20 Questions, or Just How Western I Am

by ben on September 25th, 2009

It’s a universal experience for Westerners in Indonesia: the familiar, formulaic getting-to-know-you conversation. You shake hands, smile a lot, and proceed to ask each other questions. Nothing unusual, right? What’s different in Indonesia is the kinds of questions people ask and the striking consistency these getting-to-know-you conversations follow.

When I meet someone in the States, I might ask where they’re from, where they live, and what they do for both work and pleasure. If I hook onto a mutual interest of ours, I’ll follow that up with a more specific question about it or a comment about my own similar proclivities. It’s a meeting of minds.

In Indonesia, things start out similarly—where are you from, where do you live, and where do you work/study—but from there things often take, from the Western perspective, a more personal turn. No, where do you live, as in exactly which house? Are you married? What’s your religion? There’s a discreet set of about twenty questions you commonly hear, and you learn to predict the whole flow of the these conversations as they unfold. There are no surprises.

What Indonesians are trying to do in these conversations, I’ve realized, is to place you within the social system. Which nationality or ethnic group do you fall into? Which religious group? Are you a student, a worker or a tourist? Are you a family man or simply deferring marriage till later? If you’re not married yet, can I introduce you to my neice? Actually, that last point is rarely phrased as a question.

Tell me if you disagree, but I think what we do in the West—what I do, anyway—is not to try to fit people into an established social structure (if anything, we admire people who are able to break out of the bonds of such structures), but to get into our new acquaintance’s head, to find what makes her tick. What does she like to do? What has she chosen to study and to work on? What activities and values are important to her? The best of these conversations don’t follow a prescribed arc, but career off in new and unexpected directions.

To me, those sorts of conversations are much more interesting, which only serves to remind me of just how Western I am. The focus is on the individual rather than the group and the interpersonal relationships within it. And, says Western me, isn’t that great? You have the freedom, no matter what situation you’re born into, to choose your own path, pursue your own passions. You’re not defined by what you’re supposed to be, but who you really are.

But how Western of me! For an Indonesian, not asking the necessary questions to help fit you into the social order leaves one at a loss. And what’s more, the predictability of these conversations lends a certain sense of comfort. Indonesians go to great lengths to avoid confrontation and uncomfortably new and alarming situations, so it’s best not to ask questions that are too prying. Whereas in the U.S., “are you married” and “what’s your religion” are seen as largely personal matters, here they’re simply facts: everyone is either married or later will be, and everyone has a religion (and officially there are only five: Islam, Catholicism, Protestantism, Hinduism and Buddhism). But to try to pry into someone’s head—to ask about his personal dreams and thoughts and ambitions—risks bringing to light points of disagreement or fissures in the social order which are best left alone in the name of social harmony.

And I can respect that. I’ve learned to behave myself here and follow the standard getting-to-know-you protocol, but inside I’m always thinking, “Screw social harmony. Challenge me. Challenge yourself. Tell me what you really think. Tell me who you are.”

I ate Malaysia

by ben on September 23rd, 2009

As promised, the second part of my Kuala Lumpur wrap-up: wholly, rapturously and most deservedly devoted to food.

I’ve been sitting here at my computer puzzling over how I can put into words just how incredible Malaysian food is, but mere adjectives just can’t do it justice. To get a sense of what this nation’s cooks are working with, think about this: Malaysia sits between Thailand and Indonesia, places with delicious cuisines of their own. Start with those countries’ incredible ingredients and their rich melange of flavors, then throw into the mix Chinese and Indian cuisines introduced by immigrants from those two countries (who together with their descendants make up a sizeable 40% of Malaysia’s population), and you’ve got a recipe for some truly good eating.

The three main influences on Malaysian cooking—Malay, Cantonese/Hokkien, and southern Indian—each stand up to the best of those cuisines that you’ll find in their native lands. (I can vouch for this in terms of Malay/Indonesian food, and have it on good authority for China and India.) From Malay soto to Indian masalai thosai to Chinese dim sum, there’s a lot to like. That trinity of dishes alone would make for some of the world’s best eating, but throw some flavors from Thailand and stir the four together, and you wind up with some truly incredible eating.

