Aku rindu…musim salju

I can truthfully say I don’t often miss things, here. I have all of my daily needs more than satisfactorily met. I live in a beautiful room in a beautiful house, I eat good food and as much fresh fruit as I want, and I’m blessed to have been welcomed into a wonderful, warm community. I get to be barefoot basically whenever*, and I get a guaranteed two more years of not having to work in an office. There are lots of other good things I could list off, too, but these are some big ones that first come to mind, in terms of everyday comforts.

[*I don’t think I’ve brought this up before, but this country is a barefoot-lover’s haven. Students regularly walk around school barefoot (though at the last school assembly there was an announcement discouraging them from doing this); children and adults alike roam the community with no shoes, including men at work in the fields or engaged in other manual labor; kicking off your shoes to rest your feet just about anywhere, including something like a staff meeting, is completely acceptable; and many professional rooms, or places like the school library, require you to take off your shoes before entering, to keep the place clean. I’ve always loved being barefoot, and I love this. I don’t, however, go outside barefoot, because people in my particular social niche (mid-twenties, still-single female) tend not to, and the ground is very rocky and would hurt.]

Sure, I often think wistfully of the Pacific Northwest and all the things I love about it, but I’m content to be here. Also, when I lapse into some daydream about strolling around Seattle and settling in for lunch at some swanky restaurant, the vision falls flat fast when inevitably my imagination strays to prices. When I do finally return to the U.S., that sticker shock is going to hit me good and hard, starting right off with obscenely marked-up airport food.

I do miss my family, but I’ll see them soon enough, and we talk on the phone often. I love when we’re together, but I’m okay with us being apart. I miss peanut butter and jelly sandwiches on bread. (I love bread.) I really miss animals, especially my pets—I’ll never get over missing them. I miss being alone in nature, and I miss silence.

Lately I’ve been missing winter.

I’ve often told the story of how being an exchange student in Slovakia during an epic winter there—which also coincided with my hardest time emotionally, and certain cultural elements such as no heating at school and a tendency to keep the windows open—felt like a traumatic experience. In the years after, I faced the oncoming winter with a deep-seated, visceral dread. Fall was fun, and who couldn’t love the first snowfall; but I knew as soon as Christmas was over there would still be another two, maybe three or four, months of gloom and hibernation.

If given the chance to live in, say, Northern California for a couple years, maybe for graduate school, I would have jumped at the chance for perpetual pleasant weather. It’s not something I’ve ever known, growing up in the rainforest around Puget Sound. And I’ve long recognized how much more healthy, cheery, and productive I am when the sun is out. Even if a gray, downpour of a day can be cozy, the meaning of “cozy” is I’m tucked into bed watching a movie with popcorn and my cat, not running errands around town, going for a bike ride, cleaning the house or taking my dogs for a long walk on the beach.

In thinking about countries I was interested in for Peace Corps, I knew I couldn’t handle one of the Eastern European/Central Asian countries. Winter is brutal enough at lower latitudes, even with central heating and heated water guaranteed. I’ve never been a huge hot-weather person, either, meaning that I wilt at around 75 degrees, but I figured I’d rather sweat for two years than have to go through two or three winters that were sure to be much worse than what I’d experienced as a teenager in Central Europe.

To my everlasting luck, I wound up with the best of both worlds. I was placed in a “cold” site here in West Java, which means I’m up in the hills where it’s perpetually foggy and doesn’t get hotter than 85 degrees. At night it gets down to 65, and I always sleep with my windows open to enjoy it, tucked under a thick, polar-fleece blanket. For some contrast, in Kediri, where we had our pre-service training, I lay in bed at night without any kind of covers, unable to sleep because I was so hot and completely drenched in sweat, eagerly anticipating morning when I would be able to get up and throw cold water over myself. (In all fairness, it’s true that I didn’t use the fan my host family provided. My goal was to try to toughen myself up, since I thought this would be my reality for the next two years. Syke!) In Kediri, I’d look forward all day to coming home to bathe with cold water and getting to not feel so sticky and gross for a half an hour until the sweating started up again. Here at my permanent site, I’m blessed with a shower water heater, and on the mornings when it doesn’t work, it’s just as miserable as your accidental cold showers are at home.

