ISP Time/ Back to the Village!

So I spent Monday through Saturday of last week back in the village. I love everything about being there so much . Sorry I've been neglecting the blog. Too much to do, too much to say...I don't even know where to begin, but I'll try to give you all a brief update of what's been going on.

For my ISP, I'm trying to talk to people about how they deal with sadness-- the way people are expected to cope with, and in a way "forget" death, the way people are taught to keep their feelings locked up inside rather than being urged to "get them out" like we're so often told to, and really anything else people are willing to share. I've had a few opportunities for conversations about this just fall into my lap, as if things are unfolding just the way they are supposed to, and the feeling of that coupled with how incredibly relaxing it was just to be in the village made this past week a wonderful one.

I stayed at the home of Bu Yunita, who lives with her husband, his parents, and their 5-yr-old daughter and is expecting a second daughter in January. It was nice because, as pregnant as she is, she was lounging around the compound quite a bit instead of off at work in the city or the rice fields like most of the village women. Even she, however, was busied with the tasks of offering making, cooking, cleaning, and caretaking that take up so much of the Balinese women's time. By the end she was telling two of my friends who came to the village later in the week and I that maybe we could name her next baby. I don't think that's a responsibility we deserve, but that's just a little example of how friendly and open, how quickly attached to us, these people (the women especially) in the village become. Becca and my ISPs are both kind of trying to get at the people's feelings--whether or not they really are happy behind these ever-smiling faces they put on, so our questioning this week led to a few sad stories too.

Becca's Ibu, for instance, is now living as a single mom because her Javanese husband left her two years ago. Divorce is pretty uncommon and quite a hassle here, so the burden of having the whole village community know that your husband left you is a tough one to carry. Usually something is thought to be "wrong" with you if you are that age (she's 29) and without a husband, but, lucky for Ibu, she has found a married man in a nearby village that she is having a little romance with. The story got a little complicated-- i.e. the man's wife knows about their little affair but doesn't mind because she doesn't like her husband anymore anyway? I'm not quite sure; I think some details were lost in translation. Anyway, when I interviewed Ibu she talked to me about how she always tried just to make herself smile so other people won't think that she's sad. Even friends or villagers who knew at the time didn't talk to her about it, she said, because talking about things is only thought to bring up more sadness, whereas keeping quiet leads to "forgetting", which allows you to just go on being happy.

It's so interesting-- I spent a lot of time hanging out with this group of women in the village across the river too (SO funny), and by interacting with them in their welcoming and friendly (as in some of the friendliest people I've ever met) ways, you would think that they're simply always delighted. When Becca asked them, though, to recount for her a memory of a time when they remember feeling delighted, they responded with, "Oh no, we're never delighted! We're always sad!"

"We don't have money. We're always working so hard," they said. And it's true...their lives seem simply to wind between household duties, wandering out to work in the rice fields, tending to their cows or other animals, and seeing to it that their family is well-fed day after day after day. The breaks in schedule they get come in the form of ceremonies, like the all day cremation I went to in the village on Tuesday, or perhaps heavy rain, which might change what exactly they're working on. But life seems to focus on basic needs rather than things to look forward to or look back upon, and on day-to-day gratitude rather than deep thoughts or awareness of shifting emotions.

One morning, I decided after breakfast that I would walk across the river to visit Bu Astra, one of the women I met at the cremation two days before. I didn't necessarily think she would be a good interviewee, I only knew she had told me to visit and thought we would enjoy each other's company, so I headed out walking alone with my notebook and a box of cookies as a gift. The people here have such funny concepts of what's far away. I don't know how many times the women told me that my legs must be so strong, and that I must be so brave, not only to walk that "far" but to do it alone. But what else am I gonna do all by myself in the village but try to walk around? And, the thing is, walking alone is never lonely because little heads are always popping out the compound doors with Ibus saying "mampir! mampir!" (visit! visit!).

Anyway, I arrived at Bu Astra's to find that she wasn't there, but Bu Gde across the street, who had seen me walking by, insisted that I come visit there instead. I tried for a little bit to ask her some of my interview questions, and she quickly and bluntly showed me what little time or need for questioning there must be in some of these people's lives. When she said her father died a few years ago, I asked if she ever thought about him or missed him still. "No, no, of course not! He's already become a god!" she said. "Well what does make you feel sad?" I said. "Well if we don't have money, we're sad. If we have lots of money, we're delighted," she responded. And there it was-- just as simple as that.

It's easy for me to wonder as an outsider whether any of them struggle to believe in reincarnation and the idea of "not really dying but simply changing place", but I started to realize in the village that if my presence is only just now making sweet old grandpa realize that there are farms elsewhere with cows that aren't brown, but black and white!, then why on earth would they have considered that maybe there are people who have different ideas about sadness and death?