Take for example this laksa. (Actually, this is someone else’s photo of someone else’s laksa, but you get the idea.) This dish combined a Malay coconut-fish broth with veggies, Chinese noodles and fish cakes, Indian spices and a bit of Thai tanginess to remarkable effect. Exquisite.

And that dish was just ordered in a humdrum mall food court. More than anywhere else I’ve been, the food in Kuala Lumpur is of exacting standards no matter where you go. You really can’t go wrong. Truly great food has become so commonplace that people expect nothing less. Anything short of exquisite simply wouldn’t cut it.

Malaysians eat out in many different settings ranging from street stalls and food courts to the very high end. In the end, two of Malaysia’s most common types of eateries proved to be my favorites. The first are kopitiam, Chinese-owned coffeeshops selling drinks and an assortment of dishes like fried rice and noodles. Char kuey teow, which along with laksa and nasi lemak is one of Malaysia’s three unofficial national dishes, is a standby in any kopitiam, and proved to be a standby for me to. Kuey teow—wide, pan-friend rice noodles with some veggies, and meat or seafood—are common in Indonesia too, but I don’t think I’ll ever be able to eat the Indonesian pretender again. (See, EatingAsia, a blog published by the Kuala Lumpur-based team of Robyn Eckhardt and David Hagerman, for an apt description of the Malaysian version.) Though the food alone would be enough to make me a regular kopitiam customer, the coffee was just as big a draw: rich and creamy like Vietnamese coffee and served with a similar shot of sweetened condensed milk. Divine.

The second of these ubiquitous eateries are called nasi kandar or nasi mamak. Run by Indian muslims, they offer Indian food (with a bit of Malay flare) 24 hours a day. Each place boasts an extensive list of offerings, but I so enjoyed the roti canai and the thosai that I never made it far down the menu. I usually ordered my roti canai with either curry or dahl for dipping or spread with sweet, rich kaya, a jam made of slow-cooked sugar, coconut milk and egg. The thosai come with a variety of accompaninements, such as the curried potato-and-cauliflower filling of thosai masala I recognized from southern Indian restaurants back home and a mix of various dahls, curries and chutnies. Add on the side a glass of hot or iced teh tarik—rich tea poured back and forth through a sieve to a froth and mixed with sweetened condensed milk—and you’ve got a meal I could happily eat every day for a long, long time.

Kuala Lumpur

by ben on August 25th, 2009

At the end of July I finished my year of volunteering and, in order to get a visa for my second year here, had to leave the country. The obvious place for me to go was Kuala Lumpur, the capital of Malaysia and home to some of my relatives on my mom’s side of the family. I spent six days in KL, and though getting my visa wasn’t made easy for me (I still don’t have the type of visa I went to KL to get), I had an all-around great time.

This trip was exciting for me on a number of fronts. First, this was my first trip to my mom’s homeland. Second, it was my first time outside of Indonesia since I arrived just shy of a year ago. And third, I was in foodie heaven. (That last point merits a mouth-watering post of its own.)

My mom grew up in Seremban, the provincial capital of Negeri Sembilan, a state in peninsular Malaysia about 40 miles south of Kuala Lumpur. Her mom (my nenek, or grandma in Malay) is Malay and also grew up in Negeri Sembilan. Her father (my datuk, or grandpa) was a British colonist from northern England who spend the bulk of his life in what was then colonial Malaya. My mom and her family lived in Seremban until she was 15 when, following datuk’s death, nenek moved the family to England in search of better opportunities. There are all sorts of details I’m leaving out, most of which are unbeknownst to me and most of which are a testament to nenek’s immense personal strength, but fast forward to the present and nenek, my mom and her two siblings have all adopted the U.K. and the U.S. as their homes for essentially the last 40 years. Malaysia remains a touchstone for all of them and our whole extended family, but this last week was the first time I ever made it to Malaysia and the first time I met several of my relatives: a much-belated but much-enjoyed trip.

Here’s the family I met (in a few cases for the second time) that week.

On the top row we have Julie, me, Faisal, and cousin of my mom’s through marriage (whose name I forget). On the bottom we have Busu #1 along with my mom’s uncle through marriage and Busu #2 (my mom’s aunt through marriage), the parents of the unnamed guy on top right. I’m terrible with names. Busu #1 is my nenek’s youngest sister and Busu #2 her sister-in-law. (”Busu” is a title meaning “youngest sister” in Malay.) Both Busus played a big role in raising my mom and her siblings in Seremban and on weekend trips to KL.

