Quarter Year

December 30, 2009 at 8:00 am

Shelling chocolate with the ladies.

by Azure

I remember distinctly a warm day in July. Autsy and I were sitting in the front yard at Little Home and we heard the clunking and squeeking of Mike’s ladder fastened to the roof of his Explorer coming down the road. As he parked at the curb, shirt off, windows rolled down, we could hear the familiar tune that he had been whistling from his Indonesian language cds. He sat for a minute and repeated after Cici, “Makanan ini enak” (this food is delicious!). As he rolled up the windows and got out of the car, Autsy turned to me and said, “That’s your man.” We both laughed. (read more)

Fast forward six months. Mike and I are sitting in the courtyard of a family-run coffee farm. Mike is sitting with the men and I with the women. The 11 year old daughter is staring at me smiling. She is watching me as she has been all day, at times mimicking my actions. I can’t communicate with her. I didn’t study the language and her English is not great. But, we had bonded earlier when she and her brother had chased me around the terraced fruit farm. You don’t need language for that. At this point we were very familiar and so her staring is fine with me.

Mike on the other hand is chatting with the men. Without those Indonesian tapes we would have never stayed so long (6 hours at their house). He was able to communicate enough to hold a conversation and even though it wasn’t nearly as complex as he would have liked, it was enough to open the door.

The day had started out normally for both parties. The family greeted us warmly as they do all the tourists that walk down their driveway looking for a tour and ours, as usual, began with a misunderstanding. Mike had talked to the family the night before and asked if we could come see how chocolate was made. They said they produced it, which we had learned from Iluh the day before was rare or non-existent in the area. Obviously excited, but also knowing not to get our hopes up, we walked down the driveway ready to work. They walked us out to the terraces as Iluh had and showed us the trees and the different fruits and talked about what everything was. I wasn’t really paying attention. Mike was walking with the man of the family and they were speaking in Indonesian about the trees. Mikes Indonesian was better than the man’s English, so it was the language of choice.

I hung back with the kids. The man’s oldest child was a girl named Butuh. She was 11 and accompanied by her 6 year old brother, Made. They were both very patient for children, respecting the exchange that was happening between Mike and their father, they brought out some dried cloves to show and hung back quietly without making a scene. Not understanding what was going on between the men and not really caring much about the trees, I started watching Butuh and Made. Made would have little outbursts where he would start dancing or moving his arms. He would spontaneously climb a tree or jump around. If the kid were in the states, I have no doubt he’d be on rydalin by now. He was that kind of boy. His sister never dismissed him, though. She was as patient with him as she was with us.

This one bored me a lot (people looking at cloves)

I took out my camera and snapped a few photos. They weren’t remarkable and I was honestly kind of boring myself with what I was doing, taking pictures of trees and kids and nothing. For whatever reason, my mind started wandering as I watched the kids and I started thinking about what messages I was giving them with my actions. What was I telling them was important to me, to westerners, what was I saying about the way we acted and what we did. I had a strong urge to communicate something to them, to bridge the gap and show them that we were not so different, so I started copying them. It wasn’t in a bad way, but I just wanted to become closer to them even though I couldn‘t speak.

They would march in place, so that the mosquitoes couldn’t land on their bare legs, so I marched in place. When we would head down the makeshift terrace steps, they would run down, surefooted and stop their momentum by cutting out and running along the flat ledge until they could stop. Despite their warnings “hati hati” I implemented this practice as well. I climbed a tree, I ran around. They soon wanted me to go in front of them and would laugh out loud every time I would go fast down to the ledge below. I handed the camera to Mike and went into a dead run up the hills and along the terraces. They immediately caught on and began chasing me. My size was an advantage and a disadvantage. My legs were twice the length of theirs, so my speed was far superior. The problem was, I was too tall o go running beneath the trees with ease like they could, so I had to duck almost doubled over as I ran. I would stop for a second until they had almost caught up, then, like a trapped animal, found a new escape path and darted in the other direction. I was happy to see that they were out of breath because I was gasping for air, so we stopped and walked along with the men again.

We walked up to the house and sat down at an outdoor table. The dad asked if we wanted any coffee and we said yes. I believe this area was like a tasting room to get you to buy coffee from them, but instead we used the time to do tricks with the kids. Mike was a hit. He would put a piece of fruit in one hand or the other and the kids would guess which hand it was in. The third child had appeared, Neomin, with huge eyes and fine curly hair. The three of them would point to one hand or another. Sometimes they would all chose the same hand and other times, one would defect from the group. Whoever got it right would do a little victory dance in their chair to rub it in and then they would all scream “lagi lagi!” (again, again).

