Thoughts About Aid Work From the Soap Aisle
In the supermarket (Carrefour – a French supermarket in Indonesia; how on earth did that get here ahead of Walmart, you must wonder), Anchu walks slope-shouldered, pushing the cart, never getting in front of me. His real name is Syamsuddin, but everyone calls him Anchu. Everyone here has two names, it seems. In Meulaboh, the bookkeeper is Robert but, he says, his friends call him Andre. And, he says when pushed, we are supposed to call him Robert. Does this mean that we are not his friends? He would never say of course, and I make a joke of the whole situation, calling him ‘RobertcalledAndre’ in one long word. He laughs. It catches and now that is his name among us for perpetuity: RobertcalledAndre. We found out Anchu’s real name – or his other name, I guess – too late, so he isn’t stuck with a similar silly long moniker. They say it’s because they are given another name at their Christian baptism, but Anchu is Muslim, so maybe his is just a nickname. Anyway. I am RyancalledSir, or RyancalledBoss, which is why Anchu never walks ahead of me, even though I have no idea where I’m going. The blind leading the deferent. When I call him, he sees my name on his cell phone display and answers, ‘Hello Boss.’ So what are you supposed to do with that in a post-colonial world? I can’t get him to stop.
We are shopping for soap. What kind of soap? I ask and he looks at me sag-bodied with the eyes of a wounded cat. Soap for … he says, trailing off and making scrubbing motions with his hands. Dishes? I ask. No, he says. Clothes? I persist. Laundry? He shakes his head, No. Well, what for? I ask. I have this feeling like I am a small child asking why the sky is blue, waiting for the grown-ups to reach the boiling point and yell: There is no answer; it just IS! But I continue my pesky line of questioning anyway: Well what do you do with the thing that you use the soap to wash? (This is getting complicated, even when English is your first language). I don’t know why I’m persisting; it’s not like I’ll know where to find it even if I know what it is. The shelves are full of bright packages shouting out Indonesian names for cleanliness, and I can read exactly none of them. Maybe it’s all this Boss talk – I feel like I should know where to go and what to do at all times. Maybe you should ask that girl, I say and point to the girl with the flashy Carrefour emblem all over her yellow uniform. Anchu looks sheepish. This is probably a moment when I should be culturally sensitive: Indonesian men probably don’t ask Indonesian women how to do anything. And this girl looks about 12, despite her uniform. Indonesian men probably ask Indonesian girls even less than they ask women. But I am Boss. He asks her and we find the soap. It comes in a squishy package with two pictures on the back. One is of dishes and the other is of clothes. The next item on our list is Windex. I never do find out exactly what the soap’s for
Sometimes I wish they’d just tell me off, say Look, pal, here’s how we’re going to do it, and here’s what you need to know so you’ll shut up with all the questions. But these people can walk circles around us with politeness and round here you don’t just tell your boss how it is. They put up with me and all my questions, and in the end we get things done. We buy Windex and soap for something or other and roofing tin for people’s houses. We do it with a lot of talking and planning and we do it between power outages and desperate requests for travel arrangements and vehicle use and more roofing tin because the people in the fishing village up north are getting antsy about roofless houses and starting to grumble. We do it between the frustrated sighs of the Finance department which can’t get money in fast enough for all this stuff and we do it with crises erupting like little volcanoes all around us, everyday.
My friend Erica writes me that I shouldn’t feel down because I am a Relief Worker and such a title commands respect and awe, a thing to bring admirers in truckloads. But do they know that this is what it’s like? Pushing shopping carts through the French version of Walmart and arguing over what the soap’s for? It’s not exactly running through the jungle avoiding guerilla crossfire, loose local garb soaked through with sweat and romance, trying to get the sick child in your arms to safety, is it? It’s a lot like normal life - it just gets lost in translation.
On the other hand, last night I drove through the crowded city in an old 4x4 with the steering wheel on the wrong side for me, honking like a gaggle of geese and gunning my way into spaces too small for a child’s tricycle in North America. Flocks of scooters cluster around your vehicle, bunching up in suicidal formations and spurting around like a school of fish, apparently having decided on a philosophy of life that matches their choice of transportation: it should be noisy, flashy, and cheap. Red lights are optional and the only rule is stay on your side of the road most of time and try not to kill others. It’s hectic, it’s completely mad, and it’s … a real whoop-up.