Here are Arman and Alisa, Julie and Faisal’s kids and two of my second cousins.

While everyone was busy with work and school and other responsibilities during the day, I got to explore Kuala Lumpur by foot and rail. I did this partly on my own and partly with the with Edmund, a KL native to whom I was introduced by friends. As a city boy, it was a genuine delight for me to be in a city that offered so many of the urban pleasures I love but can’t access in Jogja or, honestly, any Indonesian city: intact sidewalks and walkable streets, breathable air, decent mass transit, a cosmopolitan and global vibe, English-language bookstores, good architecture and landscaping, ethnic diversity, a sense of history, and all the intangible things like “urban drama” and “buzz” and “edginess” that urban studies nuts like myself so love. Kuala Lumpur is not a perfect city—in fact, it has many of the same drawbacks (reliance on cars, too many freeways, unchecked development, a zillion malls, and so forth) as many American cities—but when it comes down to it, its own particular messy historical, ethnic, and religious mix make it a fascinating city. It feels very modern and 21st century and yet exhibits a cultural melange pointing directly back to its colonial history. And did I mention the food?

A cup of Java

by ben on August 22nd, 2009

Oh, the irony. One might suspect that Indonesia, a nation whose list of major islands reads like the menu of a gourmet Seattle or Left Bank cafe, would boast some of the world’s finest home-brewed coffee. If only it were true.

Indonesia’s rich volcanic soils do indeed grow some of the world’s finest beans. Back home in California, I always opt for Indonesian coffee beans’ more earthy, nutty and chocolaty flavors over Latin American coffee’s more acidic notes. Mocha Java or New Guinea Highlands? Aged Sumatra or Sulawesi?

It might surprise you to hear that here in tanah air, the motherland, the coffee is wretched. And the problem is you: foreign consumers who buy up all those delicious beans that are exported from Indonesia, roasted to perfection, and delivered in a hot, steaming mug of morning bliss. While you sip contentedly, the Indonesian consumer is left with the dregs: the Two-Buck Chuck of coffee, only far less palatable.

Indonesia’s most common brand of coffee is Kapal Api. It comes in these red packets and is always the same: harsh and acidic without any redeeming flavors. I’m sure it’s the cheaper robusta variety rather than the arabica most American and European roasters prefer, but even among the world’s robustas it’s got to be pretty low end.

Other common brands feature instant coffee mixed with milk powder, creamer, and, most of all, sugar, to create sickly sweet concoctions with occasional hints of coffee. These single-serving sachets are common both in people’s homes and at the cheap breakfast spots where many people grab a cup of coffee and some soto ayam (chicken soup), nasi goreng (fried rice), or burjo (mung bean and black rice porridge) to start out the day.

Still, Kapal Api rules the roost, and in Java, at least, there’s only one way to prepare it: add a spoonful of grounds and two spoonfuls of sugar to a glass, and top off with hot water. The coffee is dirt cheap—a glass will generally run you 1,000 Rupiah (about 10 cents)—but to bring their costs down even further, many places will cut their coffee with burnt, blackened cornmeal. As if that weren’t enough, there’s no pressing, percolating, or straining. You simply stir and serve. Most of the grounds settle, but you inevitably end up with a mouth full of grit.

For a while I was able to get myself to drink the stuff, but the combination of bad coffee, too much sugar (or not enough to cover up the coffee), burning-hot glasses without handles, and mouthfuls of grounds have finally put me off. The last straw was the delicious, delicious coffee I rank for two months after my friend Anh-Thu visited from Vietnam, bringing with her a couple bags of deliciously roasted Vietnamese coffee. Reminded of what coffee could and should be, I haven’t had a cup of kopi jawa since.

So now what? There are some newly opened cafes here in Jogja that serve good coffee, but it’s not an expense I can afford every day. Do I keep trying to convince one of those places to sell me beans or grounds? (So far, no dice.) The tea here is generally better than the coffee, but a far cry from the strong, rich English variety to which I’m partial, and certainly not a true substitute for coffee. Do I forego caffeine—the buzz, the taste and the ritual of it—altogether? Oh, the travails of life.

