Heading upstream on the Mekong in northern Laos, you’re lulled into a kind of trance. The engine chattering at the back, the swishing water against the narrow junk’s hull, the twirling whirlpools in the cataracts, the misty mornings, the beat of the warm wind in the afternoon. You settle in, watching a simple, slow world go by at 10 knots. Water buffalo loll in the shallows, hopeful fishermen stalk the shore with handnets, children run their toothpick dugouts downstream. Most everyone waves, gently. Around each bend is a new assemblage of villages obscured by tangles of trees, and empty, sandy banks crisscrossed by foot trails, and another stretch of murky, mocha water that disappears again behind a distant limestone escarpment.

There were a dozen other foreigners on the two-day journey early this month from the old enshrined, royal capital of Luang Prabang to the Thai border. A French Ph.d candidate studying transitional justice, an English cameraman and his actress girlfriend, an American teaching in Japan, six Australian first-years on winter break, a Danish truckdriver. The wooden benches on the spare 20-meter boat were too narrow for big Western skeletons. So we roamed the deck, and gathered on the floor near the refreshment table at the back and up near the captain’s wheel. A few hours into it, most everybody’s story was known. We wondered where we were always, but never could quite tell. We came to accept that we were on the river and would stop at sunset.
None of the handful of locals went the distance, instead departing on beaches deep in the green gorges, received by small clumps of barefoot family members who shouldered the passenger’s burlaps sacks full of city clothes and rice. Other people hailed the captain into shore and sent a father off to the Thai docks, a student up to university, a mother to a guesthouse. Deep in rural Laos, this was still the working highway.
The first afternoon I leaned out over the wooden rail as we labored up through a fast stretch squeezed between two rock walls. Forty meters away, in an eddy against the rocks, was a body. Its bloated stomach had a light-colored t-shirt on it. Maybe it wasn’t a body. We drew even with it and I could make out the beginnings of legs and shoulders and a neck. I froze, totally engrossed. Soon, a rotting stench wafted through the boat. “There’s a body,” I said to the Dane. He didn’t hear me for the engine. “A body!”. “Whew, smell it!” He said. He fixed his zoom lens on it. “Sure is,” he said coolly. He told the cameraman, who turned slightly pallid. We stared at it, receding to a speck. For some reason, we saw no reason to alert the captain. Equally strange, he didn’t see it. And, quickly, we detached from it. “There’s some crazy shit going on upstream in Burma,” the Dane said. I speculated it might be opium trade in the Golden Triangle. “I’m glad my girlfriend didn’t see that,” the Brit said.
That night we stopped at Pakbeng, a funky little outpost of guesthouses and restaurants that owes its existence to boatloads of travelers invading the place at 6 pm each night and leaving at 8 am the next morning. We narrowly beat a jam-packed downstream boat to shore and had our pick of rooms; I settled with two other Americans at one house that promised hot water (by the bucket) and generator-spun electricity through the night. Out on the restaurant strip, we waded through a gauntlet of proprietors trying to snare us, before stopping into an Indian restaurant. The owner won us over when he swore the advertisement at a Lao spot next door — “Come here and understand why I’m married to my wife” — was bogus. “His wife doesn’t even cook anymore,” said the Indian. After our meal, washed down with a bottle of the smooth Beer Lao, he asked: “Need any sandwiches for tomorrow? I’m up at 6:30 for breakfast, too.”
We boarded a new boat with a fresh crop of locals in the morning and nosed into the current. Just after the mist burned off a few hours later, the captain sidled into a shoreline of pointy rocks to drop off two men carrying a stack of re-bar and some thin, steel framing. A girl, 10ish, in a floppy, cotton sunhat crouched on a rock looking down at us and her family unloading the guys’ stuff. The engine hushed and the boat steadied. A few of us leaned over the rail to take pictures, and I flashed a quick wave at the girl. She didn’t move or smile or frown. She only stared intently down on the whole exchange, the looks, the goods, the people, the photographs, the wonder. Nobody could force an expression out of her, the wheels in her head spinning madly from curiosity towards understanding, perhaps. I watched her still as we pulled away; it was many boatlengths before she left her perch, finally, and hopped down to the group to carry the things to the village.
The trip was supposed to take six hours that second day, but it dragged deep into the afternoon. We stopped half an hour at one village to load up two dozen yellow Beer Lao crates full of empties. We passed a group of women washing rice (or panning for gems) at a creek mouth. We wrote off the possibility of crossing into Thailand before the end of the day. But it was worth it. As we approached Huay Xai, our endpoint, the river crept out of the limestone gorges and into a broad plain. The sky rolled through the whole spectrum of orange, the water became a glassy silver. I tried to soak it up, to stay in river time for one more moment. The lights and the apartment houses and docks and Chinese trading junks in Huay Xai inched closer, and then finally absorbed us.

