Imperfect People Meet Perfectly

Easily offended? This deals with religion and observations about one church service last week. Though not meant to offend, it may not be suitable for all audiences.

It started with a Facebook post that we received from friends announcing that Nadia Bolz-Weber was coming Jakarta and would be participating in a church service.  That’s the advert up top.

She’s a Lutheran minister who’s written a book and has done some speaking. My daughter  was inspired by speech she heard a few years ago at the Superdome in New Orleans and both she and Mrs. S.A.M. wanted to go.  

It was at a church on the northwest side of town.  Maybe a 40 minute drive from our house. Our driver took us. First things first.  Our driver had a very poor knowledge of the area, so I used Google maps and that got us in the general area. But, he wasn’t too trusting of the new technology when Google told us to make a U-turn.  He pulled over to ask a group of Ojeks or motorcycle taxis for directions. They told us to keep going straight for another mile or two.  They were right.  

Smugly, our driver said, “I think we should trust the Ojeks more than Google” and just laughed.

We arrived at the church which was in the basement of a large office building.

The first curious thing was the dress of the staff.  Maybe they were ushers? Greeters?  Guards? Pit crew? Regardless, they were dressed in Automobile racing shirts with sponsor patches sewn all over.  Ferrari, UPS. Shell, Pirelli.  Maybe 15 or 20 folks all dressed in bright red and white.  Very friendly.  Offered us coffee and tea.  

They also guarded the entry doors.  We could here practicing going.  Singing and music.  Just like those entrances at amusment parks, the doors opened at precisely 10:45 and we all filed in.  Z wanted a place near the front so we sat about 7 rows back.  It was a good size room. And by the time the service began it was full.

The first thing that struck us was the music.  Pop music thumping out of a sizable sound system.  Not even christian rock.  Just pop music. Z knew all the words.  

The next thing were the lights beaming and sweeping multi-colored from all four corners of the room.  

Then there was the huge, wall-sized movie screen at the front of the room showing, curiously,  motorcycle moto-cross movies. Right there larger than life.  It fit right in with the music and maybe the racing uniforms of the pit crew outside.

We sat down, and I surveyed more closely.  I saw a pole sticking up where the lectern might be in a normal lutheran church and I joked with my family that it was a stripper pole.  And then I looked again.  My eye wandered down the tall, brass pole to the black base with purple LED lights bordering the edges. On the front was emblazoned a pink and purple flower and the name “Hannah” scripted underneath.  It was indeed a stripper pole. Or maybe a Pole-pit.

Then came the smoke machines.  The room got hazier and hazier.  I briefly feared we’d be put to sleep and our kidneys harvested, but Mrs. S.A.M elbowed me at this suggestion  The lights, though got flashier.  On the screen a big countdown clock started ticking down the seconds until the service began.

Promptly at 11, the church leader came out and it was then that we realized that the entire service was going to be in Indonesian.  This, I don’t think. had dawned on us for some reason.  But, there we were. Listening for words we knew like.. Jesus, and amen.   

Let me tell you, though, too that there is no Indonesian word for pole-dancing.  I know this because in his all Indonesian announcements I heard two more familiar phrases...  “Nadia Bolz-Weber from Denver” and “pole dancing by Hannah”

And, on cue,  out curtsied Hannah into the spotlight dressed in a stylized tank top, purple sparkly shorts and skirt and heels.  She stepped across the stage and mounted her pole as the music began.  She gave a brief, but athletic twirl up and down and around and around.  I took video.  I was not the only one.  Cameramen beamed the show larger than life onto the screen behind her. It ended with applause.

Music was next with 8 piece rock band and and 5 vocalists.  It was karaoke style. Words were on screen and you could follow along with the bouncing ball.  Jesus is King, Jesus is the savior...   Lights were flashing.  It was rocking!

Then came pastor J.  He said a few words. Led us in prayer and then brought out Hannah again. I thought for sure this was how the offering was going to go down, but Pastor J kept it classy and just let her do her routine.  And it was really athletic and beautiful and probably would be even outside of a church.  

