Saturday, 23 May 2009
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Price takes a little getting used to, 350,000 rupiah including cooked breakfast, until you get the maths working and realise that is only 35 US dollars. Then you go to the nearest ATM and find the maximum withdrawal offered is 600,000 rupiah not enough for two nights. (Later we established the physical maximum was 1,250,000 for ATMs issuing 50 Rupiah notes, or double that for 100 Rupiah notes, also that you could make repeat requests up to your daily Sterling limit). Three days in we still are trying to get a feel for the currency. I saw tea advertised in a smart cafe for 15 rupiah and then realised the smallest coin is 200 and it dawned they meant 15,000 about 1 pound.
We first met Juliater (Ater) Tarigan in April 1996 on a bus from Medan to Brastagi on the first day of two months travel in Sumatra immediately after our retirement . He was then a second year student at Medan (state run) University, studying English and hoping to teach. He took us around the area to his home village Lingga and to a memorable much photographed Batak wedding. We have kept in contact ever since.
A couple of years later the Asian Financial crisis hit Indonesia hardest of all and their currency dropped to a fifth its previous value overnight leaving many unable to afford even rice. We were able to help him finish his studies. So were a German couple who I imagine had played a major role in converting him to Christianity but later learned his mother had already been converted, along with many others from the Batak area.
During two of his main holidays at university he went to Kuta, Bali (4 days by bus) via most of Sumatra and all of Java because all the many tourists with whom he had made contact had either been to Bali or were intending to go there. Since he saw contact with tourists as the only possible route to making a reasonable income he intended to survive these learning trips any way he could. Contact with travellers had convinced him that the taboo of his home culture for university students to take menial jobs during the vacation was nonsense. When the sun shone he earned money by selling Walls ice cream on the beach at Kuta, and by selling umbrellas when it rained. He furthered his understanding of the backpacking tourists and Western mores.He has undying admiration for his mother who although only a simple farmer supported him throughout his studies even though she was getting further indebted to all the members of her village. She was a farmer, say market gardener - all by hand but on a field scale. He never had any respect for his father who had left home for a second wife with whom he had five children to add to the four of his first family. A father who unlike all the other fathers in the village never took him to the village coffee shop in the morning before work. The one daily treat he felt all working fathers could afford, in spite of poverty.
Once the Asian financial crisis hit he had to ask us and the German couple for help which was forthcoming, and he had to earn money by working the long vacations in Bali.
On graduation he left home in Sumatra, in spite of leaving his mother who could speak only Batak and not Indonesian, and therefore who could never make friends on Bali. That move was ten years ago. On arriving here he worked with an established British owned School which taught a full syllabus in English servicing the extensive ex-patriate community.
However he now improvised to fulfill his dream of travelling to Europe, which we thought he would never ever be able to fund given the huge difference in cost of living between the developed and undeveloped countries like Indonesia where a normal wage was a US Dollar per day. All the same by using what little capital I had given him to operate also as a money lender, loaning to women street traders and charging large interest rates whilst they slowly repaid on selling their goods, but soon found he was in great demand as a provider of such services. 'You lend to her. Why not to me?' This is the one period of his life about which he does not feel good.
Never the less he was able to buy a return ticket to Germany in January and arrived in Frankfurt. He told the German family the best welcome would be to let him find his own way to their town on his own. He spoke of his wonder at the Metro and of the trains which he long watched before boarding, whilst understanding the system. He stayed many days with the German couple but found they, having no children of their own, they stifled his wish to see what was going on in town outside of their mostly elderly family friends. Regrettably he left them without the best of relations to meet Joan and I in Amsterdam. We had to travel there because although he had been issued a European Visa in Bali he had been unable to get a British visa in spite of financial guarantee from us. In the process he had to take his first ever air flight to Jakarta (Java) to attend an interview and pay a large non-returnable visa fee, which had left him with insufficient bank balance to pass our visa criteria. There are a few times in my life when I have been ashamed to be British but this was one of them.
He said how glad he was that we had shown him European life, and in particular to take him to a jazz concert at a pub where Hans Dulfer, Netherlands top saxophonist had been playing to an enthusiastic audience, (his daughter was just then beginning to make her international reputation in New York also as a saxophonist). We remember that in Amsterdam he asked "Why are all the trees here dead" (for unlike the tropics there are no leaves on the trees in winter). His memories are amazement at the underground trains and snow which he had never seen before.
After meeting us for a long weekend he arranged to visit Italian friends he had met in Indonesia, and from them he learned of an organisation offering free stay in other members homes and so he arranged a trip to Rome, a city which filled him with awe, although virtually penniless he had queued so long to get into the Coliseum that he paid the required 10 Euros. From Rome he got back to Frankfurt and caught the flight back to Bali. |
The Terrorist bomb hit Bali shortly after his return. The British owners of the school in which he had been working fled and so did all the expatriates and tourists leaving him without obvious ways of support.
