Update on Life in Indonesia

As of today, I have been in Indonesia for 2 months. It’s hard to believe that it has actually been that long! The first month had its ups and downs, as has the second, but this past month has ultimately been amazing. I have had the opportunity to travel a bit to Solo and Jakarta, as well as meet some family that I had never met before in my cousin Kevin who lives in Jakarta. I also started teaching at EF.

I really enjoy the teaching job. I got quite lucky in that I am not teaching many really young kids. Most of my classes are around 10-18 year olds. I really enjoy my classes with the teenagers. The whole process of planning a lesson, and then executing it, is really fun. It makes me feel quite good about myself to plan a lesson and see it play out in the classroom as well, or better, than I had hoped. Even the lessons that fall short of my expectations provide me with a knowledge of things to leave out of future lessons. In just a few short weeks I am starting to get the hang of what works and what doesn’t. Having such helpful coworkers who are more than willing to give me ideas for lessons is nice as well. I feel so welcome in the school and really enjoy everyone that I am working with.

I still have some slip-ups along the way: on Saturday I planned a lesson on the totally wrong subject for a 2 hour class, but was able to think on my feet well enough to conduct a fairly good lesson with no real materials.

This whole year seems as if it is going to fly by. In just a few weeks it will be Christmas break and New Years, and before I know it, I will be 3 months into my contract and 1/4 of the way through my 12 month contract! I am very excited to be enjoying the teaching as much as I am. A large reason I came here was to make a decision about wether I wanted to become a teacher or go back to school in order to find out if something else was driving me. I am starting to realize that teaching is probably my calling and it feels nice to have an actual clue about what I want to do with the rest of my life.

As I mentioned above, I went on a few trips in the past month. I really enjoyed the culture that I got to witness in Solo, seeing traditional dance and music in Gamelan and Wayang Orang. Jakarta was amazing as well: what a massive, modern city. It exceeded all of my expectations. My favorite trip so far was a day trip to Singapore in order to get a new Visa while my Work Visa is being processed. Singapore is “a fine city” as they say because it is a wonderful, beautiful place, but also the way they keep it as such is through massive fines for everything. A few hundred for not wearing a seat beat, a few hundred for chewing gum in public, a few hundred more for throwing cigarette butts into places they don’t belong. Because of these strict city-state Big Brother rules however, the city is PRISTINE. Not a single piece of trash anywhere. It would be as if Chicago or New York were maintained like a Botanical Garden. The architecture there was amazing as well. The most modern city I have ever been to, by far. I don’t know that I could live there with the Big Brother type of environment though. Not that America doesn’t seem too far behind adopted that type of system anyway.

Speaking of “Big Brother” I want to talk a bit about the Indonesian lifestyle and attitude on most things. It is quite hard to be here as a Westerner sometimes; our views on everything are SO different. In classes if you have a debate no one will take the view point of what might be seen as not traditional or moral. There is a right and and wrong answer for everything and there is no reason to question why for these people. It can be quite frustrating since as a teacher I want to always get students to ask why, but that is not a culturally acceptable thing here. They have universally accepted ideals such as; Women need to be married before 30 or they are dried out and useless. Money is more important than love. Sex is only for babies. Men have higher importance. In actuality, the Indonesians remind me of pre-Vatican II Catholics.

I did a lesson about the future “will” and “going to” using the idea of a zombie invasion and they had to plan an escape using the future tense. I told the students that you cannot go to the mosque, it won’t be safe and that is not the point of the exercise (other teachers told me they did this exercise and if you don’t say that the students will answer: go the mosque or pray so God will protect me from the zombies). Even with those instructions I still got “I will go to the mosque because it is holy ground and the Zombies cannot enter.” I am not trying to blast deep devotion, but there is a total unwillingness to question anything that they have been told. I see some good qualities in having a bit stronger moral stance in everyday life, but as one of my coworkers said “the reason Batik is the only thing the Indonesians have provided to society is because they refuse to ask the question why.” I hope I am not coming off as if I am judging this society for its strict stance on most everything; I am just trying to give a view on the ideals of Indonesians and the difficulty of trying to understand it that I struggle with everyday. It is very interesting to see, but quite frustrating in the classroom at times. In anthropology we were always told never to make judgements on a culture but to observe and report, and that is what I am attempting to do here. These Indonesians are not universally right or wrong in their lifestyle and ideals, just as the West isn’t universally right or wrong in its own lifestyle as well.