Pastor Nadia did the sermon.  A talk about the Good Samaritan parable. It was translated, so that broke up the flow.  And, though good, she was clearly upstaged by Hannah.  I think even she was stunned by the dancer as she remarked on this a couple times.

Then we were done.  Some sort of introductions were made of benefactors and band members and sound technicians and then the music started thumping and we filed out for snacks and photos.  There were interviews and cameras and all sorts of stuff.  You can see them here.

Hannah and her friends. Skim fast.... there are hundreds.

The church bills itself as “where imperfect people are perfectly welcomed.”  During the Indonesian parts of the service I found my mind wandering.  Is this what religion had come to?  Trying to attract by being at the extremes.  One side being ultra-conservative and the other side throwing up pole dancers and smoke and movies. I’m an admittedly Christmas and Easter church goer, so I’ve little room to talk, but I wonder if there is a the middle ground?

We rode home in silence. All wondering about the utterly surreal experience we’d just witnessed.  I was quietly thanking my lucky stars that I hadn’t invited our driver to listen in while he waited. On the way there, I thought about it.   A devout muslim, he would have been scarred beyond repair and probably quit his job.

I think next Sunday we’ll try and tone it down a bit.  Maybe check out a human sacrifice.

Pole dancing?   Jesus...

Check out more on Indonesia here at ....Adventures in Wonderland

Maryam

This is a movie review.

The ambassador does very good job of bringing locals and Americans together.  I mean, I guess that is their job, interceding between two countries.  But, the Ambassador here does well in doing this on a personal level. Promoting activities between American staff and our locally employed staff. He is very involved in team building. He participated in the award for the local Karaoke competition. He promises to compete next year.

An Indonesian won the Venice Film Festival award for his film “Maryam.”  This is a first, and a big deal among Indonesians.  

To showcase, the ambassador screened the film over lunch this week and had the director,Sidi Saleh, come in and talk about his film. It was well-attended by all.  

“Maryam” is about a Muslim, Indonesian, pregnant house girl who has to take care of an autistic young Catholic man over a Christmas weekend and what happens to them both when he forces her to take him to church on Christmas Eve.  

There are so many conflicts contained with in.   Rich v poor. Higher Class v lower class. Muslim v Catholic. Autistic v “Normal”.

One would think it difficult to touch on so much in just 17 minutes, but this flick manages to delineate them all with a gentle humor and grace and scant dialogue.  I mean, one of the characters is autistic played by a true autistic gentleman.

I wish I could send you somewhere to watch it, but it is not yet on Netflix or Amazon or any other outlet that I can find.  I know.  What’s the use of reviewing a movie you cannot find.  My apologies.

Do keep an eye out for it though, at a theatre or film fest near you.  “Maryam” directed by Sidi Saleh.  If you can find it, you will enjoy.

Raping Gaia

The first mistake was buying a 10 year old car, sight-unseen, from 10,000 miles away.  I was assured, though. that it happens all the time in a diplomatic community.  “Everyone’s pretty trustworthy and their drivers take good care of their cars.  No one wants to ruin their reputation by selling a lemon”  

Not sure about the reputation and the car is by no means a lemon, but on arrival,  several months later, I do have a 10 year old car with 10 year old problems.  In this case, the A/C was on the fritz. All the drivers know each other or run into each other.  When they’re waiting for you, they go to designated driver areas and eat, drink tea and exchange information.  

Hence, our driver found out from our car’s previous driver that our car has had A/C problems for a long time.  Indeed, in a deep recess of the car we found service receipts and written estimates for A/C repairs dating back a year or more. The repairs were never made, coolant would just be added every so often as needed.  This is what we did 3 weeks ago.  Already, though, the coolness was waning.

With a peri-menopausal wife and an unpredictable teen daughter, this was gonna be unacceptable.

Which leads to my spending a recent Saturday morning at an A/C repair shop with my driver.  We headed to the shop where he’d had the Freon recharged a few weeks back.

We rolled up to this particular shop on a length of road with some 20 other A/C repair shops.  I will, in the future, proclaim this road “Car-Repair Street”

“Pak, how did you discover this place?”

“Oh, I used to drive down this street a lot.”  

