Reactivating, Body Cleansing, Energy Revitalizing Trickery

Here am I at 8:00 am, sitting in my living room on a Sunday morning, laughing to myself because after one year of living in Indonesia, it's still so difficult to accept the crazy reality that, in fact, I am living every day. I was just awakened by my new team of servants, who come to my house two or three times a week. Ika is a 17-year-old girl, who's currently in trade school, studying telecommunications. Her mother, Sia, has lived in Medan her whole life. After she cleans houses in the morning, she opens a small warung (eating stall), where she sells various fried indonesian snacks. They both seem to have the typical Batak personality – loud and direct, much different from my passive and polite Javanese friends. They cut me no slack when speaking the language and leap at every opportunity to make fun of my unfamiliar, American-Indonesian dialect. They were recommended to me by my neighbors, who apparently have been hiring them for quite some time. Last week they came to my house for the first time, and we negotiated a price of Rp. 150,000 per month. Compared to Java, that seemed pretty fair to me, but when I spoke to my co-workers at school about how much I had agreed to pay them, each of my new friends' expressions changed, and they scolded me for not asking their advice first about how much to pay. I guess a whopping $16 a month for washing dishes and clothes, ironing, and mopping my floor multiple times a week is pretty unheard of in Medan.

Someone outside school, however, who has already gone to great lengths to introduce me to the culture, to befriend me, and to show me the ropes may or may not have the noble intentions that I would have hoped for. Chris drove me from the airport to my home on my first day here, and since then, I have spent a couple really long days with him, visiting his friends and family, as well as checking out some scenery in the area. I had a wonderfully genuine experience with him last week when I ate dinner with his family. Before the end of the night, I was deemed 'Uncle Ken' and was asked to say the blessing before dinner. I had multiple kids climbing all over my back for the better part of an hour, and I was receiving constant directions about how to cook the delicious food that I had been served.

Later that night, we moved from his mother's home to one of his friend's places, where many people had already gathered together. One of the crew is a local TV personality, and a couple more seemed to be pretty successful business types. They were great people, and we talked about everything from our future plans and goals to how they were going to “open my third eye” and show me a ghost who tends to hang out around their house – which hell, if they can do that, then I'm totally up for it. A couple hours passed, and throughout the course of the evening, mentions of their business popped up as non-sequiturs in our conversation. I didn't really have much interest in it because I was so tired by that time, so I never really bothered to ask what they were all into. Without a doubt, however, they were certainly selling some product.

This past friday was a good 20-hour day, which started at my school, St. Yoseph, and ended on the back of Chris's mo-ped. I was in Medan city for many hours with my friend, John, another teacher at the school, where we tried to sort out my internet situation at the infamous Telkomsel office. This year, I'm handling the complications with Telkomsel quite productively, whereas a few interactions last year ended up in tears later in the day, when I still could not begin to apply for graduate school... but that's beside the point. After John toted me around on his Suzuki for half the day, he dropped me off at Citra Gardens, where I was supposed to meet Chris for dinner. However, this place's formal atmosphere looked much more like that of an office complex than that of a food court, and in fact, it was.

I sat down with my new friend and three other people I hadn't met yet and was given expensive coffee to drink while Chris explained to me that, actually, he wanted me to see a presentation before we went to eat, and how that was actually the true reason why he wanted me to meet him there. I'm not going to say that I had been leery of him the whole time, but since our first meeting, I hadn't forgotten seeing his set of motivational tapes and secrets-to-success guides (all from the same publisher) in his car on the ride back from the airport. And sure enough, all the people I had met with him the previous weekend, who had all been introduced to me merely as friends, immediately showed up wearing suits and carrying bundles of electronic equipment.

While the crew began to assemble their mini-stage upstairs, Chris began to entertain the many guests who started to filter in. To my utter disappointment, he whipped out a few boxes of Liquid Chlorophyll, a product of some pyramid scheme (which is now referred to as “Multilevel Marketing,” by the way). Last year, a few teachers at Guyangan, including Imam (who is always scheming about something), came to school one day with this great new idea about how to get rich and how to sell a product that cleanses your body naturally. Liquid Chlorophyll is just some drink with a lot of iron and a lot of calcium, but a new cult of multilevel marketers has apparently started to go around (especially in developing countries, where people have a lower standard of education), in order to promote their product with a super fancy presentation, including an LCD projector, an advanced sound system, and a Powerpoint slide-show with all the bells and whistles that the program has to offer.

