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.