That’s it.  No word of mouth. No newspaper ad. No Yelp reviews. Neither of our language skills are good enough to delve deeper into why this particular garage is better than all the other places along the way.  I am dying to know what drew him here.

The place is nothing to look at.  A dingy, concrete garage open on two sides. The mechanics are sitting on a bamboo chaise lounge eating noodles and chips from dirty bowls in the corner of the shop.  We may be the first ones there that day. They may have spent the night there.

They leap into action and quickly determine that I’ve lost about half the coolant they put in last time.  We ask for an estimate and the owner went back to the office and came back with a written estimate which seems pretty reasonable.  An almost completely new A/C system, parts and labor for 300 bucks.  

My driver mentioned that the power window was really slow and laboring and that one of the rear seat belts wasn’t working.  For 25 bucks they agreed to fix those, too.

My driver said excitedly to me, “Ok, we bargain now!” and he asked him for a better price. Maybe it was my diplomatic plates, maybe it was my lack of conviction, but we were only able to talk him down 10 dollars. With a nod of my head they sprung into action.  They told me they’d have it done in 2-3 hours.

The hooked up all their hoses and turned valves and, to my horror, vented all the coolant into the air.  I reached down and grabbed the hissing hose and took a whiff to see if maybe, this was just air.  They smiled and assured me it was Freon.  They handed me a new can of coolant and spun it around to show me the warning label, indicating that maybe I shouldn’t inhale this.  The fact that we were both concerned about the same thing was lost on them.  

Aside from the environmental concerns, though, every thing at the shop ran smoothly. While we waited, assorted others men wandered in and out of the shop.  All seemed to have some task. Some man brought in water and pulled up a chair for me.  Yet, another just poked his head around under the hood and disappeared. Another man came in and scootered off to get parts.  

They pulled out the dashboard, They cleaned and disinfected all the vents. With every new part that came, they were quick let me open the box and match the serial numbers.  They handed me all the old parts and offered to send them home with me.

In under two hours all was complete and I could stew on home in my own icy cold, environmental guilt. Though I tried to console my horror with the belief that before the repair, I was already leaking freon slowly into the atmosphere, I was now complicit in raping the earth.

I vowed to start a small fund, so that the next time I hear someone in America say the EPA is superfluous, I would fly them gratis to Jakarta and wander around with them for a week and see what sort of consequences result from indiscriminate dumping of pollutants.

The only qualifier would be that they have to go swimming in the dead and blackened river or go for a walk down a busy street at rush hour. Or just hang out here in this A/C shop and watch the hole in the ozone grow when they spew coolant into the air.

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Medical Training

I spent some time with a local doctor who gave me some insights into the Indonesian medical world.

 

A person’s medical training begins right out of high school. It is a six year program and you come out with an M.D. or the equivalent.  The education is not free.  I think he said the average cost is about $30,000 for the 6 years.  When you’re done, you are obligated to the government anywhere from 2-5 years depending on where you want to practice.  If you agree to a rural post, you only stay for 2 years. If you want to go somewhere civilized you stay for 5 years.

If you go rural, you’re supposed to get preference for specialty training and jump to the front of the line.  But this, I’m told, is an empty promise and getting into a specialty program is dependent on how much money you can pay and perhaps your religion and who you know.

  

Where residency training programs in the US pay doctors a salary, in Indonesia, the doctors pay a fee to study in a training program.  Sometimes this fee can be up to $100,000 dollars or more.  They say the money goes to pay for equipment and infrastructure, but nothing new ever appears.

The medical system as whole is very leery of outside trained doctors.  If a doctor goes out of the country for training and comes back he/she is excluded from practicing for a very long time.  The local medical associations control the licenses and there is a fear that if an outsider comes in they will be perceived as being more knowledgeable and steal business from the locally trained doctors.  This even goes so far as to effect doctors trained in one area of the country wanting to go to another area.  So, the flow of knowledge is greatly impeded.

It is nearly impossible for doctors from outside the country to practice.  If they are allowed in a hospital, they are only allowed to be observers and cannot touch or interact with patients.