It's just fact that a great deal of people in developing countries are fascinated with new technology, and because they haven't been exposed to it (nor to fraudulent money making schemes, nor to many science or psychology classes), when they see a production like this, they have absolutely no reason in the world to doubt the truth of what the presenters are saying. I actually talked for over an hour about this kind of marketing and about the psychological tricks that are used in order to get people to join these scams with the group of teachers in the pesantren, who were all highly considering dropping the equivalent of $200 to join – that's two months' salary for a lot of them.

On some level, I was actually happy that I was about to see this presentation, which had excited my co-workers in Guyangan so strongly. And about half way through, I wanted my video camera so badly it was killing me. They were making claims that if you were to leave a cigarette near a closed bottle of Liquid Chlorophyll for some mentioned length of time, that the nicotine in the cigarette would be absorbed (into what, I don't know). They had so much scientific-sounding lingo for the different kinds of products, like “omega squared,” “universe induced energy,” “solar-harnessed negative ions,”and “the six elements of health.” Each time a new presenter entered or left the stage, they were given an up-beat, rock 'n' roll intro or exit track, to which they jogged off the stage, through the audience, giving high fives to the other presenters and sometimes even to excited audience members. And at one point, they had four volunteers come up onto the stage, not knowing what their assignment was to be, and they were all told to lift a man into the air using only their index fingers (a seemingly impossible task). The man was sitting in a chair, and of course the participants were confused; they were only told where they could lift him (under his arms and legs), but they didn't know exactly why they were doing this, nor how.

After they failed miserably, they were each given a glass of Liquid Chlorophyll to drink and were told that after 15 minutes, when the product had been properly metabolized (also a perfect amount of time to think about their new job and mentally prepare), they would be asked to try and lift the man again. The second time when the group of people went up in front of everyone, you could see that their attitudes had changed. They knew what they had to do, and they had all been thinking about how they would do it. Also, unlike last time when they were expected to fail, this time they had 35 pairs of eyes expecting them to succeed. The participants had smiles on their faces instead of grimaces, and they had bent knees and fully planted legs instead of precarious and apathetic postures. Of course the four of them were able to lift the man, and to their own amazement and satisfaction, an audience of genuinely impressed people began to clap. I was desperately scanning the room to see if I could make eye-contact with anyone who wasn't buying into the silly deception. Unfortunately, I was unsuccessful.

After the presentation, everyone was broken into groups, and round-table discussion ensued. Everyone was asked to stand, introduce him/herself, and give his reason for wanting to join the Liquid Chlorophyll family. If they had already joined, they were encouraged to give a testimonial about how Liquid Chlorophyll had changed their life. I'm not exaggerating about that last comment either; Indonesian people in general love drama much more than western people. For example, yesterday I was asked to video tape the speeches that some individuals made at a going away party for one of the teachers at my school who is about to move to another island. Any time someone started crying while the camera was off, John, who was sitting next to me, gave me an urgent look and pressured me to switch it on. The fact that, in a group of friends at someone's house, people were giving speeches one-by-one to honor their departing workmate should tell you enough. Anyway, I of course was not exempt from the introduction process at the Liquid Chlorophyll debriefing. If there is anything that I have learned to do during my time in Indonesia, it's been how to handle myself in completely random, awkward, and uncomfortable situations.

After the hours of craziness, I actually did have a good time with Chris and his friends at an eating stall outside the building. They were pretty genuine people, and I couldn't really be frustrated with them. Chris had been slightly deceiving, but I have truly begun to embrace all unpredictable things that happen while I'm here. I honestly just don't have a whole lot on my plate, so it's not like anything could really inconvenience me. So many things that used to frustrate me last year just make me excited now, and I when find myself in these situations, I'm always taking notes with the software on my cell phone, just so I can remember exactly how silly everything is. The only undeniably disturbing aspect of the evening was having to silently watch desperate people get taken advantage of by an American product, clearly aiming to take advantage of desperate people in other countries (there's a reason why you probably haven't heard of this drink before). But hey, that's why I can't wait to start focusing on education next year in grad school.