Switching Hemispheres: Maine to Bali, Part II - By Al Hickey
We didn’t drink liquor and wander off like Rip Van Winkle to fall asleep under a shady tree for twenty years, but we did hop on a jet plane from Bali and flew 12,000 miles across the Pacific to settle in New England for more than two years.
When we returned, not only did we have to make our house a home again but also the whole family had to adapt quickly to life in the “new” country we had moved back to. Tabanan City had metamorphosed from a medium-sized town into a full-blown city with traffic lights, congestion and scores of police directing traffic.
Fresh from the First World, the most immediate everyday skill I had to learn over again was driving. Congestion on the island’s roads had exploded over just the few years we were away. (What’s the difference between Bali traffic and Jakarta traffic? Five years.)
Using your horn in America is considered rude and aggressive but here it’s a matter of life and death. One actually doesn’t drive the roads of Bali. The roads drive you. How you drive is determined by what objects you have to avoid in the road such as runaway chickens, wandering dogs and piles of sand. But at least on Bali you don’t have a 250-kilo horned animal smashing through your windshield. In Maine, 33 motorists have been killed in collisions with moose since 1998.
Foremost amongst objects to avoid on Bali are the tens of thousands of motorcycles, the result of easy credit and little money down. The sheer numbers make driving here totally defensive. On the big highways of Maine sometimes you don’t see a motorcycle for three days, and then it’s a big gutsy Harley. There, like here, vehicular size usually gets the right of way.
Although Portland, 30 minutes drive from the mobile park where we lived in Maine, is one of the few big cities in the US where you can actually find downtown parking. On Bali there are no parking meters or fines, just constant miniscule fees. Into the bargain an attendant even blows a whistle and stops traffic for you!
Off the Grid
Living way out in the “real Bali,” the lack of a high-speed Internet connection – or for that matter, any connection at all - is infuriating after living in Maine. When my daughter asked me the difference between a peninsula, a cape and a panhandle, or what number the Roman Number L stands for, I wasn’t able to instantly access Wikipedia. With no encyclopedias or libraries around, it took me three days to get her the answers.
The nearest wi-fi Internet café is a 25 minutes drive to Tabanan City and it’s only adequate when there’s not a lot of students using the computers and occupying bandwidth. The nearest true fiber optic high-speed Broadband connection is a grueling two-hour, 85-km roundtrip drive via the back roads to Ubud.
It’s weird that we can get hooked up with CNN, Disney, BBC, the Shopping Channel, etc. but can’t access the World Wide Web without investing $700 or so for a radio antenna and paying a steep monthly fee. Radio stations have proliferated in the past several years but there’s a total lack of English-language newspaper delivery. Six years ago the International Herald Tribune and The Jakarta Post were hand-delivered to our rented home in Tabanan. You’d think that with the passage of time the communications infrastructure would improve, not get worse.
Another reality we had to come face to face with immediately is dealing with immigration and the fact that legitimate foreign spouses and parents of Indonesian citizens have few rights in Indonesia. The sosial budaya visitor’s visa that I have to apply for every month, allowing me to stay with my wife and children 30-days at a time, is a far cry from U.S. immigration’s green card, which gives spouses of U.S. citizens multiple-entry permanent residency, renewable every 10 years.
As my sole sponsor in Indonesia, it didn’t take long before our parental roles in the family culture completely reversed. For one thing, because my family had taken her in, treated her as one of their own and lavished attention on her, my wife holds an increased respect for my way of life and thus our relationship is on a more solid footing.
In Maine I was my wife’s lifeline, the go-to guy for everything that was bewildering, confusing or incomprehensible such as kids homework, money matters, bank charges, mobile home park rules, delicate family matters. Here she’s the omnipotent Chancellor of the Exchequer whom I depend upon for bargaining, utility bill payments, teacher’s conferences, dealings with the kepala desa, neighbors and imigrasi.
Back to School
But it was our ten-year old daughter, finding herself suddenly living in Asia again, who bore the brunt of the trauma involved in leaping from one culture into another on the other side of the world. To her, moving to Bali wasn’t a move but a dislocation. At the top of her class, adored and pampered by aunts, uncles and cousins in America, she now has to struggle to remain in the same grade. She’s learning humility for the first time.