The rainy season, one of only two seasons known to Java, has been in effect since mid-October. Usually what this means is that the morning starts off eye-achingly bright and hot, and then by mid-morning the clouds start rolling in; by noon the sky is uniformly gray; early afternoon things start getting unnaturally dark, and you wonder if it’s later than the clock says; and then around 2 p.m. the downpour suddenly breaks, and lasts about three hours. By evening things are dripping, but stable, and at night the clouds begin to clear again, to the extent that you might have a starry sky. This is the usual twelve-hour cycle. Sometimes, though, it’ll be dark and gray with almost constant pouring for a day or three at a time. These times have made me remember, and appreciate, the usually fine weather, especially the endless sunshine of the “dry” (in Indonesian, panas, “hot”) season. I don’t mind the rain, and it keeps the air fresh, but even one all-rain day sees me staying sluggish, feeling entitled to do nothing but sit around with a movie or a book, rather than sunny weather, which compels me to get up early and just go hike a mountain already!

Also in defense of little seasonal variation: I only need outfits for one kind of weather, and never, ever have to run through the mental considerations of dressing in layers. The only thinking-ahead required is remembering to always bring my raincoat with me. Every day I know it will be hot, exactly as hot as it always is, unless I get lucky, and then it’ll be cool enough that I don’t sweat. There have been exactly six times here in Indonesia when I was certifiably cold, but these fell into three categories of incidence: journeying to a high elevation, like a mountaintop; riding in overnight trains between West and East Java, where the cars are refrigerated to as low as 60 degrees with air conditioning; and being soaked from swimming fully clothed and then forced to stay in those wet clothes for hours outside in the rain. I will never be cold from the weather itself here at my “cold” site, and I’ve come to find this deep-seated assurance comforting. It’s something I’ve never had living anywhere else.

And still I’ve found myself missing winter.

Maybe it’s a desire for discontent, to always want what you don’t have. Maybe it’s just missing the holiday festivities of my favorite time of the year, that magical month from Thanksgiving to Christmas. (Why haven’t corporations trademarked some buzzword for this time span yet? “The holiday season”—pff, they can think of something snappier, I’m sure, while still being inclusive of many holiday traditions.) I just glanced down at the little calendar icon on my computer desktop and with a jerk of shock, as if I realized I’m lucid dreaming, saw it’s two days until Christmas. Christmas right now feels something like snow: I know it’s happening to lots of people, including many I know and love; but it’s so totally separate from my experience, I can’t really believe it’s going to feature in it.

Just as living in South America messed with my subjective (and, I swear, bodily) sense of time, with trees shedding brown leaves in March to bitter chill through all of June, living in the Tropics with perfect temperature stability leaves me with no marking of time. I try to make sense of the passing months by mapping them onto the Northern Hemisphere seasonal churnings—I got here in spring, and now it’s winter—or by comparing it to my time in Argentina (I got there in March, I left in late December). But still, the only thing that I think will really convince me that time has passed will be the arrival of Ramadhan in May. I know there’s an irony to that, given that Ramadhan occurs at a different time each year relative to the Western calendar, but actually, for me, it’ll be the first anniversary of something occurring outside of myself. When March 12 comes around, marking one whole year I’ll have been here in Indonesia, it’ll only have the artificial significance I personally assign to it. Ramadhan, though, was a real event that happened to everyone, and Ramadhan will be repeated, which will mean my time here will have made one full rotation through.

Recently I was staying at a hotel in Surabaya, in East Java, for a committee meeting. The hotel had a strung-out Christmas tree up, wrapped presents around its base, twinkling lights up on the wall, nonstop Christmas music playing, and (probably Muslim?) staff wearing Santa hats. The decorations and general air of festivity weren’t so jarring for the reason they should have been, namely that these are Western hallmarks in a Muslim-majority country (there’s a significant Christian minority here, too, but I feel pretty sure that Santa hats are not a homegrown, Indonesian-Christian tradition). Instead, they kept throwing me off because otherwise I had forgotten about Christmas entirely. One of my fellow Volunteers who was there for the meeting too was planning on going straight from our get-together to home for Christmas. That was an equally mind-blowing thought: as if Christmas were a place you could travel to for a visit, that certainly existed over there, even if I had grave doubts about its reality here. (Later, having arrived in New England, she sent me a picture of a dark, snowy farm in her neighborhood. I couldn’t believe the image was one that someone I had just spoken to in Indonesia was experiencing firsthand. It felt like a foreign artifact I could glance over with an outsider’s interest, like a magazine piece on Russians who go ice-diving in December.)

