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What to get the kids for Christmas? A mango stone helicopter

While Indonesia’s Christian churches do their best to get people excited about Christmas, the pine tree iconography has a hard time competing with the palm tree reality. Local Christmas trees are mostly made of hoops of ugly white tinsel, like the tattered hooped skirt of some antebellum Cinderella. I did, however, like this variant made of discarded water bottles which I found in Kisar, in Maluku. Quite by chance, whiling away the night on a dock on another island with a little rant about litter, I commented on this inspired use of rubbish. It turned out that Bpk Elis, who I was talking to, was the designer of the very tree I was describing.

Though I’m in the most stoutly Christian part of Indonesia, the frenzy of consumerism is mercifully muted. This was certainly true in the village of Ohoiwait in the Kei islands where I spent Christmas with no electricity or phone signal, no gift-giving, but some desperate showing off of frilly new dresses at the three church services I went to in two days. In villages like Ohoiwait kids are used to making their fun from whatever is at hand. Tyres whipped along with sticks are still popular among boys, and spinning tops provide hours of competitive fun. But for sheer something-out-of-nothing genius, this helicopter sort of thing, made from a hollowed out mango stone, a whittled stick and a piece of string, which I found in a three-house hamlet in West Sumba, surely rates right up there.

Some travelling companions are just nicer than others

I’ve just spent five days (and five nights) on the deck of a cargo ship travelling between Wini, in West Timor, and the Tanimbar Islands in southern Maluku. As in any five day period, there are good moments and bad. The bad would certainly include the hours when the lads sitting close to me, having been drinking palm wine for several hours, broke out a guitar held together with duct tape and took on the booming karaoke machine, a competitive cacophony of tuneless shrieking. The good would include the early evening hours, when the sun had cooled enough to sit dangling one’s legs over the prow (which is also as far as it is possible to get from the relentless karaoke machine), staring at the rippling sea and beginning, gradually, to get a sense of the enormity, perhaps the impossibility, of Indonesia. The very best moments come when those evening hours are punctuated by dolphins, who have come out to play with the passing ship. After a bit, the sky goes fiery, then dark. On truly exceptional days, a blood-red moon rises out of the depths, paling as it climbs, showering gold across the sea. Drunken singing seems like a small price to pay.

Sunset
Moonrise in Maluku
Moonrise

Indonesia is rubbish

I’m always happy to see the Boys in Brown (in Indonesia that’s the police) supporting a good cause. Right now, they’ve decided to take on what I think is the biggest blight on this gloriously haphazard nation. Not corruption (that would be a stretch for the police), not a bloated and ineffectual civil service (ditto), but litter. Indonesians have gone from wrapping food in banana leaves to dressing food, drink, shampoo, sweets, virtually everything in shiny plastic wrappers. The national obsession with buying things in tiny quantities — just enough hair gel to achieve the Bus Station Lout look for a single spiky Saturday night — means there is an awful lot of wrapping around. And all of it gets discarded on the spot, as soon as its contents have been consumed.

Out the bus window, onto the floor of the airplane, over the side of the ferry into the sea — the possibilities for littering are endless, and all enthusiastically embraced. On an otherwise gorgeous and totally deserted beach in East Sumba a couple of weeks ago I counted 57 discarded plastic drinks containers in the shade of a single tree. A big tree, but still. At sea, those people who obey the “Keep this Ship Clean” signs and dutifully put their empty drink can in a bin can be forgiven for wondering why they bother — when the bins are full, a staff member will himself dump their contents over the side of the ship into the sea. Comments about this behaviour draw only blank looks: what behaviour?

So I’m thrilled that the police have nice new banners trashing litter. “Let’s work together to support and carry out the CLEAN INDONSIA MOVEMENT!” It would be more convincing, perhaps, if the police had spent as much time clearing up the garbage in their own yard as they did putting up the banner.

No country for animal lovers

Blood and feathers
The remains of my chicken

My future is golden, according to the entrails of the chicken sacrificed on my behalf to celebrate the merapu new year. If I spend very much longer trailing around islands heavy with ritual sacrifice, it may also be vegetarian. Though I’m coming to respect the natural instincts of the animals that share every corner of one’s space in Eastern Indonesia. They sit under one’s feet on the bus, snuffle around under one’s bed in the village, find their way into one’s luggage. Judging from the reluctance of these, my fellow travelers, they have a pretty good idea of what awaits them.

Medicine man: a market education

Medicine man in a market in Boawae, Flores, Indonesia

Last year, the Wellcome Collection in London had a glorious exhibition of anatomical models, called Exquisite Bodies. They were accompanied by banners from the fairs and markets where these models used to be shown. In the prudish Victorian age, they were often the only glimpse people got of naked bodies other than their own. Part education, part pornography, all entertainment.

Anatomical model, bodyAnatomical model of head and face

In the country markets of Indonesia, these models still take pride of place, though I’m not sure “exquisite” quite describes them. The sellers of herbs, patent medicines and quack cures are the only people in the market with loudhailers, sometimes even electronic sound systems. They hang their stalls about with photos of largely naked inhabitants of Papua, Indonesia’s Eastern-most province and the source of many miracle cures. And they use their models to illustrate the many benefits of whatever it is they are selling. My personal favourite was the gentleman who covered his bets by selling large heaps of tobacco as well as “Raja Gunung”, the King of the Mountains, a herbal remedy guaranteed to cure lung cancer.

