Mentawai Round II (part 1: North)

Our third wedding anniversary found us squished onto a ferry out of Padang. Greg had been really sick the day before, but promised his stomach would hold out. He spent the night on the bench at the back of the ship, alternately getting rained on and inhaling the engine fumes. I found a more protected spot sitting wedged between people sleeping in the indoor hallway between the bunks. There had been a problem obtaining tickets so we didn't get a bunk, but we were going to Mentawai anyways!

When we finally got to Pokai, a long conversation ensued about what our plans would be. We had planned to go to a very remote village on the West side of the island. We were told that it was too dangerous to go by sea, and that we needed to go up the river for two days, then hike through the jungle. However, it was raining hard and apparently the river was flooded. We would have to wait until it was less flooded, but still had enough water to go up; then we would have to wait for it to dry out so we could hike up the mountain. We only had two weeks, so it wasn't looking good. Then we found out that there had been a problem in the Elementary school in a village I'd been to before but we hadn't planned to revisit. So we decided to visit the same places I'd been and not try to get out to the West coast.

We started by going to the Northern village of Labuan Bajau, stopping on the way to visit some families in their ladang (farms). Previously, we had found many people away from home because they were at their ladang. What we didn't understand was that people's ladang are often really far away from their homes. Since they grow the food they eat near these alternate homes on their land, many people may spend only a few days in a month in their 'actual' village home. Obviously, this is not the way things have traditionally been done. The government relocation act some time ago forced family groups to move out of the mountainous interior to the coast to live in larger villages. This made it easier to introduce institutions like a police force and schools. But it meant that the people could no longer have enough land to grow food and changed their living situation, since they were now in single-family homes. It also meant that people had to learn to live near the shores and begin fishing. Because of this situation, many people are registered as living in a town and send their children to school in the town, but the parents may only spend one week in a month actually living in the town. Parents who can afford to send their children to school may leave them in the village alone the rest of the time, leaving neighbors or older children to take care of the younger ones. In any case, we thought we'd visit a few Baha'is that we'd missed on our previous visit by going out to their ladang. We got out of our out-rigger dugout canoe at a tiny inlet behind some mangroves. The family there was spending every moment making kopra by scraping out the inside of ripe coconuts, roasting them, then bagging them to be sent down the coast where it was made into either coconut oil or soap. It was a smell that Greg and I became very familiar with throughout our trip. After drinking delicious coconut water and eating smoked fish, we set out to invite the 'neighbors' to come down for the evening when we planned to share a letter from the Universal House of Justice. Several hours of hiking through the jungle found us lost. A man materialized who turned out to be a Baha'i and helped us find our way. We arrived exhausted at a little platform house where we were again served green coconut water and the best papaya I've ever had. The man residing in the house was thought to live in a village in an entirely different area, but only spent small amounts of time there. We could see right away that this was a problem for creating a sense of community, something very important in the Baha'i Faith, and also a problem for communication, since getting to his remote house was not an easy task. And of course, there are many others in the same situation.

The next day we boated further down the coast to Labuan Bajau where Greg and I swam in the incredibly clear water off the powdery white-sand beach. We saw dolphins doing flips when we arrived. We attended a school awards ceremony that lasted nearly a whole day, and we studied the letter from the Universal House of Justice. Even though the Local Spiritual Assembly of Baha'is in the area was registered with the National Spiritual Assembly of Indonesia, they had somehow failed to receive the very important letter and were very happy that we'd brought it to them. They clearly had great faith in this world institution, and it was wonderful to see how everyone took the message to heart.