From now until then

by ben on July 6th, 2009

Today is my 365^th day in Asia. Yep, one whole year.

I came to Indonesia primarily for personal reasons, but also professional ones. Among other things, having spent time working with nonprofits in the U.S., I wanted to see what a foreign nonprofit was like and if working in international development might be in my future. The verdict’s still out on that last point, but I’m really pleased to have had the opportunity to work with Dian Desa, my host organization, this past year.

Please as I’ve been, a few months ago I realized that one year at the organization would be enough. While my first year was a combination of novel, exciting and educational experiences balanced by frustrations, boredom and mundanity, a second year would be weighted too heavily toward the latter. Meanwhile, having been stuck in the office six days a week for the whole last year (not just me: the rest of the staff is too), I realized I wasn’t getting the opportunity to explore other elements of living in Indonesia as I had wanted, and that I simply had too little time for reading, cooking, spending time with friends, and other of life’s pleasures.

Starting in August, then, I’ll be studying Indonesian at Universitas Sanata Dharma, one of Yogya’s many universities. I’ll be studying through a tuition-free program run by the Indonesian government that brings in foreign students to study at Indonesian universities, as far as I can tell, to increase knowledge and appreciation of Indonesia and foster cultural exchanges between the program’s foreign participants and the many Indonesians they meet in living here. (I have yet to figure out how such a forward-looking program ever got through Indonesia’s formidable bureaucracy.)

So that’s the plan for next year. That and applying to graduate schools back in the States (with the hope of starting a Masters in Public Administration, Public Policy or Urban Planning in the fall of 2010).

In the meantime, on top of the recent travels I described in my last post, there’s more excitement ahead. After I wrap up here in Flores, I’ll have a couple weeks back in Jogja to close out at Dian Desa, and will then head to Malaysia (my first visit!) for a week. In Malaysia I’ll have four goals: get a new Indonesian visa for the coming year, scope out where my mom grew up, visit with my mom’s cousins and aunt, and eat, eat, eat. That last goal’s an important one. Malaysia and neighboring Singapore have what is unarguably one of the most delicious cuisines on the planet, and I and my taste buds shall soon be wallowing in gustatory bliss.

After Malaysia, I and my new paunch will fly to Bali where I’ll meet up with my parents and brothers for a two-and-a-half-week visit to Indonesia. We’ll spend time in Bali, Flores and Jogja together, and then I’ll set off to Jakarta for my Darmasiswa orientation, returning to Jogja a few days later to begin my language studies.

That’s the plan, anyway. I’ve learned to never count on anything happening here before it actually does.

And there we have it. My near and not-quite-so-near future in a largish (but smaller than a breadbox) nutshell.

From then until now

by ben on July 6th, 2009

The past month has included a crazy amount of travel for me. The most grueling episode had me passing through six airports on five islands in four days: Padang > Jakarta > Jogja, Jogja > Denpasar, and Denpasar > Waingapu > Maumere, and that doesn’t count all the buses, minibuses, motorcycles, and cars. It’s been a bit exhausting, and I’m looking forward to having some down time at home next week, but it’s all been great fun too. Here’s a run-down:

I started off with a trip to Bali to meet up with my college friends Tori and Chris, who were visiting, and our mutual friend Laure, who lives in Bali. Laure’s friend Nina joined us too. It was great. Even though we’d never hung out as a group before, we share the same broader circle of college friends, and it was so nice to just fall easily into a situation where we could pepper our conversations and jesting with talk about shared friends and shared memories and catch up on the last year. It also didn’t hurt that I got to piggyback off of Chris’s parents and Laure and her friend Sarah. (I stayed at three private houses during the week, including one with a swimming pool in the living room and one fronting onto a garden with the beach and the sea just beyond. The grand total for my lodging during the week: $6, plus eternal gratitude.) As an added bonus, I got open-water certified as a scuba diver alongside Chris and Tori. Diving is amazing. I wish I had some photos of us all decked out with our wetsuits and tanks and things, but you’ll just have to mentally superimpose the gear onto these photos.

