Social Justice Generation?

Two days ago I was walking around Ubud with one of the other students from my program, talking about our summer plans. I mentioned something about an NGO and she stopped me and asked what an NGO is. It threw me off, and I spent a couple of minutes trying to come up with a suitable definition, NGO's being a sort of nebulous concept.

Her confusion was the same that I remember feeling when I first learned about them (in high school, maybe?): can't "non-governmental organization" refer to almost anything? So that part of it didn't surprise me quite as much; it was more that she, a twenty-year-old American college student, had no idea what I was talking about. For me, NGO's are a huge part of what I do at school. The Africa relief club I was part of freshman year works closely with them, and so does the Women's Center and QSU. Most of my friends work with them during the school year and get internships with NGO's in the summer. A few of my friends have plans to start their own after graduation. So I find myself wondering if maybe it's just the crowd I hang out with at school. Are the majority of students in my generation unfamiliar with NGO's and what they do?

If yes, what does that indicate, if anything? I know that my generation is sometimes pointed to as the generation who sits on our hands instead of going out and protesting or being activists. That, of course, is something I'll argue any day; most of us just have a different approach to problem-solving than our parents' generation. But does this student's unfamiliarity with NGO's demonstrate that there is a section of my generation who fits that description? If so, what will that mean for the future?

(Of course, there's also the question of whether NGO's and other humanitarian organizations are the way to fix things. Maybe more on that question later, but I took a whole course on that last semester and still don't have answers.)

I'm not sure how many people are regularly reading the blog at this point, but I'd love to hear any and all opinions you guys have about this.

I Guess I'll Actually Update This Thing

Sorry for the lull between posts. I've mostly been focusing on my ISP, so there's not all that much to report from the last few weeks. There is, however, a big festival going on at Pura Samuan Tiga, not far from my host family's house (really only a few blocks). My ibu has been spending all of her free time putting together offerings for it, and this morning she went to the market around 5 in the morning (or so she told me last night; I wasn't awake to confirm her departure) to buy fruit for offerings. The volleyball field (court?) near the temple, down the street from our program center, has been converted to sort of a tent city of warungs. Since people come from all over the area for the temple festival (which goes on for something like two weeks), locals set up food stalls to make a little extra profit. Perhaps later some pictures -- I keep forgetting to take my camera with me when I go places.

What else? I did end up switching my ISP topic just before the ISP period began. Instead of researching and writing about folktales, I've been writing stories of my own. One of them is loosely based on a popular Balinese folktale/legend, the story of Jayaprana and Layonsari. I won't recount it in full here, but Jessie has described it as a combination of King David from the Old Testament and Romeo and Juliet. (Admittedly, I remember next to nothing about King David -- is he the one from David & Goliath? -- so I can't quite vouch for the accuracy of that statement. Sorry, Dad.) My second story is based on things my ibu has told me about her life growing up and with her children, and the third is about topeng and sort of about Balinese Hinduism. All in all, I've written over 50 pages of fiction this month -- so you can understand why I haven't been up to much else.

That's about it for now, but sometime in the next couple of days I'll try to get out and take some more pictures. I'd like to get take some pictures of Bedulu, so that you all might be able to get a better sense of daily life. More later!

The trick is to get lost.

Not too far from my homestay in Bedulu is Goa Gajah, the elephant cave. It's one of those tourist traps that would pretty firmly fall into the Tour De Crap category (sorry, Dad), and everyone I've talked to about it has told me it's boring. It's where my ibu has her tourist stuff shop, and if she didn't work there I probably wouldn't ever have gone to check it out. Still, there's a vegetarian warung across the street, so yesterday I headed over there for lunch and my Tourist Moment of the week.


That's the mouth of the cave. The European guy whose name I forget who renamed the place Goa Gajah thought it was a carving of an elephant. He was wrong. I'm pretty sure it's one of the major spirits in the Balinese arcana, though I forget the exact details. Inside the cave, there's a statue of Ganesh and a couple of other carvings. Like people had told me, not terribly interesting.

I'd heard there was another cave somewhere in the vicinity, so I went exploring. After heading across a rice field and down some stairs, the concrete pathway branched. To my right, it continued, probably to a temple. To my left, it was a dirt path with a sign that said "Jungle Temple." I decided I was reasonably intrigued, and followed it.

