Eruptions and Disruptions

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Sukarto smiles widely with his remaining good teeth and motions for us to enter his home.  It’s a small and simple structure, hunkered down in the ash-enriched soil of Mt. Bromo.

 

His wife Sukarni also gives our team a warm welcome and quickly disappears to make refreshments for her guests.   Even as we start chatting we can hear the grumblings of Mt. Bromo, eruptions that sound like ocean waves and rumbling thunder at the same time.  The active crater is about a mile from their house and you can see it clearly from their front yard.

 

Sukarto, like many Tenggerese people in this area, farms onions, cabbages and potatoes.   To help supplement his meager income he also works as a tour guide, bringing his horse down to the “sea of sand” every day, hoisting up tourists onto his small horse and guiding them from the parking area right up to the steps of the smoking crater.

 

Normally Mt. Bromo, a popular tourist destination in East Java, shoots out a manageable amount of sulfuric steam continually.  But since late November, it has been erupting in a more dangerous way, belching out grey ash that has blanketed the community and blown all the way to Surabaya, a few hours’ drive away.

 

There are no more tourists for Sukarto to make his living.  And even worse, his garden is covered in two feet of ash.  Life is already hard for these people, and this slow-folding disaster has made it much worse.

 

The house is built short, Sukarto tells us, because of the strong winds that whip through the fields.  If it were taller, it would be easier for the wind to knock it down.  When I stand upright in the home there is about four inches of clearance between my head and the ceiling.

 

Sukarni comes out with a tray of sweet tea and fried bananas.  We gratefully partake and once again I marvel at the hospitality of Indonesians even in difficult circumstances.  Our team of seven, made up from different organizations in Malang, gather some facts about their situation and try to offer comfort.

 

The main thing that Sukarto asks for is food staples.  The government has brought water but he and his fellow villagers are getting short on food supplies . Normally in a natural disaster there would be NGO’s crawling all over the place and offering such aid, but this has been a different type of disaster, slowly building and out of the spotlight of the media.  Nothing dramatic but ash raining down and no one has died.

 

 

We ask permission to pray for him and his wife.  They seem grateful for the prayers and disappointed when we tell them we need start driving back down this mountain range to our homes in Malang, about 3.5 hours away.  Why are we such in hurry…it’s not even raining yet?  We apologize we must be going and take our leave.

 

They walk us to their front yard, all covered by this eerie grey snow storm, and heartily wave us goodbye.

 

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Dear Faith Activating Friends,

 

What an experience our survey team had this last Tuesday in the Bromo region of East Java.  The reason we came is to see what resources our “Disaster Response Team” of Malang could bring to bear on this unfolding disaster.  Our feel afterwards was that the main need is food and maybe some man power to help clean out houses.   If you would like to help with giving toward this village, and one other that we visited, see the info at the bottom of this report.

 

To see pictures of this trip, please click here:

http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=273248&id=707338821&l=ec10a463e3

 

 

 

 

The first village we came to, called Weringin Anom, is much further down the mountain than Sukarto’s.  It lies along a river and was inundated by a flood caused by the eruptions.  Bromo’s thick ash, combined with mud slides, has chocked the rivers with hundreds of thousands of rocks and newly formed dams from all the debris.  Those dams break when the pressure builds and the rivers overflow their banks.

 

Where the river normally bends it just kept going and filled half of the 77 houses of there with about three feet of muddy water.  Through they were warned by friends upstream through cell phone calls, they didn’t have enough time to salvage their belongings.  Our host told us that about half the people have decided to stay and rebuild and the other half are looking for other places.  For the ones who stay there is fear it could happen again as Bromo continues to erupt every day.

 

For our host we gave some money to help repair some damage to pipes in his village.  He was grateful and is awaiting our next response.

 

If you would like to be part of that response, email me at mikeo@gomail.asia and I can send you the information on how to give, either online or by check.

 

Thanks for your prayers and support for the people affected by the Mt. Bromo eruptions.

 

 

 

 

 

Red Jogging Suit

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I’m standing at stiff attention in my too-tight fitting red jogging suit.  The instructor paces through the hotel conference room full of 25 Indonesians and foreigners, all wearing the same red uniforms, to inspect our stances.  He suddenly calls for an about-face.

