Quarter Year

The girl working there was named Iluh and Mike met her yesterday while I was buying water. He was asking about chocolate to anyone who would listen and she had told him that her friend was a chocolate grower. Thinking that we could go see how chocolate was made, Mike set up a meeting with her for the following day (today).

We met her at 1pm and she closed down the “tourist information office” to take us. There was no formality to this, she just closed the door and locked up shop and walked us to the trail. I don’t know what her motivation was, since it was not a paid tour, but we think it has something to do with the Bali Childrens Project, and organization that I believe sponsors the office and tries to get donations to put Balinese children through high school. We learned the it costs $40/month to put one child through high school. She had been sponsored/adopted by a woman named Joyce who is from California who is the director of the project.

I think she also wanted to practice her English, so I asked many, many questions. Here’s what I can remember…

The difference for a child who goes to school vs. one who does not go to high school is that the one who doesn’t go will work in the fields. Those people make 30,000/day ($3) and cannot find work everyday…maybe one week a month she said. The children who go to school can work in tourism like she does. At a hotel or something like that.

I asked if there are any other jobs, not tourism and not farming and she said not really. I was going to ask more but we got distracted by something.

I asked what she went to school for. She said English and computers. Computers being word, excel, the internet. I had forgotten that those things were learned and not intrinsic. I take that for granted.

I asked her if she still studied English and she said no, that that would cost more money and then I said she could learn from books and she giggled and said she guessed she could.

I asked what she talked about with her friends when they hung out. She said she didn’t hang out with friends because she worked in the office from 8:30-4:30 then went to work for another foundation called “HELP”.

She had been “adopted” by Joyce and John, but only lived with them for one month of the year when they were in Bali. Her mother had died a long time ago and her real father was very poor. She had not lived with him in a few years and didn’t see him very often, which she was sad about. Another man she referred to as her father as well, but called him Bapak. He was the director of the foundation and spoke English well. I think she and her sister had lived with him and she still lived with him when she was not living with Joyce and John. I think it was a “normal” situation.

As we walked along the path, she would stop and point out various plants and trees. It was very informative. At one point when we had been walking for about 45 minutes, Mike asked if the chocolate plantation was down in the valley where we were going. She said no, that we had passed it. Where are we going then? To see the waterfall. We weren’t really aware of this and so we asked about the chocolate production and she said that people dried it here, but did not make chocolate with it.

We stopped at the waterfall. It was very beautiful, maybe 120 feet high. It was thin and the mist was very refreshing.

We asked why they didn’t make it here and she said because no one knew how. They make it on Java and I asked why they didn’t send one person to go learn how to make it and then bring the information back and make it here. She laughed at that. Actually laughed. She thought I was joking, but I wasn’t. We had a very one sided (Mike and I) conversation about possibilities and she really did not seem to comprehend the need for any of that. We explained that we were being very American, but we asked her if people create new jobs here. She said no. People are either farmers or in tourism or sometimes work in shops.

It was difficult to ask all the things I wanted because of the language AND cultural barrier.

When she talked about low wages for farmers, I thought about labor unions.

When she explained the two career paths I thought about all the industries that are absent from Bali. I thought about marketing, I thought about investments (though they do have very primitive investment schemes, her organization gives baby pigs to poor families. Seven months later, that family must pay the organization $70 for the baby pig, but the grown pig can be sold for more. The family makes money by raising a pig)
I thought about invention fairs for children and groups who come up with new services for the communities. Trash collection does not exist here and so the streets are full of litter.

It is very very simple here. People work 7 days a week. All day. They will work for almost nothing and cannot even survive on their wages. And innovation is almost non-existent here. In fact, I get the impression that people who step outside the box are laughed at. There is a sense that if one thing works, others should do the same thing because it obviously works, so when you drive down the road it is mango stand mango stand mango stand for about a mile, then grape stand grape stand grape stand for another mile. One woman will sit and sell the same fruit as the woman next to her for hours a day. I think the competition here kills profit and hurts everyone, but how do you even start explaining what that means. In town it is the same thing. Every store carries the same things, every restaurant, the same foods. It is a funny novelty for us, but I can see it is not helping the people rise above anything.

I asked if she had been outside Bali. She said she had been to Java, but not all the way to Jakarta. She said that she would like to travel someday and California is where she would like to go. She asked me what the difference was between California and Bali. I couldn’t even answer that question. I explained that California was big, perhaps 20 times the size of Bali. I wasn’t sure. I asked if she meant the California that she sees in movies and she said yes. I assumed she meant Los Angeles. I couldn’t even describe Los Angeles. It is very big is all I could think of. Are there a lot of buildings, she asked. Yes, more buildings than trees. I decided to tell her about plastic surgery, since it is a fun novelty. She laughed when I indicated larger breasts and she seemed truly confused when I told her some people will get new noses. She didn’t understand. I asked her what she thought California was like. She didn’t answer except to say that she thought the people would be very nice. Joyce is from California, so I would assume she thinks that all people are very nice.

Iluh is very small. She might actually be a foot shorter than me, which would make her 4’8” tall. She is definitely the smallest person I have ever seen. Her English is not great and I tried to envision her walking around in Los Angeles. It made me a little sad. I am afraid she would be overlooked and I doubt the girls at the tourist office would invite her to their homes to make traditional Californian food as she did to us. On one hand I hope she makes it to California, even though the odds are stacked against her. She makes $40/month right now. We paid $900 to get here. It would be great for her to see another country so different from Munduk, but would it be kind to her? I am not sure.

We walked back from the waterfall, never getting to see a “chocolate factory” but that was okay. When we arrived back at the “tourist information office” there were people on the steps waiting for it to open. They were hot and irritated and Iluh didn’t seem to notice. They asked us if we had went to find her to open it and I felt so stupid saying, no, she just took us on a 2 hour hike. Sorry about that. Mike asked her something about recycling before their irritation halted the conversation. We aren’t asking anything touristy, we said, go ahead. They got hotel information, but ended up using our recommendation instead. They are staying next door to us now. I told them they could get hiking maps from the hotel. It took 30 second to set them on the right path because they were Americans. We knew how to talk to them and what to say.