That wasn't the case with everyone though. I think Bu Gde decided that she was tired of trying to understand my Indonesian, so she insisted that I needed to get up and follow her down the road to where a man who knows some English and some other villagers were building a house. I ended up being introduced to Pak Nangeh, who actually served in the army in Oklahoma for about 6 months. He then helped me interview some of the other men working, and I thanked him, thinking that would be the end of that, but instead he hopped on his motor bike and told me to get on. Apparently there was a teacher who lived a couple villages away that he thought I should speak with. He seemed really well-intentioned, so I did as he said, and after about 10 minutes on the little winding bumps of village roads, we ended up in front of an old man tending to his cow in front of an isolated compound. It turned out that the teacher (the old man's daughter) wasn't there, so we only chatted with her dad for a minute, and then we were back on the motorbike and before long had stopped at another compound that he insisted we visit.

Well no one was there either, though he said it belonged to his brother, so Pak Nangeh just led us in and the two of us sat down and started talking. Soon he was telling me about how his own wife had passed away of stomach cancer just a few months ago, making him a blessing of an interviewee, especially given his English abilities. That's what it felt like the whole time in the village--with a little effort by my "strong" legs, things just kinda happened the way it seemed they were meant to happen. And Pak Nangeh, unlike Bu Gde and her bluntness, met many of my questions with downcast eyes that seemed to say he was really searching for an answer, somewhere beneath his worn and gentle demeanor and thick, clear glasses. But I don't want to get all into what ALL of the people have been saying on here because I'm going to have to write about it again in my ISP!

When Pak Nangeh and I headed back to the construction site, we ended up being waved down before our destination by Bu Astra's head popping out of her compound yelling, "Soapy! mampir!" Bu Widano was across the street yelling the same thing, so we ended up compromising and ALL the Ibus (well the 4 main funny ones) and I went to Bu Widano's to visit and then moved over to Bu Astra's. I swear these women need to have a "Desperate Housewives: Balinese Farming Village Style" made about them. They are all such characters, with such a raw and rugged little spunk. Bu Indah may have been my favorite because it was like everytime you said something to her she made this expression, complete with wide eyes and a big smile, as if she were just being informed of something so fascinating and new. And she was always nodding and laughing and occasionally making these little squeals of excitement...but even she couldn't answer Becca with a memory of feeling delighted!

AH I just love those women and that village. It's impossible not to feel happy with the over-the-top friendliness of all the people there. Becca and I went for a walk to the ricefield the morning before we were leaving, and we ended up running into Bu Astra's mom, this probably 75-yr-old woman, barefoot and carrying a massive bag of something to feed the cows with on top of her head. She said something to the extent of, "Ah! Soapy! Grandpa is down there (pointing way down the hill beneath the ricefield) and he will find you young coconuts!" So then she insisted we follow her down the hill and over this little stick bridge (which we both had to have hand-holding help across but she got over without thinking twice and with that heavy load on her head), and we met up with grandpa who was more than happy (in fact I don't think "no" would have been an acceptable answer) to take a break out of his work and see to it that we were sent back up the hill with 3 freshly cut from the tree young coconuts. They're so good, too! You can punch a hole in the top and drink the milk out with a straw and then have it hacked open and eat the deliciousness on the inside.

So that was a little bit of my time in the village. The afternoons can get long there, but somehow the time overall seemed to go fast. It's amazing--one morning the grandmother in my compound took me to interview an old woman down the road around 9, and on the way back (after a visit that involved the old woman opening up about how lonely she was and crying :( ), I asked my grandmother what time it was and she simply looked up at the sky and said, "Around 12". She was exactly right too, and I was so surprised that 3 hours had passed.

The day before I left to go there, my homestay family in Bedulu and I had a big, long-awaited outing day (i.e. I paid the $30 it costs to rent a car for one day because they don't have a means of taking the kids anywhere on Sundays, which are supposed to be for "family trips"). We ended up being out and about from 7:30 in the morning to 9:30 at night just taking advantage of the ability to go places. From visiting family to seeing the water temple to "eating out" Balinese family style to swimming in holy springs to getting made up into a Balinese bride (they insisted we end this one and only car day with a trip to my Bapak's sister's "salon"), it was quite an adventure. It was so cute to see everyone enjoying themselves so much. Some of the things I was seeing for the first time were things the kids were seeing for the first time too. And I feel like I could say so much more about everything...but I think I have to stop here for now..

Spending time in the village makes me nervous about coming home because somehow it's even a little culture shock just to come back to Ubud. Oh well...I'm just going to try to deal with transitions as they happen. I think I'll be with my Bedulu homestay fam again for the first half of this week and then some of us may travel around the east for a little bit. Wherever I go, I have to try to keep interviewing people. We have two more weeks of ISP, then a week-long "writing" period, and then everything is wrapping up! So, so fast. I miss things like Thanksgiving if I really think about them, but it's also easy to just keep going along in the never-ending heat and Balinese-ness and not think about fall and turkeys at all. Hmmm. I guess I'll just conclude with a happy almost Thanksgiving, and I'll write again soon!

:)