 

On the plus side, I toured two local hospitals in Surabaya and they seemed to have up to date equipment and staff.  Both had Cardiac Cath labs readily available and newer model MRI machines.  They bragged they could get a patient catheterized in well under 30 minutes.  When there is a need for an ambulance a doctor and nurse ride along instead of paramedics.

I did note the clear delineation of classes of rooms.  I’m told all hospitals have to provide a certain percentage of beds for the indigent.  And where, in the US, hospitals would just put all patients in the same type of room and eat the cost difference if a patient couldn't pay. In Indonesia, the indigent are put in multi-patient “Social” wards rather than rooms and the doors are clearly marked as to what class of service you will receive.  The beds are a little less comfortable, but they were quick to point out that the beds were all electric. There are fewer amenities, though I’m not sure if the level of actual care is varied or not.

The VIP rooms are pretty posh.  Large, airy.  There is a separated family area with it’s own bathroom and a small dining area.  There is TV there.  I can’t recall if I saw a TV in the “social” rooms. 

And here’s an interesting thing.  On our tour through one hospital, the Medical director,the marketing director, my counterpart and I approached the ICU which was behind a closed door.  The Medical director bent over at a small shelf and grabbed a pair of Crocs and motioned for me to put them on, but there were four of us and only two pair of outsized Crocs.   I slipped mine on.  My partner slipped his on.  The medical doctor slipped off his shoes.  The marketing director slipped off her shoes and in we went.  Us in our clown-sized (Pink, no less) crocs, the director in his socks and the marketing person in her bare feet!  We just traipsed in there like that.  

The purpose of the whole charade was lost in translation.  The message that cleanliness was important was dropped, but the process of taking off shoes was still present.  

Surabaya

I spent 3 days last week on my first work trip to Surabaya on Eastern Java.  It is a sleepy little port town of 3 million people.

On arrival, I was pleased to find that the sky was still blue and the sun still hurt when I looked directly at it.  Traffic flows at a reasonable pace even with the buzzing about of motor scooters.  At speeds even, that made me reach for my seat belt.

 

Though a smaller town, I found out that the US has actually had a consulate there since the late 1800’s.  There  has been a lot of trade coming out of there and the port, at one point, was more important than Jakarta dating back several hundred years.

The people are fiercely proud of their resistance to the Dutch when they gained their independence after WWII, largely with sharpened bamboo spears.  This is a recurrent symbol around town with several statues erected.  

One, a series of large bamboo spears bundled together was listed as an area tourist attraction.  I saw it on a list of must-sees.  Pickings for the list must be slim for there is little to recommend this place .  It is concrete and 40 feet tall and sits in the middle of a noisy traffic circle, so it is nearly impossible to get to, but there you are.  It photographs much better than it appears in person.

There are apparently several hikes and volcanos in the area, but for tourist attractions in the city itself, there is a lack.

One interesting spot that was open after work was the House of Sampoerna museum.  This documents the rise of Mr. Lee, a Chinese immigrant from orphan to food cart owner to tobacco magnate.  In a rags to riches story, he earned enough to go back and buy the orphanage’s colonial building he was raised in and turn it into a cigarette factory.  

About 300 local women still hand roll, cut, count and pack the clove and tobacco cigarettes that the area is famous for.  The whole building is deeply scented of cloves. At the end of the exhibit you can actually overlook the factory floor and watch the whole process.  

One bonus, the museum is free.  There is also a nice café with live music and an art gallery.  In the 90’s, the family sold the whole operation to Phillip Morris and are living off their wealth, I’m sure.

One place, I didn’t get to was the Sidoarjo Mud Volcano.  This, Ohio, is an absolute nightmare of fracking gone wrong.  In 2006, an oil/Gas exploration company went drilling and tapped into some geological structure and…. Whoops…. Up came the mud.  

Like a land based deep water horizon, though not oil, just millions of cubic yards of toxic mud. It has consumed an entire village, some 40 hectares, under feet of the mud and it still flows to this day.  They can do nothing to plug it, so they've built a huge earthen dike to hold it all back and prevent it from flowing into a nearby river, and now the mud is about to overwhelm this effort.  There is talk of trying to route the whole mess into the ocean which can’t be good.  

