Independence Day

Today, August 17th, is the Indonesian day of Independence. Back in the 1945, Indonesia was freed from Dutch rule to become a nation on its own. Papua is another story, which you can read here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_New_Guinea

This is the Papuan flag called the Morning Star. It is forbidden to fly this flag anywhere in Indonesia. So needless to say, unlike in Bandung, there weren’t any noticeable festivities for this day of Independence in our area. We instead, had a water fight, along with Doren Togeretz who just arrived this morning from Canada along with his family.

This afternoon as I was beginning to prepare supper, a woman came to the door. She had rather deep-set eyes, an afro, and was missing a front tooth. She asked if she could speak with Hugo and I. Only she said “nyonya” for me and “tuan” for Hugo. I thought she was asking to speak with me and God. God is Tuhan. I’ve never heard anyone use the word “tuan” with respect to a man. The word is used fairly often in the Bible, but not in everyday language. Anyways, she then clarified to me, as I must have looked confused, that she wanted to speak, very briefly, with me and my husband. (she said the terms “nyonya” and “tuan” are terms of respect that she uses when talking with foreigners) She wanted to go inside our house, which is really rather culturally inappropriate to ask, but I said we’d just sit outside. I don’t like inviting strangers into my house. So we sat outside and she said she wanted to pray with us first before speaking to us, briefly... So she rattled off, at a fair clip, a prayer and her voice got louder and she spoke faster and faster and then ended. So here we are, kids are everywhere, one in the bathroom is yelling for us another one wants to go inside but is dripping wet... you get the picture. So the woman goes on to say that she is well-known around the whole area. Even outside the country, I think there’s a person in Holland who knows her... She used to drink all the time but then five years ago she stopped and now she is a worker for God. So she goes around and prays for people and on June 18th God told her that she should give people an envelope so they could give her money that she could use for transportation so she doesn’t have to walk everywhere. She claimed to have prayed over two blind people who came to see later, but not by her, she assured us, it was God who did it. She spoke incredibly quickly but as her language was pretty good we could understand 90% of it. So we explained to her that we don’t know her, we’d only just met her... she went on to say what her name was and looked at us as if we were odd because didn’t she just tell us her life story? As though that is enough to know her. I said, “Ibu, we don’t know you, we only know your words.” We explained that we like to give money to our church because they have programs set up to help people and we know where the money is going then. She said, that’s fine, I just want to pray with you again. So she did at quite a clip. Then she left. We saw her try to go around to other houses but eventually left. We called the base manager and asked him if he knew her and he didn’t. But he did say that anyone that wants to come on base to ask for money has to have a letter from the MAF office in order to do so. That way we can be reassured that they are for real and we don’t have to deal with people asking for money all the time. There are guards here at the entrance to the compound so we don’t have to deal with a lot of this kind of thing. The other day a lady came by and sold me some pineapples and bananas. That was nice, as I needed fruit and I can’t walk to anyplace where you can buy fruit.

Have a good weekend!