What is interesting is that it seems that this generation is starting to finally begin to question and challenge authority. Indonesia is the third or fourth largest user of facebook in the world and in terms of the percentage of individuals using Twitter based on the numbers of internet users is the highest in the world. And they are using social media to connect, questions political leaders, and rally around others. There was a news story about Indonesians raising TONS of money for a woman that was unjustly accused of libel for writing to the paper about poor healthcare she received. Also when one of their political leaders shook Michelle Obama’s hand even though his religion states he is not to touch women outside of his family there was an outcry about the hypocrisy of political/religious leaders (and even the practice of not touching women outside of the family in general) on Twitter. Its a very interesting place and I am very glad I chose Indonesia to live and work in for this next year. I am learning so much about this culture, Eastern culture in general, and a fair amount about myself as well. I think its very important to be learning about Asia as it very much seems as if Asia is primed to become the new economic center of the world with the problems the West is trying to deal with while having such feeble results.

Anyway, just wanted to give a quick update and let everyone know that I am doing quite well, enjoying myself, and getting everything out of this experience that I hoped I would. I do miss home, and we had a little Thanksgiving dinner over here the other night which (in true Thanksgiving fashion) we all had too much to drink at and a few of us ended up dancing on a bar later that night. It was nice to have a little taste of family Thanksgiving with great friends and good food (even found a Turkey God-knows-where). I also keep forgetting that it is winter back home: I see snow in football game replays here or Facebook pictures of people in jackets and scarves; its really hard to comprehend that its December or that its cold anywhere in the world with this heat. I love it. I now know for sure I can live somewhere without winter for the rest of my life. So enjoy the snow, miserable biting cold, and Black Friday/Christmas-shopping stampedes for the next month; I’ll enjoy my 85 degree days and a trip to the beaches of Bali!

Eid-al-Adha: The Festival of the Sacrifice.

WARNING: This post discusses some pretty graphic details of the sacrifice of goats and cows. Also, even though some of the descriptions may be a bit graphic, I do not mean for it sound as if I am judging this ceremony. Cultural norms shift greatly throughout the world and what I witnessed today was in no way “animal cruelty” in my mind, but a religious experience for the devout followers and a bit of a spectacle for the children (and myself) running around outside the mosque.

Today was Eid-al-Adha. Eid-al-Adha is the Festival of the Sacrifice for Muslims. It celebrates the story of Abraham and Isaac (Ibrahim and Ishmail) and Abraham’s obedience to God through his willingness to sacrifice his son, and also God’s giving of the ram to be sacrificed in the place of Isaac.

I headed toward the mosque nearest my house a little before 5:30am, following the procession of men and women towards the Mosque. As I approached the main street I found that the street had been closed off and a make shift prayer area had been built. I was a bit nervous heading to this festival by myself not knowing if I would be accepted or wanted there, so I asked a man walking near me if a “bule” (foreigner) can come. He said of course and asked me to come sit next to him, so i followed him and I took a piece of newspaper they were handing out as makeshift prayer-mats and took a seat about 4 rows from the front. The prayer session in the street lasted probably an hour and a half as it was composed of prayer and a sermon. I tried to go through the appropriate motions along with everyone else, but I naturally felt quite out of place until I looked around and not a single person was staring at me, or giving me a dirty look as if I was unwanted. If anyone did make eye-contact it was followed by a big smile and mouthing “hello.”

I was so struck by the welcome that I received at the first part of this festival. I can only imagine try to describe it by putting the shoe on the other foot: it would be as if a Muslim man in a prayer robe, mosque cap, beard, and carrying a prayer mat walked into Christmas Mass, looking totally lost but just there to experience and gain appreciationg for something he is unfamiliar with. Except I have a hard time imagining a Muslim man walking into Christmas Mass with America’s general sentiment toward Islam right now being treated with the respect and welcome that I was today.

