Indonesia, Etc.: Exploring the Improbable Nation (56 page)

On the screen there was a fight between two characters and their retainers. Then the shadows disappeared. The committee drained their cups of sweet coffee and got up. It was only midnight; the wayang used to run until dawn. Could that really be it?

Of course not. The men were simply shifting to the other side of the screen to watch an interlude of singing and stand-up comedy. This interruption of the story was first introduced about two decades ago to keep audiences engaged. On this occasion a mock-stroppy man was remonstrating with a pretty woman who subverted the refined movements of Javanese dance, swaying and gyrating them into something much sexier. Her ankle-length kebaya gown was see-through over the arms and midriff, embroidered with flowers and sequins over the bust. She talked back, flirted, batted her eyelids; modest and cheeky at the same time.

There was a bit of rap in Javanese, and a lot of making fun of politicians and prominent villagers. Then the committee member I was chatting with started pointing at me, and I was hauled up on stage to be gently (?) ridiculed in a language I don’t understand. I resorted to physical comedy, turning the comedian into my husband, railing at him for flirting with the dancer. Much exaggerated finger-wagging, much sulking and frowning; finally I gave a mock kick to his backside. I fled from the stage to general hilarity. The next day, walking through the village, I was everyone’s best friend.

When I left, at about two, the show was still in full swing. Walking home through the silent fields, I heard the gongs of two other orchestras. The villages used to join together to bear the expenses of the annual wayang. But in 2012, things were apparently going so well in this pocket of poverty that villages decided they could afford to rival one another. ‘They paid more for their orchestra, but we have the better comedians,’ said Pak Wardi, the man who had pushed me on stage.

I saw Pak Wardi again the following day. I had been walking along the road when I spotted a shed full of women bent over some unidentifiable but obviously fiddly task. In front of each person, two giant nails were driven into a work bench. Between them ran a tight white thread; on the bench were little packets of something that looked quite disgusting, like human hair.

It was exactly that. With an implement that looked like a miniature Victorian button-hook, the women were hooking two hairs at a time over the thread, then pulling them tight against their neighbours. They were making false eyelashes from the sweepings from the floors of salons. Washed and treated sweepings, but still . . . When I asked if I could take a photo, one woman laughed and said, ‘Ya, this is what stupid Javanese villagers do for a living.’

The factory, which worked on contract for a Korean firm, had only been open a fortnight. The workers were paid 392 rupiah – about four cents – for a pair of ‘Number 5’ model eyelashes. Because they were still in training mode, most were only able to piece together a dozen pairs a day. Those that passed the three-month probation period would then be eligible for a range of supplements, mostly linked to productivity. A really good worker who managed to churn out four times what the fastest woman was now producing could earn seventy dollars a month.

Pak Wardi from the wayang committee appeared as I was talking to the workers; he owned the eyelash workshop and the pink colonnaded house to which it was attached. But he was wearing the red and white jumpsuit uniform worn by the men and women who pump petrol at the national Pertamina gas stations. He and his wife invited me into the house for coffee. Sitting under an outsized portrait of founding father Sukarno, he told me his story. He used to own a fair bit of land, and a fleet of minibuses and taxis. Then he decided to run for the local parliament, as a candidate for the PDIP party headed by Sukarno’s daughter Megawati Sukarnoputri. He lost, and the campaign bankrupted him. ‘Now we’re starting again from scratch,’ his wife said. Working at the local petrol station, Pak Wardi had earned enough to buy the zinc roofing, plywood work benches and neon strip lighting for the eyelash workshop. In exchange for providing the space and recruiting and managing the staff, he and his wife would get to keep 3.5 per cent of the turnover. ‘One step at a time,’ he said. I admired him for it.

Pak Wardi is obviously a True Believer in the PDIP’s nationalist platform, such as it is; he was disappointed that these days voters responded to money rather than ideology. ‘The party rules don’t even allow vote-buying,’ he said. ‘But if the others all play that game, we have to play it too whether we like it or not.’ He shrugged. ‘The system is rotten through and through, what can you expect?’

Here, at least, today’s democratic Etc. seems to act as a social equalizer. Not necessarily in the traditional sense, of spreading power to those who would never otherwise have had a look in, but at least as a way of redistributing wealth, as a vehicle for social mobility in both directions.

For years, foreigners travelling in Indonesia could be forgiven for believing that the only phrase taught in school was ‘Hello Mister’. It is a sign of great progress that even in the outer islands, I am now sometimes accosted with ‘Hello Missus!’ instead. If village children are to venture further, they generally have to draw strength from one another first. There’s much giggling, shoving and egging one another on. Eventually, a child will break ranks and yell: ‘Wossyonem!’ before screeching at their own bravery and ducking back into the crowd. When I turn around and respond: ‘My name is Eliz, what’s
your
name?’ there is pandemonium, and the kids run off screaming.

They are worlds away from the boys I met on the equator in Pontianak, who were going to a bilingual school and doing their science project in English. The language of international commerce is something many Indonesians devoutly wish to acquire and there are a growing number of bilingual schools in Indonesia’s bigger cities, but they are still for the rich and the super-rich. For young Indonesians long on linguistic ambition but short on cash, there’s
Kampung Inggris
: Englishtown.

I had heard about Englishtown from several young people I had run into on my travels: a village in East Java where everyone speaks English all the time. No one I met had actually studied there, but I heard tales of intensive English classes, of using English in the post office and the coffee shops, of boarding with English-speaking families. After my forays to the schizophrenic city of Solo and sex-laden Gunung Kemukus, when I was staying with a sugar farmer close to the city of Kediri, a young woman told me that I was less than twenty kilometres from this mythical place. I borrowed a motorbike and headed off through the sugar plantations towards Pare, where Kampung Inggris was said to be. Sugar gave way to rubber, then to rice fields. Every now and then, a brand-new housing estate would lurch up out of the fields. ‘ISLAMIC VILLAGE’ one declared itself, the English words emblazoned in gold on an imposing gatepost. Behind the gates lay a short strip of two- and three-bedroom row-houses painted a lurid custard colour. The gatehouse was roofed to resemble a mosque. A gardener, painting black and white stripes on kerbstones, chased off a goat who had wandered in from the fields next door.