For starters, she had to learn Indonesian almost from a dead start which must be sort of like learning Polish. Although she knew some Indonesian words and phrases, she was overwhelmed with 4th grade level work. Even though there’s ample hot water, she now takes cold-water showers. When I ask her why, she told me that all the kids in her class do and “they’re smarter than I am.” During those first several weeks, I could hear her crying quietly in her room at night.
Maybe that’s why she has re-embraced Islam with such fervor, a faith that had lain fallow during those years in Maine. Now before each evening meal, after the family says grace, she prays separately and silently in Arabic. She wears a jilbab to her agama class and greets her teacher each day with As-Salamu Alaykum. She has even dropped my Anglo family name and returned to her birth name - Aiysah instead Aysah.
Replacing the cutesy pre-teen Hannah Montana outfits she wore to school in the States, Aysah – oops, Aiysah - now has four school uniforms that she wears on different days of the week, depending on the activities and subjects she’s taking that day. She says her different colored uniforms make her look like a chocolate bar, a big orange, a bird and a candy cane.
Aisyah, who struggled with math in the States, is now one of her class’s best students because of the intense two-hour personal tutoring she receives each week. She’s also learning such math basics again as long division, geometry and the cardinal points not taught in stateside fourth grades, and has mastered the abacus, an unheard of skill in America outside of Chinatowns.
More emphasis is placed on spelling in Maine. Aisyah hasn’t had a spelling test since she’s been here, perhaps because Indonesian words are spelled almost exactly the way they sound – it’s the ultimate phonetic language.
Girl scouts are integrated right into the school program on Bali. Unlike in Maine where the genders are segregated, girls and boys learn together and compete in games, physical contests and woodcraft basics like tying knots and starting fires. It’s considered uncool to wear your scout uniform in the eastern USA, but here pramuka are proud of their sharp brown uniforms adorned with whistle, military lanyard and little round brown straw hat!
The Country Life
On the face of it, the need to adapt to life on the island of the gods is a dilemma most foreigners might consider someone lucky to have. But the reality of living in a small desa of 300 people deep in the rice basket of Bali is not exactly what the conventional wisdom makes it out to be.
It’s not just a matter of cleaning black gecko dung off the floor daily, dealing with virulent 4-cm-long wasps, fluffy white poisonous caterpillars, plus frogs, rice field snakes, bitey ants, dragonflies, butterflies and beetles invading the house, but you also have to get used to no more free L. L. Bean open air concerts, $9 seats at Sea Dog baseball games as well as blueberries, fresh milk, and Maine lobsters for $4.95 per pound.
Compared to the profound quiet of rural Maine, one first has to adapt to the noise level of rural Bali - the intermittent whine of grass cutters from adjoining ridges, the whirring of a nearby rice mill, the sing song of a Balinese religious singer at night over loudspeakers, the clickity-clack of wooden noisemakers protecting the surrounding rice fields from birds.
The changes that are taking place around our remote villa are just a microcosm of what is happening all over the island. Since we last occupied the house in 2007, light pollution has crept ever closer to our property. Two bright neon lights – one above the chicken coop down the road and another over a newly built house in the village below – now dilute the brightness of the night sky. No longer are we able to see stars right down to the horizon.
Residents of Maine take uninterrupted electricity for granted and only lose power during severe winter storms when the weight of ice snaps power lines. On Bali power outages happen repeatedly at any time - day in, day out. But at least you don’t freeze. We spent three days as evacuees in my brother’s house last winter in Maine because we lost heat in our mobile home.
After Maine’s harsh winters, there’s something extraordinary about being able to wear a singlet every day of the year in Bali’s eternal summer. There’s also something to love about Bali’s spectacular equatorial sunrises and sunsets, far more multi-hued than the muted softer colors of a Maine lake at day’s end. The fact is we love both worlds but cannot live in both. As a famous New England poet wrote:
“Two roads diverged in a wood, and I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.”