There is also fear that because all the mud is surfacing the space below the mud is empty and that the whole thing will sink and mother earth will clean up the mess in her own way.

Who’s responsible? No one has paid for it.  The owner tried at least to sell the land for a two dollars to remove himself from the situation.  But this was blocked.  There have been some legal charge, but nothing has been pursued.  The company has never paid anything blaming the mess on an earthquake 300 miles away and occurring some weeks before.  Seems like things are at a stalemate.

Thanks mostly to my wife, who’s traveled for work and stayed almost exclusively in Marriott hotels the last two years. I got an upgrade to one of them fancy rooms with a phone in the bathroom.  It was way up on the 20^th floor with a nice view of the city.  I could count 6 mosques within my view and do you know what I learned? 

I learned that the first call to prayer is around 4:30 in morning and that 20 floors is not high enough to escape hymns to god. 

One other thing I learned is that in the name of service, if you put in a wake-up call for 530 and wake up earlier, get in the shower and don’t answer  your wake-up call they will come to your room and enter it at nearly the most inopportune time.  Maybe they thought I was frail and feeble when I checked in, but….  It could have been embarrassing. 

If you want more perspective on this whole adventure. check out
http://adventuresinwonderland4.blogspot.com

The Help 2.0

Both our driver and our pembantu started work this week. I don't think I mentioned the driver.  More on him in a minute.

The folks with State recommend and offer background checks on your house staff.  They have a whole list of things they want.  From all this, you can learn a lot. One thing you learn is never store your documents if there is any chance of things flooding. Bu A. lost most of her important documents in flooding over the years.  "All my papers turned to soup."  Mostly she was talking about her birth certificate.  She told me she only went to school through the 7th grade and so her seventh grade report card was all she had, and it turned to soup, too.

"But, Bu A., how did you learn to speak English so well?"

"Ah. I was nanny and I read to kids and they correct me when I got words wrong."  She still likes reading.  From what I gathered she likes “tween” fiction.  She does math well, too.  She told me she is the fifth of six children and that her dad was in the military. Her dad wanted a son to also send to the military.  After the sixth girl was born they stopped trying.  All six girls were sent to work in 8th grade, which is tragic if they are all as intelligent as their sister. The military is often seen as a way to great wealth, but this seems rather short sighted.  

She doesn't fault her father though. She said he was a really good father.  She got married at 19 and had kids. When she left school she thought she'd not need any more school.  Now in her mid-30s, though, she thinks about going back maybe to an adult program to graduate.

She has been very helpful with getting things done around the house and has proven herself a really good cook, at least when it comes to Indonesian dishes.  

It has been pleasant that she gets along with our dog.  This talent is hard to find.  It is engrained here that dogs are disgustingly dirty creatures, so dogs are not tolerated very well.  Often landlords refuse to allow them and househelp refuses to work around them.  Cats, though, are tolerated and seem to run around the city like squirrels, both inside and out.

Anyway, I had told Bu A, not to worry much about the dog, that we would take care of her. But she has fed and watered her everyday and said the other day, "I wanted to take her out for a walk, but I couldn't find her...um...kite." She made the sign for a leash.  Of course, I’ve adopted this lingo.

Pak H, our driver, also has a seventh grade education and, aside from also storing his important documents in flood prone areas, is also a remarkably intelligent and resourceful gentleman.  

He's also very respectful and deferential. Everyone here is, really. I met him at my place so we could go get my car.  We waited and waited outside my house for a taxi because it was rush hour.  "Mr. S.A.M, do you do like this every morning?  Wait like this?”  

"Well, not in the morning, but other times, yes. Usually a taxi comes quickly.”  

It didn’t

He asked this same question twice.  Then after some time I asked "Pak, do you think...."

He cut in without missing a beat, "...we should go to the hotel down the street and catch a cab there? Yes, Mr. SAM, good idea."  And he sprinted off ahead of me.  He didn’t want to tell me I was stupid for waiting like this when there was perfectly good taxi stand around the block.  Z has adopted this manner of telling me I’m stupid as well.  It is cute….. for now.

