Visit...

Today I made my first visit ever to an Indonesian home. Even during our time in Papua I never set foot inside the home of an Indonesian family. This evening after the supper dishes (sigh, no dishwasher) were done, I set out to pay our tutor for her services. I didn’t expect it to become a formal visit, but it did. She, if you remember, lives kind of in the middle of a rice field. Her house is attached on one side to someone else’s. I entered her home and right by the door was a very tiny sitting area the size of most Canadian’s bathrooms. There we sat. It was very dark in the house as the only light bulb was situated in the middle of the main part of the house. Ibu Nining apologized for the darkness as she doesn’t have her own electricity yet. She and her husband had built this house not that long ago and because it is in a rice field it is too far away from the other houses to get electricity without putting in a hydro pole. They have to pay for the pole and it is very expensive. I’m not sure how come her neighbours have electricity though…. You never really get the whole story here. Anyways, her husband is a taxi driver and doesn’t make very much money so she tutors. She also has a niece living with them so that she can go to school here in Bandung as the school’s where her parents live aren’t as good. This girl sees her parents about three times a year even though they live one hour drive away. Ibu Nining herself has a three year old, but she mostly lives with Ibu Nining’s sister as she has been married for three years and doesn’t have any children. It sure is a different way of living than we are accustomed to in Canada. So I had a little chat with her in both Indonesian and English. I am very excited that I can now understand some of what people are saying. It can be very frustrating when you first arrive and you have no clue what people are saying to you and it can be just the simplest thing. Tomorrow we are having an evaluation at the school. We are really hoping that we can skip unit one as in unit one you must speak with 15 different people each day and make notes about what you talked about. This will be very difficult for us as we will be in school from 8-12 and then go home and have lunch and then at 2:45 the kids need to be picked up from school. There isn’t really much time in there to speak to that many people.
Yesterday one of our helpers came to me and asked to borrow 2 million rupiah’s and have her pay cut $200,000 for 10 months to pay it back. Wow, that’s a lot of cash! She said that it was for school for one of her daughter’s who is going to university. (we don’t know if this is really the real reason, could be a family member needs the $ for something or they borrowed from someone else in the past and that person needs the $ now…) She has three daughters. The oldest is 21, then a 19 year old and then a 2 year old. So Hugo and I talked with a couple of the other MAF families about what to do. Truth is, we really don’t have that kind of money to lend out. So we decided to offer her $500,000 and to cut her salary $100,000 per month. So I wrote out exactly what I wanted to say on a piece of paper. I started out by thanking her for her hard work, and I must say she does work very hard. Laundry is a lot of work here… Then I explained that we are a big family and that we had to buy a lot of things for our house here and for the kids for school. Also that next month is Idul Fitri or Ramadan and then they receive a one month bonus. This is instead of a bonus at Christmas, as they are Muslim so Christmas means absolutely nothing to them. Then I offered her the half million. She was very thankful and said that it would pay for her daughter’s books and apologized for having to ask. Phew, I was somewhat worried as to how it would all work out. Sometimes they will push and push for the money. But we feel good about only giving her a quarter of what she asked for as that sends out the message that we aren’t a bank… The reality is that usually when you lend to the one, the other one will also ask just to keep things even… So we had to keep that in mind when deciding how much to give. Idul Fitri is a really big deal for them. They buy new clothes for their kids and make special food. Also, food prices go up in anticipation of Idul Fitri. So everyone’s costs go up. We have also been warned that starting Monday there will probably be policemen on all the roads just looking for people to pull over for whatever reason and then solicit a bribe. For us that means making sure we are all wearing helmets on our motorcycles and carrying our special traveling paperwork from the police. You don’t want to give them any reason to pull you over to get a bribe. So today I went and bought myself a quality crafted motorcycle helmet for all of $65,000 rups. $78,000 is $10 Can. Unbelievably cheap! It’s even got a tinted visor!