Sumatra

And a lot did happen. I went with my American friend and her two children to her amazingly beautiful house in Sanur, Bali (with a swimming pool!) Then left from there to Jakarta where I met a Baha’i woman. We flew to Padang, Sumatra, then took a very long van ride to Bukit Tinggi, a beautiful town in the hills (Bukit means ‘hill’). Everyone we met wanted to know who I was and what I was doing there. The air was cool, the streets were clean (and complete with sidewalks and trashcans on every block!), there were flowers and horse-drawn carts everywhere. We stayed with the woman’s mother, Mrs. Astani. Mrs. Astani came to Indonesia with her husband from Iran the same time that the older Mrs. Soraya came with her husband. Both the men were doctors, and the government placed them where they were needed. I had a wonderful week visiting Baha’is in remote villages, hiking in the canyon, shopping in the market, touring the vast Japanese cave network (dug by Javanese slaves), and driving to the lakes next to the volcanoes on either side of the town. I even went to the zoo (a bit sad – and I got photographed more than the elephants) and sat in a park. The houses have pointy roofs that resemble cow horns, and the town is laid out around the ‘Big Ben’ of Sumatra – a clock tower called Jam Kedang (literally ‘big clock’). I also ate Padang food with my hands. It’s similar to Indian food, but with different ingredients. I much prefer it to Javanese food, but it’s very spicy. The people don’t speak much Indonesian unless they’ve been educated. The culture in Minangkabao, and the division between the classes is much less than in Surabaya. I later found out that a local person will never hire another Sumatran to do housework or any other ‘low’ work – they bring in the Javanese who they consider to be inferior. One of the Baha’i families I visited were Javanese farmers. Because of their ethnicity, they weren’t able to own land and had to give half their crops to the other members of the village. Despite this difficulty, they were incredibly loving and provided a whole group of us with lunch. In exchange, I taught several children, theirs included, how to sing “head, shoulders, knees and toes” and then explained (in Indonesian, which they understood even with my limited language ability) about how many people in the world don’t like other people because they have different noses or eyes or knees or skin color, but that Baha’u’llah – the founder of the Baha’i Faith – teaches that these differences should not be a problem. That our hearts are all the same and that we should all be like one family. Outside was a beautiful flower garden full of pink and yellow crysanthemums. People in Java don’t only have flower gardens if they are wealthy enough to pay someone to garden for them.

At the end of the week I spent the weekend in Padang (Padang is where the ferry leaves to the Mentawai islands which takes about 10 hours – of note to anyone who has read Dr. Muhajir). The first day I went with a girl to visit her Buddhist friend. Then we went to the family noodle factory. It was an experience. There were trays of what looked like screen doors with piles of bright yellow noodles drying in the sun. There were teenagers packing the noodles into bags outside under a covered area (no gloves, no hairnets, dirt floor), and inside were the mixing vats, nasty-looking steaming water, and piles of broken waste noodles. I turned down the offer to try some. We hurried to meet with some youth in the community and returned that evening to talk to the many visitors who had come to the house I was staying in. The next day we visited a Baha’is grave on a hill overlooking the sea and facing the Mentawai islands – really beautiful, then drove out to the beach. We visited a very old woman whose door opened onto the ocean. Her husband had made beautiful cross-stitch tapestries of scenes such as the Baha’i Holy site of Bahji. She fed us fried sweet potatoes and we proceeded to a tourist area on the beach with a legend about a man who left from that place to seek a fortune and forgot his mother, after which his ship sank and he was turned into stone on that very spot. It was a difficult drive with several children – seatbelts and carseats especially are unheard of – and I was glad to be going home the next day. Until the airline called and cheerfully told me that my flight had been cancelled. To make a long story short, I made it home in time to teach my Monday afternoon flute student, so it was just fine in the end.