Fighting for Space

An afternoon walk on Jalan Setia Budi, the main street in our Medan neighborhood, can turn into a struggle for survival.

Many offices close around 3 p.m. in Indonesia, which means rush hour starts on the early side. At 3:30 today, columns of cars idled in the heat as drivers leaned on their horns. Motorcycles darted like dragonflies around the automobiles, squeezing along the shoulder and occasionally climbing up on the sidewalk to create their own express lane.

Of course, two-wheeled transportation on a sidewalk requires a contiguous stretch of uninterrupted concrete, which does not always exist in Indonesian cities. Fruit sellers set up their stands wherever they see fit, converting sidewalks into obstacle courses. And today, half the concrete squares on large stretches of sidewalk were pried open and removed, exposing fetid sewage canals below. Moments like these demonstrate why typhoid and Hepatitis A vaccines are mandatory for travel in Indonesia.

When they were accessible, sidewalks proved a tempting transportation option today since the curbside shoulders motorcycles usually favor along Jalan Setia Budi were strewn with mountains of trash. It had all the appearances of a garbage pick-up day, but these piles have lain dormant (or perhaps even grown) during the last 36 hours. With a mayor and vice-mayor thrown in prison for corruption earlier this year, and an interim mayor only designated recently after months of leaderless city government, Medan’s public services have seen better days. Some of Danielle’s interview respondents have reported not having trash picked up in their neighborhoods since last August.

And where are the pedestrians in this labyrinth? Most Indonesians don’t walk very far under these conditions. Between the constant obstructions and the blistering heat, people either avoid afternoon trips or hire a motorcycle cab, further congesting narrow roadway arteries. Those of us brave or foolish enough to attempt a quarter-mile journey on foot end up gingerly navigating our way through occasional seams between vendors’ pushcarts and parked motorcycles. (Even when they’ve stopped moving, the motorcycles can be a nuisance.) It’s also important to steer clear of the cats, chickens or occasional goats that cross your path.

With Indonesia’s 322 people per square mile (to say nothing of its chickens and goats), you often feel like your cheek is brushing up against someone else’s jowl. The country is not as densely populated as Vietnam or Bangladesh, but it’s three times more crowded than the United States on average. What’s worse, poor infrastructure and lack of urban planning exacerbates overcrowding problems considerably. Streets feel twice as crowded when motorcycles are on sidewalks and pedestrians are out in the road.

Sometimes, the space crunch has auditory in addition to physical implications. We enjoy peace and quiet in our more expensive home stay, but in most parts of town motorcycle drivers rev engines just meters away from people’s windows. Those windows don’t have glass, either, so any separation from the street proves impossible.

Attempts to find quiet retreats face interruptions from unexpected sources. In search of such a respite from noise pollution, Danielle and I succumbed to the temptation of an upscale Western-style coffee place today. The drinks are three times more expensive than in the curbside cafes, but the air-conditioning makes the price seem like a bargain when you never have to fight flies or ants for a seat.

But just as we were settling in for two hours of quiet contemplation, a loud buzzing noise like a welding torch emanated from the back of the store where a few staff members were gathered. We assumed someone was making repairs, but it seemed odd they would set a silversmith loose in the cafe. When the buzzing persisted for about an hour, we decided our search for silence had failed. On the way out, we learned that they hadn’t set up a foundry after all; the place had become an impromptu tattoo parlor for the day. In a country where no one seems to have enough room, spaces sometimes have to serve dual purposes.

With these kinds of close quarters, Indonesians don’t seem to expect much privacy. One sign of this blurring of public and private is that small talk touches on what we consider personal topics very quickly. For instance, most people ask Danielle within five minutes of meeting her whether she’s married and has any children. When she answers yes and no, respectively, the following question is always how long she’s been married. For an Indonesian, a marriage of four years that has yielded no offspring inevitably evokes concern about fertility. They don’t seem to fathom the idea that a couple might be waiting for the right time to start a family.

One Chinese woman with her own traditional medicine practice expressed concerns about Danielle’s childlessness and insisted on examining Danielle’s pulse to discern the source of her infertility. This woman’s first diagnosis was that Danielle’s husband might not be fat enough for conception. When Danielle assured this woman that I was taller and heavier than most Indonesian men, the woman replied, “You’re just too tired. You’re working too hard.” There might be something to that last point.

