Timeshares on Bali, Or: Pregnant Street Dogs Bark in the Night

This is no country for new souls,
A woman a fraction of my size cautions me,
Wordlessly.
She points me toward the “blissful view”
We’ve read about
On the undersides of the coffee tables.
We’re told that stabilizing forces
Are extraneous here.
Relax and enjoy the show.

***
The dead fish, animal waste, and plastic grocery bags
Spatter the beachfront
In an unpretentiously
Erotic display,
As unconvinced of their intimacy
As the pile of rocks those men just hauled
To its soon-to-be embodiment as
Bali’s Newest Tourist Resort.

***
A scrawny she-dog gives birth
In the dank safety of the night market

Sudah makan?

I am so tired of being asked if I've already eaten. In any given lunch period (between 11 and 12), I run into maybe 25 teachers, of whom at least 15 or 20 ask me "Sudah makan?" "Silakan!" "Eaten?" "Please eat," or "I am eating."

I guess what bothers me is that it's none of their business whether I've had my meal yet or not. I am well-fed, everyone knows how big a deal I make of every meal we share, and furthermore we all know I have a pretty high salary and can thus afford to never be hungry.

Although all but the poorest individuals have a solid 3 meals a day, I think this place is so used to lack and need and want that if there is plenty, they want to make sure no one's been left out.

That, or I'm just ornery.

On Malas

About 50 meters from my house is a structure of sorts, that sells stuff. Apparently they don’t have water or fruit (I’ve checked), but they seem to sell processed snacks (and the Indonesian equivalent, krupuk) and maybe, I don’t know, some newspapers, and definitely gasoline for motorcycles. There’s a shelter attached that has a low-lying table and some mats, and by about noon every day, some middle aged Muslim dudes congregate, sometimes with their families, to nonkrong (Indonesian word for hanging out, doing nothing, wasting time). But what I discovered by popping my head in, a little rudely, maybe, is that they spend that nonkrong time playing chess. Not some crappy chessboard they bought used for 5 bucks, but a handcrafted, heavy-weight chessboard with carved wooden pawns. These guys, mind you, are pretty poor. They hang out in the equivalent of a shack every day in perhaps a futile attempt to sell crap, and meanwhile they’re spending hours upon hours in focused games of chess. I wish nonkrong took hold in America. Can you imagine?

Rainy Season brings out the worst in me

Sometimes I can’t tell if I love Indonesia so much that it hurts, or if actually, deep down the place depresses my spirits so much that it goes full-circle and starts to resemble love.

I can’t explain it.

It’s rainy season now. What I thought was rainy season, back in October, November, and December, was just a teaser. Sort of like an appetizer that disappoints, only to be overshadowed by a far more thoroughly disappointing main course. You know what I mean. This is rain that begins at 11 a.m. and doesn’t stop until 9 or 10 p.m. And while sometimes the rain might be moderate-to-moderately heavy, more often than not it’s an all-out downpour that floods the streets, causes people to be impaled by 2x4s that have blown off construction sites, drowns kittens, crashes cars, ruins lives.

Well, when my anger and seasonal affective disorder (doesn’t every American have it?) get the best of me, it certainly seems this way. But what I can say for certain—puce-colored glasses aside—is that rainy season makes the lives of the worst-off in Indonesia, well, worse. I would say that at least 60% of the jobs worked by the poor Indonesians (here I’ll define poor as living on less than a dollar a day and not owning a motorbike), and when the rain strikes (and boy, does it strike at any moment, usually without much notice), guess who has to bear the brunt of it? Those who make their living selling balloons from a bicycle, those who push around nasi goreng carts or bakso carts or es (various iced drinks; difficult to explain) carts, those who stand around with baskets of fruit or tempeh or veggies, those who peddle around becaks (human-powered pedi-cabs), those who stand on the corner and sell liters of gasoline. You get the picture. The entire underbelly of the Indonesian economy, and even the culture, I think, is composed of poor people who work outside, who, if they decide to escape the rain (which often lasts all day) actually won’t be able to have dinner or pay the rent or get to the other side of town by public transportation. I have become so depressed by this weather; so frequently confined to my house because I am unwilling to ride my motorbike through flooded streets, and I am near the top, the absolute best-off, in this society. What right do I have to complain that my 6 dollar rain jacket and pants aren’t completely water-proof, when I make FIVE TIMES AS MUCH money as the BEST PAID teacher in my school?

And what in hell am I doing in this country if I’m not doing something to help the lowest echelon rise to something approaching bearable (and I do not think working bare-foot on a construction site for 50 cents a day is bearable)? I just don’t know how I can justify my being here when I am living like royalty, disappointed that I lost $280 during my traveling because I missed a flight (that lost money is what many people in Indonesia earn in a YEAR!). What am I supposed to do? And I complain that the wireless internet connection I’ve been stealing inside my house is now password protected and I have to wait until I’m in my beautiful 10-year old school building which has its own wireless network to check email that, if I wanted, I could read in three different languages?

I just can’t figure out where my perspective is supposed to be right now.

Especially because, despite the hardships that being poor in Indonesia throws at people, they don’t seem too upset by it. I’d guess that part of this is just not knowing a different life, part is being member of a society that has always had and assumes it always will have a poor, traditional, laboring underclass, and part of it is probably religion. Do your work and be honest, get married, have some kids, and your life will be okay. It’s not so much complacency as it seems to me a sunny optimism. Hey, life isn’t so bad. So in that case, who am I to think that Indonesia needs me and people like me to step in and make things right? What if this is the way things are supposed to be?