July 23, 2006
maafkan akuuu!
the title of this entry means "forgive me", in reference to the incredible lateness of this blog entry, and is also a line from one of the most popular songs on the radio right now, frequently played loudly on the microlettes (mini-buses) in Manado. in fact this song is so popular that even if you happened to get on a seriously un-"gaul" (gaul means cool) microlette that doesn't have any music on, you are still almost guaranteed to hear this song, so long as your route takes you by the usually traffic-jammed megamall area, where you can hear it being played on other nearby microlettes, along with other songs ranging from Manado christian rock to American rap music
i'm having a pretty good time in Manado, although being here taking classes everyday with a bunch of other Americans is definately a different kind of experience than my experience in Malaysia. one small example: when i first met my host family here, nobody asked me how old i was, which felt really weird since in Malaysia nearly everyone i met would ask me that. later i found out that it had nothing to do with cultural differences between Malaysia and Manado but with the fact that before we came all the host families got a one page sheet of instructions about how to treat the student staying with them. "don't ask personal questions about age or religion" was one of their instructions. my host family asked about my religion anyway, but contrary to the instruction sheet's assumptions about American students i didn't mind
i've also of course been using English a lot more, especially since there are two other students here from u of m. its not the same sort of sink or swim situation--i know i can always fall back on my American friends, so going out and talking to people here is a lot more difficult. actually, this isn't that different from the way i felt in Penang. i still used a lot of Malay when i was there, but since i knew i always had a place to come back to in the kampung, i didn't have to push myself as much to make other friends. because of this, although i love my adopted family in Penang, and all of the people i met in the kampung, i still feel a little closer to the friends i made in KL, which probably has a lot to do with the fact that when i met them the only things i could count on were my hotel room and my temporary library card. in that sense my time in Indonesia has definitely not been so intense. my days are planned out with 5 hours of class tuesday-friday, field trips on mondays, and with weekends free to either spend with my host family or friends i've made here (speaking Indonesian) or go around with my classmates (speaking english). my Indonesian has (i think) still been getting better, but because my situation is a little bit more certain here i haven't been quite as daring about going out and meeting people on my own. and when i think back on some of my best experiences in Malaysia, and think about how i ended up in those situations, this probably means that i'm missing out on a lot, and should try a little harder not to fall too much into the routine
i have started to really like my host family here though, especially my "auntie" (who takes me around to coffee shops on the weekends) and the family's daughter (who i like to watch Korean soap operas with, subtitled in Indonesian). the daughter also has two kids, a 7-year-old whose heart i think i won by giving her a small fortune in dollar bills and coins from the US, Malaysia, and Singapore, and a 5-month-old baby. the baby took a while to warm up to me, but now she usually smiles at me when i come in or make faces at her, prompting whoever is holding her to look at her and say "auntie diana" in a baby voice (little kids here call me "auntie diana" instead of "older-sister diana", which makes me feel kind of old).
its taken me a little bit longer to get to know my host father, although i think we finally started bonding a little bit the other day, when i brought home a movie to watch. i was actually a little bit worried about asking if i could watch this particular movie since it is a story about PKI (the Indonesian communist party) and other student movements around the time Suharto came to power (1964-1966 approximately). this is a really controversial time in Indonesian history, and although it has been legal to talk about what happened since reformasi (the democracy movement in '98, when Suharto stepped down), according to my friends in Jogja (were i went for my one week research project earlier in the program--i'll write more about this later) most people are still feel like anything even remotely related to PKI is pretty dangerous (they used a word that translates to "evil"). so although today family members of people who were disappeared or put in prison are now legally able to talk about it, it's still pretty a pretty difficult subject. because of this i wasn't quite sure if it would be tactful for me to ask to watch this particular movie using the families living room vcd player. but it turned out to be a good decision because my host father, who i haven't had many other serious conversations with, was actually really happy to talk to me about his experience around that time (when he was still a teenager in high school, with friends and teachers who were involved in all kinds of political groups including PKI). so i spent the rest of the night half watching the movie (about a college student/journalist living in Jakarta involved first in the student branch of PKI, then the movement to get Sukarno to step down, and then writing about what started happening after Suharto came to power, which eventually got him killed--based on a true story since even today no movie like this can be made unless the producers can prove that it is based on facts) and half talking to my host father, who would explain what the relationship was between all of the heavily acronym-ed student groups, which national groups and political parties they were all associated with, and what the situation was like in Manado at that time. the political situation over the last 50 years in Indonesia has gone through some really dramatic changes, and although i've talked a little bit with the friends i made in Jogja about reformasi, being able to talk to someone who has lived through Sukarno, Suharto, and the democracy movement was pretty amazing.
Posted by diparker at 05:33 AM | Comments (1)