***

Four days after the Jakarta hotel bombings, the country remains on edge. Security has tightened around our neighborhood, and TV news programs have shown creepy footage of a suspected Jemaah Islamiyah bomber entering the Marriott Hotel two days before the attack. Several Jakarta hotels and offices have faced bomb threats over the last few days, and the Jakarta Post reported today that hotels here in Medan have also received threats.

Even so, day-to-day life still feels more or less safe. One unsettling exception came when someone shouted English-language obscenities at Danielle and me from an automobile window earlier today. After three months of Indonesians greeting us with “Hello, Mister,” the two-word salutation we received today was far less welcome. In all likelihood, the outburst probably came from an Indonesian teenager who has watched too many American movies and doesn’t understand what vulgar English words really mean.

The episode surely doesn’t reflect most Indonesians’ attitudes toward foreigners, and our mood improved considerably ten minutes later when members of a boys’ soccer team called us over to talk to them. Several were wearing jerseys from Manchester United, the English premier league team that cancelled its exhibition match in Jakarta against Indonesian all-stars after Friday’s bombings. One of the boys even playfully recited the Indonesian language taglines he’d seen MU players like Wayne Rooney saying in the soccer commercial that has been running on Indonesian TV during the last few weeks.

It was sad to be face-to-face with Indonesians who would have loved to watch their favorite international soccer team play against their nation’s best players. A Manchester United visit would have meant so much to these kids, but for the time being, terrorism has derailed cultural diplomacy and soft power.

Democracy in Action

Posted by John
Iranian clerics horrified the world last month by stealing a presidential election through back-room maneuvers and state-sponsored violence in the streets. Today, Indonesian presidential election officials were in the streets of our neighborhood, but for a completely different reason. They were counting votes right in front of us.

Indonesia and Iran, two Muslim-majority countries on opposite sides of Asia, have had remarkably different experiences with democracy over the last decade. Iran’s theocratic regime disqualifies reform candidates from running before elections even start, while Indonesians voted for more than 40 parties during the legislative election last April. Iran’s rulers shut down reformist newspapers by the dozen, yet Indonesia’s press is free to investigate and criticize the government. And while Iranian officials implausibly awarded an election for an unpopular president a few hours after it ended, Indonesian officials remain circumspect about declaring the wildly popular incumbent a winner until all the votes are counted.

Watching that count begin at outdoor polling stations in our neighborhood this afternoon had a reassuring civic effect. Half an hour after the polls closed in our Setiabudi neighborhood of Medan, four election officials were sifting through ballots in plain view (see above). One worker opened them and searched for the tell-tale checkmark before announcing “satu,” “dua,” or “tiga”—numbers corresponding to the three presidential candidates. Another sorted the counted ballots into piles—with incumbent president Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono’s stack quickly towering over piles for the other two candidates. A third worker marked the vote tally on a posterboard, with Yudhoyono’s tick marks wrapping into a second row while his rivals managed a few lonely scratches. A fourth kept track of the total number of ballots to ensure everything added up properly. Neighborhood residents, pinkies inked purple after voting earlier in the day, gathered around the table to watch the count unfold.

At first, Danielle and I kept our distance. We were curious about the vote count, but did not want to disrupt the process. Before long, some of the polling station volunteers invited us over, pointing to open chairs and offering us glasses of water. One official paused briefly from his count to smile playfully into the camera as Danielle prepared to take a photo. Compare this to Iran, were foreign journalists were beaten, deported and accused of inciting rebellion. Here in Indonesia, two uninvited election tourists were welcomed with open arms.

By the end of the hour, the count showed 206 votes for Yudhoyono, 51 for Jusuf Kalla and 25 for Megawati Sukarnoputri. At least in our well-to-do neighborhood, a natural Yudhoyono stronghold, it was a runaway win for the incumbent. More importantly, representatives from the three candidates’ parties had watched poll workers conduct the count in real time. For an emerging democracy, this kind of transparency can build meaningful trust in the electoral process.

Unlike the outright fraud and intimidation in Iran, the main concern about Indonesia’s elections involved bringing some semblance of order to a potentially chaotic process. Today, Indonesia’s 175 million eligible voters had all of six hours, 7 a.m. to 1 p.m., to mark their preference for president at hundreds of thousands of polling stations on thousands of islands. As many as a quarter of these voters were disenfranchised amid procedural confusions during a national legislative election three months ago. These hardly sound like conditions to inspire confidence.

