies jack prices 3-fold. Frankly, it's extremely difficult to find a single person who's not going at least somewhere for Lebaran, even 15 minutes away. Indonesians love to get together to hang out, and no other country can boast a nation-wide migration even remotely close to the world's 4th most populated country.
On any saturday night, at any given city center in Indonesia, you'll find something comparable to the proportions of an annual county fair in America. Tents are set up; people sell produce and food from carts; stands are available where you can buy music and DVDs, and kids have every kind of entertainment they could ask for. So, to put this terms we can all hopefully understand, my journey home last night, during the biggest holiday of the year, was like driving through miles and miles on end of Thunder over Louisville, the Kentucky Derby, or within a half-mile radius of the racetrack parking lot directly after the checkered flag of the Indianapolis 500. Fireworks started as soon as the sun went down yesterday and hadn't stopped by the time I got back to Medan at midnight. Every mosque in the area was sounding it's call to prayer. Trucks everywhere were decorated like floats in a parade with people playing music in their beds. Countless gangs of motorcycles road together, revving their engines in synchronized rhythms. Policemen and other security were directing traffic at every stoplight. Makeshift stands, selling fried goodies lined the streets. Kid's carnival games were at every big intersection, and probably 90% of the population was outside. I've always heard people talk about Lebaran and how many people go out at night to celebrate it, but last year, circumstances prevented me from seeing what really goes on. This year, circumstances allowed me to see Lebaran from farm to village to the 3rd largest city in the country.
All this was admittedly quite nerve-wracking for me, considering that I had no clue where I was (except that the road signs kept saying “to Medan”) and that it was pouring rain the whole time. It is currently the most intense part of the wet season in North Sumatra, and at one point around 10 pm I was riding through six inches of water with a legion of other motorcycles. Despite the chaos though, from the moment I lost sight of Chris, I had already decided that I wasn't going to be angry with him. I know Indonesian people well, and I was positive that the extent to which he was going to be worrying about me, once he realized that he had lost me at night, in a monsoon, hours before arriving in Medan, on the last night of Ramadan, was going to far and away surpass whatever combination of emotions I could possibly be feeling about the situation. I also knew that if he had started to make calls to people at my school about his losing me, then they were going to be so angry with him, that there was no need for me to add any more negative feelings to the equation. In fact, I was hoping in my heart of hearts that he had not already begun to make calls (that is if he could have gotten through to anyone in the first place).
The fact of the matter is that I would have never agreed to go on an epic motorcycle journey if I wasn't already 100% confident that I could have done it by myself. I know how to handle myself here, and I know how to talk to strangers. After more than a year of constantly traveling in this country, I'm also much better equipped to deal with unpredictable circumstances in unfamiliar environments. If something to the degree of losing my only guide in the middle of nowhere had not happened on this trip, truthfully I would have pretty surprised. I may not willingly put myself in positions of needless risk, such as driving like the MotoGP champion on pothole-laden roads; on the other hand, I have come to the point where I seek adventure at virtually every opportunity.
Once I arrived in Medan, I went straight to Chris's house, and despite his having stopped to looked for me (as well as having asked locals if they'd seen a white guy wearing a silver poncho) at every intersection in each subsequent city before Medan, he still managed to get back before me. Truth be told, not too long after I lost sight of him, I decided that since I wasn't going to be mad at him, I would make up for those feelings in another way and just relish in the fact that he should have been more responsible and that he was certainly going to be feeling intense sensations of guilt. Accordingly, I slowed down, pulled over, got my iPod out of my bag, safely secured it under my rain jacket, and fed the headphones into my helmet. I reduced my pace to a speed that would ensure my utmost safety, and I drove happily in the rain for hours, listening to my favorite music, through the craziest bedlam Indonesia has to offer. I then cruelly enjoyed the desperate expression on his face when he burst through his front door to meet the motorcycle pulling into his driveway at 12 am.
Did I mention that Lake Toba happens to be one of the most beautiful places on Earth? Well, it is.
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