An old college friend now living in Paris recently had to sell her coop apartment in New York, her former home. Emailing a group of us, she considered what she was really losing: “Is New York still my home? Do I even have a home? What does home even mean anyways when my family is so scattered and I am on my own?”

Living where we do, 12,000 miles from the nearest American coastline, this one hits home — as in, the one in the gut. It’s a question we constantly mull over. We talk about “going home” some day. For now, our bikes and bed and a group of friends are in Portland, Oregon and we are enough attached that it will draw an up or down vote at some point. But usually we’re speaking more loosely about returning to the old country, lofting back into place our passports came from. Which is to say, home is very much unresolved.

Meanwhile, in this foreign place of Arabic prayer calls, catcalls (for her), and Hey Misters (for both of us), we step to a faintly familiar rhythm. Our house is a finely arranged pleasure, with smooth tile floors, cool concrete walls and a Mediterranean look that would be in character in Southern California. (The owners, a contractor and an economist, voraciously read architectural magazines). We steadily add our photographs and plants and lamps to the rooms and patios. I reflexively duck under the low ceiling on the way upstairs and haven’t hit my head in months. We know to expect some leaking near the kitchen in a heavy rainstorm, and we know how long it will take fruit skins to attract ants when left on the kitchen counter.

In the neighborhood, the fresh bread baked by a Costa Rican ex-pat arrives at the local store at 5 in the afternoon. The fish traders pull their motorcycles onto the street with shrimp and tuna at 9 am. I can play ping-pong most evenings between five and six with the teenagers on the other side of the mosque.

And last Saturday morning we had blueberry pancakes.

There are few things that embody home more. On every Saturday morning that I can remember growing up, first in Boston then San Diego, there were blueberry pancakes plumping up downstairs and a sweet, buttery smell in the air. Later, when I started hustling off to play sports at dawn or, alternatively, slept through the breakfast hour, there would always be bowl of batter waiting on the counter when I finally settled into the kitchen. The prized mornings were those visiting Fire Island, New York, when my mom, having worked the wild bushes, would turn the pancakes deliciously tarty with the local berries.

This summer, chatting online with a stepsister who was visiting the parents, I asked What’s for breakfast? Lighting quick reply. Blueberry pancakes, of course!

A few weeks ago, a surprise guest showed up in the Aceh bulek market: canned blueberries, with OREGON stamped across the black label. Oregon’s berries, reared in cold, wet springs followed by warm, dry summers go toe to toe with any I’ve ever had. In our last home, I always gravitated towards the juicy clusters of blackberries and marionberries, but the blues are none too shabby. And more to the point, they’d somehow made it here, to the tip of Sumatra.

I was torn: the food miles. What would all the Portland, Oregon locavores, eating only stuff from the local growers, say about this choice?

Hayley bought them anyway, thank God. After I braved the Indonesian instructions on the pancake batter box (I figured out it was “add water, an egg and stir”), she opened the can and we smothered the ‘cakes in the berries. They were a shade chalky. But they went down easy, because they were blueberries and in this corner of the world it was Saturday morning. And we were home.

Take care until next time,
Oakley

These are busy times for the economic development director in our house, what with an 10-person team to manage, a language barrier to navigate, new agriculture consultants to find in Java (or Zambia), conferences, donor presentations, field visits, and hectic traffic to navigate from the wrong side of the road. (She is our designated driver). On Wednesday at 8 p.m., Hayley settled down at the dinner table to focus on the next adventure: her upcoming appearance on a local, public affairs TV show in two-and-a-half hours. “What am I going to say?” she sighed, panic creeping in. “How ‘bout some bullet points,” I said. She produced a piece of scrap paper, folded it in half and set to jotting. The paper quickly unfolded, the bullet points spreading into the double digits. Her head was full of nuances in the economy, beset by 30 years of conflict, laid flat by the devastating tsunami, pumped up by $8 billion in new aid money. I said: “Just keep it simple, like you were explaining it to your Mom or your brother.”