From Bali Tori and I headed back to Jogja so I could squeeze in a few days at work and she could get a peek at Java, and then we headed off for a week exploring West Sumatra. The mountains and rice paddies were beautiful, and the women refreshingly self-confident compared to what I’ve seen in Java. They spoke to me more directly and seemed to carry themselves with more poise. (The Minangkabau ethnic group, to which I owe a great-great grandmother, is, after all, the world’s second-largest matrilineal society: a fact which a tourist is frequently reminded.) Frustratingly, though, the men—especially in the provincial capital of Padang, but really all over—were obnoxiously and sometimes scarily aggressive. I’m still glad to have visited and both Tori and I enjoyed ourselves despite the constant hassling, but it was enough to ward me off of future trips back to the area.

Saying goodbye to Tori as she wound up her visit, I launched into those four hectic days of travel. Fast forward two weeks, and here I am in Flores, a poor, rural island in eastern Indonesia. It’s my first time beyond the Bali-Java-Sumatra axis which dominates Indonesia in population, the economy, and general public awareness, and I couldn’t be much happier to be here. Flores is, in short, awesome. I haven’t seen a very big range of things, just the small city of Maumere and a few villages outside of town, but the landscape is beautiful—full of hills and mountains tumbling into a sparkling blue sea—and the people are incredibly warm, good humored and (this is a word I keep coming back to in my head) natural. Everyone here is very friendly without being at all pushy (like Sumatra) or so friendly they won’t leave you alone (like Java). People are interested to talk to me, but leave me personal space. In the market or if while walking around town (there are sidewalks!), people notice me and give me a second glance (I’m quite obviously not from Flores, after all), but won’t hassle me a bit. If I strike up a conversation with someone, they’ll ask me where I’m from and that sort of thing, but everyone here just seems to look at me as simply another person, as a human being. It’s amazing! In Java I feel like I’m being constantly sized up, evaluated and judged by almost every person I talk to, even a lot of the people who I interact with regularly. In Sumatra, I feel like every random person who spots me sees me as holding something they want, namely money, and pursues me rabidly. Here I finally, finally feel like I can have normal human interactions where people look me in the eye and take me at for what I am without expecting anything of me. Yes! I’m human again! As an added bonus, Flores is home to so many languages, each of which covers so little area, that if someone wants to talk to a person from 30 minutes away, they have to resort to Indonesia. Not only does that cultural diversity make this place fascinating: it also means that I can be much more involved in conversation.

So why am I here? While Bali and West Sumatra were pure, frivolous vacation, I’m here in Flores to work on two projects for my nonprofit. The first is a pretty straightforward grant report, and the second a survey of biomass (wood, coconut shells, palm leaves, etc.) burned by households and cottage industries for daily cooking. Working alongside my organization’s Flores-based field staff, I’ve helped adapt a written survey to the local context, and we’ve begun heading out into villages to interview people. One of the real pleasures for me is that because people speak in Indonesian, I get to be fully involved in the whole process, a real contrast to the Javanese villages where it’s all Javanese all the time.

And thus I’ve caught you up to the present.

Indonesia in the News

by ben on May 27th, 2009

My friend Becca commented the other night that Indonesia finally seems to be getting more attention in the American and international press lately, and I think she’s right. As the world’s fourth most populous nation, its most populous Muslim nation, a model democracy in Asia, a model for religious pluralism, a major world economic player, and home to incredible environmental wealth and beauty, Indonesia is a place one might expect to hear a lot about, but that’s hardly been the case.

So is this uptick in attention, as Becca suspects, a result of people learning of Obama’s childhood years spent here? A reflection of the recent national election, as I first suspected? Or are we both projecting and seeing a trend that’s not even there?

Well, I clicked over to Google Trends just now, and our suspicion is borne out.

First I looked at the number of Google searches done on the word “Indonesia,” and since early 2007, there’s been a slow but steady increase in the number of “Indonesia” searches. If you tease out the searches made from the U.S. however, the numbers are flat. I suspect that what I first surmised to be increased interest from foreigners is actually a sign that more and more Indonesians are gaining internet access and searching for terms relevant to their own country. (Indonesian Idol, anyone?)