Yet voting appeared to proceed smoothly today in Medan. Indonesia declares Election Day a national holiday, meaning the streets were actually quieter than usual. Each polling station serves fewer than 600 voters, cutting down on potential wait times. These booths were well-staffed, with four to five election officials and a local police officer at each. So rather than seeing long lines in the world’s third-largest democracy, only a handful of people were voting in the ten or so stations we visited. In addition, voting took a few seconds since the ballot only contained the vote for president. The Indonesian government certainly set up adequate election supply to meet voter demand.

Problems with voting lists, which may have kept as many as 48 million Indonesians from voting in the April legislative election, almost threatened the presidential vote as well. Voting lists that are supposed to contain all eligible voters were not updated, leaving off names of people who had moved or married. Fortunately, all three presidential candidates agreed yesterday to a Constitutional Court ruling that allowed Indonesians to cast a provisional ballot as long as they show their national ID card. It’s far from a perfect solution, but it promises a far more inclusive election.

Of course, the candidates’ agreement about the voter list issue hasn’t stopped some of them from complaining. Megawati’s enigmatic running mate, former general Prabowo Subianto, made a statement this evening criticizing the voter list compromise and the media’s early vote counts showing Yudhoyono in the lead. He made the statement in English, presumably for the benefit of the international media that he hopes to set on edge. Prabowo also claims he and Mega are in the lead, even though most exit polls show them at less than 30 percent. No one shows signs of taking him seriously.

The Election Commission promises to certify the results by July 25, but we should know the final outcome much sooner. President Yudhoyono has close to 60 percent of the vote in initial national returns—less than the 73 percent he won in our neighborhood, but still enough to avoid a September runoff if it holds through the night. If they have to recount 175 million ballots, Jakarta’s central square would the perfect spot. We’ll be there with our cameras.

48 Hours before the Vote

Posted by John
As Americans celebrated independence on Saturday, Indonesians were treated to another familiar civic ritual — the barrage of last-minute election advertisements. Streets were plastered with signs and flags proclaiming the virtues of the three candidates: incumbent President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono (SBY); vice president Jusuf Kalla, running against his boss; and former president Megawati Sukarnoputri, who wants her old job back.

During the Saturday evening news broadcast, more than 80 percent of the ads were campaign commercials. By now, Danielle sings along with refrains she knows by heart, and Indonesians who’ve been subjected to a month of campaign mottos can probably tell you in their sleep that Kalla stands for “better and faster” government, Megawati is “for the people,” and SBY intends to lead the people “Forward!”

The most frequently aired advertisement features hundreds of SBY supporters in color-coordinated outfits carrying similarly color-coordinated flags to the top of a verdant mountain where a huge red-and-white Indonesian flag sways majestically in the wind. There’s nothing about SBY’s agenda, just a dose of stirring nationalism, impressive choreography and reminder that SBY is number two on the ballot. You can probably afford this kind of celebratory strategy when you have a 40-point lead in the polls. (I’ve searched for this and other ads on YouTube, but no luck so far.)

Meanwhile, in a country where close to 90 percent of the voters are Muslims, the Kalla campaign has sought to capitalize on the fact that neither SBY’s wife nor the wife of his running-mate wear jilbabs (head scarves). Both Kalla’s wife and his running mate’s wife wear them. Kalla draws attention to this bit of symbolic politics because the major Islamic parties are supporting SBY’s coalition, and this jilbab issue might lure some voters away from the president.

Kalla billboard ads regarding headscarves (see sample above, from the New York Times) are the first ads I’ve seen where candidates’ wives are featured more prominently than the candidates themselves. We saw one ad bearing the words “Insya Allah” (Allah willing) above the wives’ heads, further driving home the point. Another Kalla ad stresses his outsider status—from Sulawesi, he would be the first non-Javanese Indonesian elected to the presidency. None of these ads appear to be gaining traction, as Kalla is mired in third place in most polls.

Megawati seems the most willing to engage in critical campaigning. In a more combative style most Americans would recognize, her ads outline promises that SBY made but did not fulfill during his five-year term. One ad features some wretchedly melodramatic acting, where a boy celebrates after hearing a radio broadcast promising free elementary school education. His parents embrace him and regretfully inform him he can’t believe everything politicians say. It turns out they won’t be able to send him to school because they would still have to pay hidden school fees. Of course, voters’ disappointment with Megawati’s own inability to deliver on her promises as president from 2001 to 2004 hurts her credibility on this front.

