A Style of Heart

I like the dawn best here. After night has sucked up the radiant heat of the earth, the air creaking with the sounds of frogs and insects like the music of an old wood stove pinging as it cools, morning comes in colours of chrome and gold and slides through air smoky from the fires of burning refuse in the cities and the rice husks lying in blackened piles in the fields under t-shirt scarecrows, smouldering. (‘Indonesia: land of tiny fires,’ Jon says). The drive to the airport is quiet; even the road seems dimly populated like a cathedral before Holy Mass. The faithful worship seated on Japanese scooters decaled in horrible splashes of pinks, yellows, and blues, their engines thrumming like prayers. The rope-limbed, fruit-leather men belching along with utility carts welded to their ancient motorcycles’ frames, out early like robins on the lawn, seeking strips of metal, earthworms of rusted rebar to pull from the ground and sell for a handful of coins. The Muslim school girls in ugly uniforms like troops of Brownies, their heads covered in soft white cloth, which fails utterly to hide their beauty and only sets it up like a jewel on a cushion when they toss their heads back and laugh open-throttled and skimming the asphalt road like Joy itself. Still like photographs, the farmers stand reflected in the waters of flooded rice fields, woven cone hats like seashells on their heads, watching the road rush by. Palm trees spread green wings to greet the rising sun, lit up with the colours of ripe mango fruit, floating up from the fields like phoenixes on the glow of dawn. The world uncurls again, yawning, stretching, alive like creation on the first day and blinking, with only the scars of yesterday to give such unbelievable innocence the lie.

*

We fly the inland route to Meulaboh, averting our eyes from the damaged coast out of boredom now, rather than horror. Destruction is like Evil – a flashy opening act and then mind-numbingly dull. Creation is far more interesting. Life is always more thrilling than death, despite all the lurid entertainments produced to enthrall us to a different opinion. The news, when I make the mistake of paying it any attention, is full of journalistic grumbling about the paucity of results after so much money was given to rebuild this place. The news, as usual, is particularly focused on the uninteresting. Houses are being built. It’s just that it’s mostly the Acehnese themselves who are building them. On their own, even (gasp!) without our help, the way grass grows up through concrete. Drive by, fly over, and look a little: houses made of old boards pop up overnight on old foundations cleared of rubble, a spontaneous re-population of the littered scene, people splashing about in the piles of broken bricks and dead palm trees. Look further than the TV or you’ll miss the art of creation.

*

I look out the window the airplane and watch the brown river undulate like the ribbon of a dancer through the carpet of untouched jungle to tease the edge of the world. The sun gets caught momentarily in each of the broken-mirror fragments of rice-paddy water below before shaking itself free and skimming again across the unreflecting earth. I am thinking of the line I just read in my book: ‘For us, the living, the problem is of a totally different order: how to harness time in the cultivation of a style of heart – something like that …’ A style of heart. Scott writes and says that I beat myself up too much, but this is why. I do want to love, even help, in the end. I want to be kind, merciful, humble, wise. I want to cultivate that style of heart, and sometimes you must use fists to crack your own crusted habits, the tunnel of your own narrow vision. The world is bigger than that, and Life, and God. You must break the ground. You must really look at things.

Thirty Plus One

Perhaps you thought from the last entry that I was depressed. I don't think so. Sometimes you get to a spot where you wonder what the silly heck you're doing, though. I feel a bit like I've been trapped in a time warp, carrying on doing things that all my friends were doing in their twenties while they all move on to things most people are doing in their thirties - marrying, having children. It's a disconcerting thing to reach 31 years and realize that mostly, I've formed. This is what I am. For most of my twenties I was trying to figure out what I was and learn to like it. Now I am it, encrusted.

It's hard to realize that most of what has made me like this is hurt and my response to it. Recently I've felt empty of love, that thing which is so vital to the health of the heart. My response to my recent hurts has been to hone myself into a sharp object and slice through the world before it even comes close. It looks like self-assurance. It feels like hell. 31 and despite all this trying, I still don't know how to love people ...

Oh blast. I was hoping to come out bright and cheery eventually in this, but I guess it's not happening. Can't fight the Muse. It is what it is.

Thanks to all who wrote and called on my birthday. I do feel loved. I am having a good time here. We are doing some good. So we've got all that.

The rest of it is just the insides of me.

Sharing the Evening with Prayers and Giant Bats

In the evenings here sometimes a breeze comes, bringing slightly cooler air in from the sea. That is the time to sit out on the front porch, thinking blank thoughts and letting the day’s sweat dry on your brow. If the electricity has been on the soft drinks in the fridge are cold, but some days I’d give anything for a cold pint of lager or a chilled gin and tonic with ice clinking in the glass and the cold water condensation dripping down my hot knuckles. I’d probably give even more for someone to come out and sit beside me and just understand, but all that remains of God’s human form are the stories, and so far there's no other company.