Look at the graph for “news reference volume,” though, and you see a different story, and it looks like Becca was right. In late October of last year, just before Obama’s election, there’s a sudden increase in news references to Indonesia, and that attention has held up since. That means the early press mentions of Obama’s childhood years have apparently transferred into real coverage as the weeks and months have worn on, and much to my pleasure, the coverage I’ve seen lately is more than just the usual terrorist/tsunami/volcano/earthquake/pandemic/plane crash/ferry capsizing/man-made mud volcano disaster reports.

Some specific events have drawn coverage, and praise, like Indonesia’s hospitable treatment of Burmese refugees set adrift at sea by Thailand, the peaceful and democratic national legislative election in April, and the World Ocean Conference hosted in Manado a couple weeks ago.

There have also been some interesting articles not on specific events, but on broad trends in Indonesia, which I definitely take as a sign of increased interest in the country. In just the last couple weeks, for instance, The New York Times has spotlighted professional carpool riders in Jakarta, the country’s newfound penchant for reality TV, and competing solutions to dealing with tons (literally) of tourist trash in Bali.

After years of media neglect, which I blame for Americans’ staggering ignorance about this country, it looks like people may be starting to pay attention. Have I mentioned that I like this Obama guy?

Updates

by ben on May 5th, 2009

After my last two posts, I want to give a quick pair of updates.

First, I’m pleased to report that my friend Tjuan, who was in that motorycle accident, is doing well. He spent time recovering at home with his family in Jakarta, was deemed well enough to return to Jogja on his own two or three weeks ago, and is now living as if nothing ever happened. He went straight back to work after getting back to Jogja, and seems to have no lingering effects other than a slight limp which gets better by the day. Remarkable.

Second, Indonesia’s parliamentary election also went off quite smoothly. There was no violence, no major fraud, and no big surprises. Official vote counts are yet in, but polls indicate that President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono (SBY), who enjoys widespread popularity, led his party to the biggest haul of the 40 or so parties in the running, winning 20.5% of the vote. Falling short of 50% means he’ll have to put together a coalition government with some smaller parties, which everyone expected. Overall, despite the fact that Indonesia is 90% Islamic, those parties advocating for an increasing Islamicization of public life (sharia law, for instance) only attracted a small percentage of the vote. Most Indonesians continue to support a mostly secular state, which is good news for the country’s millions of ethnic minorities and good news for the nation as a whole.

A presidential election will follow this parliamentary election this summer, and all bets are on SBY to win easily over Former President Megawati Sukarnoputri, the leading challenger.

One interesting factoid: over 1 million individuals ran for public office in this last election cycle, mostly at the local level. Without the major infrastructure that parties like the American Democratic and Republican Parties have, running for office tends to be a do-it-yourself affair. People hand out free food, wave flags, blast announcements on megaphones, and rely on friends and word of mouth. Campaigns are often self-financed too, so in the wake of the elections (when 19 out of 20 candidates lost), there’s apparently been a rash of bitter feelings (I read about one man who cut off his neighbors’ access to a well on his property when he learned they voted for an opponent) and even a spike in suicides.

This is still a messy democracy, but a democracy it is.

Election

by ben on April 3rd, 2009

Indonesia has a big national election coming up next week. Rather than pretend to know something about it, I’ll point you to this informative article from The Economist, which does a good job of laying out the historical, religious, economic and political context of the election. If you’re still interested after that, this opinion piece contrasts Indonesia’s young democracy with others in Southeast Asia and claims that Indonesia now has the region’s “only fully functioning democracy.”

As with the commentary, I’m outsourcing photography to The Economist too. These sorts of political rallies are an everyday occurrence at this point, and as the article points out, are more a way to get a hold of the lunches and other freebies the political parties hand out than they are an exercise of political expression. I thought my friends who I’ve asked were just being cynical, but the article confirms what they’ve said: there are really no substantive policy differences between the parties, and political apathy is a big problem.

And despite my recent Machismo post, I think these rallies are also a way for young men to let out some of their energy. They’re the equivalent of an American high school pep rally or drunken bash in the stands of a college football game. How many women do you see in this photo? Or people over 30?