“You don’t understand: I don’t do simple!” she replied. “Grad school appearances I can do. But I can’t speak without jargon anymore. I used to be able to. I remember the first day I came to Mercy Corps, I read this report – full of jargon – and I was like “What is this!” That was a long time ago. So just enjoy life in your little jargon-less world over there.” She fought a smirk and retreated to the bedroom to polish up.

At 10 p.m., the Mercy Corps van, already packed with Mark, the Corps’ Aceh director, and three young Indonesians staffers, Ardian, Dian, and Nazar, drove us a few minutes to a narrow, two-story shop building with an illuminated ACEH TV sign high on the façade. We walked through the garage-like entryway, past a half-dozen motorbikes and five guys sitting on couch watching TV, and headed back to a studio room. Mark followed Hayley under a ON AIR sign sitting over the studio door. “She got all gussied up didn’t she?” he said, turning to me. She wore a long-sleeved, wrap-front blue top and grey cotton skirt. A shade restrained but acceptable in any Acehnese living room, and it was gracefully appointed: a chain of seven Afghani amber ovals hung around her neck and three turquoise slivers in train dangled from each ear.

The show set for “Obrolan Malam” — Night Talk — was primed to go. Bright spots and three small cameras trained on four wooden upholstered chairs and a low coffee table sitting on a riser with a checkerboard floor. A big signboard formed the sets’ back wall, the bottom word “Malam” obscured by the chairs. The side walls were thin, red polyester curtains. Other signboards — “Musik Zone,” “Korupsi dan Koruptor” — were pushed against the walls around the studio. Three young cameramen milled around aloofly. Through a huge window in the wall at one end of the studio, we could see another baby-faced posse manning the control room piled high with screens. Soon Aulia, Obrolan Malam’s 18-year-old whisp of a host, hustled into the room with a laptop, a list of advance questions for the Corps crew and a light layer of powder on his face. If there was anyone over 25 in the building, I didn’t see him. (no women to be found, either). Ardian said the station was just a few years old. (I’m beginning think that the media/networking start-up is also the hip venture here in post-tsunami Aceh, even if it’s older stuff like magazines, radio and TV stations, media consultancies, internet cafes and providers, instead of Indonesian Facebook)

Aulia hammered out his script on the computer while Hayley, Mark and Nazar were wired up with lapel mics. They drifted onto the set, 10:30 rolled around, and with a snap of the fingers from one camera man, they were off.

If the pace was a little pokey for the first few minutes (Aulia: “Give us the background on Mercy Corps, Mr. Mark Ferdig”), it was enough to admire young Aulia, his grew suit shining under the lights, switching back and forth from Indonesian to English and engaging a couple of folks from across the Pacific. The listeners, presumably, understood only bits and pieces.

Things quickly ratcheted up after the first commercial break. Just as Aulia leaned across the circle to ask Hayley if she could explain how the Corps was helping the Acehnese economy, a loud ringing sound reverberated in the studio. “We have a caller,” Aulia said, straightening up. A man from the outskirts of the city wanted the Obrolan Malam panel to rate the performance of the Indonesian reconstruction and rehabilitation agency — BRR in local-speak. Not a softball; the agency has been a lightning rod for any complaints about reconstruction. That afternoon 150 local students staged a sit-in on the BRR grounds, asking them to speed up permanent housing construction. Mark furrowed his brow and tread on eggshells. “They’ve had their challenges,” he said of BRR. “We all have. But what they’ve able to accomplish overall has been remarkable.”

The phone continued to ring in the studio, usually right smack in the middle of the conversation. The questions didn’t get any easier. What was Mercy Corps doing to help small businesspeople? Why were they only training local village councils and not community leaders outside the government? Wasn’t it high time for the buleks — the foreigners— to go home, to stop driving up car and housing prices? Aulia did not translate this question for the foreigners ( a little too hot?), handing it quickly off to Nazar, the Corps’ only Indonesia speaker. Nazar looked uncomfortable but answered nonetheless. (I couldn’t catch the gist). Ardian, the pr guy sitting with me in the audience, later passed a translation of the question discreetly on to Mark through host Aulia. Mark found an opening to answer. “Pak,” he said, formally addressing the buleks-out caller. “You’re right, the costs have gone up. It’s something we NGOs need to continue to talk about it.” Later, he called attention to Nazar, an Acehnese, who had a prominent role running Mercy Corps government affairs program. The message: we are handing things over. Whatever thin polyester curtains formed the set walls on upstart ACEH TV, say this about the crew: they had brought some lively substance to the little blinking box in people’s living rooms, a worthy feat anywhere.

