Quarter Year

I paused, caught off guard. Surabaya’s not that far away, maybe a half-day of travel. I thanked her and left the office. Almost anyone we ask has never left Indonesia, and most people haven’t even made it off of the island of Bali. Not only is it too expensive, but there’s little precedent for travel in the modern culture.

Ari is the only Indonesian we’ve met who has traveled abroad extensively. We met him when, sitting outside a restaurant, he started talking to us about the state of tourism in his ancestral hamlet of Munduk. This, we thought, is a forward thinker. He’s happy Munduk is getting its 15 minutes on the tourist trail, but he’s determined to make sure popularity doesn’t destroy the land that is his home, travel fad or no.

The next week, Ari invited us to his house for dinner. We learned a lot that night.

Ari works around the world on a cruise ship. The unequal pay dramatically favors Western workers, so Ari cleans the pools and does hard work and gets a fraction of what his coworkers make, just because he’s Indonesian. But he sees the world, something that’s otherwise impossible for many with his finances. He’s been to Japan, Vancouver, Amsterdam, more, and he says, “I was in Amsterdam for just two hours, but I can imagine how the people live.” He’s eager to share this understanding with any Dutch person he meets on Bali. He feels connected to them because he’s been to their hometown. We know this feeling, but it’s hard to express because people can’t conceive of their homes as the culmination of a many-thousand-mile journey.

A lot of the night we talked about the trouble of getting a visa for the US. I wasn’t really interested in this topic, except that the price of a visa is a shocking $500 per person, which I can’t imagine them spending to get in temporarily. In Vancouver he stepped off the boat to discover he couldn’t afford more than a cup of coffee. You know what he said? I find this significant: “It’s so expensive there.”

When do I say, “It’s so expensive?” I say it about Japan, England, Scandinavia. This word choice implies that Ari doesn’t think of himself as poor, he thinks of other places as expensive. Food in Indonesia is cheaper, he can go out and enjoy a night playing pool with his friends. His finances, limited in the view of Westerners, are normal to him.

If we had approached him with pity tonight it would have been harmful: pity doesn’t afford a person pride.

Ari stood in his favorite country, Japan, and looked at the streets, peaceful and clean. Nobody buzzes around, it’s calm. Ari was amazed to watch how the Japanese dealt with their trash: people carefully consider the item and put it in one of five or ten proper receptacles, each with its own purpose. On Bali the locals drop trash on the ground where they’re standing, put it in a stream or river or dump it on the road next to their store. Ari had never even known that throwing away trash was a THING until he visited Japan. It had never occurred to him that one should do this. That’s the battle he’s facing among his compatriots.

Ari recognizes trash collection as a symbol for the roadblocks to both tourism and environmental health. As it stands, you can walk into town holding a piece of trash, looking for a trash bin, and leave town holding the same piece of trash.

The problem is too big, he feels – people have to change in the head, and that’s next to impossible. His main idea, so far, is to start by “speaking to the river,” which means, I think, putting up a sign at the river asking people not to dump their trash there. It sounds like a good start.

Az and I are all gung-ho about starting programs to get people to be more responsible: We suggested that, first of all, there needs to be an opportunity to throw things away – something simple as a garbage can next to a recycle bin. So why not start there, start with making trash cans available? (It’s simple to say, but what materials do you use to make them? And who picks up all the garbage?) Apparently there is a company in Seririt (the closest large town) that recycles plastic, but it pays next to nothing for the materials, so people just dump everything in the river.

The second part of our ambitious plan was to educate children about the benefits of consuming less unnatural material and recycling or disposing properly of the rest. We told Ari that some American Wwoofers who work in the schools here might make good allies since they’re looking for projects. He hadn’t known about the Americans, but his brother had.

My brilliant idea is to put up posters that read, in English, “Bali is not beautiful.” with a picture of someone dropping a piece of trash on the ground. It would be controversial and insulting, but it would get the point across. They live on an island that everyone agrees is gorgeous, but I think it’s important to realize it’s limited beauty, and their actions have an effect on it.

Azure asked whether coming to a third-world country and preaching responsible consumption is any different than coming on a religious mission to convert heathens. I don’t know. I don’t know if it’s different, it might not be. The “green” movement could be the current incarnation of ancient earth-worshiping religions. So maybe we’re no better than missionaries, trying to change someone else’s unique values because of stories we were told half a world away, cleansing the world of its diversity.

Uh, the next few posts will have better endings.