The sky is turning oyster pearl and soft rose pink, deepening to the colour of a bruise. The cars on the main road up past the fields and the houses thrum like bluebottle flies and the motorcycles wind up and whine, mechanical mosquito noise mixing with the laughter of children next door. The evening call for prayer shimmers up from the minarets around the city like a mirage. My favourite description of the call to prayer is in Lawrence Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet:

"... a voice hanging like a hair in the
palm-cooled upper airs of Alexandria. ‘I
praise the perfection of God,
the Forever existing’ (this repeated thrice, ever
more slowly, in a high sweet register).
‘The perfection of God, the Desired, the
Existing, the Single,the Supreme: the perfection
of God, the One,the Sole …’"

If I could pray I would, but I lack the effort, the discipline, the habit of mind. God, the Desired, the Existing, will just have to understand tonight, or write me off. For the last six months I’ve tapped on his door with my prayers like the poor widow at a late hour and I’m tired of tapping. He has given me enough to live for now, so for now I will simply exist in this evening air filled with the prayers of the faithful, in the midst of a people who close their doors, face towards Mecca, and kneel. I hope that my resigned acquiescence in the middle of this is enough for Him.

Like tired Ezekiel, sipping his G & T in the valley of bones, my only prayer is a sigh: ‘O Sovereign Lord, you alone know.’ What else do you say to a God who takes everything and leaves only a promise behind? ‘Maybe in the end it will all be clear,’ you let the thought seep through you like a drug and settle your body back into the porch chair to think no further and watch the sky harden into a dark gunmetal blue. Muslims have a word for this. ‘Inshallah,’ they say, and usually shrug. A Huckleberry Finn existence: drifting on the river and calling it God, or Life, or Fate, or whatever you prefer. This is the realm of religion, and we do not know our way here. There is only a Name – if you believe in such things - to keep calling out, or whispering depending on your strength. There are times when I hope it’s enough only to remember that the Name exists. Maybe you are stronger than that.

Above the world the foxbats fly over when the sun drops, gulping the air like a thick drink with rubbery flaps of their translucent beer-bottle-coloured wings. They do not flit like fruit bats, but fly in steady straight lines like a race of dragons, hundreds of them. So here giant bats share the air with prayers, and perhaps they collide sometimes; perhaps some prayers are gulped like flies before they reach heaven; perhaps some prayers tear through the fruit-leather wings and a black bat falls to earth like an angel cast out of heaven.

I don’t know.

Tonight I am only a bystander to the struggle of the universe. Today I made a schedule for the vehicles and mostly got people to follow it, and I connected the fax machine. That was my effort, my blow struck against the chaos. Greater powers than me will have to decide how it weighs in the balance of good and evil.

‘O Sovereign Lord, you alone know.’ I will just sit here in my cooling skin under drifting clouds of prayer and the black shadows of bats, and close my eyes.

My Rather Jaunty Specialist Went to Indonesia and All I Got Was This Lousy T-shirt ...

Mock T-shirt, originally uploaded by rjschmidt.

Well I know I’ve been silent on the page for awhile, but I have a good excuse: I’ve been on tour. If U2 can keep doing it, so can I. (Speaking of U2, by the way, my birthday is coming up and wouldn’t it be a great, great gift for someone to say, ‘Hey Ry, by the way, got you tickets for one of the shows in the fall’ … Just a thought.)

No really, I’ve stepped up into the role of Logistics Manager for our programs, and just recently I’ve also agreed (I plead insanity for this one) to act as the Administrator for our Medan office temporarily. What that means is that I’ve been touring the country with Sally, a brit logistician on loan from Tearfund UK, setting up systems for managing procurement, stock, and vehicles and staff movement – and looking for places to buy beer on the side. Sally has a great taste for beer, which I’m more than willing to match.

So I’ve been busy. Logistics is a very interesting exercise in creativity while faced with chaos. In other words, it’s like trying to change a tire on a moving vehicle. Dr. McKemey, the Oxford PhD in Disaster Management who consulted for us (and, for those of you who remember, hired Hannah as the bookkeeper while she was washing his underwear) said that doing Logistics you see the underbelly of an organization.

In honour of our time under the underbelly of World Relief, Sally and I decided to make T-shirts. I’ll leave the subtleties up to you to figure out.

Pirates of Holy Saturday

In Which I Am A Pirate, originally uploaded by rjschmidt.

