Life in Alor

We have been in Alor for about two weeks now. Our lives here are rather unstable as we alternate our stay in three different places in this island: Kalabahi, Takpala and Kolana.

Kalabahi: Kalabahi is the harbor city in Alor. The phrase ‘harbor city’ is definitely injecting glamour to the place which it does not deserve. Kalabahi is dirty, in the strong sense of the word. There is no organized garbage disposal so one either burns one’s garbage or buries it, in the case of metal. The remains of the burnt garbage get flushed down the road when the rain comes. It is now the dry season so the half-burnt garbage just rots in the road, contaminating the air with the smell of burnt plastic. The market is filthy with the uninviting smell of rotting fish, which are being dried in the open, with flies feasting on them. Hawkers sell their products on the ground, piled up on top a big piece of cloth or plastic. Most hawkers have red teeth, the resulting of the constant chewing of betel nuts, something they can’t live without. We stay in what used to be an SIL office. The house is one of the better built houses in this slum-like area, which is slightly comforting. The only constant worry is water, which only runs in average twice a week. As for food, it is not possible to get meat here except fish and we have almost become vegetarians, a consequence that both Frantisek and I are quite content with. We are stuffing ourselves with eggplants, tomatoes, sweet potatoes and different Chinese greens. In other words, we are doing fine food-wise when we are in Kalabahi. Both of us have only lost 2kg so far, which I consider to be an achievement.

Takpala: Takpala is the village where Frantisek used to stay when he did fieldwork before. We stay there with Papa Timo’s (the chief) family and I like them all (Mama Ameku, Dori, Orpa and Simon). Takpala is not so far from the Kalabahi (about 30 mins on a motorbike). People there normally eat really hard/old corn that would hurt your/my jaws. Sometimes if they can afford they would have rice, but vegetables are not always on the menu. The first morning there I got plain over-boiled rice for breakfast that almost made me puke. When we go there, we either bring our own grocery or we can ask Dori to go to the market to buy food for meals. The coffee there is really nice though. I was taught to grind the coffee with two big stones and I must say I quite enjoyed it. The chief’s family lives in a traditional house. It is a very comfy structure in such hot and dry weather. Frantisek and I also have our own small hut for ourselves which give us a bit of privacy. The hut is built on poles so when I turn in my sleep the whole hut moves. People in the village really like to talk and hang out. Sometimes, when socializing gets too heavy, I would go in and hide. In the beginning I was a bit weird out by the bathroom, which is basically open with a bamboo wall circling it (but not quite). There is a 30cm gap for going in and it has no door. But since there is never anyone around so that does not matter so much. There is a concrete container for water, which has to be filled by people fetching and carrying water from a well down the hill (takes an hour for a round trip, going downhill then going uphill). The villagers normally bring water up when they know we are around so we haven’t had the chance to fetch water yet. I don’t think I will survive the walk though. I walked uphill carrying nothing with arms swaying once and the heat almost killed me.

Kolana: I really dislike this place. I am scared of the thought of having to go back there and I have to next week. The route to get there from Kalabahi is rough. The whole trip takes about 6 hours because half of the roads are broken. We fell from the motorbike on our first trip there and a big piece of skin (bigger than a 2 Euro coin) on my leg was torn off. It did not look like an extremely bad wound right from the beginning but it got worse after the one-week stay in Kolana. In Kolana, people like to have their live stocks walking around. I was often surrounded by chicken and pigs when I was there. Due to the abundant amount of animal manure, there were loads of flies and they really liked my open-wound. They came often to sit on my wound. To keep the wound clean, I washed it with water often, but the water was really dirty as we found out later. The Kolana people take both washing and drinking water from the same well which is very close to the sewage from the toilets. I got diarrhoea from drinking cooked water. I was showering with such water for five days, several showers a day. My wound in the end got infected. It has got pus coming out and it has strangely gone deeper. We stayed with an old couple (Papa Isak’s family) and their daughter. The house was primitive, with neither proper walls nor floors. There were also mice walking on the beams near the ceiling all day long. At some point, I might want to name the mice, just to feel more like home there. People there are very ‘religious’ in the sense that they pray very often and they like to do really long prayers. The pre-meal prayers lasted for so long sometimes I thought I had missed the ending Amen and had in fact fallen asleep. Frantisek said people were scared and thus they prayed for so long. Praying was the only thing they could do in hunger and sickness. I found all these understandable but also hypocritical. Women had very low status in the village (as well as in the whole Alor I think). There was one time there were a bunch of village men coming to visit Papa Isak and we were sitting around at the back of the house and chatting, then Papa Isak all of a sudden asked me to make some tea to serve them, which I found outrageous. I am still and will always be annoyed by this. I was a guest in the house. He must be out of his god-damn mind to ask me to go and make him some tea. If he wants tea for himself and his fellow-male guests, he should go and make it himself. Normally he treated me politely so that ‘go and make tea bitch’ episode must be a slip, showing that deep down he thinks women are just lower animals. The other day I went to a small shop in the village with Papa Isak’s daughter to get some eggs. There was a drunken soldier there. His job is to guard the border on the mountain top but as I was told later, he is drunk at the coast most of the time. Once he saw us, me looking like a non-local, he came around and started talking to me. He began his conversation with the only three English words he knew. He yelled at me with the words ‘you go where’. He was standing way too close to be polite and he was later on asking me questions like whether I was married, where my husband was, why I was buying eggs and whether he could come around and have cakes. I could barely understand what he said as he was speaking Malay after his three-English-word introductory yell. However, it was clear he was being rude and was harassing me. I could tell that that guy was a bully from the scared smiles the villagers were putting on their faces. The scariest thing was that the villagers were simply looking. They knew I did not speak Malay and I was having a communication malfunctioning there, but no one was trying to help, not even Papa Isak’s daughter whom I was staying with. I have a feeling that people in the villagers in Kolana are just nice to you as you are bringing in a bit of income for them (taking them as informants, buying them food, fixing their houses, etc.). They will sell you off if they have to. I had some very primitive fear there. People there are at the edge, at some break-off point. They are too hungry. Some part of me feels sad about it but most of me just feel like escaping. I was simply not born to be a very kind person. I will leave the save-the-world business to the more talented people. It is hard to be kind when one’s life is threatened. But if one is only kind when one is safe and can spare it then such kindness bears no sacrifice. I think life is asking me to show some strength and I am all-set to disappoint it. I dislike the place, the people and the animals in Kolana and the water there makes me ill, the journey there is dangerous and yet we still need to go there next week. Frantisek said hating the place does not make it easier. He is brilliant in pointing out the obvious.

Joanno