The preponderance of political ads in the streets and on the airwaves reached a saturation point all last week. Come Sunday morning, however, all the flags and signs came down. TV broadcasts returned to normal, punctuated by commercials for coffee and cell phones rather than 60-second candidate biographies. In turns out that Indonesia has campaign rules that strictly prohibit political messages in the final three days before the polls open. Accustomed to American campaigns where supporters wave signs on street corners until the polls close on Election Night, it will be strange to travel down the home stretch in relative silence.

It’s not clear these ads were having an impact, anyway. SBY, the wildly popular incumbent, has consistently polled well above 50 percent, in some cases as high as 70 percent. There remains a slim chance that Kalla and Megawati will earn enough votes to force SBY below the 50 percent mark and into a September runoff. But all signs point to SBY winning in a landslide, as his re-election campaign takes on more of the feel of a coronation.

Even though the election will not be competitive, Indonesians will vote at a very high rate. The turnout in three national elections from 1999 to 2004 was over 75 percent of eligible voters in each instance, including 93 percent in the first post-Suharto election of 1999. Compare that to the United States, where about 60 percent of eligible voters cast a ballot in last year’s closely contested presidential election. Social pressures to vote were very strong in Indonesia during the authoritarian Suharto era, even though election results were essentially meaningless since Suharto controlled who could run. Still, Indonesians developed the voting habit, and will go to the polls in droves on Wednesday.

Yet Indonesian voters’ motivations can prove elusive. More than a third of Danielle’s interview subjects said they did not know what “democracy” meant, only knowing it as a word in the name of SBY’s political party (“Partai Demokrat”). Voters identify much more closely with political personalities than parties, and parties do little to distinguish themselves ideologically through platforms or policies. In addition, the presence of patronage and “money politics” persists, factoring in voters’ decisions to an unverifiable extent. Everyone acknowledges that parties still buy votes with food and gifts in the post-Suharto era, but of course no one owns up to doing it themselves.

Even with Indonesians’ high rates of political participation, new forms of disenfranchisement have crept into the political process this year. Shockingly, an estimated 40 million voters were unable to vote April’s parliamentary election, mostly because the Central Election Commission (KPU) had not properly updated its electoral rolls. Indonesians don’t have to register, but the KPU was more lax about updating its lists this year than in previous elections. The commission has since run numerous advertisements exhorting Indonesians to check with local KPU offices to ensure that they haven’t been left off the list. It’s unlikely, however, that the voting rolls will be completely fixed before this week’s presidential vote.

In addition, the KPU has introduced some confusing procedural changes in 2009. For the first time in more than 50 years, Indonesians are supposed to mark their intent to vote by putting a check next to their candidate of choice rather than using a punch card ballot. Much confusion ensued in the April parliamentary election, with the KPU invalidating 14 percent of votes because of improper marks or other irregularities. (The average ballot invalidation rate in most elections is about 3 percent internationally.) With more than 1 in 10 voters disqualified on these kinds of technicalities, Florida’s butterfly ballot seems like the model of rectitude in comparison.

International election organizations like IFES have worked with the Indonesian officials to address this issue, encouraging the KPU to take a broader approach in honoring voters’ intent. They’ve gotten the KPU to accept X marks as well as the officially preferred check marks, for instance, but there’s still some disagreement about what counts as a vote. There are no signs that these invalidations have benefited one party or candidate, but they don’t inspire trust among Indonesians learning to live in a 10-year old democracy.

Still, Indonesia will have a proud moment on the international stage on Thursday morning, as wire services run stories confirming SBY’s victory in “Indonesia, a democracy with 240 million people and the world’s largest Muslim-majority country.” Then the world will mostly go on forgetting about Indonesia until something drastic happens.

With his broad mandate, SBY may be able to continue his progress toward making free public education available to all students, combating corruption at the heart of Indonesian politics and business, and spreading the benefits of economic growth to the broader Indonesian population. That is, of course, he stays true to his campaign motto of “Forward!”

Disrupting Corruption

Posted by John
North Sumatra’s Medan Airport provides the perfect view of the consequences of corruption among Indonesia’s political elite. Jockeying for position among hundreds of passengers around two antiquated baggage claim carousels, you’re left with the impression that Indonesia’s third-largest city of 2 million people deserves better.