The first sign that I might have arrived in Englishtown was an advertising banner: ‘Mr Bean Laundry. The Wash Service. Dry Clothes (kering). IRoned clothes (sterika)’. In English, I asked the attendant if I was in Englishtown. She didn’t understand. But as I drove on I knew I must be: every second or third house was decked with banners advertising English courses and promising all manner of benefits. This one, for example, from INTENSE, graced with a photo of an infant wearing language-lab headphones:

I
ntegrate between science and spiritual

N
umber you among INTENSE family

T
each you how to speak English better

E
nrich your vocabulary every day

N
ecessitate you to practice your English in INTENSE dormitories

S
how you the ways to learn English easily

E
nglish is easy if you think it’s easy

INTENSE IS COMMITTED 2 U

The Seruni Camp (The Developing Confidence Camp!) offered speaking and grammar courses plus a room with a bathroom, wifi and free health care, all for 200,000 rupiah a month, less than US$25. I ducked into the attached coffee shop.
‘Cari siapa, Bu?’
asked the owner, who was whipping up milkshakes for a handful of students. ‘Who are you looking for?’ I answered that I was looking for a coffee, and a town where people were supposed to be speaking English even at coffee shops. She laughed, and nodded at her clients, a group of spiky-haired boys in their late teens. ‘Ya,
they
have to speak English, Bu. I don’t speak a word.’

The boys were indeed speaking English to one another, and not badly. They came from all over Java and Sumatra, and they said there were students from eastern Indonesia in Christian boarding houses. Many of them dreamed of getting a scholarship and studying overseas. Had they studied English at secondary school? ‘This is Indonesia, Miss,’ said a young man from Riau, in English. ‘School for six years, and at the end only Hello Mister.’ ‘The teachers, they cannot speak English too,’ added another student.

Here in Kampung Inggris they were doing better, though none of the teachers was a native speaker. ‘Sometimes, we don’t know if the teachers are right. Like, how can one word have so many meanings?’ asked the boy from Riau. He gave the example of the word ‘leeff’, reeling off the Indonesian words for the green thing that grows on a tree, the act of abandoning a person or place, a verb indicating human existence and an adverb meaning immediately. I got the first three: leaf, leave, live. But immediately? ‘You know, like when you’re watching football. Leeff from Old Trafford.’ Oh,
live
! Layve. I exaggerated the difference in pronunciation but they just pointed to the phonetics in their textbook, which did indeed give exactly the same sound for the four words.

When I went to the loo out the back, I found a little knot of girls in jilbabs. They had hiked their long skirts up their thighs and were squatting around a tub, peeling vegetables and gossiping about a Korean Boy Band. In English. The owner told me that she had set up this ‘camp’ just the previous year. ‘Everyone was doing it; I thought why not give it a try?’ By her count there were now 174 English schools in Kampung Inggris. It all started with Pak Kalend at BEC, she said.

BEC was a lot more than just a kampung house with a banner strung out the front. There’s an imposing gateway in front of a sizeable mosque; behind that is a proper school complex. In the office, a young man with a wispy beard wearing a knitted Muslim skullcap jumped up to attend to my needs. Minutes later, Pak Kalend appeared. He was stout and moon-faced, with a flared nose and neatly clipped grey moustache. He grasped my hand warmly. ‘How may I help you, dear Madam?’ His English was courtly, correct. I said I had come to pay my respects to the founder of the famous Kampung Inggris. ‘Dear Madam, please don’t call it that. I did not set out to build a Kampung Inggris and as a matter of fact most people in the kampung don’t speak English at all. Let us call it “
Kampung Kursus Berbahasa Inggris
”.’ More accurate, perhaps, but ‘English language course town’ doesn’t have quite the ring of Englishtown.

Muhammad Kalend Osen settled into Indonesian to tell me his story. He was a Kutai Dayak, one of the few Muslim Dayak tribes, born in East Kalimantan. ‘But I knew I didn’t just want to stay in the jungle.’ At the age of twenty-seven, with barely any education, he took himself off to Java and studied for a few years with a polyglot religious teacher. Then, only because the cleric was away, Pak Kalend started tutoring civil servants who needed to pass English tests. That was in 1977. Now, BEC takes in 1,600 students a year. ‘So far, 19,000 people can speak English because of us.’ Pak Kalend beamed with pride, but he is not a show-off. BEC stands for ‘Basic English Course’. ‘I call it that because that’s what I know I can deliver. The basics. That’s what I will answer for.’

The campus was buzzing with young people in tidy uniforms, all speaking English to one another. It was show-and-tell day; the students had made posters which they used to explain their lives to one another. When they spotted Pak Kalend the students would rush up, grab his hand and touch it to their forehead in a gesture of respect. They’d do the same to me – it made me feel very old – then they’d elbow one another aside, each trying to tell us their story. One boy, rather a talented artist, had drawn a self-portrait in the centre of his poster. Radiating off it like electrons around a nucleus were bubbles in which he put his parents, his home town, his high school. The final bubble contained a carefully drawn pile of red 100,000 rupiah notes, and the words ‘My purpose is to become a business man.’ He could hardly contain his excitement as he outlined his future. In clear, confident English, he said: ‘Where I come from we have many mangoes. I will buy mangoes for cheap, and I will sell them for expensive.’