While my time so far in Indonesia has now been almost exactly the length I was in Argentina, the big difference between sunbathing in December in 95 degree heat in Buenos Aires and waking up to another blisteringly-bright sun west of Bandung is that a year ago I knew—and was very much eagerly anticipating—that I was headed home to a cold winter. The prospect of winter didn’t scare me then, because it was guaranteed to be brief (I was heading off to steamy Indonesia in March, after all), and because I was craving some return to the clockwork of Northern Hemisphere seasons. Reversed seasons in the Southern Hemisphere had disoriented me the entirety of the ten months I was there.

This time around, I’m not going home. To be honest, the strangeness of the progression of time here is such that if I were given a free ticket to Seattle tomorrow, I’d be happy, but with an unshakeable feeling of being undeserving. It doesn’t feel like I’ve been here long enough (certainly not that I’ve done enough) to merit a home tour. Pre-service training is a blip of time that was cut off from any recognition of having been lived even before it was over; the long summer months before school got underway compress into about five days. No wonder it only feels like four months. It does feel like I arrived here in September.

Even referring to some metrics which should be more objective, like the fact that I came here not speaking Indonesian (or Sundanese), and now I do, doesn’t do much to break the surreal vibe. In music we use dynamics, the rising of the crescendo that builds up to something; but with no terminus in sight, what do I build up to? With no external marking of the seasons, when do I check in, register that time has passed, gauge how far along I feel I should be or take stock of how far I’ve come? It’s a very strange thing.

Another weird thing about there being no winter, is if you get depressed, you have nothing to possibly excuse it by. Negative feelings are guaranteed if you spend enough time in a foreign country, especially if you’re in an immersive environment. You might manage to avoid initial culture shock, but I think culture fatigue is unavoidable. (This isn’t a real term that I know of, but believe me, it’s real.) It’s a generalized malaise that comes and goes with devastating randomness, like a shingles flare-up, and while it’s certainly caused by living abroad for an extended period of time, it can’t be mapped to specific daily occurrences. You might try to point out to yourself that someone said something annoying to you, and thus your intense feelings of irritation at the whole world have a clear and reasonable justification; but just as likely, no one says anything, and you just feel irritated because you do.

I’ve always charted my emotional tides to the seasonal calendar. Although I never thought of myself as officially having S.A.D., I operated as if I did: I dreaded winter because it was synonymous with depression, and I considered bad feelings in the coldest months as just inextricable part and parcel of the turning of the wheel of the year. I never looked forward to a descent into darkness, but I didn’t resent it too dearly, either, because there was a big-picture balance to it all that felt like fairness. Spring always brought with it the promise of unparalleled emotional highs. There’s no ecstasy like a clear blue sky on a February morning, sunshine through still-bare trees refulgent with promise. I may have had my worst winter in Slovakia, but I’ll never have a purer spring than that one, either. It’s as Aristotle wrote: there’s far more pleasure to be had in moving from an unpleasant state to a neutral one than moving from a neutral one to a pleasant one. Being brought back from the brink of frostbite is better than a warm bubble bath on an average Tuesday afternoon. How much more pleasurable, then, to go from certifiably unpleasant to certifiably wonderful?

Long before coming here I did spare a thought for what it might be like to live somewhere with not just reversed seasons, as in Argentina, but no seasons at all, at least temperature-wise. I wondered: Without an external seasonal dial switching my emotions up or down, would I just be stable, neutral? Or if it were sunny all the time, would I feel emotionally that I was running through an endless field of plump spring crocuses, “the hills are alive with the sound of music!”, not a care in the world? I was curious for what would happen in an environment outside of what I considered to be the natural ebb and flow of things. It would be a new experiment.

