Scrambling under snarls of rattan and thorny vines last week while tracking silver leaf monkeys and macaks through the lowland forest of Borneo, we were suddenly caught by a pounding rain shower and sought shelter under a huge hardwood. An American doctor named Kinari, who’ll you will be hearing more about in an upcoming issue of Reed College Magazine, reached out in front of her to grab some low shrubs. “These areas are so diverse; let’s take a look at these five plants,” she said, checking the variegation patterns on the leaves in front us. “See, five different species just right there.”

The hardwood behind us, on closer examination, was losing a battle to a strangler fig whose main root began thick as my thigh and then several stories up splayed into a massive choking bird’s nest of branches. Warrior ants the size of cockroaches also patrolled the trunk.

If you’re a plant or animal in the rainforest, there’s little time for dilly dallying. Competition’s fierce; life’s in constant motion. Stop moving, or growing, or reaching for the light for a moment and something else overtakes you, eats you, evolves to beat you.
It’s thrilling and humbling to be immersed in it just for a few hours.

My trip on assignment to Kalimantan – Indonesia’s section of Borneo — also wended through Singapore and Jakarta, and it was hard not to see those pulsing metropolises as outgrowths of the dynamic tropical forests they replaced.

Singapore’s obsessive sense of law and order keeps some of the tropical flourish at bay. But the powers that be can only control so much. Step away from the sleek malls and wide streets along Orchard Road and into the warrens of the Chinese markets and Little India and now the shops and hawkers jam together under neon signs while the smells of curry, incense, pad thai, and durian hang in the air. Shopping and gawking is once again a contact sport.

I watched a rabid scene one afternoon at a durian stand, where Chinese residents and tourists pawed and smelled the spiky-skinned fruit and some even fingered the eggy interior hoping to find just the right texture. Inside the food court, a Chinese woman carried on a non-stop mantra as she blended fruit drinks, “Fresh orange, mango, banana dolla, dolla-fifty!” Thirsty shoppers pooled around the counter, quickly siphoning off glasses of juice while the woman whirled to keep up.

In Little India, the streets came to life after dark, when expatriate Indian construction workers and professionals descended on the vegetarian joints and ever-busy faxing and copying outfits. Cars get crowded out of the streets by all the people; the sidewalks are for eating.

If Singapore embraces organization, Jakarta gives up on it. Here’s a concrete jungle long overgrown and overwhelmed by inhabitants. I didn’t get a good look at Jakarta’s infamous and growing slums, as I spent most of my time between the quiet expat burg of Kemang and offices in the business and government districts. But no part of the city is untouched by the teeming, chaotic churn of cars, commerce, smog, and people. Getting anywhere is a royal chore. It took me about half an hour to make the three-wheeled taxi trip a few miles to a mall area near where I was staying. Just too many cars on a narrow street. It was 3:30 on a Tuesday afternoon.

Kemang has jammed in just about anything a healthy American consumer could want — the latest episode of Harry Potter, wines from around the world, a double mocha frappucino from Starbucks, sushi and thinly sliced pastrami (no rye). The shops are modern, angular, glass-walled affairs; KFC is so stylish that rock bands play there on the weekends. The centralized malls nearby are a dizzying display of goods: petrified bugs in amber by the dozen, floors and floors of cosmetics, more brand name sportswear than you can get your head around. On one floor, four or five different sports shops all selling the same gear occupied the same room so you couldn’t tell know where one shop ended and the other began. Didn’t I just see that shoe…?

The side streets around the malls are filled with ramshackle stands of knockoff goods, covered in tarps. In the alleys and underpasses and plazas, more stands. There are few pieces of concrete in Jakarta unclaimed, it seems.

And so it was all too fitting when one afternoon, while stopped dead in traffic, I looked out to see a young woman in metal food stall that had claimed a sliver of shoulder along the road, between a concrete wall and the cars. Business had paused and the sun beat down on the spot and so she’d wedged herself into a sitting position in the small space where she usually stood to serve people. There wasn’t any room to spare. And, at that moment, it was the last niche available.

