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.