The year has yet to fully run its course, but I’ve come to some conclusions. I think the sunshine does keep me more up than gray weather would, and I can’t imagine how I would be faced with real winter now. But there’s still culture fatigue to contend with, which means the lows are inevitable, even if they’re just as unconnected to what’s actually going on in my life as cold weather would be. Thanks to culture fatigue, I experience the strange alien feeling of being depressed on sunny, objectively-beautiful days. Somehow, although it’s equally irrational, it feels more acceptable to pin moods on the weather, pointing to a cloudy sky as if it provides the irrefutable explanation: “I want to crawl under my covers and stay there for the next two days and I have no motivation to do anything and I can’t think about future goals and possibilities because it’s dreary.”

Without winter to blame, I sometimes blame myself. That’s also not a good strategy, though. Because ultimately I do realize that whatever depression I’m momentarily given over to is also, as I’ve said, not really connected to my personal emotional life. It’s contextual. Living abroad for a long time takes its toll, and that’s okay, provided you recognize negative feelings for what they are and manage not to internalize them. Freaking out over their implications, listening to all the unpleasant things that get stirred up from ruminating, and spiraling deeper, is unproductive, unhelpful, and unnecessary. Winter or not, I’ve been through all this before, many times over, in many different experiences living abroad. I know the only strategies that are healthy and do reliably work are staying active, finding channels of distraction, refusing to engage with negative thoughts, and remembering that this too shall pass, as it always does.

Maybe later on my winterless experience here will give me a new view on what I’ve always seen as my powerlessness to the will of the seasons. If I can be feel low in eternal summer, what’s to say I can’t stay upbeat in the throes of winter? Another experiment to try sometime.

Sure, it’s always easier to miss in absentia. But since I don’t have to deal with the consequences of my wishfulness, I’ll end where I started and say I do miss winter and all the complexities of a four-season yearly emotional journey, even as I’m thankful for my temporary, 27-month foray into summerland. As I’m still disbelieving that December 25 will mean anything to me, but also fantasizing about arctic wildernesses given over to snow and ice, which I’m wont to do every six months or so, enjoy this wonderful piece that captures the spirit of the season for me every year:

Acara-acara dan kegiatan-kegiatan

Hey guys. I’m officially on winter vacation from school: first semester of teaching has finished! The semester officially started July 17—it’s been awhile.

I haven’t blogged since Ramadan, which was my first month at site, and now I’ve been in Indonesia nine and a half months. Actually, that’s not entirely accurate. I have blogged maybe five or six times since my last posting, but for various reasons I ended up not posting what I’d written.

A main reason I haven’t written more, or posted more, is that I simply haven’t had the time or energy. They tell you a million times during the Peace Corps application process and pre-service training that it’s important not to go into this with expectations. I thought I was pretty set in this regard, ready to take what I got and go with the flow of it, but I’ve since realized I did have one pretty entrenched expectation, and guess what? It got fully upended. Namely, that I’ve perused hundreds of Peace Corps blogs over the years, and one of the few universals I’d picked up on between all the vastly different experiences was that Volunteers tend to have a lot of free time—to the point that they actually complain about having too much of it. But, surprisingly, this hasn’t been the case for me. Instead, I’ve found myself chronically sleep-deprived, exhausted, often stressed, and relentlessly busy. When I come home in the afternoon after an eight-hour day at school, after waking up at 3:30 a.m., I’m definitely not in the mood to blog. Sure, I’m tired; but it’s also that the prospect of writing out the particulars of a day that’s just exhausted me is draining all over again to even think about.

But hey, I’ve got a couple of weeks of vacation now, so no excuses. In this installment, I’m going to write about some of the many life events that are marked by parties and rituals here.

Disclaimer: many of these customs are probably shared by Sundanese, Javanese, and other Indonesian groups. But I really haven’t been privy to cultural customs outside those of the Sundanese Muslims in my region, so that’s all I can speak to here. Indonesia has far too many diverse ethnic groups and religions for me to just say these are “Indonesian” customs, and have you assume that’s how it goes for the whole archipelago, but I also don’t think that all, most, or perhaps any of these are exclusive to my community.