Take care until next time,
Oakley

Took the camera for a little ride around Lamaligang, our neck of the swamp.

Our street

New mosque under construction down the street.

These guys are taking a break from working on a house down the street. There’s not much mechanized in home building. “It’ll be done in a year maybe,” says the owner, far left.

The guys at the local metal shop are always trying to get me to install a surf rack on my rented motorbike.

Pak Oka came with the house. He runs the garden. Has braved several waves of NGOs as evidenced by the T-shirt from another Portland outfit NW Medical Teams.

My favorite local lunch spot. Get rice, put it on a banana leaf and add fish, beef, chicken, tofu, veggies, lots of chilies, all kinds of curries and fish sauces. They love to deep fry. Did I mention chilies?

These ladies were washing a diced chicken for a birth celebration tonight.

Off to mosque for Friday prayers.

Back at the ranch, a bulek party. We were sending off friends Dee and Graham, who are headed back to the States.

This is not in the ‘hood. Weh Island, a lovely little spot about 1 hour ferry ride away. This is where we’ll take you when you come visit. Turtles and dolphins sighted off the bungalow featured in the first two shots. You know who you are.

“Bob”, a likeable dude and an American foreign service officer, showed up at the July 4th barbecue on Wednesday night slightly sloshed, carrying a watermelon and a copy of the Declaration of Independence. As he plopped down in a friend’s backyard chair, he told me, “Read that second paragraph, that’s a beauty.” It’s the one that speaks of the inalienable rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. “I think that’s why we’re all here in this place in the world, to spread those ideas around.”

He’s probably right — even if it does sound a little swell — that ideas of freedom stirred many of us to go abroad. But once we get there, something just as important happens: a distant place shows us fully and completely the niche we’ve somehow earned in this world.

In 1998, I awoke inside a South African luxury coach bus in the early morning hours of the 4th as we approached the Zimbabwean border. Tucked up against the curb as we sped past were people sitting on their pickups and rickety Peugeots and bicycles piled high with sofas, bedspreads, lamps, TVs. Only after a couple of kilometers did I realize they were cueing to get across the border when it opened in an hour or so. When we finally got to the border post, we were through in 30 minutes. Those at the end of that long line of Zimbabweans would have been lucky to get through that day.

There’s been a study recently released that shows that as a result of the 30-year long guerilla war here Acehnese suffered a level of trauma only experienced in war-torn Bosnia and Afghanistan. And this was setting aside the issue of the tsunami. Yet among study participants, there’s countless folks who’ve plunged back into life and started selling cell phones and coffee and sodas at corner shops.

Last month, Danny, a 30-something Indonesian guy who runs the internet café down the street, said he was putting in a Wifi cloud for the neighborhood. He claimed it would be done around July 1st. I thought maybe by the fall. But just for kicks, I went in yesterday to see. “It’s going up right now,” he said (speaks clear English). This morning, he text-messaged over a password. “You can be our trial customer,” he said. Turns out it only works within about 50 meters of the café but it’s fast and it’s the only public cloud I know of in Banda Aceh. “We’ll get it to your house soon enough,” Danny said.

After watching the uneven function of electricity and telephone lines and transport from the nearest modern outpost of Singapore I can guess that this Wifi cloud will be a minor miracle. And yet I think back to how ubiquitous Wifi was in Portland, OR — in every coffee shop and hotel and even public parks.

Yesterday, I took my yellow and green Oregon soccer ball (courtesy of my brother-in-law) into the neighborhood pitch looking for a game. The field had been under water for a few weeks thanks to some heavy rain. One half just dried out, but the local cattle took to the fresh pasture and left land mines as they went. No matter; within thirty seconds of me taking a shot on some weather-beaten wooden goalposts, there were six kids kicking off their sandals and setting up for a scrimmage. It was me and the littles against the teenagers.

