Days Three Through Eight: Maumere
I took that picture when I got off the plane. I was not the first to take that picture, I’m certain, and given the immediate actions of the tourists I watched arriving as I departed, I will not be the last.
Anyways, back in Maumere, where the sun shines, there is a light breeze, and having a hotel parked on the beach is within your price range (or, at least the Bank’s).
Don’t want you to think I worked too hard after all, or sweated it out in mosquito-ridden huts in a dusty village.
(Also, the hotel is owned by the airline, so you get airline pastries for breakfast - a humorous touch)
OK, the beach was not all fun and games. It was fun to laze and read a book after a day of rambling around dusty inland villages. But not much in the way of games. This isn’t really a beach where you’re going to go for a nice brisk morning swim. Walking around in the water at low tide the first time, I kept thinking to myself “This is a rocky beach. My feet hurt. Those volcanoes must have left a lot of rock behind millennia ago.”
That would be wrong. The sharp rocks I was walking on were not sharp rocks; they were eroded cement.
A few Americans are still thinking about the tsunami in Aceh, but I bet almost none are thinking about the Flores tsunami. An earthquake in the Flores Sea, followed up by a tsunami in 1992, killed thousands (not hundreds of thousands, fortunately), and wrecked infrastructure in many places, but especially in Maumere. I think there was hope that Flores with its varied terrain and attractions would become something of a second, less trafficked Bali (although it would need to be Bali number three – Bali number two is the island of Lombok, to Bali’s east) After the currency crisis in the late 90s and the Bali bombing in 2002, that possibility seems unimaginable at this stage.
Here’s where the eroded cement comes in; after the tsunami, the waves moved inland and re-claimed 15 meters of beach. The cement that was nicking my bare feet was leftover from whatever people had built out into the water before the tides terrifyingly surged up onto the island.
The longer-term impacts on Maumere as a city are really fascinating. This is a place where km after km of beach is not settled by the wealthy and privileged. Women and their children were meandering about at low tide for shellfish to pick and take home for dinner. Fisherman had parked their boats up and down the beach, seemingly free of charge. Children played, and I even got trailed by a barking dog when I strayed into its territory while out for a stroll. The rich don’t want this beach; so, it belongs to the poor.
I look at that fact, and for a moment I say “Forget development. If you want to get wealthier, this beach won’t be yours anymore. This beach will be mine.” And who is to say what the people here really want – to eke out an existence in this quiet, low employment, low energy, and low stress town of 60,000 (probably about the population of my immediate neighborhood in Jakarta). Or to charge about in SUVs pitching to tourists why they should deal with annoying guides driving them to and fro as they go visiting “traditional villages?” It’s not for me to answer that question, but I don’t like SUVs rattling about at home, and I certainly don’t enjoy them here.
A language lesson…and some liquor
Here is the internet’s only Bahasa Sikka-Bahasa Indonesia-Bahasa Inggris dictionary:
Apang Gawan – Terima Kasih – Thank You
Hama-Hama – Sama-Sama – You’re Welcome
Mo-AT – Bapak – Mister
Du-A – Ibu – Misses
Bao Sa-AYE – Sampai Jumpa – Goodbye and have a good day
These are a few important phrases when you are rolling around in quiet villages, talking to locals for whom Bahasa Indonesia is at best a second language.
Don was my “local facilitator” translating all of my questions about decentralization laws and village governments to the mostly village elites that I interviewed. He also helped me find my way to decent seafood, bargain for nice prices on the local sarung ikat cloth to bring back home (the secret? Walk Away!), and know where to get whatever I needed in Maumere. Don is a native of the town, living the next island over now in Kupang, Timor Barat (the other half of East Timor’s island) with his wife, and soon baby (good luck!). Don wasn’t just a native of Flores or Maumere – he’s a native of the neighborhood where many of the hotels and airline ticket offices are located. On the last day in town, Don picked me up and took me over to meet Du’a Dela Santo, and we may as well have walked.
Don and his mother also fixed me up with a couple of bottles of Moke, that being the liquor distilled from the fruit of palm trees in the backyard stills of countless Florenese homes. There is quite a lot of moke sold in Flores, but basically no moke industry. People from the villages who live in Maumere bring some back when they go home, and sell it on the streets…in emptied out bottles of Bintang Beer, with corn cobs to plug up the bottles. I’m serious. I’ve got two bottles of the stuff sitting here if you don’t believe me, and I’m wondering what it will do to my head when I drink more of the stuff.
(Party at the International House, September 6…maybe call the CU student ambulance, too)
Actually, I really mean more of the stuff because I already had a taste. Here is the still in Desa Watugong that I visited.
Not much of a flavor to it really; and after having a gulp from a hollowed out palm nut shell, I can’t say I felt like I had much of a buzz on, although the locals were certain I would be all mabuk and on my ass by the time I made it back to the road. These kind of stills are all over the villages, people cooking up the booze first for their own consumption, and whatever surplus they can manage for sale. We were trying to find the former kepala desa (it literally means ‘village head’) of Watugong one afternoon, and wandered back onto his property looking for him. We decided to wait, and the place to wait was…underneath his still. He didn’t turn up. Maybe he had gone off somewhere to sell his moke…or, perhaps, drink it.
