Mendekati ujungnya

[Written in March, but for some reason I forgot to post it.]

It’s a few days past the official two-year mark of when I arrived in Indonesia (March 12, 2017), and I have just over two more months until I leave. This is usually the point at which a person should be shaking their head good-naturedly and chuckling about “where did the time go?” Personally, I can’t believe it’s been two whole years (!!), but it hasfelt like a long time. 

Last Saturday, in one of the starkest reminders that my time here is wrapping up, I left for COS Conference, the final Peace Corps conference, which is scheduled to fall right around three months before the end of service.

For the first two-and-a-half days that made up the official conference portion of the week we were gathered in Surabaya, we were booked at the Singgasana Hotel. It was a beautiful, self-contained place (officially a resort? I’m not sure) that was insulated from the city, but best of all, it had the one feature that really gets me excited at a hotel: a pool. A huge pool, at that. Have I ever stayed anywhere with a pool and not practically lived in the water? We arrived at the hotel in the early hours of the morning, fresh off the night train, and waited in the beautifully-lit, fragrant lobby while our rooms were prepared. As soon as we were able to check in, I changed into my swimsuit and headed outside. It couldn’t have been more perfect. It was pouring down rain, but the sky was bright. The rain was cold, and the pool was warm. I could smell the blossoms on a nearby plumeria tree. The water seemed salty, maybe; it had a buoyancy to it, where I could lie on my back and just float without having to breathe, and I could rest my arms on the surface and the water held the weight. The pool more than made up for the long night train to get out to East Java. I wound up swimming two or three times a day our whole stay there.

The conference itself was very fun, and sadly very short. I live for Peace Corps conferences: the chance to hang out with friends while also getting to sit and be an attentive listener? My dream! (Can you tell I miss being a student?) The first day was spent going over lots of practical information, including all the forms and documents we would need to fill out—which, incidentally, I forgot about wholesale until today, when someone texted me something tangentially related—and medical stuff. There were also final Language Proficiency Interviews, one-on-one tests of Indonesian speaking ability. (Aside, whenever I’ve had an LPI test, my drive to study Indonesian spikes right afterwards. It’s not because I get depressed by my performance and think, “wow, I should probably study more” (lol), but because I remember all over again how much I love Indonesian, and how valuable every new word I add to my vocabulary is.)

The second day of the conference was devoted to preparing for post-Peace Corps professional life, and featured a panel of RPCVs who live and work in Indonesia talking about their various career fields (USAID, the Foreign Service, English teaching at a private company, etc.). I found it all really interesting. In some ways not much of it applied to me, given my plan is to go into a literature Ph.D. program, but it's always good to get a better sense of different paths that are out there. My biggest takeaway: it’s finally time to make that LinkedIn profile I’ve been running from for almost a decade.  

The third day was my favorite, though unfortunately also the shortest, only a half-day that ended at lunch. We did reflective and sharing exercises, which I always love. (I didn’t love being an R.A. in college, but all those behind-the-scenes ResLife “team-building” activities were gold.) We got to open and read the letters we’d written to ourselves during training. That, however, didn’t wind up being the revelatory and heart-warming experience for me that it was supposed to be—all I could think was, “you were in a seriously weird mood when you wrote this, weren’t you?”, and roll my eyes at my former self. We played Jeopardy and Family Feud (the Indonesian version of this, by the way, is one of the most popular shows on primetime TV). Then, after everything, we finished with cake. God, I love cake.

COS Conference marked the first time we were all reunited since Pre-Service Training. One thing that Peace Corps Indonesia does that I think is fairly uncommon among Peace Corps posts is that the program is functionally split in two. After we swore in as Volunteers and were shipped off to our permanent sites, we were discretely divided into East Java and West Java, with all our conferences and trainings held separately for the full two years. I understand why the program is configured the way it is, with the East/West division (there’s an explanation for that that I don’t need to go into here), but it’s still always bummed me out. I’ve really missed my friends in the East and wished we weren’t structurally walled off from each other. Over time, I did manage to get to see many East Java PCVs for various reasons, but there were still a handful of people that, until last week, I hadn’t laid eyes on since May of 2017.

For sheer curiosity value, it was fascinating to hang out with those people and get to see just how different they were from how I’d last seen them. I know that every last person I came to Indonesia with two years ago has changed (and I don’t mean that as an empty platitude, I mean really), but it’s harder to see the evolutions of the people you’re close to, that you hang out with a lot—the changes are subtle and gradual, and it’s easy to forget your first impressions of people once you know them well.

It’s a testament to my fellow PCVs, but also to the Peace Corps model itself, how much for the better everyone seems to have changed. My cohort is such an impressive group of people and I’m so proud of everyone for making it through the struggles I know we’ve each gone through. That’s one interesting generality/specificity of the Peace Corps experience: every person has their own unique challenges, which make their service uniquely hard for them, but the uniting feature is that absolutely no one has an easy time of it. I’ll never know the depths of what everyone went through, but I can be certain they had to go through a lot.

After leaving Singgasana, we moved over to Artotel (>> think Art + Hotel), whose motto emblazoned over their doorway is, “Because the Earth without Art is just ‘Eh’.”  Artotel Jakarta is easily one of my favorite places in the world, and all the goodwill I have for that place transfers right over to Artotel Surabaya. I’m realizing just now that I love Artotel and IKEA for similar reasons: both put out an ultra-modern aesthetic that may be downright off-putting to large swaths of their would-be consumer pools, but they don’t seem to care about potential customer alienation and just put it out there anyway. They have their style, which is really their own utopist vision that they’re committed to creating in the here and now, and all the regular people will just have to bend their own tastes to match whatever the designers tell them to accept. I’m all about it. (It makes me think of the music video for Télépopmusik’s "Breathe," which, incidentally, I love.) On the subject of post-Peace Corps career planning, I still haven’t shed my fantasy of somehow getting to work for IKEA without having to be a part of the business world. Come on, IKEA, make my dreams come true! 

