Charming and Cute

(from Thursday)

Until today, I’d not seen anything/anyplace in Indonesia that was charming and cute. Indonesia is that middle school girl in the midst of puberty, a bit too grown up in some ways, not quite grown up enough in others. She perhaps was really cute earlier in life. She’ll perhaps be really charming again, but for the moment, she’s just a bit awkward to look at. I’d experienced that sentiment again and again in my first week here. Very friendly people, not much to look at that has any sustainable beauty, of course based on a very limited sample size.

Today, nearing the end of my week of work with CIFOR (www.cifor.org, I believe), we’ve come to a Dayak village in East Kalimantan, and it’s quite lovely. Not “lovely” in that it’s traditional and quaint, but in that it seems to be comfortable in its own skin. The first village we stayed in was not charming or cute. The folks there in Gunung Lumut did seem at ease with who they were, but perhaps problematically so. They suffered more from their abundance. They’ve got so much fruit and other natural resources that they don’t really have to work very hard, and in fact they don’t pick fruit as much as they just cut off giant branches with fruit exploding from it. They have so much wood lying about that they don’t have to be more efficient with their fuel usage (and thus cook on open fires). They generate enough surplus income that they can have a village store and the low-quality foods that go along with it. And they have enough free time and money that cigarettes are the number one expense for just about every household, with most men, and some women, smoking 2 + packs a day. They smoke when they relax (and they do a lot of this), they smoke when they work (not so much of this, and good for them), and they smoke when they take care of their young. Basically, they smoke all the time, and the only physical problems that I saw in the community were some dental health issues and some hacking coughs that sounded like asthma in young people and far worse in some of the adults. The community leader, also a shaman, told us that there are many local herbal cures for such things like cancer, but also admitted that there are some modern diseases coming along that he can do nothing about. This community had been moved and rebuilt by a logging company, and that might explain some of the uninteresting architecture and odd location, more than a kilometer away from the nearest river. In any case, it had none of the good lucks of the Amigos community that I found myself in 25 years ago in the Venezuelan Amazon, one that was also about a hundred people, but was near the edge of the river, and built up almost entirely from local resources.

With the first Borneo community a bit of a disappointment (from a charm standpoint), and a few others that we passed through also lacking promise, I was hoping that this last one would be more photogenic. Upon our arrival in the community house, we looked out from the back porch to see kids vaulting themselves into the picturesque river below. We saw boats passing by, laundry being scrubbed, and a fellow strumming a guitar in a nearby open-air hut. I ran out to spend the last two hours of the afternoon talking to people, seeing the lovely architecture, and photographing some of the daily life. With six more hours of photography tomorrow morning, I’m very hopeful that this will be the first set of exciting images of the trip. If nothing else, it’s quite cute and charming, and I’m sure I’ll sleep well in anticipation of what lay ahead.