For the past 10 years, North Sumatran political leaders have promised better. Money is budgeted for a new airport, but construction has stalled. Each year, local politicians dip into the funds in order to cover other costs, such as financing their own increasingly expensive campaigns. Meanwhile, over at the airport, cranes idle and planes squeeze into crowded terminals.

The story of Medan’s airport — false starts, good intentions and incomplete implementation — is repeated in other public works projects across the country. Part of the explanation lies in Indonesia’s public finances. Almost all Indonesians work in the informal economy and make very little money, which means they don’t pay taxes. Not paying taxes may sound appealing to Americans who grumble about the IRS each year as April 15 approaches, but it also severs citizens from their government.

With little understanding or stake in how the government funds its programs, most Indonesians have low expectations for what their government should provide. The government manages to meet those low expectations, especially since there is genuine ambiguity about who is responsible for basic services — schools, roads and trash pick-up — that Americans take for granted.

Meanwhile, businesses and wealthier citizens tapped to fund the Indonesian government’s coffers move their money offshore whenever they can. It’s often a matter of finding the right government official and meeting his price. Corruption has been a consistent feature of Indonesian politics in the country’s 64-year postcolonial history. Transparency International, an agency that tracks political corruption, placed Indonesia 126th in its 2008 Corruption Perception Index of 180 countries. That’s slightly behind Honduras and just ahead of Libya.

Two new features of Indonesian politics promise meaningful change, however. First, President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono (“SBY”) has had a far less accommodating attitude toward political corruption during his five years in office. The government’s anticorruption commission even prosecuted a member of SBY’s extended family accused of wrongdoing. Here in Medan, both the mayor and vice-mayor recently landed in jail for embezzlement.

SBY’s anticorruption consistently comes up in Danielle’s interviews with Indonesians and accounts for much of the president’s popularity. If he wins next week’s presidential election by as large a margin as projected, his meaningful accomplishments in anticorruption will be a major reason why. For some sense of the change that has occurred in the SBY era, Transparency International’s Corruption Index as recently as 2001 placed Indonesia ahead only of Nigeria, Uganda and Bangladesh.

The second change on corruption comes from the Islamic-inspired Justice and Welfare Party (PKS), which has served as a gadfly on this issue during the last decade. While I bemoaned the political confusion that has emerged with the proliferation of political parties in Indonesia, one real advantage has been that success by new parties like PKS shows that people are willing to listen to parties that take corruption seriously.

PKS has garnered Western press attention because of its links to Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood and its professed intention to implement sharia (Islamic law) in Indonesia. Less noticed, however, has been PKS’ fight against corruption, which accounts for much of its popularity. The party has become so successful at making corruption its signature issue that one sex worker Danielle interviewed as part of her research said she would vote for PKS — even though the party’s insistence on sharia means it would hardly look kindly on this woman’s profession.

In most Indonesian towns and villages, political parties still offer money, rice or other goods on the eve of an election in exchange for votes. Rather than receiving sustained public services from the government over time, this one-time bribe from political parties is often the extent of constituents’ interaction with the political system.

PKS’ influence is challenging this arrangement, however. During the April parliamentary election in Medan, several mosques gathered up religious clothes and prayer rugs that political parties had donated. They told parties to come retrieve these items — no one would be allowed to bribe their way into office using the mosques. Partly because of the attention PKS has brought to corruption, religious figures are unwilling to passively accept it.

PKS earned 7 percent of the vote in Indonesia’s parliamentary elections in April — not enough to allow them to run a presidential candidate, but enough to make them a potential kingmaker in Indonesia’s coalition politics. For this election, they’ve cast their lot with SBY’s Democratic Party. While the parties disagree about social issues and the role of Islam in Indonesian politics, they can find common ground on anti-corruption initiatives. SBY will probably have to find important places for PKS leaders in a second-term presidential cabinet.

It remains to be seen whether SBY’s Democratic Party and PKS — both relatively new creations — will have staying power in the Indonesian political landscape. PKS’ successes in fighting corruption mean they will remain relevant, if not a major party. And if the president’s party consolidates its legacy of anti-corruption, it will go a long way in helping it establish institutional permanence after SBY.

For all these successes in challenging the culture of corruption in Indonesia, however, nostalgia persists for Suharto, the president who set up one of the world’s most corrupt governments during his 33 years of rule. Suharto’s crony kingdom began to unravel when disgust with members of Suharto’s family and inner circle lining their pockets reached a breaking point during the Asian Financial Crisis of 1998.