Birth of a baby. I’ve been to two of these. One man told me that the ritual specifically is that on the third day of the baby’s life, a lock of hair is snipped (I asked what happens if the baby has no hair, and he said this is never the case); but everyone else has just told me the event is to celebrate the baby’s birth.

The family slaughters a goat to celebrate. Then, hundreds of friends and family drop by the house over the course of the day. When entering the house, you remove your shoes (true for any house, always) and shake hands with all of the hosts and any other guests in the room.

[There are many subtleties to hand-shaking. Sundanese and Javanese styles are different, for instance. Personally, if the other person is roughly my same age, I use the most common Sundanese way, which is to gently clasp the tips of the other person’s fingers in the tips of my fingers and then bring my hands up, clasped, in front of me, or else touch my fingertips back to my chest (“bringing the person into your heart”). If the person is much younger, they will “salim” me, by clasping my right hand and bringing it up to touch their face or to kiss; if the other person is older than me, I will salim them.]

After greetings, the newborn will be brought out for a quick viewing. Oohing and aahing over the beauty of a new baby transcends culture. Guests sit down on the floor in the main room, which has been prepared with carpets rolled out and all furniture cleared away. (To be fair, there usually isn’t too much furniture in the middle of the room to begin with—sitting on the ground casually is the norm in most households.)

All around the room are plastic tubs and glass jars of snacks, usually things like cassava chips, bananas and watermelon slices, gelatinous rice rolled up in banana leaves, and little cookies and sweets. (Party or no, every household keeps tubs of these snacks on hand in their receiving room at all times to be offered to guests who might, culturally-speaking, drop by whenever.) The hostess will open the lids of all the tubs and push them towards you, and that’s your cue. You must eat some of the snacks, and drink from one of the single-serving packaged waters which are a staple at any gathering.

After sitting, talking and socializing for a time, maybe ten or fifteen minutes, you are invited to eat. There is a catered buffet, and you fill up your plate. The usual fare is rice, diced spicy potatoes, fried vegetables with sausage slices, a beef and/or chicken dish, a meat and noodle soup, glass noodles with bell peppers, and rujak, which is a very spicy fruit salad of mango, jicama and cucumbers.

When you’ve finished eating, you discreetly give the host an envelope with money, shake hands with everyone once more, and then leave. On your way out, you are given a bag of party favors, which is usually foodstuffs, such as small bags of cooking oil; mini bottles of soy sauce; packages of ramen, aka Indomie; canned sardines in tomato sauce; a lemon; a big block of Sundanese brown palm sugar….

The time you spend at this event might be as quick as twenty minutes, and at most usually won’t be more than an hour.

Circumcision. In many (all?) Muslim cultures, circumcision is not done at birth, but a bit later, when a boy is around seven or eight years old. I don’t know the details of who performs the circumcision and what religious rituals surround it, but I do know there’s a party afterwards. I’ve only been to one of these. I’m not sure if there’s a goat/ram slaughter for this occasion, too, but it seems likely.

As before, the house has been prepared for a steady stream of visitors coming by all day, which means rooms are cleared, carpets rolled out, and food laid out. You enter, shake all hands, nibble at snacks, eat a full lunch from the buffet, shake hands again, and leave.

On this occasion there were also three giant, professional cakes sitting on one table. The little boy himself was only seen for a moment: he grabbed one of his toys and then went back to his room.

Wedding. I’ve been to both pre-wedding receptions and an actual wedding party; these were for different couples.

The pre-wedding receptions followed the template you’ve seen above: go to the parents’ house (in both cases, the groom’s), shake everyone’s hands and offer congratulations, sit on the floor with snacks, then eat a full meal at the catered buffet, give an envelope with money, shake hands and leave, receiving a giant bag of party favors (food) on the way out.

The wedding party was different. Full disclosure: I actually didn’t know the bride and groom at all. This wasn’t an issue, though. Guests are invited with official invitations, but drop-by distant friends-of-friends are always welcome. In this case, my teaching counterpart’s badminton partner, who owns the town’s most popular wedding venue, invited me to come to an upcoming wedding at his place the first time I met him.

My teaching counterpart and I went together. You have to look nice for weddings. Women come dressed to the nines with professional-looking makeup and bedazzled dresses. I wore the one dress I’ve had made for me here, and next time I’ll even wear high heels...but just because the dress’ hem is really long and I tripped over it all day.