After the prayer service, everyone got up and began a mass exodus down the next side street, I followed not entirely sure if everyone was going home or if this was leading to the sacrifices. I saw a small mosque off of a side street and walked up to it hoping to ask if the ceremony was over or if more was to come. The man I began trying to talk to in broken Indonesian was pointing at the goats and asking if I was here to be a part of Eid-al-Adha today, I told him yes and he asked if I wanted to eat. He led me upstairs where his family and friends had quite a spread of fish, rice, and what I assume was chicken. They kept piling food on my plate asking if I liked it and if I wanted more. I was STUFFED by the time I walked back down for the sacrifice to begin. The sacrifice took place in an open area behind the mosque and between a few houses. It was not at a large butcher shop as I understand some of these to take place. A hole was dug and the first sacrifice occurred. The goat was laid down with his throat over the hole and in halal style they slit his throat. The goats were hard to watch be slain because of the screams that they made. It reminded me very much of Clarice’s statement about hearing the lambs crying in the film Silence of the Lambs. The yell from a goat in distress is strikingly human and that human-like scream right before death was very disturbing for me.

Next, the Sapi (Cow) was slaughtered. The cow was tied up around the body and pulled down by about 5 or 6 people who then hog-tied its feet together. Once his feet were tied, the cow was dragged over to the hole dug for the blood and turned to be facing the correct direction. While the sound was the hardest part about watching the goat sacrifice, the amount of blood and the visuals were the hardest part of watching the cow sacrifice. The cow’s throat was slit and blood SPAT everywhere. It spurted almost like in a bad Steven Segal film. But maybe even worse than the blood was the visibility of throat muscle or esophagus or whatever it is that you breath from: the muscle was opening and closing pushing out what air was left in the cow and trying desperately to breath more in but all it could accomplish was to spray the blood that was running into and over the opening. Also, as it came closer to death some greenish liquid that I can only imagine to be stomach acids/bile started to pour out as well. All of this was very graphic, especially for me: I vomited after watching the live birth video in health class, after watching a live birth video of a cow in a science class, and stuck my lab partner trying to hold down and cut upon a pig fetus in highschool because I threw up again and almost fainted; I don’t do blood, its not my thing. So this was quite hard to watch and I was honestly pleased with myself for not having to run into the street to throw up into the roadside ditches.

After the slaughter, the animals were hung upside down, skinned, and beheaded (the animals head cannot be removed until it is fully dead) and divided into three sections for family, friends, and the poor.

I bring up the gruesome details of the story to make a point of not sugar coating everything. It can be so easy when witnessing such a foreign celebration to just go on about how eye-opening and life-changing it was while shedding only positive light on the experience. And while this certainly was eye-opening, there were parts of it that were hard to be a part of, and I think that made me realize how large some of the differences between cultures or religions can actually be. But in witnessing these difference in celebration, worship, or even sacrifice it became a bit more clear to me that all of these differences should be seen only as differences in the details. Faith is Faith, and these people certainly had a lot of it. While Islam and Christianity may be incredibly different in their practices, they are still both a way of relating to a higher power and hopefully of gaining a message of acceptance and love. And there were certainly similarities to be seen as well: the men and women at prayer this morning were as devout as someone at Easter mass. The sacrifice seemed to have a meaning that strangely mirrored the Eucharist. But despite any differences between myself and the Muslims I spent my morning with, they welcomed me with open arms. They embodied the good nature of people that religion, ALL RELIGION, should aim to nurture. They did not try to “convert” me, but merely asked if I had questions about what was happening or its meaning to them. It makes it hard to look back the “ground zero” mosque or Murfreesboro mosque controversies and see how narrow minded this American Islamophobia is. If people would open their eyes and try to experience other faiths and accept their differences rather than blindly judge them we might not be in the situation we are currently in.