So that’s it, really. Driving on the wrong side, not knowing what the soap’s for, never figuring out what anyone’s actually called – these things put the tilt on normal life just enough to make it, well, more fun.
I have a theory that our know-it-all-ness is a thing we should ditch after our twenties are over and the whole game has gotten old. I’ve got a few more toes into the Thirties now and all being here does is confirm what I’ve begun to suspect anyway: life is a bit crazy, a bit out of kilter, it makes sense a lot less of the time than you’d like, and actually, it can be quite a bit of fun.
We are shopping for soap. What kind of soap? I ask and he looks at me sag-bodied with the eyes of a wounded cat. Soap for … he says, trailing off and making scrubbing motions with his hands. Dishes? I ask. No, he says. Clothes? I persist. Laundry? He shakes his head, No. Well, what for? I ask. I have this feeling like I am a small child asking why the sky is blue, waiting for the grown-ups to reach the boiling point and yell: There is no answer; it just IS! But I continue my pesky line of questioning anyway: Well what do you do with the thing that you use the soap to wash? (This is getting complicated, even when English is your first language). I don’t know why I’m persisting; it’s not like I’ll know where to find it even if I know what it is. The shelves are full of bright packages shouting out Indonesian names for cleanliness, and I can read exactly none of them. Maybe it’s all this Boss talk – I feel like I should know where to go and what to do at all times. Maybe you should ask that girl, I say and point to the girl with the flashy Carrefour emblem all over her yellow uniform. Anchu looks sheepish. This is probably a moment when I should be culturally sensitive: Indonesian men probably don’t ask Indonesian women how to do anything. And this girl looks about 12, despite her uniform. Indonesian men probably ask Indonesian girls even less than they ask women. But I am Boss. He asks her and we find the soap. It comes in a squishy package with two pictures on the back. One is of dishes and the other is of clothes. The next item on our list is Windex. I never do find out exactly what the soap’s for
Sometimes I wish they’d just tell me off, say Look, pal, here’s how we’re going to do it, and here’s what you need to know so you’ll shut up with all the questions. But these people can walk circles around us with politeness and round here you don’t just tell your boss how it is. They put up with me and all my questions, and in the end we get things done. We buy Windex and soap for something or other and roofing tin for people’s houses. We do it with a lot of talking and planning and we do it between power outages and desperate requests for travel arrangements and vehicle use and more roofing tin because the people in the fishing village up north are getting antsy about roofless houses and starting to grumble. We do it between the frustrated sighs of the Finance department which can’t get money in fast enough for all this stuff and we do it with crises erupting like little volcanoes all around us, everyday.
My friend Erica writes me that I shouldn’t feel down because I am a Relief Worker and such a title commands respect and awe, a thing to bring admirers in truckloads. But do they know that this is what it’s like? Pushing shopping carts through the French version of Walmart and arguing over what the soap’s for? It’s not exactly running through the jungle avoiding guerilla crossfire, loose local garb soaked through with sweat and romance, trying to get the sick child in your arms to safety, is it? It’s a lot like normal life - it just gets lost in translation.
On the other hand, last night I drove through the crowded city in an old 4x4 with the steering wheel on the wrong side for me, honking like a gaggle of geese and gunning my way into spaces too small for a child’s tricycle in North America. Flocks of scooters cluster around your vehicle, bunching up in suicidal formations and spurting around like a school of fish, apparently having decided on a philosophy of life that matches their choice of transportation: it should be noisy, flashy, and cheap. Red lights are optional and the only rule is stay on your side of the road most of time and try not to kill others. It’s hectic, it’s completely mad, and it’s … a real whoop-up.
So that’s it, really. Driving on the wrong side, not knowing what the soap’s for, never figuring out what anyone’s actually called – these things put the tilt on normal life just enough to make it, well, more fun.
I have a theory that our know-it-all-ness is a thing we should ditch after our twenties are over and the whole game has gotten old. I’ve got a few more toes into the Thirties now and all being here does is confirm what I’ve begun to suspect anyway: life is a bit crazy, a bit out of kilter, it makes sense a lot less of the time than you’d like, and actually, it can be quite a bit of fun.
posted by rjs | 12:05 AM
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