A portion of the street outside the building was tented, and there was a stage with a dangdut band. (Dangdut: a Bollywood-inspired musical genre that is considered very home-grown Indonesian, as opposed to Western-influenced pop. Dangdut can be sung in Indonesian, Sundanese, Javanese, etc.) Inside the venue, the ceiling is permanently strung with tent-like bolts of fabric in different shades of blue, with a big crystal chandelier in the middle of the hall. There is a stage covered in flowers, and the walls are mirrored.

Big speakers blasted nasheeds, which is religious music in Arabic that’s generally a cappella with drums, somewhere between a chant and a song. The bridal party stood on stage. Upon entering the room, we signed the guest book, I was given a cloth fan as a party favor, and then we made our way to the stage. We went down the line shaking hands with the bridal party, took pictures with the professional photographer there, and gave the envelope with money to the bride. We came later in the day, when there weren’t many people there, but when the wedding is bustling, there is a box behind the bride that she throws the envelopes into, without looking, to keep the line moving.

After taking photos, we filled up our plates at the buffet, and then found seats along the walls to sit down and eat. (Note: eating or drinking while standing is a cultural no-no.) When we’d finished eating, we shook hands with the badminton-partner host again and then left. We only stayed maybe twenty minutes, and this is pretty typical. People drop by whenever, make the rounds saying hi, eat their food and then exit.

White foreigner privilege in Indonesia: you’re never a wedding crasher, just a delightful surprise.

Leaving for hajj. One of the pillars of Islam is making hajj, or pilgrimage, to Mecca at least once in one’s life, if one has the financial and personal means to do so. You can go to Mecca any time of the year, but these visits are called “umroh.” To count as hajj, pilgrims must go at a specific time, around the time of the Eid al-Adha festival. The Islamic calendar is lunar, so the exact timing changes from year to year, relative to the Western Gregorian calendar.

The Saudi government, as the gatekeepers of Mecca, sets quotas for each country for how many pilgrims are allowed to attend hajj each year. In countries with relatively small Muslim populations, like the U.S., everyone who wants to go, can; but in Indonesia, which has the most Muslims of any country in the world, there’s a long waiting list, generally 5-7 years. When a would-be pilgrim’s turn does arrive, however, the Indonesian government gives them 90 days of paid leave from work. As the rituals to be performed at Mecca themselves only take a few days, most couples spend the remaining time traveling around elsewhere in the region, to Medina and so on.

Because of the big financial investment needed to do hajj, and the fact that usually it’s a married couple who are taking off for three months (so the kids probably need to be grown up by then), people generally manage to do hajj later in life, when they’re in their fifties or later. You’ll know who around you has done hajj, because they will forever afterwards be referred to as Pak (male) or Bu (female) Hajji as a sign of respect.

[Interestingly, my teaching counterpart told me this practice was actually first started by the Dutch colonizers, who used this terminology to single out Indonesians who had performed hajj as possible dissenters to keep an eye on. Needless to say, this connotation has completely dropped out now.]

The religious sanctity and awe associated with getting to finally perform hajj; the fact that hajj is physically demanding, requiring lots of walking in the sweltering Arabian desert; and the fact that most of the people who will be undergoing these physical demands are older, means that there is a certain amount of emotional poignancy that surrounds people who are leaving for hajj. Friends and family are overjoyed at their loved one’s opportunity, but also often fear that loved ones will not come back.

There are send-off parties, and welcome-back parties, for the pilgrims. As hajj must be done at a particular time of the year, there’s one month in which it feels like every other person is having a send-off.

I’ve been to two send-offs, both of which followed the template: come to a house, shake hands, sit and eat snacks, eat buffet food, shake hands and leave. The only slightly different elements were that the couples who would be going on hajj were dressed specially, in all white—note that when on hajj itself, men have to wear white cloths, while women are free to wear anything, so long as their body is covered with their face exposed—and nasheed, the religious chant-songs, were playing out of speaker systems.