Still, historical memory has been kind to Suharto. The poorest Indonesians have not all seen consistent gains during the SBY era. Several SBY supporters told Danielle in interviews that while they are happy with the current president, particularly his anti-corruption efforts, they would definitely vote for Suharto if the former president were on the ballot.

“Suharto may have been corrupt, but he left something for the rakyat kecil (little people),” one said.

Those “little people” still vote in large numbers in Indonesia. Absent meaningful changes in Indonesians’ economic circumstances, a populist who can convincingly pose as the people’s champion — regardless of his or her political platform — may galvanize a new political movement in the post-SBY era.

The Unkindest Cut

Posted by John

Any linguist will tell you Indonesian is an easy language to learn.

Unlike most other Asian languages, it uses the same alphabet as English. Those 26 Roman characters create a comforting sense of familiarity from the outset, whereas Chinese, Japanese and Korean pictograms seem deliberately designed to disorient the uninitiated.

What’s more, Indonesian verbs don’t have tenses and never need to be conjugated, so no endless series of “amo, amas, amat” exercises for the beginning student. If you, I, he or we love someone—even if we ever loved someone—“cinta” will do. That may seem confusing at first, but you learn to pick up the meaning from pronouns and context. It’s a small sacrifice, considering the fact that it liberates you from having to remember which endings belong with which verbs.

Ever have trouble remembering when to use “good” and when to use “well”? No such problem exists in Indonesian, since adjectives and adverbs usually take the exact same form. To mix metaphors and languages here for a minute, in Indonesian you may not be feeling very baik, but you can still remain in someone’s baik graces.

You’re probably getting the hang of this already.

There’s a reason why Indonesian is considered so easy to learn. It’s a recent innovation, formalized in the early 20^th century as a nationalist project to unite Indonesia’s more than 100 ethnic groups on more than 1,000 islands, each group with its own language. It has its origins in the Malay trade language that has permeated the Indonesian archipelago for centuries of maritime commerce (and which is still spoken in Malaysia as well).

Like most aspects of Indonesian life, the national language incorporates foreign influences when they’re found to be suitable. In addition to the language’s Malay roots, there’s a sprinkling of Dutch words. No reason to reject the colonial language out of hand when it’s found to be useful. There’s a light Portuguese linguistic footprint as well, owing to these Europeans’ presence in Indonesia in the 16^th century (they stayed in East Timor until the 1970s). Throw in a few words from the Islamic language of Arabic, some Sanskrit terms from Indonesia’s Hindu forbearers, and you’re in business.

Finding a linguistic vehicle to bring together a disparate population in the modern era requires a commitment to simplicity. People won’t give up their own languages unless you make it worth their while, so you can’t hold on to archaic conventions and quirky rules solely for the sake of posterity. The new language must be sensible, convenient, and above all rational—the linguistic equivalent of the metric system.

Yet for all the purported ease of the Indonesian language, my four hours of daily one-on-one intensive language training sessions in Yogyakarta last week were beginning to take on the feeling of an interrogation by the Grand Inquisitor. This struggle occurs despite the fact we’re at Wsima Bahasa, the best language school in the country and the “Grand Inquisitors” of my imagination are incredibly competent instructors who, truth be told, treat us with kid gloves.

Spending an extended period of time surrounded by an unfamiliar language is perhaps the most disorienting of human experiences. Sessions at Indonesian language boot camp leave me feeling deprived of my senses and doubting instincts I’ve learned to trust over the course of a lifetime. I know the red light in the center of the road means “stop” in any language, but what happens when I start speaking Indonesian and “go” comes out instead?

Each session became a test of willpower and endurance. The heat, unfamiliar noises, forced repetition, teachers’ intent gazes, flashes of recognition betrayed by defective memory or stammered diction—at the end of each class, I was ready to confess to a major crime.

You wouldn’t know it from this melodramatic description, but 90 percent of my Indonesian language training sessions are actually conducted in English. My instructors speak my native language better than I do, so much so that I’m surprised when they ask after the meaning of some American idiom I’ve employed. So this isn’t a prisoner-of-war situation where I’m caught far behind enemy lines—there’s always a ready escape hatch of English, an escape hatch I’ve readily employed with little shame.