(That’s going to be it for pictures in this post. I was conserving battery power as I managed to fry out the charger for my camera during the trip. I’m also not comfortable with taking pictures of villagers in settings like this – I’m not artful enough to portray poverty tastefully)
Cuisine in Flores was underwhelming. I ate at Rumah Makan Jakarta, Rumah Makan Sarinah, Rumah Makan Borobodur, all very cozy locations at the harbor. But, I may as well have been back in Java – it was all ayam bakar and ikan asam manis, just like it might be here.
The culture here uses pigs in ceremonies all the time, so I was expecting there might be restos selling pork products and I could get some locally flavored pork ribs (shhh….don’t tell my Jewish friends and family!). But, no, not really. Apparently they just save the pigs for the ceremonies, and that’s the only time they eat pig. Someone had even stopped by Don’s mother’s house that week and made an offer on the sow that was sunning itself in her backyard when I visited. So, no curious locally-flavored cuisine for me.
Didn’t you come to Flores to work?
Oh, but I did. Five days, ten interviews, about 35 pages of notes. It was hard to do much more than that. Life here just doesn’t move very quickly. We could have run around like madmen and tried to interview everyone in site asking zillions of questions, but nothing else would be moving that quickly – it would be like some experiment in relativity where I’d be getting real old real fast and everything around me would be aging slowly.
That’s how life is in Flores. People work – they keep cattle, they grow rice and cassava and coconut and palm and corn.
(not to neglect tamarind - it was asam season and everyone was breaking tarmind shells in their yards)
They drive transport buses with annoyingly souped up horns and dirty English phrases in colorful letters on the front windows.
They are catching fish, and sharpening their machetes for days out in the fields.
Some of them go to offices that are just as relaxed.
This place is a little bit plugged into the grid of the tourist economy, but once you get past the hassles of the airport and the bus station, just like the world has forgotten much of what’s going on in this city, it also forgets you.
Errr, sort of. Rolling through these villages, I caused a lot of rubber-necking, a lot of “hello mister,” even some squeals. Especially shocked when I declared “Bao sa-aye!” as I roll by. These are places that Pak Bule the white man just doesn’t penetrate most of the time, even if they are a fifteen-minute motorbike ride from “the city.”
But mostly, life goes on here. While I interview the kepala desa in Watugong, I hear chickens clucking and children carrying on at the school across the street in one ear, and a way old school typewriter clacking away in the other ear. It’s the typewriter in one ear and construction of the new village office going on in the other when I get to Nele Wutung later in the week, that is to say, not all that different (although Nele Wutung was visibly wealthier than Watugong – and before the Suharto-era ended, governed by leadership that was much more corrupt; coincidence?).
In that village, when we were finished one afternoon, I asked Don what was up the hill we were on. He said “the end of the village.” So, I asked him to take me up there – and the bike fought its way up the steep hill where the pavement had long ago given up and started returning to dust.
And there it was – a grotto at the top of a stone staircase, with an empty space for the Virgin Mary. I immediately wonder about who the poor sucker is that has to drag the statue up there when the occasion requires it. People come up to the end of the village to pay their obeisance when Mary is on display, and then they must turn around and wander back down into it – the end of the village doesn’t lead anywhere – it just takes you back into the wilderness, and no one really wants to go there.
Indeed, there is no end of the village. It stretches onward, blowing with the dirt past the signs that say “selamat jalan dan terima kasih!” as you leave every village. But, when you get to Maumere there are still pigs running along on the beach, goats chewing up the grass on the soccer pitch, and chickens dodging traffic. Old women still have teeth stained with betel. And young men may lounge on the street corners in jeans instead of sarung, but they are still lounging, with that expectant look that says “What next?”
Don’t have the answer to that question – don’t want to have the answer to that question for anyone but me.
But let me tell you, when I strolled up the beach, I decided to go back inland and walk down the main road off the beach on my way back. At one stage, I came to a sign across the road from me, and it said “Maumere” in white letters across a blue background.
There was another sign pointing away from me, and I turned back to look as I passed it. And there was the exact same sign, but with a red line drawn crosswards. I guess that sign, indicating the place I had just walked from, meant “Not Maumere.”
And in this place where some clown of a civil servant can simply draw a line across a sign and say what is and is not the city, and what is and is not the kampung, we know it’s all a lie – this place is no city – it is all kampung.
In the research I did, the villages in Flores came across looking much less encumbered, and much less corrupt, with much for zeal for the reform that works so hard everyday to take grip in this country. But there’s that cynical part of me that wonders if local political leadership has ceased much of its official theft here because there just isn’t that much to steal.
But enough punditry; you can read the report in 2006 sometime if you’re really interested in all that.
