Ted Meinhover

This is where I lived for a week during the Lebaran holiday. “Bule Masuk Kampung,” the title of a famous movie here in Indonesia, was shouted by children in the village, or kampung, enough to challenge my admittedly limited patience at times. “Foreigner Enters the Village.”

It’s common knowledge that three young men in a car, after ten straight hours and the fourth mini-meal and coffee snack, at about four in the morning, can engage in some very interesting conversation. Add the fact that there are at least three languages bouncing around, three radically different perspectives on religion, various militantly-held political ideologies, a general lack of sleep and overdose of caffeine, and the constant threat of instant death in the insanity of the fast moving two-way traffic winding through the narrow mountain rode in Central Java in the middle of the night, and you may begin to get an idea of the absolutely wonderful and strange time I had on Sunday night/ Monday morning.

Agung, Hendra and I arrived in Jakarta at about 5:30 Monday morning, after 12 hours navigating the crowds returning to the capitol city after the holiday. The conversation was a mix of English and Indonesian. Agung and Hendra are both Javanese, the “suku” or tribe from the middle and West of the island of Java, and would often speak that dialect. While I learned many words of that language over the past week, living with Hendra’s family in the village, I usually simply pretended to follow what was going on as they shot comments in cadence back and forth, when they became so engaged in the conversation we were having about global economic policy or the role of religion in Jogyakarta’s recovery from the earthquake or whatever that they forgot I was a foreigner and reverted to their more comfortable “bahasa asli.”

Agung is very dedicated to his Islamic doctrine, making sure to pray, or sholat, five times a day. Hendra, also a Islamic, considers himself an “intellectual Muslim,” and approaches his practice in a very different way. This is very interesting, for he recently started work at a new job in the Indonesian province of Aceh, where Shariat law has been instituted. While he may prefer to not fast during the month of Ramadan, he relates his fear of being arrested for not following the religious law that governs so much of the life of Muslims. And of course I am coming from a very different perspective. Tension in this regard, however, was non-existent – our various perspectives made each conversation all the more fascinating and enlightening.
More than 60 people died on the road this year during the holiday, according to the Jakarta Post. Most victims rode the ubiquitous motor bike, though people also died in cars and buses. I saw people on top of train cars, hanging out the back of tarp covered trucks, families of four or five crammed on one motorbike as they made a twelve hour drive across country.