Indonesia

November 14, 2011

Two fingers up for family planning

When I first lived in Indonesia, in the not-entirely-golden age of Suharto, family planning was one of the government’s core priorities. So much so, they’d take people on safari for free. These family planning safaris involved laying out the camp beds, slapping women down on them and shoving an IUD up them. Though the programme improved hugely in later years, it remained sullied by its coercive infancy. When responsibility for reproductive health devolved to the districts, it was a rare…

November 11, 2011

Graffiti, Catholic style

The Blessed Virgin Mary on a hill going out of Boawae, in Flores, made me homesick for the near-identical BVM outside the Priest’s House in Castletownshend, the prettiest village in Ireland. (I wonder idly where they are produced. There’s a smaller but otherwise also identical version in the garden of the guest house I’m staying in.) As I walked up to photograph her, this graffiti outside the dorm rooms caught my eye. I wasn’t sure whether to be shocked that…

November 8, 2011

Indonesian Ferries: possession is nine-tenths of the law

Not trusting to the vagaries of shonky inter-island passenger ferries, I scheduled my visit to Sumba so that I could move on to Sabu, an even drier and poorer island in NTT, on the fortnightly PELNI boat. Needless to say, just for this one fortnight, PELNI is having the barnacles scrubbed off it. The shonky ferries are “lagi kosong” — “currently lacking”, a phrase that strikes horror into the traveler’s heart in much the same way that “rail replacement bus…

November 5, 2011

Mystery sandal slashers

Note to self: don’t leave sandals outside your room when you’ve had a scrap with the room boy and barked at the dog. Though I’m pretty sure it wasn’t the dog that left my slashed sandals peeping neatly out of the bin outside my room…

November 2, 2011

Twenty years on: warrior-in-waiting heads Sumba village

For my 30th birthday, my mother framed school reports from the time I was 12 or 13. “Elizabeth is far too fond of the sound of her own voice” and “she sometimes sails too close to the wind for comfortable passage in the flotilla.” Are we really set in stone by the time we reach our teens? I had cause to wonder this week, as I wandered West Sumba in search of people whose photos I had taken 20 years…

November 2, 2011

Death to the budget! Graves in Sumba

Sumba is a graveyard of bodies and good intentions. Physically, it is littered with impressive megalithic tombs and their hideous modern counterparts. Financially, it is littered with development projects that haven’t quite developed anything. “Megalithic” sounds ancient, and many are, but they are still being built today. The tomb in the photo above was built in the 1970s; it took several hundred people the best part of a year to drag the stones on wooden rollers from the quarry to…

October 31, 2011

Moncong putih: nyoblos atau main belakang?

With individuals and political parties jumping in and out of bed with one another with gay abandon, it’s quite hard for a new (re)arrival to figure out what’s going on in Indonesian politics. I am somewhat incorrectly on the record as a supporter of PDIP (a story too long to tell, but perhaps this banner, modified ahead of the last election, will give an idea…). I thus have to express dismay at the apparent bullying of PDIP in its former…

October 29, 2011

Spinning around Sumba

Sumba is well known for its weaving; back in the day, villagers used to wait til the pods of the kapok tree kapas bush burst open to yield their cotton, then patiently spin it in to thread with nothing but a little wooden top (a jenny? am I making that up?) gyrating on a broken plate fragment. It’s rare these days. Trying to follow all the steps involved described by Mama Lakabobo, shown here with a whole year’s production, I…

October 24, 2011

Repel hazardous trespasser!

You can see the hazardous trespasser reflected in the glass. For what it’s worth, a more correct translation would read: For our mutual well-being, please wear your ID card. Perhaps they are worried about all the dodgy visitors going cap in hand to the top floor of the building, home of the Ford Foundation, which funds all sorts of hazardous enterprises, including programmes that aim to increase accountability in government.