Eventually, between callers, Hayley got an opening. She noted that the finishing of Aceh raw products and the major markets that sold them had shifted out of Aceh during 30 years of conflict, to places like the neighboring provincial capital of Medan. “We hope those market centers, like Medan, will be part of the solution in rebuilding the economy in Aceh,” she said. Ardian flashed a thumbs-up from the back of the room. Host Aulia pressed for more: So who, exactly, are you helping? Hayley replied. “One of the areas we’re working in is the rice industry. We’re trying to boost rice farmers. We would like local kiosks and restaurants and hotels all to be serving rice that’s grown and milled in Aceh. That doesn’t happen today. But one day, we hope it will.”

It wasn’t a world beater, but it was a mission, clear and simple. A take-home nugget.

When it was all over, the mics pulled off the lapels, the cameramen moving their gear quietly and swiftly toward the late-night news show set next door to Obrolan Malam, we went home with something else. A little of that TV light glow lingering around us.

Take care until next time,
Oakley

Wildlife is a constant presence here, but last week’s display stood out. On Thursday, the sky opened up with abandon. The rain became so loud and heavy, you couldn’t do anything but watch it. Then it raised up another notch. It felt like the roofs wouldn’t hold, like their stoic, silent, metallic stand could end any second. But somehow it didn’t. When it died down, I went outside and dozens of tiny, thumbnail-sized frogs dashed around the yard. I’d never seen them before. They weren’t tadpoles but fully formed miniatures. It was as if they’d been buried dormant in the muck waiting for just the right downpour to float them free. Now, they were adjusting to flagstones and human toes.

The rain cleared on Friday and at lunch I went to find the tigers. Everyone had been talking about the tigers: two wild Sumatrans that had been terrorizing villagers in the western and southern regions of the province. The forestry department darted and trapped the animals, and then brought them to cages at department headquarters in Banda in early November, forming an impromptu zoo exhibit. When I visited, 30 or 40 people of all ages hovered around the back-to-back cages, about the size of jail cells. The animals were both impressive specimens, even cashed out in their midday naps. From behind a makeshift rope fence, you could lean in closer to the bigger of the two of them, a male. He had a thick, meaty head, paws the size of dinner plates, and a lean, painted body. Both of them looked fearsome, and cuddly.

One of the forestry officials watching all us gawkers said he hadn’t decided what to do with the big one, which had killed three people down on the West Coast. There have been more incidents of animal human conflicts since the guerilla war ended in Aceh and people felt it safe to go back to forest-edge lands.

By Sunday, it warmed up but the huge sunken lot across the lane here was still knee deep in runoff. Dry and dusty this summer, the lot has transformed into a lush wetland. (It’s the kind of thing city officials might pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to develop in Portland, but here it springs up out of neglect). Just after lunch, we noticed an elegantly tall, white stork, stalking around in the water looking for his own makan siang. He’d hold still for a minute or two, one bulging eye turned towards the water, and then move a step or two. A pack of kids rode by but he didn’t budge. When I biked by him a little later, he jumped and waved his giant wings with a quiet swoosh but stayed to walk the marsh.

What makes the seeing fresh is the new species and also the surprise of their entrance. The lines between wild and tame, right in the heart of the city, blur in unexpected ways. Things show up on your front doorstep.

It even felt like we were crossing into the lives of the caged tigers, which we returned to see on Sunday. Now there were well over 100 watchers, and soda vendors set up in the forestry department parking lot. At one point, the big Sumatran stood up and shifted nervously on his feet. He stuck his head through a small doorway into an adjoining cage, then backpedaled into his main one. Something was wrong. Slowly, reluctantly, he squatted to pee through the bars. We were close enough, at six or seven feet, to see his sheepish eyes. I didn’t know if I should watch or turn away discreetly.
Take care until next time,
Oakley

I let Pak Oka go last week. He is the stick-thin, 70-year old Navy veteran who hung around the house enough when we first arrived that we thought to give him a job as a gardener. We didn’t need a gardener. But he had worked security for the internationals who had previously stayed in the house. And when we asked our benevolent landlord about Oka, the landlord thought it was a good idea to hire him for a few days a week. The landlord suggested how much we should pay Oka. When I went to negotiate, Oka asked for triple that amount. Such are the expectations in post-tsunami Aceh.

