Indonesia, Etc.: Exploring the Improbable Nation (40 page)

Now, sitting quietly away from home and family, she told me her story and I began to understand just how strong she was. She had Yufrida and two other children with her first husband, whom she described as a good-for-nothing. ‘He used to steal cars from the military. Then he’d sell them and gamble away the money so that when they caught him, he couldn’t pay them back.’ She shook her head as if wanting to disbelieve. At one point he disappeared for two years, leaving her with the three children. It wasn’t until she was introduced to another batch of children that she discovered he had long ago taken another wife. He was, of course, no help with Yufrida. Hamidah learned to be self-reliant. She was living in Banda Aceh at the time of the tsunami. She grabbed the immobile Yufrida and climbed out of reach of the waters, but their home was destroyed. ‘The good thing about the tsunami was that we finally got a wheelchair, from one of those help-the-victims NGOs.’

That was the only assistance Hamidah has ever had in caring for her daughter, despite petitioning the department of social welfare for help for years. I asked about schooling, about physical therapy, about speech therapy. None. Yufrida is clearly a sociable person, and bright. I suggested to her mother that with a little bit of support, she could probably live a much more independent, engaged and fun life. ‘After all,’ I said, ‘she’s not mentally handicapped.’

Hamidah, usually so quick-witted in response, said nothing. She looked at me for a long time, then looked away, then looked at me again. At last she said quietly, ‘That’s right. She’s not mentally handicapped.’

The next day, a group of ladies were teaching me to make Acehnese cakes. Yufrida watched me trying ham-fistedly to copy their rolling and squeezing of dough, and laughed. I asked her what I was doing wrong. ‘Too thin,’ she said of my scrawny attempts.

A neighbour with a face like a horse wrinkled up her long nose and spoke over Yufrida. ‘She’s handicapped,’ she said, as though this might have escaped me. ‘She has to be spoon-fed, and you think she knows how to make cakes!’

I opened my mouth to respond, but Ibu Hamidah cut in, low voiced, icy: ‘She’s not mentally handicapped.’

Horse Face looked shocked, as though the distinction between physical and metal disability was something entirely new to her. She made her excuses and left. ‘She’s not mentally handicapped,’ Hamidah repeated, as her neighbour walked out the door.

Later in the trip, in Kalimantan, I met a young Dutch volunteer who was providing free physical therapy for the disabled. She felt that religion was the first hurdle many Indonesian parents faced when considering how to care for disabled children. ‘This child was sent by God to test me. I must bear the burden with equanimity.’ The second, perhaps related, was a sense of shame. I have an imperfect child (perhaps a punishment for some misdeed of mine?). Better not to let anyone know. The third was a fear of the costs that would be involved in treatment. Finally, many parents simply didn’t have any idea that treatment was possible.

All of these things are partly true, I’m sure, though perhaps not of Hamidah, who had at least tried to get some help for Yufrida. But the biggest challenge for Yufrida and hundreds of thousands of other disabled Indonesians is surely the attitudes of people like Horse Face and indeed her own grandmother, upstanding members of a society that simply does not deal well with misfits.

My own efforts to fit in as best I could with the people among whom I was travelling came a cropper in a group of microscopic islands off the coast of Sumatra. Pulau Banyak (‘Many Islands’) is technically part of Aceh province, but the local population speaks Malay and the police chief in the main town referred to himself as ‘not from here at all: I’m an outsider, from Aceh’.

The police chief railed for a while about the short-sightedness of the local fishermen. Breathing air pumped down a tube from a primitive compressor on a canoe above, the divers sink to great depths, then squirt potassium cyanide on lobster, grouper and other expensive fish, a technique illegal since 2004 but still widely employed. The toxin stuns the animals and allows them to be captured alive and sold to seafood restaurants for their aquaria. But the poison also gets caught in the sea currents, killing swathes of the very coral on which the fish and other valuable species such as lobsters and sea-slugs depend. ‘I don’t even know how to begin to explain to them how stupid that is.’ The policeman shook his head.

While they were busy wiping out their own future earnings, the divers often got the bends; several had been paralysed and a couple had died. I remarked that there were many ways to die around here; just that morning I had heard that a woman in neighbouring Haloban had been eaten by a crocodile. ‘Only her bones were left,’ the person who told me had said, with some relish.

The police chief nodded. ‘But it’s okay, they’re hiring a shaman to catch it,’ he said. He explained how it worked. The Crocodile Whisperer goes to the shore where the person was eaten, and drives a sacred spear into the ground. That calls together the fraternity of crocodiles. Then the good crocodiles, the ones who haven’t done anything wrong, point out the naughty, woman-eating croc. The shaman catches the murderer, and the other crocs go back to eating fish and minding their own business.

It seemed unlikely that a police chief who railed against idiotic short-termism among local divers could simultaneously believe that a man with special powers could convoke a conclave of crocodiles. Does it work? I asked. ‘Oh yes,’ said the police chief. ‘Unless, of course, the shaman is a fraud.’

I resolved to go to Haloban to talk to the Crocodile Whisperer, hitching a lift on a boat with a couple of curiously laconic Dutch volunteers who were passing that way en route from a turtle monitoring station I had visited. The weather was filthy, but it didn’t deter the boat boys. They emptied the water out of a small boat through a hole in the gunwales, then plugged the hole with a bit of old flip-flop. We launched out through the crashing surf.

My yellow rain cape proved helpless in the face of water which sloshed and sprayed all around. The volunteers looked miserable. ‘In Ireland, we call this kind of weather “lumpy”,’ I shouted across the roar of engine and waves, fake-cheerfully. The young Dutchman nodded silently. Then he spoke for the first time. ‘In Holland,’ he said, ‘we call it “shit”.’

