Tales of a Female Nomad (28 page)

“But Bapak, Indonesians are the police, the army, the businesses, the government workers, and many of the teachers. The government is filling your island with workers and transmigrants until the Papuans are no longer a majority. How can you win a fight against Indonesia?”

“We have a very strong belief that we are right. No one knows our mountains and valleys the way we do. And we are also building up an arsenal and experience, and we already know where the government stores its weapons. In the last years many Papuans have joined the army and the police.”

As we walk back to the village, all I can think of is the power of the Indonesian army, the militias, and the police against the Papuan natives.

At dinnertime, we crawl through the three-by-two-foot door into the
honai.
The wooden floor is covered with grass and there is a fire burning split wood in the middle of the room. It looks as though the fire has been built on a thick layer of ashes that is protecting the wood floor. Above the fire is a four-post structure with horizontal beams, and hanging from the beams, cooking our rice, is a large metal pot.

Ours is the biggest of the seventeen
honai
in the village, with about a fifteen-foot diameter. It used to be the men’s house, but now the men go somewhere else, so Bapak’s family uses it.

Merinus and I brought the rice and vegetables that we are going to eat; we are nine for dinner. A few more people arrive while we are eating, including the chief of the village, who wears a knitted ski hat and a
horim,
both of which are symbols of his station. All the other men are wearing shorts. And the women are wearing blouses or dresses. The chief sits with us for about half an hour, long enough to eat, talk, and smoke. When he goes home, we all curl up and go to sleep.

Sort of. There are nine of us on the grassy floor: Bapak, three women, three children, Merinus, and I. There are sneezes, snores, coughs, a stillcrackly fire, and critters on the thatched roof. At some point in the middle of the night, a little girl, no more than six, climbs in the door, curls up on the floor, and goes to sleep. Where is she coming from in the middle of the night?

I twist, wiggle, change positions, scratch, and dwell on mosquitoes, pig fleas, and malaria. Three of the four adults who are sleeping across from me have had malaria attacks within the last year. Bapak’s attack was so bad he had to go to the hospital. Bapak’s wife is currently in the middle of an attack. I have never spoken to the fourth person; nor have I asked Merinus if he suffers from it. Nearly everyone does. It will be a miracle if I get off this island malaria-free. (I do.)

All night I am haunted by the image of children with distended stomachs. I can not get their shapes out of my mind. More than half of the young children in this village look as though they are pregnant. The condition, called kwashiorkor, is caused by a diet low in calories, high in starch, and seriously deficient in protein. Some of the other visual symptoms are dry skin, and reddish-orange discoloration of hair. Kwashiorkor can also lead to stunted mental development. In one of the mountain villages during our trek I talked to a teacher who told me that the kids were hard to teach because their brains were affected by malnutrition.

The simple addition of powdered skim milk to the diet could reverse the disease. But who would buy and distribute the milk? And educate the people on how to use it? What about beans and rice? Or chickens and eggs? Or goats? Or cows? Who cares about these people of the clouds, high in the hills of Irian Jaya? Certainly not the Indonesian government.

I have no idea what time it is when the rain starts, but the thatched roof leaks, badly. I wriggle around in my sleeping bag, feeling and looking like a giant worm, until I find a spot where only my feet are being dripped upon. Then I pull my knees up to my chest and fall asleep.

The next day, after we eat boiled yams and corn baked in the fire, I decide to write down some of my thoughts, but there is no place where I can be alone. Every time I sneak off to a quiet spot, I am surrounded by kids. Bapak gives me permission to go into the church, which is on a hill about one hundred meters from his house.

“The children are not permitted to enter unless I am there,” he tells me. “If you are in the church, they will leave you alone.”

The church is a wooden building, painted white, with a corrugated metal roof, by far the biggest structure in the area. The dimensions of the sanctuary are about thirty by fifty feet with a twenty-foot ceiling. The building is less than a year old. Bapak told me that they raised money to pay for it by having a giant 250-pig feast. People came from all over the island.

I sit in a pew and begin to write. Within seconds I see the bobbing silhouettes of heads and hands in the windows. And I hear giggling. My hide-out has been discovered. Before long all the windows have bouncing heads. I ignore my audience. I desperately need these minutes alone to think about the last two weeks. They have been extraordinary. Singing, sharing meals, holding babies.
Horim,
naked breasts, laughing children, malaria, cookfires, river baths, kwashiorkor, pigs, yams,
honai.
The people I have met have been overwhelming and wonderful. We are from opposite ends of the spectrum of human life on earth, but we share a core that makes us human. I have known kindness, generosity, gentleness, and warmth from everyone I have met.

Later that afternoon, I sit down with a group of kids and ask them to sing me some songs. They sing a hymn. Then I teach them, in Indonesian, one of my favorite kids’ songs, which I have heard Balinese children singing, “If you’re happy and you know it, clap your hands.” For nearly an hour we sing to each other, laughing, miming, being silly. When we finish singing, everyone wants to hold my hand as we walk toward home.

I find it hard to say good-bye. Everyone in the village sends me off with hugs and waves and smiles. I am returning to Wamena to say good-bye to Ursula, Teresia, and Elsa, who have been trekking. Tomorrow they leave for Bali.

When I go to the airport to see them off, I decide that since I still have a week before I have to meet Michael, I am going to find another village to live in. But this time I want to go alone. The first time I was with a team. This last time with Merinus. Now I’m ready to go on my own.

Before I leave the airport, I stop off at the MAF (Missionary Aviation Fellowship) terminal. The office is packed with indigenous people signing up to get on flights for immediate takeoff. There are no tourists in the chaos. It’s worth a try.

I load up on food, pack a few clothes, and go back to the terminal. I want to go someplace, anyplace, deep in the mountains, where it will be just me and the villagers. I have eight days before my tour with Michael begins.