The trouble is neither Oka’s lofty view of his worth, nor his sunny disposition nor his punctuality — 8 am arrival every Monday, Wednesday and Friday — could mask the fact that there wasn’t much for him to do. He found things to pass the time and look busy. Built leaf fires in our tiny backyard. Swept out the garage three times a week. Meticulously watered the plants. Crushed our old aluminum cans. Told me stories about shipping in to Dubai and Singapore. But every time I shared his yard adventures with Hayley she said what I knew was true: We needed to send Oka on his way.

She brings a little different perspective, facing down the skewed sense of goods and work every day. The Acehnese got houses and business start-up cash, which they needed. They offered all kind of services to NGOs, services that were also desperately needed — plowing and construction materials and transport. Some fishing boats were also built for people who weren’t fishermen, and now they rot in the rivers. “Farmers” signed up for seed and tool assistance even though they weren’t farmers. Everything was bought and resold at such bloated prices that nobody knows what normal is anymore. Houses on the local market are selling for only 1/6th of what it cost NGOs to build them. An environmental worker told me recently, “Whenever we go into a community now they ask what kind of money we bring to the table.” When her group recently approached a village about building a new environmental ed center there, the group was asked by the village head to also supply funds for a new road to the center. The road would eat up all of the money the group had earmarked for the project, so the project has gone nowhere.

We, unfortunately, played out the wider tensions of the place with Oka. We finally decided that the inflated buck stopped here in our yard. Hayley’s argument runs deeper: It’s about dignity. You’re not respecting someone when you pay him to do nothing. But I kept stalling when it came time to end Oka’s term. Here was this harmless, small, poor man. His gaunt face, drawn tight over his cheeks and jaw. The way he struggled ever so slightly for breath when he talked. His salary was pocket money back in the States.

Two months ago, I came up with a plan for a soft landing. I told him he could stay on through October and November and then “habis” — finished. OK, he said. No problem. Two months, plenty of time to find another odd job, I thought. I avoided the subject of the end for two months.

Last Friday came. It felt like Good Friday. When I saw Oka sweeping the driveway near the front door, I stepped out onto the stoop and sat in a wooden chair there. I carried my dictionary with me. “We said in September it was two months and then finished,” I said in halting Indonesian. He crouched down on his haunches next to the stoop and nodded. I asked him how he’d make a “living” now, digging “living” out of the dictionary. He didn’t know. Nothing had come of our visit to the village head’s office in late September, he said. His pension from the Navy had run out nine years ago, after which he’d taken to fishing to keep food on the table. He had a wife and a grown son in town, neither of whom worked. I asked would he “starve”  (another dictionary word). He smiled and turned his palms up and said he’d figure out something.

I was really expecting him to protest. (I think I would have caved.) But he didn’t. When it came time for him to leave a short while later, I gave him his month’s salary plus a little extra. He took my right hand in both of his. “Thank you very much,” he said in English, giving a graceful nod and a big smile with this glint in his eye. His dignity gave me a lift. Then, in Indonesian, he said he’d see my around the neighborhood, and he walked his bike down the driveway.

Take care until next time,

Oakley

Sometimes getting to the story is a bit of an adventure. Two Mondays ago, I flew one hour to Medan, the traveling hub in North Sumatra, hoping to catch a flight the next morning to Padang and a boat out to the Mentawai Islands on Tuesday afternoon. But trundling into the Medan airport on Tuesday morning, I found my flight had been cancelled. And there wasn’t another one until the next morning. I canvassed the freelance agents milling around the ticket counters at the airport: could I take an alternative route to Padang, which is half way down the west Sumatran coast? One tall guy who spoke a little English dialed a few of his friends in the bus business while I checked on flights to places near Padang. We figured I could jump a bus from Medan all the way to Padang or fly to Pekanbaru in the middle of Sumatra and go by road the rest of the way.