It turned out I had a budding star on my team. While the older kids laughed and yapped “Mister, we’re going to win, mister,” my 11-year-old teammate approached the game like a tryout. He showed dazzling footwork, once clasping the ball with his bare heels and spinning up and over the outstretched foot of a defender. He pulled off an acrobatic bicycle-kick shot back over his head. And after each brash pass at the goal he ran back up the field wiping his brow and looking at me humbly, like “How did I do?”

It crossed my mind that he thought I could connect him to something — some place, some person, some team — that would hook him up with a uniform and shoes and maybe some glory. But that seems a stretch. It’s enough to say that on the day after the 4th of July, he created something amongst the fresh cow pies and the uneven pitch. And though I didn’t really know it until it was over, that’s exactly what I’d come to see.

Take care until next time,
Oakley

It’s been a week colored by frustrations. We had rolling blackouts for most of the last seven days, and in the evening they often hit around dinnertime and lasted past when most people would want to go to bed. No AC, no water pumped into the house, dinner by candlelight (which wasn’t terrible). All in all, more tropics than we bargained for.

Hayley still hasn’t gotten her work visa, upon which a driver’s license depends as well as a general feeling of settledness. The length of my visa process to work as a journalist also continues to lengthen.

And we’ve also been up late nights hashing out how it is Hayley’s going to make an impact on an economy that had been whittled to a nub by the last decade of conflict, before the tsunami hit. Nobody seems able to remember what the economy looked like at full health, nor to decipher where it’s headed.

One thing I think I have figured out is why people keep latching the front gate to our house. When I head out on the motorbike, I sometimes leave the chain unhitched on the big, swinging, picket-fence doors. That way it’s easier to ride right back up the driveway when I get home. (I was a habitual door-left-open-guy growing up and my family never bought this sort of expediency argument) For the first several weeks, when I got home, the gate was closed. What’s the big deal? Was I breaking a cultural or neighborhood norm? The guy next door didn’t even have a gate. If I wanted to leave the gate open, let me leave the gate open!

Then I looked out the window one day when the gate was open and saw a gaggle of three goats happily chomping on our (landlord’s) plants and grass. One goat had stepped up on a low retaining wall and was hammering away at the new shoots of a young palm tree. Cheeky brotha. I shooed them out and… shut the gate.

But good habits die hard. Another afternoon, I also failed to shut the gate and, peering out, found a heifer and her calf making a late lunch out of the small lawn. When I opened the front door, the calf immediately bolted and the mother did a fine Leipezamer move on her way out:

During both visits of the village wildlife, I looked around to see if anyone was watching: not a soul. Maybe they had given up on me, or had melted away to the cool recesses of their houses.

The heart of this neighborhood is beyond our house, where the road winds past some open, swampy fields, to a shady knot of small, well-kept concrete houses. Always, there are a collection of young kids playing in front of one, and an ancient woman with no teeth on the stoop of another. A group of young guys are usually gabbing at a third place. Someone’s hanging out washing; men work quietly along the street pouring concrete for a new section of gutter, cigarettes dangling from their bottom lips. The guys at a metal shop remind me that I need a surfboard rack welded to my motorbike. In the mornings, a fishmonger pedals his goods from Jerry cans attached to his bicycle. In the afternoons, another guy with fried rice on wheels passes through. In the empty lots, ducks and hens and dogs pick at the piles of half-burned trash. Nearly everyone utters a slow, almost pained hello when I pass. The kids yell excitedly at me each time like it was the first.

What I sense here on the neighborhood lane is not the frustrations of Aceh but a long-standing acceptance of the place for what it is. This, despite the change agents at the NGO and UN offices sitting a stone’s throw in any direction. Certain things you can control and so you do. But what you can’t close and latch yourself is not worth getting hot and bothered over. There’s only so much you can do to change it. And then you need to find some shade.

Take care until next time,
Oakley