August 17th

Thanks for all of the positive comments on my last post. Wainyapu is a seriously cool place. There is so much rich tradition and history there. I’ll quickly answer a few questions I received.

1.Yes, we did take Colby to Wainyapu the first day we went. Our nanny was brand new and we were only going for a few hours to meet the Village Chief. We felt it was important to introduce him to the whole family.

2.The people of Wainyapu don’t seem to be starving, but they are malnourished. Their diet is not very well-balanced consisting mostly of rice. We never eat our lunch anywhere near the village. It causes too many problems. We do, however, supply lunch and water for the whole census team each day that we work.

3.There are a wide variety of foods here. They can be difficult (and expensive in local terms) to procure. We are well-fed with a diet of mostly rice, tempe, chicken, eggs, carrots, beans, and bananas.

4.We do take our safety seriously. We are strangers here. Quite odd, in fact. We naturally draw a lot of attention. We do our best to minimize that attention.

Independence Day

August 17th is an important day in Indonesian history – Independence Day. Indonesia is a relatively young country celebrating 45 years of independence. For about a week now, the 3 schools near us have been rehearsing for the big day. The drum band practices start at 7am, even on Saturday. Colby really enjoyed chasing them around the neighborhood.

To celebrate the day, a flag raising ceremony of sorts was held at the town soccer field. All of the local schools lined up in across the field, and the various drum bands and a pom-pom squad paraded across.

A military procession dressed completely in white preceded the flag raising. This procession paraded around the field, the flagpole, and the main hut for almost 45 minutes.

It was an intricate display. They seemed to first ask permission to approach the main hut. Then a portion of the squad approached. Permission was again requested to present the flag for inspection. Once the flag was found to be acceptable, they marched around some more before they finally came to the pole and actually hung the flag. I am not sure I got the point of all of this pomp, but perhaps that is because for half of this time I was chasing grasshoppers with Colby.

 

As the ceremony was coming to an end (at least for those of us more interested in grasshopper-chasing), Colby became good friends with a police unit that had set up near us. One of them tried to get Colby to hold his automatic rifle. I was torn between not wanting my toddler anywhere near a gun and not wanting to piss off a man holding a gun. In the end, I decided to smile and pose for a photo and keep a tight grip on Colby.

Colby seemed to really like the police. He climbed up in the truck with them.

As we were leaving, we saw one of our helpers –Esty. She is part of a rescue brigade. For the ceremony, she dressed up in uniform and participated in the line –up.

The best part of the day, in my opinion, was the silence that could be found around our neighborhood. It is amazing how much noise a boarding school makes! Since they were all participating in the festivities, 

Bukit Sunyi was fantastically quiet!