The Pekanbaru flight didn’t leave until 12:30, so at a little after 10 I hopped in a taxi to go out to the bus stations. As we worked our way down the row of private terminals, the news was grim. It would take 24 hours to get to Padang by bus. (But it’s just not that far on the map, I’m thinking). Tidak ada espress? I kept asking. Tidak . Back to the airport. Pekanbaru or bust. The agents still hovering at the air ticket counters estimated eight hours from Pekanbaru to Padang by road, after the short flight. If I could pick up a minibus quickly and the boat was a little behind schedule, my carefully hatched plan just might work.

The flight landed on time; at the airport information desk, a courteous youngster told me: “Don’t go to the bus station, there’s bad men there,” and sent me to a minivan company in a residential part of town. There were about eight drivers sitting around watching TV in the office, attached to an empty restaurant. We did have a van for Padang, they said; it left ten minutes ago, at two o’clock. One guy, with longish hair and pulling on a cigarette, said, I’ll take you to Padang for 500,000 (about $50 US). That’s big piece of change in Sumatra. I downshifted into my haggling voice, but at this point I was a bit hot and still hadn’t had eaten lunch so I think I was cracking like a 13-year-old. I managed to get the driver down five dollars. They passed the cigarettes around and kept trying to give me one. Seeing the pained look on my face, another guy began discreetly flashing two fingers and pointing at a different car outside, as if he would do it for 200,000.

Then two guys walked in and one asked to go to Padang. When they found out I was headed there, the traveler, who turned out to be an executive in a security company, said, “We’ll split it, you pay 300,000 and I’ll pay 200,000.” I think he was just winding me up, and it worked. 250, 250, I repeated. No, he said, you’re American, you’re rich. The drivers were eating it up, sort of a stand up act for them. “Three hundred for you, I don’t need to go so soon!” the guy said; laughs all around. But he did want to go soonish and finally relented. An even split.

After my lunch of peanut butter and banana sandwiches, we took off on one of the hairiest trips I’ve ever joined. The driver, heretofore in little hurry to get in a car to Padang, now drove like Jeff Gordon. On speed. Since there were only two of us passengers in a three-row SUV, I lay down in the very back row, hoping the back of the second row would cushion me should the NASCAR exercise suddenly go pear shaped. At one point, I sat up, and seeing exactly how we were slicing off the corners as we crossed the mountains from Riau into West Sumatra, I quickly found the lines “I don’t want to die! Slow down!” in my Lonely Planet phrasebook and screamed them from the back. The driver shook with laughter. “Are you my wife!?” he asked. “I thought you were in a hurry and wanted to get there fast?” My Bahasa got suddenly clear, and straight from the top of my head I said “There’s fast and there’s crazy. You’re crazy!”

He slowed down. For a little bit. We stopped to break the Ramadan fast and for prayers at just before 7. Then again for dinner and prayers at 8, at a restaurant that had tablecloths and a cascading fountain at one end. Outside after dinner, a pack of boys wanted to know where I was from, where I was going. The smallest, skinniest boy did the asking, in English. I embarrassed him by telling him how well he spoke.

We descended into damp Padang just after 11 pm.

I’d missed my boat, but my contacts with SurfAid, the humanitarian group in Padang, said there’d be others in the next day or two. By midday Wednesday, a flight to the Mentawais on Thursday morning turned out to be my ticket. On the tarmac the next morning, a young Indonesian guy with a traveling Christian group looked at the twin-prop, 18-seater plane and said, “It’s a toy!” But after a slight delay, we had a smooth 30-minute trip over atolls and turquoise water before landing at a concrete strip near the beach, on the east side of Sipora Island. The flight saved me at least a 10-hour boat ride.

What a relief to step onto Mentawai ground. But I wasn’t there, yet. Between trying to arrange a return ticket with a wandering airline rep and hooking up with a boat that would take us around to the Mentawai capital of Tuapejat, I dropped my lightweight sleeping sack. I searched in vain for a couple of minutes, only to find that the airline’s boat had left, leaving me to Ferdinand, an entrepreneur in a life jacket. He had my sleeping sack, and, Sure, he’d take me to Tuapejat. We headed out from the beach in his narrow, wooden longboat, built to slice the waves. He fished along way, while one of his buddies motored. When we hit Tuapejat, I waded into land with my bag and Ferdinand calmly hit me up for the ride, though I’d been told at the airport is was free. We worked out a half price detente.

After finally dropping the backpack in Tuapejat, I headed out with Surf Aid, in a small outboard boat, to visit villages affected by the earthquakes and surfers at Telescopes break.