Pengajian. Pengajian is Islamic religious study. Every Tuesday night between maghrib (the prayer at sundown) and isha (the last prayer of the night, about an hour after maghrib), a local Ustad, or religiously-learned man, comes over to our house. The women and children of my semi-extended host family sit on the floor of the living room with the Ustad, with each person having a copy of the Qur’an in front of them. The Ustad leads a beginning prayer, and then a chapter of the Qur’an is read aloud by turns, with everyone alternating reading a couple of pages.

Religious education usually starts young here. My little host sister recently turned six, she’s still in kindergarten, and already she can read the Qur’an’s Arabic script at a good pace. She participates in pengajian along with the others.

Oftentimes this local Ustad comes over and leads a kind of pengajian-like ritual, where people take turns reading the Qur’an aloud, on the occasion of family members’ birthdays as well.

Wake. One thing that almost every Peace Corps Volunteer I know here has experienced, which disoriented all of us initially, is how people in our communities speak about death. People are saddened by death, but will often appear to smile or laugh when talking about it. I think this ties into the broader cultural aversion to visibly showing strong negative emotion, and the fact that Indonesians often default to smiles and especially laughter when they are uncomfortable.

Even though I’m also someone who laughs when I get uncomfortable, especially at first I was confused by the Indonesian variety of this, and even now sometimes I find it hard to read certain situations. In moments of ambiguity, kind of counterintuitive to what we generally think about body language and communication, I’ve learned to try to listen to what people are saying rather than relying on their facial expressions. E.g., if someone tells me a distressing story but is smiling, I will guess that they’re distressed rather than amused. But it’s also true that even when people may be smiling or laughing, their discomfort is usually subtlely betrayed elsewhere, in their glassy eyes, in how they clench their shoulders, or around the corners of their mouths.

I’m sure none of us in my training village who were there will forget one incident, during pre-service training, when we were practice teaching at local high schools. One of the English teachers we were working with was telling us about his family, and showed us a picture on his phone of his young, lovely wife. “She’s so beautiful, isn’t she?” he said, smiling broadly, and we all agreed, and then he said, “but she’s dead.” We were frozen with smiles on our faces for half a beat, and then we suddenly all looked around at each other with horror, unable to believe we’d heard correctly. He was still smiling, though now clearly painfully, and none of us knew how to respond. Our smiles dropped off our faces. “Oh…I’m sorry, that’s so sad…”

This situation came back to me many months later when I accompanied some of the female teachers at our school to a kind of wake. A former principal of the school had died, and we were going to see his widow. She brought out the customary snacks, and she and one of the teachers had a lively conversation. Looking at her, I wasn’t sure I hadn’t misunderstood: had a man died? Was this his widow? She was smiling and the two of them were laughing. Maybe a death wasn’t viewed as such a sad, solemn occasion, here, I thought to myself. I certainly don’t think it always has to be. So I wasn’t sure if I should smile as well, or if somber was most appropriate. But then, even while she was smiling and laughing, I suddenly realized she was also crying, and the teachers patted her consolingly.

Prayer in cemeteries. There were lots of festivities and rituals for Eid al-Fitri, known as Lebaran in Indonesia, the holiday that closes the month of Ramadan. One of these reminded me of All Saint’s Day, as celebrated in many Catholic parts of the world: I accompanied my host family to the cemetery, and we cleaned up family grave plots.

All cemeteries I’ve seen here have been grouped by religion, with separate Christian, Buddhist, Muslim, etc. cemeteries. Christian cemeteries have vertical tombstones as are common in the U.S., though often with two slanted pieces of stone atop them, like a little roof. Muslim graves are marked by horizontal raised slabs, with higher stone slabs on one end, like a bed with a pillow. Some of the base slabs are stone, and others are tile, with space in the middle for plants, like a raised bed in a garden.

What is most distinctive about cemeteries for me here is that they always have the same two plants. One is short and decorative and looks distinctly tropical with bright, red-purple leaves; and the other is a kind of tree which never seems to have any leaves at all, but is perpetually blooming with white flowers, just at its crown. When I see either of these I instinctively glance around for the gravestones I know can’t be too far off.

On Lebaran, we cleaned up the grave plots a little, sweeping dirt off the slabs, and then people read aloud from the Qur’an for some time, between half an hour to two hours, before we went home for lunch.