After a couple of minutes of walking, I ran into a guy whose job it was to take donations. I looked at the register -- everyone had donated 15,000-20,000rp ($1.50-$2.00) -- and I decided I was too cheap to go see what the fuss was about. I told the guy I didn't have enough money, but I'd come back another day since I live in Bedulu. Either he was a really nice guy or happy that I spoke bahasa Indonesia with him, because he let me through without paying. I meant to pay him a bit on my way out, but for reasons that will soon become clear, I never got the chance.

I kept walking down the path, a couple of times running into women selling water, fruit, etc. Finally, I ran into a woman who chatted with me for a few minutes, asking me where I was staying and why I spoke Indonesian. She showed me a path down to the river, saying I could go swimming (I opted not to), or cross a bridge, see some meditation caves, and make my way back to the parking lot across the river. As I was following her, I slipped -- Birkenstocks aren't great for hiking -- and landed pretty hard on my knee. It's fine (only a colorful bump), but I should have taken it as a sign to turn around.

After I gave her some money, she left me on the path. I continued down the slope to the river, all the while dodging enormous troupes of ants that wanted to climb up my legs.

Then I saw the bridge. Picture the quintessential rickety southeast Asian bridge: four big bamboo trunks lashed together and stuck above the river, held there by what looked mostly like sheer willpower. I don't know how I convinced myself to cross it. I basically ran-walked across it, scurrying as fast a I could without slipping. It probably wouldn't have been horrible if I'd fallen -- it was only a ten foot drop or so into reasonably calm water -- but I had my camera and didn't much feel like taking it for a swim.

When I got to the other side, I realized there probably wouldn't be a way to get back over the river and scrambled back over the bridge. I tried to climb up to the path by another route, but my way was blocked by wet, slick rocks and a couple of terrifyingly large spiders. I don't know why I didn't try to go up the way I'd originally come down. By this time, it had started to rain -- maybe I thought it would be too slippery.

So, I crossed the bridge again, and miraculously it held my weight once more. I checked out the caves -- which were, admittedly, pretty cool -- and then followed a path upriver, the direction from which I'd come. Then the path dead-ended. It looked like it might continue up the slope, so I followed it, figuring that at the top of the ravine there would probably be people (at this point I was pretty sure I knew vaguely where I was.) After a muddy scramble, I made it to the top. Sure enough, I emerged onto a back road.

I asked two guys siting on a bale (sort of like a big veranda/pagoda/porch thing) where I was. They replied with the banjar (neighborhood) name, which wasn't much help, so I asked how to get to Bedulu. (A few minutes later I realized I'd asked them how to get to "the biggest road" rather than "a bigger road." No wonder they were confused at first.) They pointed me in the right direction. I set off down the back road, avoiding some frighteningly mean dogs, and asking people every once in a while how to get to Bedulu. They were all helpful, if a little weirded out by my muddy attire. Ultimately, I ended up on the slightly-less-back road that I took home from Mas when I was learning to make masks. I was incredibly relieved to know exactly where I was.

I headed back to Goa Gajah, it being on the way home, to tell Ibu that I wasn't lost or dead or anything. It had been less than an hour all told, so she wasn't too worried, but she laughed at my story. She gave me some water and sent me home to shower. Later that night, she made fun of me some more.

So yeah, Goa Gajah the tourist attraction was pretty dull. But if you do it right, it's pretty fun. The trick, of course, is to get lost.

So That's Why They Call It the Rainy Season

I had just finished lunch in Ubud and was en route to finding a new cafe with wifi, when it started to rain. I ducked into the market to buy an umbrella (usually I wouldn't mind getting wet but my computer was in my backpack), at which point it started pouring. Now, I'm not talking "slightly above a drizzle" pouring. Nope -- after about twenty minutes, the streets looked like rivers, current and little rapids included. A very nice group of Balinese people let me sit in their pottery stall for a couple of minutes, until I got bored and ventured out. I wish I'd had my camera with me. It really was amazing.

Anyway. The French tourist story.

A couple of weeks ago (I think; my comprehension of the passage of time is a little wonky at this point), my Ibu and Bapak informed me that two French tourists would be staying in the spare bedroom across from mine for two nights. (By across I mean in the building next to mine, the one with the bathroom I use. I think I've explained that Balinese houses tend to be a collection of small buildings rather than one big one. If I haven't, well, then, there you go.) Apparently this sort of thing happens with some frequency; as long as my host family has spare bedrooms, they figure they may as well use them.