The next day, we did more of the same.

By Friday evening, I’d written the story but needed to send it. A foundation had set up a satellite internet connection in a wooden house in Tuapejat after the earthquake. By evening, after a bunch of tries, I got into one of my webmail accounts and began sending off the story and some pictures. It was slow, grinding web work. The foundation organizer, a guy from Medan who’d been working in Banda Aceh, pumped out some classic U2 tunes while I stared at the screen.

On Saturday morning, the story successfully through to New York, I got a call on my cell phone from my mother in the States. She wanted to talk about a rendezvous in Southeast Asia this winter. “Where are you?” she asked. “The Mentawai Islands,” I said. She barely missed a beat: “So, let’s talk a little about Vietnam…”

Take care until next time,

Oakley

We are fine, in case you’re wondering. The big ‘quakes were well to the south. Hayley said she felt a little sway during the first one. I haven’t heard if there were any big surges at the coast, after a small 1-meter tsunami hit Padang. There is more info about the tectonics along the Sumatran fault here. The geologists had recently predicted a big one would hit around Padang, for what it’s worth.
Oakley

Ramdan, the Islamic month of fasting and prayer, will begin any day now. It opens with the sighting of a new cresent moon in the 9th lunar month, an event we are on the cusp of. Anticipation’s in the air. Already, some kids have been out of school and scooting around on their motor bikes with a little extra rambunctiousness. They’re throwing firecrakers out side on the lane at night.We’ve been told to expect loudly broadcast prayers around the clock and scant food  during the day — most of the grocery stores close up. Even the cigarette companies get in on the holiday. In the banner above, from tobacco company Clas Mild wishes everybody a happy “month of fasting and devotion” (Ibadah Puasa ). It hangs across one of the mosques under construction in Banda. Be not shocked: If Islam is the national religion, smoking is the national pastime. No word yet whether cigarettes sales are up during the month, as folks try to supress hunger.

Stocking food,

Oakley

It’s rare I miss a Wednesday or Friday afternoon here on the court at Komplek P.U., where a group of civil servants plays some up-tempo doubles. I come for a sweat, to practice Bahasa Indonesia, to hear snippets of the guys’ lives and —for an hour or two — to slip out of the strange skin I appear to wear most other times when I’m in a group of Indonesians. Jolly Mr. Tam, the small guy on the far left, works in the city’s water and sanitation department during the day and teaches tennis lessons in the evenings when he’s not playing. He lives just across a narrow lane from the court and he’s adding on to his little house to accomodate an in-law. Mr. Jainun, in the far court on the left, has a little wobbly boy toddler he brings around sometimes. Mr. Anh, who you can’t see, is losing a battle to a cataract in his right eye. He always wants to try out his English. His son, Iksan, is a young policeman with a big forehand who stops to play when the competition looks good. He carries a picture of his lithe new wife in his wallet.

Round and round we go on the court for 6-game sets, sweating more than a set dictates, then sitting and waiting on the aging stadium benches, sucking down water, trying to produce some new Bahasa words and remember the names of Hollywood movies I saw 6 months ago. If I’m lucky, I get a second set. The mosque at the back is mostly an ornate back drop. One can apparently still swear “Allah!” and get away with it. But just before the prayer call at 7, when the old men in their sarongs and pointed felt caps stare silently out from the praying area, we must pack it up. I shuffle out onto the lane, wave good-bye to Tam’s family sitting in his postage stamp yard, a few trees around them leveled for the addition. Sampai Jumpa. They laugh, with me. See you next time.

Oakley

This month, the wind blows dry and hot from the West and so much of the city and surroundings is smouldering that the air is constantly ripe with smoke. There’s no getting around how close you are to the sun. Luckily, when God draped Sumatra over the equator, he also created refuges like Takengon, eight hours across and 1000 meters up from here. It sits on cool Lake Tawan and is surrounded by coffee plantations and green mountainsides, logged but lush. The Gayo people troll the lake with handnets. We spent the weekend up there with a crew of 5 others from Banda, celebrating Indonesian independence day (see parade), foldable kayaks (red and blue), dugouts (most are seaworthy, my borrowed rig had an unseen slice down the keel), fresh water fish (best with local chilies), earthy coffee (handpicked by the Gayo) and the allure of another man’s boat (someone else in my Folbot).

Take care until next time,

Oakley