Lagi Lagi!!!

We went into the mill area to watch the chocolate beans roast in a big metal oil drum, heated by a gas burner below. They simply picked the chocolate fruit, opened it up, dried the seeds in the sun, then roasted them in the oil drum. After all the seeds had been roasted, the family sat around the courtyard and shelled them.

I sat with the women near the door of the house and Mike sat with the men under a covered open space across the courtyard from us. If I thought olive sorting was tedious, I don’t even know the word for what this was. It went SLOW. We shucked less than a gallon an hour between 8 people. The women were more serious about the work. While the men would talk and go off on tangents, getting up and down, the women powered through. Especially the oldest woman, who was the grandmother. I tried to stay on par with her, but she never took a break. Not one. Mike had mentioned that the older women never smiled and I wondered if it was because they had the hardest lives. Not only did they work their entire lives, they also didn’t have the same freedoms as the men.

Mike conversing with the men.

We were sitting on ground. The floor was made of cement and I had to hunch over to grab the chocolate beans to shuck them. The women kept offering me a small wooden stool and I kept declining. I tried to explain that since I was so big, it was hard enough to reach the ground. If I were to sit on the stool, I would have had to bend an extra 8 inches to pick up my beans.

The day pushed on and we kept up the shucking. Tedious work suits me. I find it rewarding. And, it was an activity that everyone could participate in, which I appreciated. The grandparents could shuck, the kids could shuck. Aunts and uncles shucked. It was truly a family activity, a time that everyone could get together and just be in the same space for hours and hours.

My hands started to hurt after a while. It is similar to shelling peanuts, except the pieces inside are not loose in the shell, so it makes it harder. My back ached badly, but I wanted to finish the job. People started getting up and messing around, but as long as the old grandmother continued, I continued. People came down the driveway from time to time. A French couple came on a guided tour, a brother returned from his transportation gig, a man selling snacks on a bike came down and the family bought us some bags of jackfruit and tofu treats. Butuh showed me how to eat them.

Eventually, the sun shifted and I was forced by heat to go to the men’s compound. The kids followed. The men didn’t work as consistently as we did and they eventually had all gotten up. It was just me and the three kids. My back hurt so badly that I needed to lay on my stomach to shuck. The kids did the same. The youngest started touching her toes and I copies her. I did some push-ups and yoga moves and the kids mimicked. It was like gym class, except they were laughing the whole time. I eventually looked over at the sunny spot I had abandoned and the old woman was still shucking quietly. Everyone else had left. I straightened up and got back to work.

Laying down on the job.

Eventually everyone left to go look at the new addition that the family hoped to rent out. It was just me and the old grandmother in the courtyard. I was uncomfortable and my fingers hurt so bad. That would have been fine if I knew we were making progress. I looked over at the basket and we had barely made a dent. We were maybe 20% done and we had been working for 3 hours. I finished the little pile that I had started and stood up to join the others.

I thought I was tough and that I worked hard at home, but I had met my match. There is no way that I could work like this, day after day, with so little progress, for so little reward. I thought about what I think my time is worth and how much the grandmother thought her time was worth. I wonder if she felt valued at all. Does it bother her that her hours are worth pennies. It is the only thing she has ever known, so I suppose it doesn’t. It bothered me, though. It seemed pointless.

At the end of the day, I could understand the kids. I related to the way they played with each other and with me. Butuh wants to be a teacher, Made, a pilot and the youngest one wants to be a banker. I don’t know how she got that idea, but the point is that I can understand what it is like to be a kid with a dream. I could understand the dad and mom. They were doing the best with what they had, trying to make an easier life for their family with tourism and expansion. The Grandfather liked to work. He reminded me of my father. He was out working in the fields even though he didn’t really need to be, but he had his time to talk and at times laugh.

It was the grandmother that I was stretching to understand. We only made eye contact three times all day. She kept her head down. She smiled at me once when they were asking if I would have kids someday. That was about all I got from her. I never understood anything about her except that she loved her family, perhaps sacrificed much for them. I imagine she had seen it all. I think her stories would be the most different from my own and the most shocking of the family. I wished I could have spoken with her about her life because there were no answers in her actions, she only worked.

We left on the best of terms. They gave us a papaya and a young coconut. Mike said the littlest girl cried. We had spent the whole day with the family. I had said perhaps ten words the whole day, Mike many more of course, but their presence had seeped into my life. They were familiar to me now and I liked that. When we went back to say goodbye the next morning, everyone was around. They immediately came out and were even more welcoming than the day before. They said when we come back to Bali, we should come see them with our baby (I accidentally told them I was pregnant and never corrected the error).