Indonesian Diary Entry

December 16, 2001.

This comes from my bedroom, where I am preparing to leave for a few weeks. I think excitement will lead to brevity. We’ll see.

The semester is over, and in a sense the year is over. Today is the much waited for Idul Fitri, and it is the very important end of year holiday. This year it precedes X-mas and New Year’s so I suppose they will be more of a winding down of the year – a gradual deterioration of 2001. As a colleague once told me, the best parting words come from a bit of Irish verse: Please don’t go, please don’t go; But if you must go, please don’t go so slow. My feelings about 2001, exactly. Perhaps 2002 will have no Osamas, no Wolfowitzs, no Memoranda of Intent or Letters of Understanding, no attempts to achieve fame through mass hysteria, and in their place nothing but sweetness and light. I wonder if we would be able to recognize it.

As part of the toning down of the semester one of my colleagues had enough time to cart me around to a few places this week. The highlight was a 15th century temple complex known as Candi (Temple) Gedong Sanga. This is a relatively small complex, but the beauty of it is that it is a series of 9 small Hindu sites in the mountains. The day we visited was a rain day, and like so many weather related events, that had a good and bad side. The bad was that I got pretty wet. My cap just didn’t shield me completely from the downpour. The good side was that I was able to see the temples in a solitary mood and a solitary environment. My companions sought better shelter, so I was able to wander a bit and poke around. This wasn’t a 15th century experience, and I can’t say that I was transported to a higher level, with great secrets being revealed about vexing problems. (Since coming here I have had so many enlightening experiences that I guess I should add, further enlightenment did not occur.) It was just a very nice late morning, seeing and experiencing one more new thing. There are always human sides to these events. That morning it was a woman who followed us up to the site carrying a rather large box with all kinds of drinks. If you can imagine a drink seller at Fenway Park, you’re on the right wavelength. She didn’t say a thing, but just followed us. When I went off by myself, she stayed with the other two. When I returned, there she was, still waiting. So I bought a water from her, for a modest sum, and that made her very happy. The rest of the day was rather nice. A nice drive through the mountains, lunch in a travelers place, and the other kind of stuff. There was one very dark side. On our way out of Solo, perhaps 20 minutes out, we saw an odd accident. It happened as we were driving through a valley. A bus apparently blew a tire, left front, and went skidding into a stone wall of the valley. Every bus has two assistants, who stand at the doorless entries, and wave to people who are potential riders. (Why this should influence anyone to ride the bus is beyond me.) They also help people on, pushing or pulling, help them off, and collect fares. I don’t know if the guy in front (recall that the driver is on the right hand side of the vehicle) was killed. I do know that there was much screaming, that the side of the bus was essentially peeled off, and that when I shouted to my friend to call the police he said “yes” but didn’t do anything. I now think that this was because police don’t respond to such calls, but when it happened it was upsetting.

People are continually exposed to danger. It seems as if most of the population over the age of 40 has a serious limp of some sort. It is inevitable. Construction workers are much in evidence. There may be a slowdown, but there is quite a bit of building going on nonetheless. The construction workers on the site do not wear any of the following: hard hats, harnesses of any sort, special equipment that I recognize, or shoes. No one wears shoes. Rubber thongs are the uniform. This applies whether the worker is a brick carrier, a mason, a painter, an electrical worker, or someone working with a saw. The saws, by the way, are almost always hand saws – not power saws. Did I mention that they don’t wear shoes?

Well, off to do the things one does in anticipation of departing for vacation. I meet Trudy in Bangkok tomorrow. We are traveling in Thailand for two weeks, after which we return to Indonesia. This is certainly the most exotic vacation we have done. But after four months apart it has a lot of other meaning.

Happy New Year.