We stayed at Artotel to the end of the week, while we had final medical and dental check-ups. It was a slow-moving time. I got Padang food. That was one axis of desperation that really set in for me as the countdown to the end was thrown into relief: how many more meals of Padang do I have left to me?! Since that dark moment of realization, I’ve made a point of getting Padang any and every time I eat a meal away from home. Padang food is one of those things I love so much that I achingly miss it even before I’ve had to say goodbye. The flavors, the whole ritual at the restaurant, sculpting the perfect bite with my fingers… I’m going to tear up soon if I dwell too long on it here.

We had a last final party at the end of the long week, at a chic bar/lounge with an ample dance floor. It was a great time. COS Conference met and exceeded my very high hopes for it, for getting to be with people, relax, and begin to make sense of things. Then I had a long journey back to West Java, and waiting for me at the Bandung train station was a giant bundle of anticipatory stress and sadness, akin to my missing-before-it’s-gone newly-bittersweet relationship with Padang food, about how little time I had left at site and in Indonesia, how much I had or hadn’t accomplished, and all my dreams and goals for the last three months that I worry might not get done.

Luckily, I’m not someone to obsess too much over tallying (or spiraling into guilt over lack thereof) achievements and impact: I’ve done what I could, I feel fairly content with what I’ve done, and probably the best things I did are the things I’ll never guess at. I think I’m okay with all that. There are a couple more things I still want to do, things I’ve been planning for literally years, and if I can get them done I’ll leave on such a high note, and if they fall through in the end, I’ll have that regret; but whichever way it turns out, I’m doing my best and that’s really all I or anyone can do.

For awhile I was mentally cataloguing my current emotional state as “ambivalent,” but now I see that that’s not it. What it is, is two things skewed extremely in two opposite directions at the same time… which I guess could theoretically cancel each other out, leaving me in a state of neutral ambivalence, but that’s not how it actually works.

In one corner, we have my intense and abiding love for Indonesia, which is rooted in so many things I could never identify them all: there’s the cultural richness, natural beauty, the language, food, the vastness and promise of adventure, the diversity, and so much more… and there’s the fact that I’ve lived here for two years, which, everything else notwithstanding, gives me a permanent attachment to this country, in all senses of the word. I love Indonesia, and I miss it with an ache even as I’m here today to enjoy living in it.

In the other corner, we have my definite inability to stay in Indonesia too much longer as a PCV. There’s got to be a terminus. At least once a day this thought floats to the top of my mind: I’m ready to be done with this. Some things never get easier, but instead only compound over time.The assault on the senses is exhausting. Even in the best of circumstances, no matter how well I’ve adjusted to so much, I still find being around people constantly to be draining. I know what I should expect when I attend a wedding, but that doesn’t make it any easier to deal with, and I’ve been through it too many times to still find it new and interesting. Sometimes I wonder if I could live in Indonesia and find a way to revel in that other corner only, the Indonesia-loving one—maybe if I were an expat, free to live where and how I wanted. But insulation from the things I don't like is a distancing, ultimately isolation. And no matter how hermetically-sealed away I might be, I wouldn't escape the pollution, and unless I went really remote, I probably couldn’t escape the population density, either. I’ve come to see that those are two things I really can’t live with long-term (and I have the privilege of getting to choose to live somewhere without them). So I have to accept that I can love Indonesia to the point of never wanting to be anywhere else, while also not wanting to stay here. And as eager as I am at times to get away, I’m also fully aware, even right in those moments, how much I’ll miss this country as soon as I actually have to leave. Above all, I feel so grateful that I know what’s out here waiting for me as soon as I can get the money and the time to come visit again, and so endlessly overjoyed to be able to speak the language, and to have the access that that gives me to this wonderful country. 

My RPCV friend and I, both eternally marveling at the inspirational excellence of Peace Corps ad campaigns, have a few favorites: “Life is calling. How far will you go?” and “When you get back, you’ll be able to say ‘I’d do it again’ in [insert language here.]” As far as the latter, being linguistics fanatics, we’ve discussed exactly how we’d translate that phrase in our own Peace Corps country languages. (For Indonesian, I’d say, “Aku akan melakukannya lagi.” Interestingly, the conditional in Indonesian is the same as the future tense: ‘I would/I will do it again.’) Before doing Peace Corps, I was of the belief that staying and withstanding 27 months in a country was the task and the goal wrapped into one. I’ve stayed and withstood, but I don’t believe that anymore. For one, it’s not just about surviving and outlasting. You’re not hibernating in a cave for two years, you’re out doing your job, to the full extent of its broad lack of definitions, trying to do your best. But it’s also that doing things you don’t want to do, even (and especially) when they’re hard, and pushing through, is often very good for you—but suffering is not automatically good for you, and sometimes it’s just suffering. Knowing when you’re in one situation or the other, and when you need to make a change, is its own wisdom. As for me, I’m happy to have made it through, but I’m not mistaking making it through as the ultimate and only achievement of Peace Corps. It’s been tough. (Has it perhaps been, to quote another iconic Peace Corps ad campaign, “The toughest job [I’ll] ever love”?) But without doubt, aku akan melakukannya lagi. I like the little built-in ambiguity there, too, with Indonesian being loose about tenses—maybe Iwillin fact do it again someday.