That evening, I was sitting on my porch reading when an enormous tour bus pulled onto our street. We live on a fairly major street in Bedulu, but it's not the main road that goes through town and to see a tour bus there was bizarre. I had assumed it was just going to be two random tourists; instead, it turned out, it was a whole group.

So these two ladies came into the yard accompanied by one of the group guides and my Bapak. I tried very hard not to judge them by the enormousness of their suitcases (which really were bigger than mine, and I've been here for two and a half months. Ah well.) Bapak showed them the room, and hardly a moment passed when there was a shriek. Ibu and I looked in that direction, and caught something about a lizard. They had seen a tokek, the bigger of two varieties of gecko commonly found in Bali. Now, if you piss off a tokek (i.e. by chasing it or trying to catch it), it might bite you, which'll probably hurt. But short of that, they're totally harmless. I'm pretty sure one lives behind my closet. Still, they refused to go back into the room until the guide came out with a dead lizard in hand, which he did.

While this was going on, my ibu and kakak (older brother) and I were cracking up, teasing them in Indonesian. My ibu asked me if I was afraid of lizards, and I laughed, telling her that they're everywhere and there's no sense in being afraid. I didn't have the heart (or the language skills) to explain to the two Frenchwomen that another tokek would probably find its way into the room later.

Things were pretty uneventful until the next night, when Bapak came to get them to go to some dance performance their group had planned. As they were leaving, one of the women pointed at the painting that hangs outside my kakak's door. "I bought one just like that!" she said. "Only bigger."

So my bapak promptly started trying to sell it to her. He explained to them that he and Ibu own a painting shop, which is kind of true, in that my Ibu owns a tourist tchotchke store outside of Goa Gajah which sells some paintings, among other things. Then he named a fairly ridiculous price.
She declined, but said, "maybe we got it at the same place!"

At this point, my bapak feigned being upset. "No, no, no!" he exclaimed. "I painted it myself."

Up to this point, my ibu and I had been watching the exchange with interest, giggling occasionally, but at this point we completely lost it. My bapak is a very talented man, and he makes awesome woodcarvings (that being his job), but he definitely doesn't paint. Without thinking, I said to him, "bohong!" which means liar. For a moment, I panicked, not sure if it was really bad to tease one's elder. Fortunately, when I said it my ibu laughed even harder and repeated it to him.

The French women didn't buy the painting. Still, it was a pretty entertaining thing to watch.



In other news, to answer Ryan's question about whether auspicious days are spontaneous:

So, the Balinese have several calendars. There's the lunar calendar, which determines when things like Nyepi fall. Then there's a seven-day calendar, based on the Gregorian calendar and used for things like school calendars and general day-to-day business, since it matches internationally. It's also the basis for the 210-day Balinese year, since the calendar is made up of 30 seven-day wuku, or weeks. That determines when a temple's odalan, or temple birthday, falls. Then there's a five-day calendar and a three-day calendar, both based off of traditional market days (one Javanese and one Balinese, though I can never remember which is which). Then there's also a calendar that works something like 1-day week, 2-day week, 3-day week, etc etc, but that one is completely over my head so I won't even try to explain it.

The point is, when you look at a Balinese calendar, it's got all sorts of writing on it. Each day will have the Gregorian date, the Gregorian day of the week, and then what day of the five-day, three-day, bizarre cycle I don't understand, and lunar week it is. Also, all of the wukus have their own name, so that's on there, too.

As far as I can tell, in terms of religious offerings, the five-day and three-day week are most important (although the wuku is important for odalans). Each week has its "most auspicious day," and the intersection of those days, Kaja-Kliwon, is the most auspicious day of all. A lot of rituals go on on that day. Days that are just Kaja or just Kliwon are also reasonably auspicious, and I think some of the other intersections are too. Some of them are not auspicious at all, but I don't know which particular days those are.

So to make a long story short, yes, people absolutely know about these events in advance. They take a ton of planning, especially for something like the enormous odalan at Besakih. In the days before a festival, women are making various offerings out of palm leaves and flowers, and the men are doing the cooking necessary for sacrifices and offerings. Also, the temples are decorated, and I imagine the high priests are also doing a whole bunch of things to prepare (though I can't say with certainty what they are).

