Indonesian 101

Safely back in Tado, I found I had some time to chill out after a long bout of Floresian transit.  Yeremias and the family were kind of indifferent about the cinnamon and coffee (like “so why do you want to carry this all the way back to America again?  You know it’s just coffee, right?”), but they had some recommendations as to how to prepare it.  As I tell the story of that, I feel like it’d also be a good idea to introduce the various family members, since I’ve been spending most of my time living and interacting with them while I’ve been in Flores.

Ame, Tua Golo bea Tado

At the head of the household is Ame.   He is the patriarch of the entire extended Tado clan, and has a number of customary responsibilities that I don’t quite understand the breadth and depth of completely.  However, as far as a day-to-day existence goes, Ame mostly pads around the house, reads whatever BI book of mine he finds interesting (including the dictionary), eats regularly, takes car of yard work, and generally lives the life of a stately retiree.  Every once and a while he will be accompanied by a number of young men, who will sit and smoke cigarettes with him under what I’ve been calling the Cell Phone Tree (because that’s where I get the best signal to make calls to the US), discussing what Jeanine has informed me are probably any number of land use or family disputes.   While Ame doesn’t have universal power or anything, I think he does call the shots as far as a lot of family relationships are concerned, and it’s very clear that a lot of people in the village respect him, and people as far away as Labuan Bajo will nod in recognition when I tell them I’m living in his house in Pusut.

Ame with baby Reno

Ah yes, baby Reno.  If Ame is the chief of the village and extended Tado clan, Reno is the chief of the “rumah”, or household.  Through some happy accident, Reno has learned how to cry like no other baby I’ve ever encountered before, and can bring the entire household’s operations to a grinding halt just by being denied simple line-of-sight access to his mom.  When I first met Reno,  I thought he belonged to Yeremias, or perhaps someone younger; however, I learned later that Reno is in fact Yeremias’ brother, and Ame’s youngest son by his new wife, Bibi.  Ame was married before, and his first wife, Yeremias’ mother, died within the past few years.

Ame takes care of Reno a lot, since he and Reno both spend a lot of time in the same space not doing much in particular, while Bibi and Leni take care of household work and Yeremias generally tends to the “sawah” or rice fields.  It’s an interesting parallel to watch the interaction between a man in his later years and a boy in his youngest years because they get fascinated with a lot of the same stuff.  While I’d hardly say that Ame is in his “second infancy”, it is kind of fun to watch the two of them putter around.  Reno’s definitely got more energy (particularly when crying) and it’s interesting to watch the Indonesian method of young child-rearing.  Diapers are nonexistant here, probably because they’re wasteful and a pain to maintain, so Reno mostly just ends up running around naked from the waist down most of the time, like a lot of other walking-not-talking children that I’ve seen.   Sanitation generally takes the form of cleaning up whatever goes down after the fact, which is pretty easy on the concrete floors of the hut, and I guess trying to teach potty training later.  This can become problematic though–I once watched baby Reno cry, stop, run around, pee on the floor, cackle gleefully, run around in circles for another minute, then slip on his own urine, fall, and begin to cry, and loud.  After a long day of listening to Reno cry for what seemed like 14 hours straight at uneven intervals and for no particular reason, this was a difficult episode for me to process in any kind of a sane way, and gave me a lot of respect for all the parents and child workers out there who live with kids this age day in and day out.

One of the people most responsible for Reno, as well as a lot of other stuff around the house, is Bibi, Ame’s second wife.   Bibi also offered to help me roast the coffee beans I brought back from Waerabo.  She is very quiet, but very friendly, and really takes care of me with food and laundry, etc.

Roasting coffee was a very cool experience.  I doubt that many people I know have ever seen coffee beans roasted over an open fire, but the entire kitchen ends up getting filled with smoke and smelling like an espresso.

Unroasted beans from Waerabo

You start with your standard beans, which like roasted beans are hard, but don’t really have a particular smell or flavor.  The real character of coffee gets brought out through the roasting process: we dumped my half a kilogram or so of beans into a big cast-iron fryer and threw it over the flames.

It’s imporant to keep stirring the beans, since you don’t want them to get too burnt, and we ended up having to stir mine for about an hour.   Gradually, they turned the color of what I would recognize as prepared coffee beans, and began to give off a really powerful coffee smell.

Finally, when the beans were ready, we spread them out on a woven basket to cool.

Mmmm…coffee.

The only thing left to prepare for my trip back to the States was the cinnamon, or “kayu manis”, I had brought back from Waerabo.  In its current long and smelly form, it’s pretty unlikely they would let me take it through customs, so Yeremias and Ame helped me break it up into smaller pieces and seal it in plastic bags.

Cinnamon starts out in pieces like this, or longer:

A lot of the pieces are stashed inside of one another. Ame and Yeremias helped me break all of these sticks down into smaller, more manageable bits.

The result?  One kilogram each of processed coffee and cinammon, ready to be carried back to the US.  I just hope the smell comes out of my clothes.