Author Archives: Monica Brand

I’m still here with my distractions

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Otherwise known as LIFE.

To bring you all up to speed: went on vacation to Florida. Those of you following me on the Twitter must have figured that out. Now I’m preparing to go to Typeamom conference next week while I’m trying to find interesting things for the kids to do. This tends to happen in September. I get antsy like we should be doing some great strides in learning. You know – make it look good. I’m sure I’ll get over it soon.

Now back to life and getting ready for the conference. Not sure if I’ll have anything book-wise to post until after I’m home. Thanks for understanding.

Remembering Indonesia: part 2

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This week I’m republishing articles originally with Relief Journal. The memories of Ujung Pandang, Indonesia continue:

I wrote it all down

Write in my journal, that’s the first thing I want to do.

Leaving home and all things familiar, bound for exotic Indonesia, I can’t wait to get words onto the page. After I stow my first laptop underneath the airplane seat, I open a new blank book. The date: June 1996. As the plane lifts off the Newark airport runway, only then do I finally stop to look out the window.

That’s what we do as writers, isn’t it? We write down as much as we can, whenever we can, the important things – and even the trivial. All the details and emotions captured on paper or hard drive, observations to bring our fiction/poems/essays to life.

The airplane is full leaving the east coast, LAX seems a small city and not just an airport. I find the gate for my connecting flight, the majority of the passengers are Asian. For once, I’m a minority. Lord, do you really want me to do this?

All of it recorded on paper.

Finally in Indonesia, I write lengthy emails about the heat, a wicked-smart spider and rice for breakfast, all on that Toshiba laptop, lugging it to a friend’s house because where I live has no phone. I’m a toddler learning to talk, thriving on the romance of my new life. Even the toilet, at first confusing, becomes a silly story for the journal.

A Muslim girl my age, and her mother, who doesn’t speak any English, rent me a room for three months. Ripe mangoes fall onto my bedroom roof sounding like little bombs as they hit the tin metal. The sing-song Arabic broadcast throughout the city call Muslims to their prayers. The rats on the streets at night. Old man becak drivers call after me as I walk down the street, imploring me to hire them for a ride. Young girls walking in pairs toward the local mosque, their white prayer coverings blow in dry wind.

All captured within my journals.

And when homesickness finds me, I take solace in my journal. I write of my lack of anonymity on the street, I feel like I’m on display in a shop window. People openly stare. I hear “Hey, mister!” and “America!” and “Hello, Bill Clinton!” far too many times. Stupid Indonesians, I write in my journal. And when the married church leader makes a pass at me, that goes onto the page too.

Today the journals lay buried in a box in the attic along with other souvenirs. The old laptop on my closet floor. I don’t want to re-read those words yet. I wrote to remember, to relive it someday, but along with the beauty of Indonesia is pain, loneliness, and abandonment. A voice saying the Lord forgot you.

I never knew loneliness like Indonesia.

I prayed. I wrote. And when I questioned God, I wrote it all down too.

Remembering Indonesia

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Due to the release of the film version of Elizabeth Gilbert’s memoir Eat, Pray, Love, I decided to re-publish several posts originally on the Relief Journal blog. I hope you enjoy them.

The dark-eyed toddler clutched the mango, squatting barefoot on the counter top next to a basket of fruit. She stared at me, unblinking, her eyes wide. I smiled at her. I knew it wasn’t everyday an American woman like me walked into the market of this remote mountain village in Indonesia.

Before I traded my Miss for a Mrs., I traveled to the other side of the world to teach English in a private elementary school in Ujung Pandang, the capital of South Sulawesi, Indonesia. If you look at a map of the country, the island Sulawesi is most easily described as a floppy letter K. Today renamed Makassar, it’s still labeled Ujung Pandang (or Ujungpandang) on the map here.

When not in the classroom, I explored the city or went to the beach. Sometimes to the mountains. Hot, crowded Ujung Pandang buzzed with Vespa scooters and mini-buses. Everywhere I went – children.

Camera-ready kids, a shy first grader and funny beggars

Meeting children proved easy.

At the Bantimurung waterfall, a nearby tourist attraction, an energetic pack of youngsters playing in the water rushed to meet me. They all wanted their picture taken. My students in the classroom – loud and just as fun loving. So cute in their red and white uniforms. One first grade girl I imagined taking home with me. She was quiet, shy. Probably afraid of the giraffe American who talked English too fast.

I wonder what happened to her.

Then there are the children part of me doesn’t want me to remember. The way-too-young beggars at the Central Market in the heart of the city. One boy without a hand. Another foreigner told me parents were known to cut off a hand or foot, just so the child could beg.

I bantered back and forth with those children, making them laugh. I asked their names, impressing them with my growing Bahasa Indonesia language skills.

I never did ask about their parents.

The children at the shops were friendlier than the beggars in front of the post office. Like beggar kids needed to be friendly, entertaining to me. If anyone should be cranky, it’s them.

A wrong bus and Pizza Hut

I once got on the wrong bus, taking me to a section of the city I’d never seen before. Shacks of tin sat too close to the road. Hundreds of them. Hard to believe families lived in little more than a one-room metal chubby. Like the girl with the mango, I stared openly, glad for the window buffer between me and that foreign world.

Later I saw homes far removed from the tin shacks. A wide iron gate across the driveway was not uncommon for those upscale homes with their high walls and landscaped front yard with tropical flowers. I admired those houses as if I were buying real estate.

I ate at Pizza Hut. Same pizza we eat here in New Jersey. The big difference: the bottle of Sambal sauce on the table. I grew to love the spicy sauce on my pizza too.

Looking back

It’s the littlest things that trigger a memory. I can’t look at bamboo, papaya or an orchid without thinking of Indonesia. Not too long ago, a magazine I picked up in the bookstore pictured a durian on it’s back cover. In Indonesia, we attracted a giggling crowd when we tried the white, fleshy fruit the locals believed to act like an aphrodisiac.

I still have the pictures of the children at the waterfall. The snapshot of the little girl with the mango is worthy of National Geographic. I could scan them, put the best on the Internet, share them with you. But that seems wrong somehow, like I’m pimping them out.

I have no photos of the beggar children and now – 10 years later – I wish I did. Their faces fade the longer I’m gone from Indonesia, and I suspect they are the ones the Lord wants me to remember.

map image: InfoPlease.com