 

My timing is a little off, as I actually spin the wrong way, and it’s obvious to all.  The instructor parks his demanding persona in front of me, and in a surprisingly polite way, asks me to drop and give him five.  The American who is on my left side, who has already been giggling throughout this whole exercise, erupts into volcanic laughter.

 

I try to be a good sport and drop down to do my five push-ups of penance.  The whole room applauds.

 

He barks at us for more left turns, right turns and about-faces.

 

 “Sit down!” he suddenly yells.

 

“Thank you sir!” as we all quickly obey.

 

“Stand up!”

 

“Yes sir!”

 

“How is your strength?”

 

“Five-Five,” we yell in unison with two pumped fists, meaning  5 out of 5 on mental and physical stamina.

 

“Codass Indonesia!” (the name of the company that is doing this “outbound training”)

 

“Best friend!” we all respond as we shoot our arms forward and give the thumbs-up sign.

 

And again.  “Codass Indonesia!”

 

“Best friend!”  Two thumbs up.

 

“Are you ready for a new challenge?”

 

“Ready,” everyone shouts with spirit.

 

 

Not me.  I’m not ready.  I’m making my exit strategy.  Maybe as we are all marching off to the parking lot for another challenge game I will just slip out and scoot away on my motorcycle.  It’s already 10 PM and I’m dog tired.  I thought this was going to be a boring governmental meeting, lasting maybe two hours tops, and I’ve already been at this hotel since 5PM with my fellow foreigners-turned-soldiers.  Too many of my American Constitutional Rights have already been trampled on during these first five hours and I can’t imagine lasting two more full days of this.

 

The bizarre meeting is the opening session of a three-day training put on by the city’s department of labor and outsourced to a very zealous group of trainers, my new best friends.  The labor department is one of three governmental agencies those of us needing work visas deal with here.  We all pay $100 a month as a foreigners’ tax and word on the street is this agency is getting heat from their higher-ups to show what they are doing with all that money.  There’s a lot of money going in but not a lot of receipts showing money going out.

 

 

So what better way to splurge on us foreigners by demanding that we attend a three-day retreat with the theme of military discipline and team building?  Included are two nights at a hotel with all meals paid, a transportation allowance of $15, plus a groovy red leisure suit that I wish was American XL and not Indonesian XL.

 

Out of the 40 organizations that were invited, those in our city hosting foreign employees, only 20 are represented.  I heard from a “pengurus”—a warrior advocate whose full-time job is to overcome governmental bureaucracy—that if you ignore meetings and events like this it can make the next visa processing round even more difficult.  Most of the people here are of that profession, along with a few token foreigners from their organizations.  Like me, all of them are trying to figure out how to wiggle out of this.

 

The next two days are not as intense, but often punctuated with shouts of “Codass Indonesia” and the obligatory reply, “Best Friend” (effective and hypnotic marketing strategy).  We do a lot of team building exercises like making up cheers and challenges like rope courses and tower building.

 

It’s actually not all that bad, but I still duck in and out of the schedule, due to other important things I explain to my trainers I must attend to, but really due to the fact that I am a spoiled and entitled American and don’t like submitting to things that don’t make sense.   The days start at 5:30AM and end at 11PM.  I have to apologize for missing certain things on the schedule, like the late night dance-around-the-campfire and the early morning yoga by the pool.  All the Indonesians attend every session and press in to all the activities with good spirits.

 

I am the entitled, spoiled, pampered American grumbling the whole way through.  These Indonesians are fully pressing in and embracing all of the schedule’s inconveniences and physical challenges.  They joke and laugh a lot the whole way through.

 

While they were trying to learn something new to take home with them, I could only think of the exit doors that led back toward home.  I didn’t really get much out of the exercise, but I was very inspired by the can-do, non-entitled attitude of my Indonesian teammates.

 

They are my heroes. 

 

“Do everything without complaining or arguing, so that you may become blameless and pure, children of God without fault in a crooked and depraved generation, in which you shine like stars in the universe.” (Philippians 2:14-15).