Second First Impressions

It’s always tricky starting a new job - always stressful, at least I’ve found it so. In situations where I haven’t felt completely inadequate for at least the first couple of days, the work didn’t challenge me and had no potential for growth. Trust me, right now I’m stressed. I can only offset the feeling by telling myself that this just might turn out to be the best job I’ve ever had. I have no doubt it will be (another) steep learning curve.

So here I am in Palangka Raya, provincial capital of Central Kalimantan in Indonesian Borneo. Fast & dirty geography lesson (or recap for those of you who stuck with my blog - by the way, I love you). Indonesia sprawls out between the Indian Ocean and Pacific Ocean, almost 2 million square kilometers of land area nestled in over 5 million square kilometers of territorial area. While many foreigners have heard of Borneo and Bali you’d be surprised at how many don’t realize that these are just two of the country’s 17,000 islands (give or take a few hundred). Checking population on some websites, estimates vary from 240 to 270 million people - imagine a margin of error equivalent to Canada’s entire population.

Borneo itself is shared by Indonesia (the bulk of southern land area), Malaysia in the north, with the small country of Brunei located in the northwestern corner. There are 5 provinces in the Indonesian part of the island: North, West, East, South and Central Kalimantan provinces & if you live or visit here you would usually say you’re going to Kalimantan, not Borneo.

First impressions when comparing to South Sulawesi - it’s a little closer to the equator, but seems hotter not because of that. The area is flat, flat, flat. Apparently more mountainous in the interior but from the little bit I’ve seen so far the area around Palangka Raya has very little elevation. So it’s a change for me from the cool hills in Bengo-Bengo. Different vegetation - but I’ll leave the intensely interesting botanical discourse for (much) later after I’m more familiar with the local ecology, tropical peat forests. The city is quite small compared to Makassar, quiet, much less traffic, but my new office mates tell me that it’s had a sudden spurt of development just in the last few years. A new Hypermart (one of my favourite places for cheap household goods), a Mata Hari clothing department store, cinema, new hotels and apparently yogurt & cheese can now be found locally, so I’m all set.

So getting back to the stress - my new job is Operations Manager for the Orangutan Tropical Peatland Project (OuTrop), a research and conservation organization that partners with the local university, Universitas Palangka Raya and their conservation group CIMTROP. OuTrop itself was originally established by several researchers from the UK working on (surprise) orangutans, and has branched out over the last 15 years or so to include other wildlife studies, forestry and ecological projects, etc. etc. But why reiterate (and massacre) a good description of the organization when you can find it at outrop.com.

I have a long job description which may be summarized by the phrase “run things smoothly” - primarily the logistics of the station. Again, first impressions - there are several staff members responsible for research, communications, finances, camp management etc. There’s an office in town and a field station in Sabangau forest, about an hour away by road, boat & small rail. I’ll visit that tomorrow to see the set up and meet the staff there. Anyways, the staff all seemed happy to meet me, maybe because they’ve been filling in the gaps for several months of what will be my job. 

Other news: language skills are coming back, I’m meeting tons of new people involved in the projects here, still not crazy about Indonesian food, but I brought my favourite coffee mug from home & am freely indulging in good coffee again. Pictures to follow.

Don't Ask Why

Friends & family in Canada were curious about why I wanted to go back to Indonesia & as soon as possible. Beyond the usual ‘skipping the cold winter’ I didn’t, & still don’t, have an answer. But there’s a feeling here that I don’t get at home, that is maybe explained through an anecdote.

Before leaving again I had to get a passport-sized photo of myself with a red background for the visa application. Sounds easy, right? Conceding that Fredericton is a small town with a limited demand for portrait studios, one of which had just closed its doors, there remained about half a dozen larger and smaller businesses. I called all of them & none of them could meet the requirement of a red background, except Walmart as long as I could ignore the Christmas tree blocking out a lot of the solid red. The answers were ‘No, sorry, can’t do that’. End of discussion.

Now, if I had asked on any commercial street in a similar-sized town in Indonesia for a blue background (they all have red for the official photos) the answer would rarely have been ‘no’. It would have been ‘well, no I don’t have that, but my brother knows a guy who works two streets over who may be able to do that’ or ‘no, but if you want to pay this guy to go and buy a blue sheet of paper, he will bring it back and then I can take your picture’, or ‘no, but why do you need that?’ which would devolve into a long discussion of the funny things different governments require for official purposes.

(Sidenote: The above example also illustrates why I find Canadians teaching entrepreneurship to Indonesians laughable.)

Maybe that’s why I like it - there just seem to be so many rich possibilities in every small daily transaction & nothing seems impossible. When I started learning the language I gathered a lot of my Indonesian vocabulary from books & flipping through the dictionary, so the foundation was proper language, not everyday use in conversation. So when I used one of the words I’d learned - “mustahil” - one of my friends didn’t understand what I was trying to explain. Mustahil - dictionary definition - means ‘impossible’. My friend laughed. “We never use that word - we just say ‘tidak mungkin’”. Which means ‘not possible’, or conveys the meaning ‘improbable’. It may sound subtle but ‘not possible’ leaves that gap for chance to slip through. In Canada, many things are mustahil, in Indonesia, nothing seems to be.

Taking off the rosy specs, often you can’t get what you want or need here. The answer may be ‘next week’ or ‘next month’ and you may be continually put off until it becomes evident that you’re just not going to get what you want. Part of this is due to the cultural tendency to politely answer any demand, even obviously unreasonable ones. But part of it really is optimism in what the future may bring. So, maybe what really explains my feelings about the country is ‘lie to me, I still love you’.

But - maybe - life is pretty much the same here as in Canada, without polar vortices. Just in a different language so everything seems new & more exciting. That’s entirely possible & how would I ever know if that’s not the case? I’ll write more about how returning is going in the next post. No doubt it will be a new experience (again) - new job, different island - I can’t wait to start. Right after all the bureaucratic hoops in Jakarta have been negotiated.

In the end, I got my red background in Fredericton - went to Fabricville, bought a meter of red cotton, went back to the Walmart studio where I received the most positive negative & helped the friendly portrait artist hang the cloth from her curtain rod. Voila - an official passport photo against red rather than white background. Tidak mustahil after all.