But this stuff also goes on on a daily basis, too, since every day people make offerings, usually in the mornings and the evenings, part of whatever they've cooked that day. It's actually kind of problematic: a generation or two ago, people made offerings less frequently, but as tourism and other forces have emphasized Balinese Hinduism, there has been pressure to make more offerings. In and of itself, that's not necessarily problematic, except for the fact that daily offerings require both a lot of money and a lot of time. As a result, some Balinese families put more effort into offerings than things like education.

Still, it is pretty cool to watch the whole community come together in preparation for the big festivals. Everyone gets really excited, and the temples really do look spectacular. Plus, it's a lot of fun to get to go to them.

Woosh!

That's the sound of time passing quickly. I didn't realize it'd been so long since I'd last posted!

The last few weeks have been pretty laid-back. We're prepping for our independent study period (ISP), so we've had a bunch of papers due and we have exams next week. After that, classes are over and we have a month to explore the topic of our choice. I'll be studying satua, traditional folktales, most of which are animal fables. I'm going to be going around Bedulu (some people are going elsewhere on the island, but I like Bedulu and I really like hanging out with my host family) getting as many people to tell me stories as possible. Then I'm going to try to figure out why the stories aren't told as commonly now as they were before (my hypothesis: electricity, TV, and public education). Then I'm going to attempt to deduce whether there's a correllation between people not telling the stories as much and changing cultural values.

Basically, it's all an excuse to get people to tell me stories.

Prep for ISP -- meeting with my advisor, writing up the proposal, etc. -- has been taking a lot of my free time, but last night I went with my host parents to two huge temple festivals. Now, I can only understand some of what my host family says to me (and I think because they know that they never give me fully comprehensive explanations of what's going on), so I had been under the impression that at six o'clock, we would ride a bus to Besakih, the biggest and most important temple in Bali, then go to the festival, eat dinner, and head home.

Technically, all those things happened. At 6, we piled into the car and drove toward Mas, where my bapak works. We met up with his boss and some people he works with, then sat around on the bale (sort of a porch/gazebo-ish structure) for a while waiting for more people to show up. Then we piled onto a big bus (the kind they use for tours), at which point my ibu informed me it would be a two-hour ride. Roughly an hour and a half later, we arrived at Pura Ulun Batur, the second biggest/most important temple in Bali. I figured maybe I had misheard my host parents. We prayed for ten minutes (the big festivals are a pretty quick in-and-out affair, because there are so many people who want to make offerings and pray), then walked back to the bus.

"Next we'll go to Besakih," my ibu said. That would take another hour to get to, and by this point it was around nine pm. I snacked on some of the fruit my ibu had bought, and napped. When we got there, I was floored. Besakih is huge -- my ibu said that there are 1000 temples within the complex, but I think that might be a little bit of an exaggeration, but only a little bit -- and the whole thing was fully adorned with brightly colored fabric, gold, offerings, flowers, and fruit.

We first walked up the stairs (the temple is on a hillside) to a relatively smaller temple to pray. My bapak said that there are different temples for different castes; because the family follows the patriarch's caste, we were in the ksatriya temple. (Quick review: there are three high castes. First is brahmana, the priestly caste. Second highest is ksatriya, the warrior/ruling class. Third, I believe, is wesya, the merchant class. After those castes come the sudra, the commoners. Caste in Bali isn't nearly as important as it is in India, but it does determine things like where in a village someone lives and where one goes to pray.) After that, we went to the main courtyard, which was enormous. The ground was covered in offerings that others had made and left. We knelt, waited for the high priest to begin instruction (which basically involves when to pray, who to pray to, and when to stop), then followed his instructions. After that, we were finished, and walked down the stairs of the temple.

At this point, it was roughly 11:30pm. My bapak went to buy us fish sate, and we sat on a wall alongside the road and ate it with rice and fruit that my ibu had bought. When we finished, it was time to head home, and we piled onto the bus again. We got home around 1:15am, and I headed to bed.

The temple festival at Besakih lasts for 15 days, in order to accomodate all of the people who want to come. Later in the week, my brothers and their wives will go. I'm not sure if they'll go to Ulun Batur, too, but it wouldn't surprise me if that festival also lasts for a long time. To an outsider, it appears that these festivals just kind of pop up without reason, but usually it's because it's an especially auspicious day. I'm pretty sure these festivals were odalan, which is sort of like a temple birthday and happens twice a year (because the relevant Balinese calendar has 210 days).