Sorry, I’m told at the desk, reservations must be made long in advance.

As I’m trying to figure out how to get around the system, I meet Yarit, a man who has been in Wamena for a month with his three-year-old son and a young man from his village. A month ago, the child was watching someone in his village cut brush when the little boy got too close to the knife. His eye was slashed. The missionaries flew him, his father, and a cousin to Wamena, where the injured eye was removed. Now they are on their way home. There is no eye patch, just a hole and what looks like an ooze. I hope it’s ointment.

“My first son got sick and died,” says Yarit. “And now this.” He hugs his little boy. Then he looks at me through the hug. “Why don’t you come with us to our village? There is room for you in our plane. It’s a Cessna that seats five. We are three, the pilot is four, and you could be five. The plane will take us to Holuwon. From there, we will walk together to my village.”

Why not?

I sit in front with the pilot, an American missionary in his early thirties. We fly between mountains, curving as the mountains curve, close to the ground, past waterfalls and rivers, cliffs and thick forests.

After about thirty minutes, a field appears. The pilot puts the wheels down at the bottom of a hill, and he stops the plane by rolling up.

When we are on the ground, I ask about a return flight in six days.

“Today is the eleventh. There’s a flight ordered for here on the eighteenth,” he tells me.

I am supposed to meet Michael on the nineteenth. It could work.

“But we’re only honoring 20 percent of our requests right now. We’ve got a lot of planes being repaired. And a lot of flights are cancelled because of clouds. If you want to be absolutely certain that you’ll be in Wamena on a particular date, you better come back with me right now.”

I just got here. I’m not leaving. Within minutes, he is gone.

The whole village of Holuwon has come to meet the plane. Yarit tells them I am going to walk with him to his village.

The teacher of the Holuwon school, Bapak Guru, introduces himself to me. “That walk is very difficult,” he says. “There is a six-inch-wide bridge over a river with a rope to hold onto. It sways back and forth as you walk across.”

The Indonesian word for “sways back and forth” sounds exactly like the act it describes,
goyong-goyong.
It scares me just to hear the word.

“If I have a hand to hold, I can probably do it.”

“It is a one-person bridge,” says Bapak Guru. “And there’s another place on the walk where you have to put your back against the hill and walk sideways for a long time.” He demonstrates, stepping sideways as though the path is no bigger than his feet. “In front of you the mountain drops off; that’s why you have to go sideways.”

I can feel the panic rising inside me just hearing about it.

“We would be very happy to have you stay with us in Holuwon,” says the teacher. “You can stay in my house with me, my wife, and our three children.”

Feeling just a little bit suspicious, I ask Yarit if it really is true about the bridge and the drop-off. He confirms it. I’m staying in Holuwon.

The teacher’s wife is sweet and young, probably about twenty-three. The kids are seven, four, and one and a half. The youngest was adopted when her mother died in childbirth. I write down and memorize everyone’s name. Two of the three children have distended bellies. I have brought enough food, rice, noodles, vegetables, tangerines, and powdered milk to feed all of us for a week. My first night there I cook rice and vegetables. The kids eat as though they are starving.

Bapak Guru is from a distant village and another tribe; he has no land in Holuwon so he cannot grow anything. The family is dependent upon whatever the schoolchildren bring to the teacher. Bapak Guru tells me that he graduated from junior high school, which qualifies him to teach.

The next morning I walk with him to the one-room schoolhouse. There are twenty-two kids in the room from class one to class four. Five girls, probably between twelve and fourteen, fully developed and topless, sit in the back of the room. They are wearing beaded plastic necklaces and grass skirts. Last week there were six; one of them just got married.

The school day begins with Bapak Guru asking if anyone has brought him food. Five children hand him yams; another gives him a bunch of green leaves.

Then come two hymns and a prayer. One of the main jobs of the missionaries in Irian Jaya is to give the people religion in their own tribal languages. Hymns and the Bible and the prayers are translated and taught in the local languages.

Bapak Guru holds a rattan stick in his hand as he calls the roll. Two girls who were absent last week are hit on the legs. Three of the younger students giggle and are hit on their heads.

Time for math.

Bapak Guru opens a book (the students do not have books, only notebooks) and copies onto the blackboard, 125 × 5.

“What is it?” he asks.

No one answers. He writes the answer without comment, and then writes, 12 × 2. Again, no answers.

Twenty-four in Indonesian is
dua puluh empat.
Bapak Guru says, slowly,
“Dua puluh em . . .”

“Pat,”
says the class.

25 × 3. No answers. Seventy-five is
tujuh puluh lima.

“Tujuh puluh li . . .”

“Ma,”
says the class. And so it goes for other examples, each one copied from the book.

There are no explanations of how to do the calculations until he puts on the board, 126 × 7. And he writes the answer, 862, and goes about showing how you can prove that your answer is right. Except he can’t because it isn’t. He spends ten minutes facing the board, trying to figure out where he made his mistake, and finally he gives up in frustration and puts seventeen new examples (from the book) on the board and tells the class to do the calculations in their notebooks.

“Whoever doesn’t do these gets the rattan,” he says, and he leaves to go to his house for some coffee.

I stay in the classroom and watch the students write the examples in their notebooks. They can write numbers, but only one girl can do the math.

When Bapak Guru returns, he sends everyone outside to cut grass and go home.

In the afternoon I tell Bapak Guru that I would like to try to arrange for a flight out next week. If I’m going to meet Michael on the nineteenth in Wamena, I have to get a secure flight out of here. Today is only the twelfth, but if I wait for the scheduled flight on the eighteenth, and clouds close the door, I won’t make it. So far, all I’ve seen are clouds. Ideally, I’d like to book a flight for the sixteenth or seventeenth, with the eighteenth as backup.