Still, these Indonesian language lessons have been the first time in a while I’ve been on the receiving end of the inherent power relationship embedded within language. In a world where everyone learns English as a second language, I usually wield the whip hand, whether I realize it or not. So the next time I’m caught in line in the United States behind someone struggling a bit with the English idiom, I’ll be a bit more forgiving.

A neurologist could probably explain exactly why there’s dispiritingly small space left in the 34-year-old brain to acquire language. I really wasn’t looking for an explanation, however. I just knew something had to give, so I asked (or had Danielle translate my request) to reduce my sessions to 2 hours a day. Mercifully, the school agreed.

I celebrated the first day of my newfound freedom—two hours each day in the late morning—with a trip to the barber. I’ve surely learned enough Indonesian, I thought, to handle this basic task. I’d already had that unfortunate incident last week when my hair clippers exploded after I’d failed to plug in the proper wattage converter, so I eventually had to do something. With my close-cropped hair, it wasn’t like much could go wrong. Or so I thought.

I never made it to the recently rechristened “Obama’s” barbershop. The intense heat had me detour instead to a nearby salon that billed itself as “styling for women and men.” When I stepped through the front door, the stylists looked at me a bit quizzically. Does this guy want a perm or something?

A few seconds of halting dialogue between us, and they quickly realized that my Indonesian wasn’t sophisticated enough to articulate or comprehend such advanced hairstyling concepts as “layers” or “highlights.” And with my hair, it’s not like Rapunzel just walked in to their establishment. At a loss for the right Indonesian words, I drew my hand over my short locks, pantomiming what I envisioned as the universal sign for a Johnny Unitas flat-top.

My stylist nodded in what seemed liked agreement, but somehow I ended up being escorted over to the sink. Before I knew it, there was shampoo in my hair. This was a bit more than I bargained for, but with the exchange rate in Indonesia, it was all going to come out to $3 anyway, so I figured I might as well smile and try to enjoy it.

Once I was back in the stylist’s chair, he proved a bit more fastidious with the clippers than I was expecting. To my mind, there’s only so many ways to style a flat-top, but I appreciated his sense of professional dedication. Maybe fifteen minutes later, I was back at the shampoo station, having my hair rinsed. Shouldn’t be long and I’ll be out of here, I thought.

At that point, however, I was handed off to what I presumed was another stylist. She showed me the haircut in the mirror and asked a question, which I in my haste assumed to be Indonesian for, “Do you like it?” Ready to leave the salon, I nodded yes and said “Bagus,” which I had learned as the all-purpose Indonesian version for “It’s good.”

Having expressed my satisfaction, I expected this new stylist to pull off my smock and bring me over to the cash register. Instead, she started anointing my scalp with oil. Again, this was pleasant enough, but it seemed curious. When I said, “Bagus,” had I fully understood the question?

She continued running her fingers over my scalp and down my neck. By the time she reached my shoulder, I realized, to my horror, that she’d asked, “Would you like a massage?” And I, in deploying the little Indonesian I knew, had nodded my head resolutely and said, to her ear anyway, “Sounds good! Sure!”

I’ve spoken metaphorically here about how paralyzing it can be to not know how to say something in the predominant language, but there was nothing metaphorical about this. It was paralyzing. I was having my shoulders poked, my back prodded, and the space between my fingers probed for their pressure points. The stylist—or perhaps she actually was the salon’s in-house masseuse, what did I know?—wasn’t shy about putting her hands down the back of my shirt to get those treacherous knots that were only tensing up more as my shock increased. It’s usually relaxing to have a massage, but I was desperate to find a way to call for this “relaxation” to come to an end.

But how would I do that? I had just learned that using “bagus”—“it’s good”—would only bring on another round of potentially more compromising contortions. Think, John, think. In the Indonesian language unit on bargaining, there was a phrase you are supposed to use when you wanted to bring the haggling to a close. What was it?

As my fingers were being bent in every direction, vocabulary lessons flashed before my eyes. I could say “rice,” “clock,” maybe “airplane” if I really thought about it. But what message would that send? They’d probably be harmless nonsequiturs, and they certainly wouldn’t help me out of my predicament. Worse yet, by saying “airplane,” would I unwittingly be calling for some more complex and potentially permanently damaging massage maneuver?

My brain, at the breaking point, finally alighted on “Tidak apa lagi,” or, “No, nothing more.” After all my complaints about language immersion, I was suddenly painfully aware of the merits of intensive classes. As the massage continued, I bided my time, confident that the next time the stylist cum masseuse spoke, I could pull the plug on the whole thing.

