Sumba
Thirty minutes before I was to head to the airport in Sumba, Doug, the missionary I had been staying with there, challenged me to reflect on why I came to the island in the first place and what it was God was teaching me by bringing me there. I don’t have a good, concise answer, I’m afraid. But I’m glad I went. Now I’m back in the big city, mostly thinking about my upcoming move back to the States, my pending marriage to the love of my life, and trying to land the right job from 10,000 miles away so I don’t start off my time as a husband unemployed. Sumba was a reminder in many ways, of who I am, what I’m bringing to the table in this next phase of life, and what God has called me to. It was also a reminder and an eye-opener to the way of life of so many people in our world.
In a lot of ways, traveling to Sumba is like going back in time. The Dutch didn’t pay much attention to the place while they were pilfering everything they wanted from the rest of the archipelago. The Japanese basically left it alone during their WW2 occupation of Indonesia. The Indonesian government has given considerably less effort to developing Sumba than it has to most of the other 17,500 islands. And setting aside a couple of luxury resorts on the west end of the island, the wave of tourism that crashes on Bali, Lombok, and Yogyakarta every year waves right on by Sumba. This is because Sumba doesn’t have much to offer outsiders searching for natural resources or a strong local economy. Sumba is a dry, limestone island in the poorest province in the nation, without gold, oil, or many thick forests to cut down. All of this to say that the people of Sumba have mostly been left to keep living the way they have been for millennia.
Shortly after being picked up at the airport by Doug, I was told that I would be going the next day to a remote village about one hour from their compound to stay for a week. A part of me was anxious about what the conditions would be like, but overall I was excited for this opportunity. I learned that this village was called Kadumbul and it did not have electricity, indoor plumbing, or English speakers. I was informed that my main role would be to help with the construction of a new church that was being sponsored by a larger church in Surabaya and that I would have the opportunity to preach in Bahasa Indonesia there the following Sunday. I was also told that I could have a translator come out from the city for that and that I could come back and stay in the compound if I needed a break from village life for a day or two. As I was excited about the challenge at hand, I quickly turned down both of those offers.
Day to day life that week was both a predictable rhythm and rife with activities that came up seemingly out of nowhere. With no electricity, waking up and going to bed, bathing, meals, and work on the church happened at predictable hours. Yet there were numerous points where Pastor Ansel, my host in the village, would come to me and say something like, “Hey, I’m going to this celebration thing for a lady that just had a baby a kilometer from here where there will be lots of rice and a hundred or so villagers. Want to join?” And I never turned one of those offers down. I studied cultural anthropology while at North Central, and staying in Kadumbul was like walking into the pages of one of those textbooks. It was fascinating. Among the interesting things I observed that week were:
-Traditional funeral rites and graves that had to be done in a very specific and costly way to please the spirits most of the villagers believed in. According to the animistic religion in Sumba, if you don’t build the right kind of grave for your deceased relative and you don’t sacrifice enough animals in the right manner, your relative doesn’t enter heaven.
-Dowries were not just something people still do there; people in that village couldn’t conceptualize an idea of marriage that didn’t involve giving cattle to your fiancée’s family. Apparently, the normal rate around there was 10-20 animals, either cows, buffaloes, or horses, to get yourself a bride.
-Fathers would usually stop being called by their own name and start being referred to as “Father of whatever their firstborn’s name is” once they had a child. For example, “Bapak Kembar,” meaning father of Kembar, was one man I met.
-The villagers were considerable more open-minded in what they would eat than most other Indonesians. For instance, I ate dog for the first time on my second day in the village.
-The houses were unique. Most of them were made of wood, grass, and thatch, and had a roof with a slope that went from gentle incline to sharp peak in the middle. Underneath the house on the ground level, the animals and farming equipment would be kept, in the main level the people would live, and inside the peaked part of the roof they would store their food and valuables.
I also realized a lot of things about the way that people in those kinds of places think and some of the ways I think that maybe aren’t so great. There is no such thing as privacy out there. They have no felt need for personal space or alone time. Families basically share a bed indefinitely. Kids think nothing of running up and grabbing your hand or sitting on your lap or otherwise getting into your bubble without asking. Hospitality is given and received with little thought or question because it’s the most natural course of action out there. “Of course you can just walk up and sit on our porch and join in the conversation with us and we’ll offer you some betel nut and homemade alcohol!” sums up the normal response I encountered when I would go for my usual evening walk. It was nice. I’m not quite there when it comes to having no felt need for personal space or alone time, so many times I would try to simply walk on past houses with people socializing on the porch. In fact, those walks I would take were my way of getting a break from all the people and the speaking in Bahasa.