So he took a 10 year lease on a house, converted it for use as a school he called Seminyak English School, with a single bare backroom in which he could sleep with shower and toilet. Here he initially taught the Balinese English. As the expatriates began to return and with them the tourists, he switched his major activities to teaching Indonesian to the expatriate business community, a far more lucrative undertaking. Yesterday he had just finished teaching an Usbekistan couple, who are travel agents. He teaches basic Indonesian conversation in 40 hours of tuition, four week course five days a week, two hours a day, in small groups or even one to one for those with more advanced requirements. Indonesian, basically the Malay language, is like many Asian ones have very simple grammar - no verb conjugation, no genders, no 'to be' verb, no 'a' or 'the' just 'this' and 'that', no plurals and so on, but word order is important. I learned Malay with Linguaphone before coming in 1996 and intended to relearn it but got lazy.
Ten years ago he rented his present property for 10 years, but there is only three years to run. He is quite happy, though sad his mother will never join him, she didn't like Bali since she cannot speak Indonesian or Balinese, only her native Batak, and thus could make neither conversation or friends here.
Last August he also rented a shop an converted it into a restaurant called 'Warung (food stall) Ala Asia' where we ate well on the second night. He had decorated the interior tastefully with one huge enlargement of a Banyan Tree and other old black and white and sepia photographs. But we ate outside on the covered patio. As a business in which he had no prior experience it was just breaking even, so he felt he had his main gratification in being able to give work to seven Indonesian staff some with families to keep. The majority of Indonesians have no work, not I think a new phenomena.
Yesterday after his last lesson ended we all went by taxi 5$ to the capital Denpasar to visit the island's main market. On the way we stopped at 300 square metres of land which he was in the final stages of buying, where he hoped to build a one room house 6 by 6 metres, with a second storey later, leaving a huge garden where he could relax away from his work, and get back to his country beginnings. He bought us a huge range of sweetmeats and confectionery made from sticky rice, sago, and a sweet black jelly. One of the key sales in the market was of flowers and vegetables. He explained this was a wholesale market where people bough to sell on at smaller markets. We sat for hours on the steps of a simple temple and watched traffic roar, observed the going on and talked by on the main street ceaselessly. We watched a middle aged woman regularly stagger past with a huge basket of cabbages on her head, which must have weighed 50kg. Many other women walked around the market with empty baskets on their head looking for such work. There doesn't seem to be break from rush hour conditions in this part of Bali.
Just in front of us right adjacent to the road two women were assembling Hindu offerings from small boxes of coconut leaves and flowers petals and selling often by the half dozen. Making such offerings on a daily basis is part of the Hindu Culture of this Island.For over a decade now we have had a dream that we would meet Ater again here in Bali. He had a similar dream, and he has been marvellous company.
Our last evening before leaving to explore the island we spent together in Kuta. First I asked to go to Perama who organise minibuses on a schedule to various parts of the island. We wanted to go first to Ubud to which there are four departures a day at 7, 10, 13.30 & 16.30. The 10am minibus goes on to Lovina. We wanted to go Ubud and then several days later to go Lovina and found that we could buy a ticket for 13.30pm to Ubud but with an open journey onward to Lovina provided only we confirmed a seat a day in advance at Ubud. The cost 12.50$ each (It is easy to convert into USD so I will use this currency throughout (1 USD = 10,000 Rupiah).
Just a short walk along the street brought us to the monument for the victims of the first Bali Bomb. A little chastening to realise that people from 21 different countries were killed in that blast, all their names were listed 88 from Australia, 60 Indonesians, 38 British etc.Then we went as planned into Kuta, rather better than we had expected, but very Westernised, name a shop and they have it. We ate pizza at a popular backpacker restaurant off the main street. This day for the first time Ater allowed me to pay. We visited the beach for the sunset, not at all spectacular and finally ended up in Starbucks for a coffee and a long chat. It was over the following two hours or so that Ater told us his story. That caused me to re write much of this first posting so it would be good thing to start at the beginning.
What I have not integrated was the way he described that he felt very different from the rest of his extended family of eight siblings, because he had ambition and was prepared to work as hard as it took to succeed. He did not understand where his drive came from! This feeling became very strong when he graduated and they had a big party at his village and his mother instead of being the universally disliked debtor and pauper suddenly became celebrated in the village as the first mother to bring up a child and support him through to graduation from Medan University.
He had originally planned to go to Bali since he could see there were prospects with the tourists for those with a good grasp of English. Unlike a cousin who had simply returned to his village and back into subsistence living in a farming community, the disillusionment of which had driven him madness. Graduation was his opportunity, and he was determined to take it. He wrote to me again asking for money to start a business, I seem to recall sending him 1000 pounds. He used half of this money to pay all his mothers remaining debts and with some of the rest he bought a lot of chillis which he intended to sell in smaller lots in the 'free trade' island of Batam, south of Singapore. There he discovered he could afford to buy a big number of a new hand held computer game. Unfortunately although these sold reasonably well on the boat to Bali, he could not shift sufficient thereafter even though he tried very hard to master the selling technique, for instance boarding a bus and handing them around for people to handle and then either collecting them or taking the price asked. We have seen this technique used many times in many countries particularly as a way of selling learning books for say English or Health care - but it obviously didn't work for this much higher cost items. Eventually he gave up and sold the rest of his stock at a big loss. Then he got a teaching job in the British owned and run school. The rest has already been described earlier in this posting.
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