We found our car in the center of the city. I actually bought it about two months ago, but hadn't seen it.  The A/C had gone and there were 1.5 flat tires not including the half inflated spare.  Pak H and I changed the flat with near-NASCAR speed.  He is quite good at finding repair shops.  Within an two hours of returning he had all the tires fixed and the A/C recharged for a little over $20.  I was amazed.  

By the afternoon the car was washed and fresh wax applied.  

By the next day, the inside of the car was spotless.

When he was done with the car maintenance, I found him sitting in the corner of my garage on a plastic mat on the floor.  Shocked, I offered my basement which is attached to the garage, has a couch and A/C and we have not used it.  There is a fridge there and I told him he could keep some water or drinks there if he wanted.  

“No, no,: he declined, “if I could get mop and mop out garage, I be fine.”  

Sure enough, the following day, my garage is spotlessly mopped.  We even take off our shoes to go in there now.

A List of Observations

Here are some things witnessed by my daughter 16 y.o daughter on her travels along the highways and byways of Jakarta along with editorial comments. These are in no particular order.

- entire families of 4 or 5 on one scooter including sleeping toddler leaning on handlebars

- three 13 year old boys on one scooter

- ordinary people standing in the street directing traffic for tips. Some of them don’t even direct, they just stand there blowing a whistle.  Cars do what they want and still they blow.

- police cars with sirens on going no where because of traffic

- teenage boys in a local school gym class running without shoes.  Even 10,000 miles away, there are still groups that run the whole way, groups that run only in view of the teacher and groups that just walk.

- 0 laws of traffic being obeyed

- street numbers that follow no logical order along a street (ex. 92, 4, 22, 24).  It is as if people choose their address by lottery.

- no crosswalks.

- people washing their dishes in the gutter of the street.

- snake skin strawberries

- a real reason to wear a mask when outside near busy streets

- a Winnie the Pooh respirator mask worn by a woman on a scooter.

- a restaurant in a mall where you sit and eat on boats,... like legit sized sail boats

- workers who just follow you around the second you enter their shop because they have nothing better to do.

- riots and tear gas

- a Louisiana seafood restaurant.

- pollution haze so bad you can look directly at the noon day sun and not be blinded.  It often feels like being on the set of the Truman Show and if you could just get close enough could bang on the sky.  The Sun is a dimming orb etching across the ceiling.

- a pond on the roof of a 5 story building

- a scooter with a bagillion car tires on on it

-a gecko leaping from the trash can

- cars with the front windows tinted… Really dark.

- two speed escalators that slow down when no one is standing on them and speed up when you step on them to save energy.

- random gaping holes in the side walk

- two guys at high speeds on separate scooters having a conversation with each other

Car-Free Day

After a few weeks of hearing about it, we finally got up the gumption to check out Car-Free Day in Jakarta.

This has been going on here since 2007 and weekly since 2012.  On Sunday mornings from 6  until 11 am they close several of the main thoroughfares to auto traffic and it is open for several miles to pedestrians and bikers only.  

It probably doesn’t do much for the overall pollution levels, but I think it must do wonders for peoples sense of well being.  

We made a few mistakes.  One, I live with a teenager and it’s hard to move her along too quickly on weekend mornings.  Two, we decided to take a cab to the other end of the pedestrian area.  Cutting off the main drag to cars only serves to make traffic everywhere else a little worse, so our taxi ride took a while.  But we saw some new sights along the way.  

While we live near “flower street” with all the flower and plant stalls, we also passed “statue street” and “mirror street.”  Stall after stall of purveyors of all these items.  I guess keeping them all together stimulates competition and shopping around.

Lots of time in the cab, but we did have a good hour or so walking on the street and you could just sense how people were more carefree. Being able to stroll without fear of collision or accident was so relaxing for people.  Gaggles of people were walking and biking and talking and laughing.  Every once in a while they would start hooting.  There was some singing and portable sound stages and of course food carts.  

