Ramadan II- The Exceptions to the Rules

We’re two and a half weeks into the month of fasting. I’ve learned some things.

There are exceptions to fasting. If you’re pregnant, you’re excused. If you’re sick or infirm, you’re excused.  If you’re a child, you’re supposed to be excused, but a lot of kids still fast.  Maybe it’s at the urging of their parents, so the parents aren’t tempted, or maybe the kids just want to go along.  

our office was planning a going away party a few weeks back and the issue of time came up.  With several Muslims in our office we didn’t want to schedule too early.  We’d need to wait until nearly 6 to begin.  We asked one of our staff if she minded starting a little earlier.  

“Oh, I won’t be fasting that day. I’m gonna be having my period.” She announced to the group.

That’s the other loop hole.  If women are menstruating, they’re excused. And apparently this co-worker is regular as well as, um, boundary-free. 

Several weeks on, I passed her in the break room and I asked how her fasting had been going.

“I woke up to good news, Doc! I got my period today.  I LOVE the color red! No fasting for me!” Did I mention boundary-free?

I led a smoking cessation group for local staff part way through the first week of the holy month.  It was all men.  I think that men are the predominant smokers here.  I went around the room. They all started around the age of 8 or 9.  All the marketing is geared toward kids.  Transformers and skateboarders are all linked to smoking here.

Anyway, the topic of nicotine patches came up.  They were curious, but also worried about putting something into their body during their fasts.. I asked if they could take medicine and they said that they could if they were sick.  I also asked if they were allowed to smoke during Ramadan.  “Well, we’re not really supposed to, but we can’t help it, plus we blow most of it back out.”  So I asked “what would Allah do?”

No, I didn’t.  Wanted to, but I didn’t.

Love Jannah

Cinetron is a national pastime here. It is the Indo version of the soap opera, but it comes on in the evening.  And all across the country people tune in.  If you see a road side hut or restaurant, you’ll see a bare lightbulb, a grainy black and white TV and a group huddled around watching the days drama unfold.  

I’d never really watched, but I’d flipped past off and on.  This month I noted more women on the shows wearing head scarves. I thought it was part of the story line, but a colleague told me that every year during Ramadan, the stories change from the usual “boy meets girl, girl stabs boy in back” stories to stories of peace and purity and other holy lessons.  All the characters dress more pure, too. 

Porridge Seller Goes on Haj

Then the day after Eid, it all switches back to the same old sordid tales. Apparently people can only be good for 28 days.

Sitting here in a hotel lobby bar in Surabaya, I asked the waitress how business had been.  She said it’s been swamped because it’s Ramadan and all the bars are closed, so no one can get alcohol.  “Everyone comes here to get a drink.”  

Apparently 28 days is too long.

Appeasing the Gods

Once upon a time, on big island on a bigger ocean there were two lovers who wed. One’s name started with the letters T-E-N-G….  The other’s ended with the letters G-A-R. Their full names were lost to time or at least lost in the translation between my guide Benny and me.

The names are important in that these two came together to form the Tenggar clan in east Java. 

The two tried for years and years to have a child but they were unable. They prayed very hard to the god in Mt. Bromo and their prayers were answered with a son.  In fact, they were answered further with 24 more children in the span of their years.  

Sometime after the birth of their 25th child, the god came to them and asked them to give thanks by sacrificing one of their children to the volcano atop Mt. Bromo.  Though they were grateful for their answered prayers, people being people, they were unable to part with any of their children.  

Their refusal angered the mountain god greatly and the god being a god, went all Kaiser Sosei on them, laying waste to their settlement and killing all twenty-five of the kids.  

S.A.M returned to Surabaya and after the work was done took a trip to Mt. Bromo about 4 hours from Surabaya.  The goal was to see the sunrise which entailed leaving the hotel at midnight and enduring a rather uncomfortable car ride up to a base at Penanjakan. The roads are not made for smooth travel or sleeping in a car. There are lots of starts and stops and bobs and weaves. In Penanjakan we switched to a 4x4 for a trip across the lava sands and up the other side of the crater about 1500 meters above the lava field.

For a quasi-car geek, this is a great place to come because all the 4X4s are vintage Toyota Land Cruisers from the 70s.  This must be where they come to be put out to pasture. There are hundreds of them in varied states of repair. Some looked complete. Others like mine look good from the outside but the inside is lacking dashboard lights and working speedometers and working seat belts.  

Benny apologized for the deficiency, but reassured me that I was safe.  “You’ll be fine, because the driver is my friend!” And he gave him a big old hug.  And off we raced into the night along with hundreds of other motorcycles and 4wd trucks.

At the bottom of the mountain , I was encouraged because I saw clear skies and stars up above. We arrived at the top of the main crater at about 4 am.  In true, Indonesian fashion, because this is a major tourist destination, there are food vendors set up and doing a booming business even at 3:30 am  We stepped inside a stall and pulled up a bench and grabbed fried bananas and hot ginger tea, served family style to any takers.  It seemed nearly all the local tourists were feverishly smoking cigarettes in preparation for the big climb later.  Me, I just breathed when I could.  

45 minutes before sunrise we made our way a short distance to the sunrise viewing area.  As the day dawned, though it was clear that we were only going to see fog and mist.  5 hours of dozing in the back of a car for nothing.

Back down to the crater floor and across to the center where a new cone rises.  This is the active portion of the Mt Bromo.  There’s a 2 km hike and then 245 stairs that lead up to the crater rim. There is an option to skip the hike and hire one of the hundreds of ponies to take you up to the stairs.  I felt like a walk and the small ponies looked rather ridiculous carting around some of the larger people.  

The people and the horses use the same trail and it seemed heavily trafficked. It did make me wonder how a culture that dislikes dog partly out of concern that dogs poop everywhere, can hike through sand infused with horse dung in a pair of flip flops.  It don’t make no sense.

There is a Hindu temple near the base of the mountain. It is run by the Tenggar clan. Every year on the 1st of August they hold a sacrifice ritual. They’ve moved beyond humans, though.  Apparently the god is okay now with freshly killed animals and vegetables. They haul the whole buffet up the steps and hurl it into the crater.

There are some resourceful folks who climb down into the crater and catch all the bounty falling out of the sky. I suppose tourists aren’t going to want to look down into a crater full of decaying carcasses and rotting vegetation. But it makes me wonder if they don’t know about their god’s anger problem.  This taunting just seems like a disaster waiting to happen.  

Speaking of disasters that are slowly unfolding. Long time readers may recall the Lupindo mud eruption that I spoke about the last time I was here.  We stopped by on the way home. This is a video I took standing on 35 feet of mud that has been oozing out of the ground after a fracking accident in 2006.  The damage extends to square miles of toxic, stinking mud that oozing out of the ground at a rate of 10,000 cubic meters per day. It is projected to keep flowing for the next 50 years.

Most all the people in the buried settlements are gone.  My driver tells me this is a place where the lady boys hang out at night. During the day a few remaining folks hang on waiting for some sort of settlement.  It is such a depressing place.  

Talk about a group of people who could benefit from some ritual sacrifice.

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