well, saturday turned out to be QUITE an eventful day. i met some friends in town around noon and they led me to the house where a party would be taking place later that evening. they had just gone shopping for all the food for the party, and they needed my help to carry it back to the house… so me, alone on my motorbike, carried 8 kilos of oranges AND a large box of banana bread on top of that! it was actually more difficult than it might sound.
indonesians are very family oriented, so there was lots of family swarming around the house when i got there. in case i didn’t mention it before, this day was in celebration of a baby. forty days after a baby is born is an important day in javanese culture. and this was the 40 day mark for baby zizi. i knew a little of the background and some of the family, so let me take a sec to explain.
(beautiful baby zizi)
i have these married friends, jamal and navita. they are muslim. navita has 6 siblings. she cares for the younger ones because their mom works in singapore. her 17 year old sister, vivi, lived with navita up until a few months ago when, through a series of unfortunate events, they found out she was pregnant. now, in muslim culture, this is a very bad thing. in just about any other muslim country, she would be killed. she had sex with her boyfriend only once. and after they found out she was pregnant, boyfriend was going to do the honorable thing and talk to her family and accept responsibility and likely marry her. a very noble thing to do, especially when, as a man, he could have easily just walked away with no blame placed upon him. however, the day after he decided to do this noble thing, he got hit by a bus and died.
but imagine his (catholic) family’s surprise when, about 2 months after his death, navita came to them to tell them that her sister was carrying his baby… they were ecstatic. i hadn’t met his family before saturday, but they are incredible people. they love that baby like nobody’s business. she is all they have left of their son.
(gramma and baby zizi)
it took me basically all day long to figure out who belonged to who and which side of the family was his and which side was navita’s. but i think i got almost all of them down. can’t remember a name to save my life though…
anyways, they were all very accepting of me and weren’t afraid to put me right to work! the first order of business was filling boxes with food. at any indonesian event, you have to have food. and the food is usually served in boxes so that people can take it home with them or eat their individual portion there. i never had any idea how much work goes into filling those boxes! we spend almost all afternoon on it!
(l to r: navita the master chef, indra, an aunt, me, mega)
(hotjaga and i – his wife decided that i can be his 3rd wife – their college friend dyah is 2nd. i wore his glasses half the day without realizing they weren’t mine! oops…)
(bowls of gule – soup – to go in the boxes)
(mega putting rice, veggies, and sate – goat meat on a stick – into the boxes)
ALL the food was cooked on 2 burners on the garage floor. this is the kitchen. that is nuts. all afternoon, mega wanted to go out in the sawah (rice fields) behind the house to take pictures… typical asian. but it rained for quite awhile, so jamal said we’d better wait or we’d get struck by lightning. in the meantime, we ate oxtail soup for lunch.
(a first for me! it was quite good! just watch out for tailbones…)
i got to meet navita’s younger brother, ook, who is deaf. interestingly enough, indonesian sign language is almost the same as american sign language, which i took a year of in high school! i remember basics. but besides signing, ook also lip reads indonesian AND english and he can semi-communicate verbally as well. a neat guy!
(me, mas ook, mega)
(me, mega, and navita – food preparers extraordinaire!)
after FINALLY finishing all the boxes of food, we decided to go out into the sawah to take pictures. it had stopped raining a couple hours earlier. but of COURSE as SOON as we walked out the back door and stepped out into the rice, lightning struck the sawah! AAAAHHHHH!
(mega and i trying to find cover from the lightning! mas jamal just laughed at us. and took our picture. our hero…)
eventually we made it out to the middle of the sawah and had a photoshoot with all of us.
(me, indra, jamal, and mega in the sawah)
when we came back inside and washed all the mud off of us, we showered, got changed, and made final preparations for the guests to arrive. some people just came to take boxes of food and leave. but most of them came and stayed. and most who came were men. at about 7 o’clock, the women were banished to the garage/kitchen where we cooked tea and chatted. the men were all in their prayer clothes sitting around the main room of the house.
(the men. the one in the white holding the paper was chanting in arabic almost the entire time.)
after awhile, one of the men came into the kitchen to get the baby. part of the ritual is that a family member carries the baby around and all the men there get to cut off a piece of its hair. i don’t really know what this symbolizes, and the baby’s gramma (remember, catholic) was equally as confounded as we peeked in the front window.
(cutting the hair)
after much more chanting and singing, the men all got their boxes of food, posed for pictures with the baby, then left.
(all the finished boxes!! the big one is a meal, the little one has 5 desserts in it.)
(zizi with great-gramma and great-grampa)
(navita’s family + zizi’s gramma. the girl to the left of gramma - holding the baby - is zizi’s mom)
(my turn with the baby! as soon as i held her, she started crying! everyone joked that it was because she wanted my pointy nose – pointy noses are considered beautiful to the javanese!)
after all the guests left, several close friends came over and we ate dinner together! have a look…
(gule – soup that uses ALL the parts EXCEPT the meat! i think it looks like the poor goat is trying to pull itself out of the pot!)
(this is what got put on my plate for dinner – a leg! i ate it, of course… with some rice.)
(i also got to suck the marrow from the bones – i LOVE it!)
so for dinner i had brains, an eye, two legs, bone marrow, rice, and strawberry fanta. and i have to say – it wasn’t nearly as bad as you’d think! i’d go so far as to say that i liked it. my friends were super impressed, which was an added bonus! they asked if there’s anything i CAN’T eat. i quickly said DURIAN.
by 11 that night, i was exhausted… most of the speaking that day was done in javanese, which i don’t speak. i kept up with some of it, but it’s exhausting. people were patient with me and used indonesian when i needed to understand. it was great just to be there though. i never once wished to myself that they would use a language i speak… just to be able to help out and to be a part of what was going on was enough. i love being surrounded by family, even if its not my own. and i love being a part of something and being useful. i learned a lot about islam and javanese culture. and i had LOTS of laughs with great friends. it was hands down a good day...