I had meant to post this just after Easter, but it wasn't done, and then I was taken by events to places far, far away from internet connections and similar vestiges of sanity and reality. So here it is, two weeks late ...

‘They say these are the most pirated waters in the world,’ Sally tells me as we are trying to get a boat across them. The boats available look like those boxes your food came in when you were a kid at White Spot. ‘Pirate Packs,’ I think they called them. Hmm.

The trouble is, we’ve got to get back. Big Easter plans for tomorrow: Sunrise service, team-building exercises … On second thought, maybe we should stay here.

But we’ve missed the ferry off the island. Actually, we didn’t really miss it – it just wasn’t going our way. And it didn’t leave when they said it would. Also, everyone here thinks it might have left three hours earlier. Besides that, it’s not quite clear if it even left from this dock, or this island, now that they think of it. It’s hard to get a straight answer out of people who think they can make more money if they tell you what they think you want to hear than what is true. We obviously want a ferry, and the local crowd at the dock is more than happy to provide one – it’s just not here.

‘How about a fishing boat?’ they offer, helpfully. We look dubiously at the painted tubs bobbing at the crumbling pier. ‘Do you have any other boats? Bigger ones?’ I ask. Our translator gets this across a little too quickly and the idea is met with vigorous approval. The local busybody runs for his motorbike. Bigger boats are farther away. My group volunteers me to go appraise their seaworthiness. Kelsey, meanwhile, will head up to the airport to see if the Russian helicopter pilots are still there and can be charmed by her Russian-speaking charms into flying us over to the mainland. Sally and Naomi stay as entertainment for the gathering crowd of local kids and men with nothing to do but take photos with fancy cell phones bought, presumably, with the wads of money they make arranging boats for clueless foreigners.

‘Where you from?’ yells my boat-arranger, turning back to me as we bounce along on his bike. I think he’s also lighting a cigarette as he does this, so it’s not clear how he’s also driving. ‘Canada!’ I yell back brightly, alternately trying to go with the flow and looking for soft places to jump clear. ‘Oh Canada!’ he shouts. ‘Speaking Indonesian?’ ‘Nope!’ I say, and ‘Ow!’ as we hit a raised bridge deck at 35 klicks and catapault over it. ‘Ok,’ he says and goes back to driving or whatever you call the thing he’s been doing with the motorbike and the cigarette and our lives.

When we arrive at the village with the bigger boats we see them out in the water and they look like bath toys. ‘Um,’ I say. People gather and look at me. I smile and look as if I know something about boats, which I do. I know that the boats in this village are small, exposed and questionable craft for crossing the most pirated waters in the world. I know there’s not a snowball’s chance in hell we’re taking any of them across said waters, even with team-building and sunrise services at stake. Especially with team-building and sunrise services at stake. ‘No go,’ I call Kelsey and tell her. ‘No Russians, either,’ she chirps back on the other end of the cell phone from the airport. It’s too bad. We’d heard they had vodka. Or maybe it’s not too bad. We’d also heard they had it with them in the cockpit. Between Acehnese fishermen with dollar signs in their eyes and dinky boats and Russian helicopter pilots hopped up on hooch, it would’ve been a hard choice. ‘Better,’ I say, ‘to cut our losses, call in AWOL for the group activities and go back to the beach to see how quickly we can drown our guilt in cold Malaysian beer and beautiful sunsets.’ ‘Mmm,’ Kelsey agrees.

I distract the boat-arranger from the conversation he’s started with the onlookers, no doubt whipping them into a greedy frenzy with the enticing prospect of getting my money. ‘Hey, Ok, we go back, we go now,’ I say waving back the way we came and pawing at his motorcycle. He looks confused. ‘Boat?’ he asks hopefully. ‘Nope,’ I grin at him. ‘Too small. Let’s go.’

We re-convene back at the ferry dock where the crowd of men is just about to propose marriage to Naomi en masse and try for the umpteenth time to take Sally’s photo despite her growling. ‘Right,’ I say. ‘Boat’s no good and the Russians have gone. Back to the beach, then?’ There is general agreement.

And that is how we would have missed out on the teambuilding, except for the three Germans sitting on the porch at the dive shop back at the beach, and their hired boat sitting at the end of the pier. Just as we settle in with cans of cold Tiger for another hard night away from the team, they pop the surprising news that we can catch a ride back on their boat with them in half and hour.

Which is why I’m standing on the prow of a thirty-foot Acehnese fishing boat watching flying fish skim over the waves out in front of us, keeping a sharp eye for pirates. So far no luck. We may make it back for the teambuilding yet. And the sunrise service tomorrow on the beach. Personally, though, I’m keeping my fingers crossed for the pirates. But that’s just between you and me.