drbruce
The monsoons are here and for those of you who have never lived through them, they can get rather depressing when it is dark and overcast and wet and rainy day after day. It's similar to the cabin fever that folks used to get when I lived up in the mountains in northern California during my fieldwork days. Up there, it would snow or rain and be just miserable and folks would rarely leave the house. Despite the fact that I said a few months ago (when we went for five weeks without water), that I would never complain about rain again, here I am complaining. Well, when you live in Paradise, you have to find something to complain about. (For you who don't know me that well, the Paradise thing is said tounge-in-cheek.)The good news about the rain is that our crops are growing and growing and growing. We may actually have managed to save about half the baby mango trees that were decimated during the dry season. Our corn is coming along nicely and the cherry tomatoes are excellent. I'm trying to find the carrot seeds so that I can plant them this week if it stops raining long enough for me to get out of the house.The bad news about the rain is that our roof leaks and everytime we fix the tiles, a strong wind or earthquake comes along and moves them again. We'll get at a permanent solution when the monsoons are over. In the meantime, I've gotten used to the stained ceilings.Continuing on with the water theme, our drilling for water finally paid off. We hit water 17 meters down in the front yard. So now when the next dry season comes and the village water supply vanishes, we can use our own water. Last week the water stopped for a day. Just as we were about to turn on the pump and switch over to our own water, the electricity went dead. It was just so Indonesian that we all got rather hysterical with laughter. Another Life in Paradise moment.The kids have finished with their exams, and we are all on vacation. The Christmas season has never really been something that I've enjoyed since I left Chicago. It was always hard to get really festive in Berkeley, but I always enjoyed seeing the decorations in Bangkok on my way through during the Pakistan years.Books. I have time to read again. During the school year, my reading time is fairly restricted. Right nowI'm in a South Seas period. I'm currently reading Robert Louis Stevenson's In the South Seas, which is fascinating. It's probably been over forty years since I last read Stevenson, and I forgot that he can really write. Part of the fascination of the book is his descriptions of the expat community and his discussion of why people leave their home countries to go live in some remote patch of jungle. Seems like things haven't changed much in the past 115 years. Stevenson wrote: "Few men who come to the islands leave them; they grow grey where they alighted; the palm shades and the trade-wind fans them till they die, perhaps cherishing to the last the fancy of a visit home, which is rarely made, more rarely enjoyed, and yet more rarely repeated. No part of the world exerts the same attractive power upon the visitor..." Expats in Bali would probably say exactly the same, and as for the expat in Sumbawa, it accurately describes my feelings about life here in the islands of Indonesia.The Penguin Classics edition that I recently purchased (I did my first experiment of ordering books from Amazon - it took four months for them to arrive which isn't too bad. I did have to pay about $30 for shipping for ten books, but the closest good bookstore is in Singapore) has a wonderful photo of Stevenson, his wife and a Samoan woman. The scene is something from a traveler's fantasy - all three are dressed in white with Stevenson and his wife wearing some type of flower garland on their heads. Sunken cheeks highlight Stevenson's face and support Henry Adams, the American historian, who visited Stevenson in his home in Vailima and said about Stevenson: "As we reached the steps a figure came out that I cannot do justice to. Imagine a man so thin and emaciated that he looked like a bundle of sticks in a bag, with a head and eyes morbidly intelligent and restless. He was costumed in very dirty striped cotton pyjamas..." The image of the dissolute expat, although Stevenson was anything but as he wrote constantly during the final years of his life while he was living in Samoa.Here's a slice of life in Paradise. I wake Su up at 5:30 to get the kids up and ready for school. Usually, I get up at the same time to get ready for school, but since I'm on vacation, I go back to sleep for an hour. Up at 6:30 to drive the kids to school (it's 300 meters, but they appreciate the effort). When I get home after delivering Mercedes, Rebecca and Sam, Su takes Meredith to school (she insists on her mother taking her to school). Su gets home and we share a little quiet time together which is hard to come by with four kids and a yard full of animals that are always hungry.After a breakfast of frozen waffles from Australia, I shower and take the faucet off the kitchen sink to fix. Su drives over to the building supplies shop to buy some brushes so we can clean the shower tiles. I take the fawlty faucet out to the generator building (which still houses the now dead generator) which I use to store tools and garden supplies. I fix the faucet and start to cut bamboo which we are going to use to build fences to keep Apple out of the garden (he's taken to sleeping in the dirt now for some reason and the plants are always crushed). I cut one four meter length of bamboo into meter pieces. Apple is barking hysterically in the front so I walk up around the west side of the house to see who's at the gate. It's Su arriving in a cidomo (a horse-drawn cart widely used for transportation here). I guess that the police are probably out doing a rahasia (a sting where they set up shop along the side of the road and pull people over to check on if they have a driver's license, registration for their vehicle, and are wearing a helmet. Su, of course, left the house without a helmet, or driver's license, or vehicle registration. When she spotted the police, she pulled the bike over and took a cidomo back to collect all her equipment.By this time, our neighbors are warning villagers driving towards the rahasia that the police are out. (The police charge 50,000 rupiah (about five dollars) if they catch you. If you don't have the money, they seize your motorbike until you come up with the cash.) As drivers get warned most of them turn back home because almost no one drives legally around here. While Su is collecting her stuff, I chat with the cidomo driver and a neighbor who has hopped on the cidomo because she can't drive her bike because she has no license. We chat about the rahasia and the size of my goats. (Anthropological note: My neighbor calls me Meredith's father which is how many people around here refer to each other - by the name of their child.) Su takes off to collect her bike, and I go back to cutting bamboo. Even though it's only 10:00, the sun is already up (it's sunny for once), and I'm too hot so I get a bottle of ice water and sit on the veranda and watch motorbikes turning around to avoid the police.The junior high gets out of school, and a stream of motorbikes with junior high boys go zooming by. Some of them immediately come flying back having seen the police before the police saw them. The unlucky ones are trapped. Su arrives home wearing a helmet and tells me that four bikes full of boys sped past the police without stopping. Neighbors are out and everyone is having a great time talking about the rahasia. There's not a lot of entertainment in Sekongkang. The police finally move on down the road since by this time everyone has either made themselves legal or have decided to delay their business until the police leave.Su and I sit out on the veranda and talk for a while about my new pellet gun and how the monkeys seem to have figured out that they should stay away. I go back to the generator building to split the bamboo, and Su goes in to cook. Sam comes out back to ask if he can help cut bamboo. He gets a saw and after five minutes of sawing with minimal results decides that the work is too hard and goes inside to work on a educational program I bought for the computer to help him with English.Meredith is over at a friend's house, Rebecca comes home from school to ask if she can go to a friends to study. We tell her to stay away from boys; she says she will and off she goes. We have lunch, the day passes quickly. I rake up rocks, chunks of concrete, and pebbles that are still embedded in the front and back yards from the construction period. At five, I throw bag of grass and leaves in the wheelbarrow and take them back to the goat pen. The goats, Betty, Veronica and Bush get animated when they see food coming. Apple comes with me to bother the goats while they eat, and the geese come along as well, keeping a distance from Apple, because they like going through the grass searching for insects. By 6:30 the sun is about to go down. The kids are all home, some of them studying, some eating, some watching tv. The rest of the evening is spent like this until the kids go to bed at 9:00. I spend the rest of the night watching tv until midnight or so when it's time to check all the doors, turn out the lights and go to bed.