A whale of a time in Eastern Indonesia

Whale meat hung out to dry
On the line: Whale meat drying in Lamalera, Eastern Indonesia

I’ve just spent a few days hunting whales in Lamalera, on the eastern end of Lembata island, off Flores. We didn’t have much luck, but last week, there was something of an end-of-season bonanza: in rickety wooden boats and using only long bamboo harpoons with rusty metal tips, the lads of Lamalera (and they are definitely Lads) brought in six whales. They get hacked up on the beach, which is littered still with spines and skulls.

Whale bones on the beach, Lamalera, IndonesiaHunting whales and dolphins in Lamalera, Indonesia

Every household gets its part: when I arrive the whole village is garlanded with shriveling flesh, dripping oil. It stinks. I hate to keep harking back to my past life, but when we were writing questionnaires for sex workers, the boys from Statistics Indonesia and I had long arguments about how to describe symptoms of chlamydia and other STIs in women. In the end we settled on this delicate formulation: a vaginal discharge “yang bau kurang sedap” (“that smells unfragrant”). Now I’ve got a new suggestion: “a vaginal discharge that smells like Lamalera”. The whole village exists in a miasma of stale fishiness; since dried whale meat is virtually the only protein on offer, that stuck-in-the-back-of-your-throat stench surfaces on the dinner table, too.

To punish me for my uncharitable thoughts, the whale Gods saw to it that the villager sitting next to me in the truck leaving Lamalera spilled a bottle of fish oil over my backpack. A little, portable miasma which at least creates space around me in overcrowded buses.


For readers in Britain, here’s a BBC feature on the whale-hunters of Lemalera:

Credit where credit is not due

The Tree of Cell-Phone Life
Sucking a phone signal out of the cashew tree, Lamahera, Indonesia

You can tell a lot about a country from the sort of junk mail it circulates. Or, in the case of Indonesia, junk SMSs. Travelling in areas where a particular tree is designated as a “pohon senyal” or “signal tree” (hold on to the tree and you might just get enough of a signal of your phone to send a text or even make a call) I get quite excited if my phone beeps. But with disappointing regularity, it is someone trying to give me money. “NEED 200 MLN IN QUICK CASH? JUST 1.6 %, NO FEE, QUICK PROCESS FROM WELL KNOWN BANK. CALL EVA AT 021 92526473.”

200 million rupiah is around US$ 21,000. And MY well-known Malay-Indonesian bank assures me they’ll lock in a 7% interest rate if I put it on deposit for three months. So if I borrow at 1.6, and lend at 7.2… Hmmm. Is this beginning to sound like one of those Nigerian “You’ve won the lottery” scams? The easiest conclusion to draw is that a few Indonesians are very credulous, and that this is a plain old scam. But Bank Indonesia, the central bank. recently shocked markets by cutting its base rate to 6%, its lowest rate ever. Which means that money is getting cheaper for everyone — more credit floating around, though 3-month deposit rates of 7.2 become rather less likely.

My well-known bank is one of those trading at about three times their book value, pumping out around 20% more loans this year than last, in response to consumer demand. But wait, it’s also the bank that tried to shove a platinum credit card down my throat “Guaranteed no fees, life-long”. Despite the fact that I am unemployed and on a cultural visit visa. So that I can consume, simultaneously adding to their “assets” and creating demand, and so creating the need for more loans.

Having come from the doldrums of the Euro-wobbly West, it’s great to feel the energy of an economy that is growing at 6.5% a year. Faster even than inflation, for now. Bank Indonesia may well be lowering rates to discourage “hot money” from the West, but they have to consider, too, the message that cheap money sends to the recipients of all those junk SMSs. Does anyone else see the word “bubble” floating on the Indonesian breeze?

Indonesia’s antibiotic resistance mystery solved

Some years ago, when I was working on HIV prevention in Indonesia, we diligently treated sex workers for common infections such as gonorrhea and chlamydia, using national treatment guidelines. They were not cured. After much head-scratching, we sent some samples off for resistance testing. The results were pretty shocking. We found that 100% of our gonorrhea samples were resistant to tetracycline (marketed here as “SuperTetra!”), and 40% to Ciprofloxacin, the second commonly-subscribed antibiotic. (It took a shameful four years to change the national guidelines to include drugs that actually worked, and during that time we continued to use ones we knew didn’t work. But hell, it’s only hookers, right?…)

In an effort to find out why so many bugs in Indonesia are resistant to tera, cipro, amoxy and the rest, I went out to ask the nation’s pharmacists, Here’s one, helping with prescriptions in a market in Boawae, Flores.

Chile drug-seller in Indonesia

Notional Networks: the realities of Indonesian Telecoms

Ancient rotary phone under lock and key
Telecommunications in Eastern Indonesia

In my proposal for Taking Tea with the Dead, I wittered on at some length about how fabulously plugged in Indonesia is. The world’s second largest Facebook community, some 18 percent of all Twitter traffic. Jakarta pulsates a glorious crimson on this wonderful Twitter heat map at most times of the day and night.

But as Merlyna Lim reminded us in a recent report on democratization and social media in Indonesia (pdf), most of those people live in Java and Bali, with a smattering in large cities in other islands. Since I’ve started my travels far from the mother-lode, I can identify especially with this map, taken from Lim’s report, of telecoms distribution.

And let’s not forget that that phone pictured above, under lock and key in a Waikabubak guest house, counts as part of the 0.2 percent. I’m hoping some of those open source guys can find a way for us to Tweet by tom-tom.