“Tidak apa lagi,” I said a few minutes later, and with that, deliverance. At that moment, they were the three most beautiful words in the Indonesian language.

Cut from a Different Cloth

Posted by Danielle and John

Our walk to Indonesian language class took longer the other day when a traffic jam developed in front of St. Canisius Catholic Elementary School next to our usually tranquil Yogyakarta street.

Weaving our way through cars and motorcycles, we quickly realized the source of the roadblock. Rather than the standard 7:30 a.m. drop-off, parents were taking pictures of their children wearing traditional Javanese costumes. Girls were dressed in kabaya kain (check out the sample on the left: cloth wrapped tightly like a skirt and a fitted tunic), with traditional hairstyles and lots of make-up. Boys were wearing Javanese hats and jackets, with toy daggers tucked in their waistcoats.

We were unaware of any national holidays, but then again Indonesia has so many holidays honoring its religious traditions, including days off for Buddha’s birthday and Chinese New Year. So we figured it was entirely possible that April 27 was some sort of important occasion.

When we asked our host family about the Javanese costumes, they explained that the students were honoring Kartini, an early 20^th-century Indonesian women’s rights advocate who promoted the girls’ and women’s education and professional opportunities. We had read about “Kartini Day” (April 21) in the Jakarta Post last week, but our neighborhood’s school was late in its celebration because of exams last week.

The Kartini Day custom is for women to dress in traditional costume—a picture in last week’s paper showed a woman pumping gas in a movement-constraining kain — not what you see at your local Shell station. But as one Jakarta Post editorialist pointed out, dressing in traditional costume to honor a women’s rights activist seems somewhat incongruous. In order to celebrate how far women in Indonesia have come, females get all dolled up. It’s not clear how that honors Kartini, and we never did quite understand why the boys at the school were also wearing traditional attire.

People in the United States often ask Danielle about the condition of women and gender relations in Indonesia. In many respects, the Kartini Day celebration is a useful illustration of this complicated set of issues. On the one hand, Indonesian women (thanks to pioneers like Kartini) are fully integrated into the public sphere today. They obtain education at the same rate as men and are employed in all sectors of the economy. Indonesia’s previous president, Megawati Sukarnoputri, is a woman and is still the reigning opposition figure in Indonesian politics. (Our resident political scientist notes, however, that “Mega” is the daughter of Indonesia’s first president and deeply revered national hero, Sukarno, and thus her popularity and success is attributable to a “successor” effect.)

On the other hand, Indonesia adheres to tradition and social change happens at a slow pace. For example, we also read in the newspaper last week that five high-school girls were prevented from sitting for their national exams because they are pregnant and unmarried. What would Kartini have to say about that?

Clothes reveal something about cultural values in all societies, and here they often speak to Indonesian attitudes regarding modesty. Today, we saw a throng of Indonesian high school boys and girls running for their PE class. They wore standard-issue gym uniforms like in the U.S., but with three-quarter-length shirt sleeves and long pants. Some of the girls wore headscarves, color coordinated with the uniforms. With the prevailing emphasis on standards of respectful physical appearance, students endure gym class in 90+ degree heat in clothes seemingly designed for much cooler temperatures. No one seems to think much of it. Presumably, if you never wear shorts or a tank top, you have no idea how much more comfortable it can be.

Indonesians’ propensity for uniforms also stands out. They are standard issue not only in many restaurants and hotels, but also in shops, banks, and all government agencies. The subtleties inherent in how the uniforms are worn, however, do seem to tell us something about the diverse spectrum of people wearing them. Prefer the long-sleeve option even though it is hotter than Hades in the cramped office? You’ll find a clothing store happy to oblige. Would you like a headscarf to match your outfit? No problem!

It should be said that the “Muslim Wear” shops in Yogyakarta, where mannequins sport brightly-colored jilbabs to match any outfit, are probably not what most Americans envision when they think of an Islamic woman’s wardrobe. It’s a far cry from the burqas of Afghanistan. And while discussions about Muslim religiosity often put a spotlight on the headscarf, we often overlook similarities in other religions--Russian Orthodox women cover their heads before entering a church and Orthodox Jews cover their heads in public.

More this weekend, after we make our pilgrimages to the Buddhist temples at Borobodur and Hindu temples at Prambanan.