Two lives too short

by ben on March 21st, 2009

I hemmed and hawed about whether or not to write this post. Given that you, the readership of this blog (basically limited my parents, grandparents, and Robin Smith, a surrogate parent—hi, guys) have a vested interest in my safety, I was worried about worrying you. But you’re all worldly wise, and since what I’m about to write about is stuff I’ve been thinking a lot about recently, I wanted to share.

Without beating about the bush, three weeks ago tomorrow, three of my friends here in Asia got into major motorcycle accidents. Two died, and the third sustained a major head injury and is slowly recovering.

Needless to say, the news has cast a pall over the last few weeks. For a while there, everything else came to seem incredibly small and insignificant. How could I be worrying about all the trivial pieces of my life when there are people out there—people I know and care about—dealing with so much worse? I, as many of my friends here, were quite upset by the news, but I’ve been careful to try to think about everything that’s happened with remove rather than conceiving it all in terms of what’s happened in my life to my friends. This is easier for me than many others since I wasn’t especially close to either of the guys who died, but they were two truly kind, warm, open human beings, and will be missed by many. More than anything, they were both at a really exciting point in their lives where they had recently discovered their passions and had shifted their lives to pursue what they truly cared about. So few of us ever work up the courage to do that, but both Andy and Dadang had, and it’s sad to know that’s been cut short.

Andy was a fellow VIA volunteer. I met him along with the 30-odd other VIA volunteers at a two-day training in the Bay Area in April, and then we all spent three weeks together at a follow-up training in Thailand in July. Andy wasn’t among my closest circle of friends in Thailand, nor I among his, but our whole group felt a certain sense of kinship together, so to know that we all came to Asia together, but that Andy no longer walks among us, is hard. He had spent a good deal of time in Asia before in spurts, but just before VIA had finished a hard push through college to return to what he really wanted to be doing: living in Laos. I count myself lucky to have met him, but regret that his process of living and discovery has been cut short and that he’ll no longer be able to share the gift of his enthusiasm and openness with all those he would have met in the future. Thanks for sharing with me, Andy.

For his part, Dadang was a outdoors buddy. We met on a camping trip shortly after I got here, hung out with friends a few times since, and last got together a couple weeks before his accident on a hike with a group of friends. Because I had seen him so recently and his accident was so much closer, his passing felt much more real than Andy’s. Dadang held on for thirteen days in the hospital before he passed away. I visited him in the ICU once, but he could only muster enough energy for a grim smile. I went to his funeral last weekend, held within hours of his death according to Muslim tradition, and it was deeply moved to see so many people who so cared about him. Some of my best friends here were among Dadang’s best friends, and much of the sympathy I’ve felt over the last three weeks has been for them. And as with Andy, I’ve felt sad about what might had been. Dadang had recently consciously refocused his life on what he cared about—bird watching was a big new interest—and I was one of the lucky beneficiaries of his passion for the outdoors. Thank you too, Dadang.

My third friend, Tjuan, is one of my closest in Indonesia. He was out riding with Dadang on the back of his motorcycle in a hilly region outside of town, and when their accident happened, was tossed over a 20-foot drop and lost his helmet in the fall. He miraculously survived, and has since been released from the hospital, but his prognosis is uncertain. Much to my and everyone else’s relief, he’s reclaimed his memory, his speech, and his personality, but in visiting with him since the accident, I’ve noticed that his responses are slower and his mind now easily wanders away from conversation, but this will hopefully improve with time. He’s now home with his family resting and getting further medical care. I’m still worried about Tjuan, but given what befell both Andy and Dadang, largely feel a great sense of relief. Before his accident, I saw Tjuan six, and sometimes seven, days a week, so his absence has been noticeable in my day-to-day life. All the more reason to hope for a speedy recovery.

These events have forced me think about our common human mortality in a way I haven’t had to in a long time. I suppose some of that is healthy, but it’s hard too. I do realize though that there’s no use getting bogged down in things, so I’ve tried to step back and focus on everything else in my life these days, and I’m pleased to say I’m doing well. I’m healthy, happy, learning, looking ahead to new excitements on the horizon, and, yes, am safe. So please don’t worry about me. (If anything, what’s happened will serve as a little reminder in the back of my head to live life even more safely). In fact, my life is probably going more smoothly for me now than ever before here, so look forward to new, and cheerier, updates to come.