It took nearly two hours to get to Haloban, plenty of time to wonder idly how many weeks it would be before anyone noticed if I drowned out here. By the time I arrived I was cold to my bones and my hands were almost too numb to hold my bag. I clamped my sodden jilbab firmly over my hair and dragged my bag along the muddy street past Haloban’s only coffee shop. The coffee drinkers eyed me silently. Not one
Dari mana?
– ‘Where are you from?’, not one ‘Hello Mister’, just a wall of stares.

Haloban has one guest house, run by a woman from the island of Nias. She was elaborately kind, but treated me as though I were a bit simple. She spoke Slooooowly and Cleeeaaarly, and scattered in the odd word of English every now and then, just to make me feel at home. ‘
You
mandi dulu, habis itu
you
lapor diri, baru kita
eat rice
,’ and she mimed scooping food into her mouth. After I’d washed, I could go and report to the police, she said. Then we’d eat.

After I’d washed and dug dryish clothes out of the middle of my damp bag, I went and sat under an awning in the street in front of the guest house. Lying on a bench under the awning was the village cop. In the Suharto years, foreigners were supposed to report to the police when staying in rural areas, and in Aceh the habit persisted throughout the conflict that ended in 2005. I sometimes still report in very remote areas when I am staying with villagers just to spare them any suspicion. Besides, the cops are often a good source of local gossip. But the policeman lying on the bench obviously did not have the slightest desire to register me. He had hiked up his T-shirt and was scratching his belly with one hand, his other hand was busy texting. I said good evening but he studiously ignored me. Somehow, I was glad to be relieved of the need to launch into the polite chit-chat which would bring me to the burning topics of the day: Crocodile Whisperers and the theft of turtle eggs.

In truth, after seven months on the road, I was feeling a little fragile about the whole just-say-yes, of-course-I’ll-get-into-a-leaky-boat-in-a-lashing-rainstorm travel experience. I started playing with my own phone, reaching into my other world for the first time in three days. I texted a writer friend in Jakarta: ‘How will I ever make sense of this country?’ I wailed. ‘That’s what editors are for,’ he replied.

I scrolled through my e-mails. There were a few requiring grown-up policy recommendations for HIV treatment services in Papua – a reminder of a day job that seemed very far away. One from the editor of a magazine in London wanting an Indonesia think piece, a cheery hello from my mother, and a message from Sara, my editor in London, the one who had commissioned this book in the first place.

She was quitting her job.

My book would be orphaned. I’d have to wrestle this impossible jelly all by myself. The sky was falling. For the first time since I’d been on the road, I burst into tears.

The cop, his belly still flapping in the wind, continued to ignore me. I can’t sit in the street in this unfriendly town sobbing, I thought. I made a dash for the dark cubicle that served as my room, through the front hall where the whole family, including grandparents and assorted teenagers, was sitting on the floor watching sinetron. I closed my door and suddenly seven months of staying in damp, windowless flea-pits, of being woken at four by the mosque, five by the chickens and six by the schoolkids, seven months of defending my childlessness, being asked why I didn’t have any friends, being told I must have been pretty when I was young, seven months in a world without loo paper, alcohol or English conversation, seven months of wearing the same six pairs of knickers, of endlessly packing and repacking bags, seven months of getting over foot rot only to come out in a mystery rash, seven months of trying to make sense of things that made no sense, above all, seven months of trying to fit into a world that was, quite simply, not my world: it all came crashing down on me. I started really sobbing: hiccupy, snotty sort of sobbing.

The mosque bellowed out the evening call to prayer from just next door. (Great!) Then an announcement: there would be special prayers to implore Allah to support the work of the Crocodile Whisperer, who had already been camped out at the Beach of Death for three days with no success. ‘
Aduh!
’ I thought. ‘I’ve got to stop sobbing so that I can go to the prayer meeting for the Crocodile Whisperer.’ And then I was laughing at myself and sobbing at the same time, and thinking how postmodern it all was. Ibu knocked at the door. ‘Dinner.’

I blew my nose and dried my tears as best I could, and emerged to explain that I was just going to the mosque for the crocodile prayers, that I’d eat after that. Ibu was having none of it. She took me by the hand, led me to the table, sat me down, and put a plate of rice in front of me. Then she sat down and put her face close to mine. ‘Eat!’

I ate. She watched each forkful disappear into my mouth, as if I were a wayward toddler. After a bit, satisfied that I wasn’t going to wriggle down from the table before finishing my dinner, she sat back. ‘You’re sad,’ she said. Mmmmmm. ‘Why?’

How am I going to explain to this kind, solicitous lady that I’ve got swollen eyes and a snot-trailed face because my editor has quit? I chose the easy option. ‘My friend died,’ I said.

‘Oh,’ she said. ‘Well . . .’ She hinged a forearm at the elbow, and snapped her hand smartly down on the table-top. ‘. . . At least she wasn’t eaten by a crocodile.’

Eventually, I made friends with some of the silent, staring fishermen at Haloban’s coffee stall. None of them would tell me where the woman had been eaten; the Crocodile Whisperer couldn’t be disturbed until he’d made his catch, they said. After a couple of days, they began muttering about the shaman. He had been brought in all the way from Simeulue island, eighty kilometres to the north of Haloban, and had been paid three million rupiah, twice the average monthly income in Aceh. But after five or six days: still nothing. Maybe he wasn’t a real whisperer, this one, maybe he was a fraud.