After being here  two weeks we finally decided to sample some food from a cart.  Knock on wood, thus far we’ve been able to stay pretty healthy gastro-intestinally. We wash our veggies and sanitize our dishes. We avoid ice and tap water.  Z has been really fastidious and if I slip up she chimes in “Oooh, Daddy’s eating human waste!” Then I go and quickly wash my food again.

Anyway, I was hungry and after scanning the row of carts for my choices we opted for Roti Coklat.  Stringy fried bread drizzled with sweetened condensed milk, covered in chocolate sprinkles and drizzled in another layer of condensed milk.  All of this handled with pretty sanitary techniques, including gloves!  Not sure if that was for us Bule or not. It was the best breakfast $0.80 could buy.  

Z has been walking a line with her race.  At a soccer team bonding event the other day, all the white girls were named for some event.  Who knows what?  But, Z noted that she wasn’t called out as a white person which was fine with her.  She said she wasn’t really slotted with any other group either.

Then today, walking down the street, we were both quite aware of all the eyes being on us.  She,more than I, was the clear minority and the clear person of interest and she said she felt significantly out of place.  This may take some getting used to.

Along the way, I was handed a handbill for a weight loss clinic.  Maybe it was random, maybe I was being profiled.  

At 11 am, on the dot, a police van, sirens blaring, starts at the end of the road and leads cars safely back up the main street and within minutes the whoosh of traffic fills the air and all the pedestrians retreated to the gutters, side streets and malls. Life in the big city was back to normal.

Jilboob

Read a news article the other day about “Jilboob.”   This was not in the New York Times.

Jilbab, in Indonesia, is the wearing by women of head scarves and not the full flowing garment that middle eastern women wear. I’m told that the number of women wearing scarves has grown remarkably in recent years.

Reading about this, I have to wonder if this is what Cyndi Lauper was singing about with her big hit years ago.  “Jil bab, he bab a we bab….”

Anyway, here’s why they do it….

"Tell the believing men that they shall subdue their eyes (and not stare at the women), and to maintain their chastity. This is purer for them. God is fully Cognizant of everything they do. And tell the believing women to subdue their eyes, and maintain their chastity. They shall not reveal any parts of their bodies, except that which is necessary. They shall cover their chests, and shall not relax this code in the presence of other than their husbands, their fathers, the fathers of their husbands, their sons, the sons of their husbands, their brothers, the sons of their brothers, the sons of their fathers. They shall not strike their feet when they walk in order to shake and reveal certain details of their bodies. All of you shall repent to God, O you believers, that you may succeed." (Quran 24:30-31)

They don’t want to inflame the males.

Well, back to that article on “Jilboob”.  It drew back the veil on the phenomena of Indonesian women wearing a head covering to signify their chastity and modesty, but also wearing tight fitting garments that show off their curves in an effort to be in touch with their femininity.  It must be a real thing, ‘cause I saw it on the internet.

Walking around the malls and shopping area, you can see the discrepancies.  From the neck up, they’ve given themselves over to God. From the shoulders down, it’s OMG!.  And, the heels?!? How can they “not strike their feet when the walk in order to shake and reveal certain details of their bodies” with 5 inch heels?

This is just another of the contradictions that adds to the richness of this place, and indeed any place.

Deciphering Street Codes

Despite the near absolute lack of sidewalks, I’ve been walking. Getting out and exploring the neighborhood.  Off the main roads, it’s not too bad walking along the side of the road if you’re alert to…. everything, and can step around the holes and detritus and obstacles and evade the scooters zipping towards you.

Every once in a while, punctuating the din of the city,  I’ve heard the non-rhythmic tap of a stick on bamboo.  Other times, I can hear an intermittent bicycle bell.  I hadn’t been able to figure out what it was.

Walking after dark the other night, I spotted a man padding down the street ahead with two large boxes hanging from ropes, balanced on a pole over his shoulder.  On one box hung a lantern.  Tap…….. Tap… Tap.  He was the source of the stick on bamboo.

I asked my companion what that meant.  “Oh, that means they have food for sale.  You have to know the codes.  The knife sharpener will ring a bell once.  The metal recycler may ring his bell two times.  There are all sorts of codes.”  You just need to know what they mean.