At home in Nakao

Home of Riyanto and his family, Nakao Village, Lampung

Our motorcycles pulled in at a neat little cottage made of cinderblock, roofed with terracotta. As we dismounted, people started pouring out of the house. Riyanto’s wife and her mother, as well as other relatives and friends. It was hard to know who was who at that first meeting, and I never did quite understand all the relationships, but we were met with a gentle and gracious kindness—I should say, I was met—for I was the stranger, and probably the strangest person some of them had ever seen. Yudhie introduced me to his step-mother and step-grandmother, but there’s no such thing as ‘step’ among them. Granny looked at Yudhie with as much love and pride as a natural grandson.

Hen and chicks, not the Garuda,
should be the national birds of
Yndonesia

Protocol, yes, even—no, especially—in a rural village. The front room of the house, the door left open, the only windows with glass in them, that was where we left our sandals, to enter the other rooms of the home barefoot. I noticed later that the motorcycles were also parked in this front room. The door left open allowed hens and chicks to come running in and out as they pleased, but no one seemed to notice. We men sat down around a table, while the women brought snacks, then rice and cooked food. Something that tasted like grape Kool-Aid with ice was brought in a pitcher along with glasses. The guide books all warned, ‘Don’t drink iced drinks. The ice could be from tap water.’ I shrugged and drank.

As it turns out, even in a small village where electricity comes into the house by a single wire that taps into the power line following the road, people know how to live clean and healthy. There, standing in a corner of the room was a water cooler like you’d find in any office, loaded with an inverted five-gallon plastic bottle of water. ‘I’m not gonna die after all,’ I breathed a sigh of relief. Remember, all this was very new to me. I hadn’t discovered yet that the guide books are warning tourists what not to do. I wasn’t a tourist, but a returning family member, and if my family could eat or drink something, it was safe for me too. Following this rule, sometimes against my common sense, I came to no harm.

There’s almost too much to tell, even about this short visit. Though daylight lasted only a few hours, it seems like we did and saw so much, more than can be described. Riyanto, though a Christian, was married to a Muslim, and so the house was full of cats. He sometimes threatened to do away with them—they were so many—but he never did. He is a gentle, quiet man, a little younger than me, who works on motorcycles for a living. His customers bring their sick cycles to him, and he heals them, squatting in the yard, using tools that’d be thrown away in America, with an ingenuity that puts formal training to shame. Boys and men stopped by all day, maybe to fix cycles, maybe to see the stranger.

Yudhie took me on a little tour of the house after our ceremonial first rice had been eaten together. The women had never joined us, but brought the food and drinks in, and removed them when we were finished. He showed me the kitchen, a very large room at the back of the house, whose back wall seemed to be made of woven bamboo rather than cinderblock as were the other walls, even the interior ones, in the house. The kitchen was absolutely medieval, with a raised floor at one end, and many kitchen tools I had seen in museums of ancient history. There were windows in the house, covered by woven bamboo shutters. In spite of the simplicity and poverty, everything seemed clean.

Despite the warnings that Indonesia would be crawling and swarming with insects, I almost never saw any, not a single roach, maybe a handful of flies—literally—and of course, a scattering of mosquitoes—I came away with perhaps a dozen bites. I saw plenty of ants indoors, anywhere you left food or sweets uncovered, they would invite themselves, but so tiny that you could scoop them up with a paper towel as if sweeping up spilled poppy seed, and throw them away. Riyanto’s women had caged song birds hanging in the front porch, or perhaps they were his, I never asked. I couldn’t figure out how everyone knew whose chickens were whose, but asking, was told, ‘Yes, we know which are ours.’

Granny with the ‘Big Bulé’ in front of her store, Nakao Village

Granny has a little store built at the edge of the roadside. There she sells small treats, fruit, and drinks, little gadgets and anything else she can find. Sometimes she even sleeps, or at least naps, in her little store. It has a single low bench in front of the window and under an overhang. Yudhie and I sat there as she patiently showed us the ‘right way’ to peel and cut up a mango, which we then shared between us. Literally, mangoes and rambutans and other fruit simply fall off the trees everywhere you look. It seems that almost every family in this village has a little store or shop of some kind on the road in front of their property. In Yndonesia, it seems everyone always has something to sell. It’s free enterprise run wild.

Next… Inner Light