The village was an unforgettable place for me, filled with some warm-hearted, memorable people. On Sunday, my last day out there, I got up early, preached a sermon in a language other than English for the first time, ate some rice and some fish, worked a little more on the church, and returned to the relatively civilized world of Uma Monungu (the mission compound). I then turned on an air conditioner, took a shower, and bought a chocolate bar from the store next door. The beauty and simplicity of the village is a wonderful thing. But modern civilization isn’t all bad either.
If the village caused me to examine concepts of modern vs traditional societies, the merits of collectivist cultures, and all the things that we have the capacity to go without, the remaining two weeks in Sumba left me looking inside much more.
Uma Monungu, which means “house of hope,” was an organization started to serve the youth on Sumba. Many teens from all over the island would stay in the dorms there and learn English, participate in small businesses, take care of the daily chores and learn about Jesus. The idea was that these kids come from places where the mindset is very narrow and the education is very poor. They might be able to grow rice and look after animals, but if they had aspirations beyond the shores of the island, they would be well behind kids from the rest of the country in achieving those dreams. For me and how I would fit into serving these kids, there was little direction given, but many tasks that could be done if I chose to take initiative.
After the village, and with an infected wound on my foot that was taking a long time to heal, I was grateful for some rest, but that feeling didn’t last long. I took for granted that if I wasn’t instructed on what to do, then there wasn’t anything for me to do. After a few days of this, I was growing bored and after asking for some instructions on how to help, it became clear that the onus was on me to find ways to serve. The only thing I knew was that I should spend time getting to know the kids there, and that at some point there would be English lessons to teach.
I found a situation like that one, where there is ample opportunity to do good, yet no external compulsion, to be a bit revealing. Sometimes I would go play soccer with the junior high aged kids, sometimes I would find chores to do around the compound or people I could help with something, and other times I would just lay on my bed and scroll Facebook or read a book. Not that there’s anything wrong with resting, but it did make me examine how motivated I really am to build relationships and show love to people like Jesus would in the way that I like to think I am. When I was in Master’s Commission, I remember someone saying that if you want to know what your relationship with God will be like once you’re out on your own, only look at the times you spend with Him that are because you choose to, not because someone or some institution is compelling you to. I think for me as someone who wants to be a missionary and wants to follow Jesus as closely as I can in how I interact with people, that same concept applies. If I’m in church or life group or some ministry activity and I do something good, it doesn’t mean as much as if I’m on my own and no one is expecting it. How I use those free times show who I really am and what I really believe. I came away from that period realizing that I still have plenty of room to grow to become the person I want to be.
The final phase of my time in Sumba was more rewarding. The kids were all back to the dorms and there were other foreigners there helping out. Three of us who were English teachers, along with the regular English teacher, sat down to discuss a plan for the week of staging English classes that were outside of their normal schedule. I was to have two classes that I would meet with a few times that week, both of which were with students that had very little ability in English. The first class were all younger kids who just hadn’t been studying English that long and were still learning the basics. They were fine. The other class was the one I grew more fond of though. There were three guys who were all older, all star athletes in the area, all looked up to by the other kids, but all of them had virtually zero knowledge of English and all of them had written off learning English as something they were capable of. The regular teacher told me that she had invited them to join a class but that they wouldn’t come. When I asked them later to join the new class I was starting, they each said they would be willing if it were a very small class, but that they were too shy/ embarrassed to learn with other kids in the class who knew more than them. So the problem wasn’t that they weren’t interested; it was that these guys who were the cool kids in other areas lacked the confidence in speaking English to learn around younger kids that knew more than them. The really cool thing was that once we started meeting, they couldn’t get enough. They didn’t want to leave when the hour had finished. They started asking to have class more than once a day. They really made progress in the week I was there. And most importantly, I think they are going to stick with it now that things are back to normal.
I enjoy traveling alone. I love just getting on a bus bound for some foreign city I’ve never been to and figuring it out when I get there. I’ve done that at a few points since starting my two year period of living in Indonesia. With my time here down to the final weeks and my life about to take a drastic change, I envisioned using this final term break from school in a similar manner. An anti-honeymoon, if you will: alone, unplanned, and not luxurious at all. But spending the entirety of my time in the same place and being able to actually get to know some people reminded me of the valuing of putting down roots in a place. Three weeks isn’t enough to really do that in a lasting way, but it’s enough to provide a taste and remember why being a missionary is different than being a backpacker. When we travel simply to travel, we’re mainly taking from the places we go. We enjoy the food, we meet people for a bus ride or a night in a hostel, we take some pictures, and end up with a rewarding and enriching experience. But other than plugging a little money into the local economy (and I’m cheap, so there’s not even much of that happening), what do the people we brush past in those places really gain from our time there? There are always exceptions, but if our aim is to make a difference for the people in the places we go, then it’s probably going to require that we spend some time there and get to know them. Though I saw the same people every day I was in Sumba, I kept thinking how much more I would be able to get to know the kids there if I stayed for a few months or a year. Traveling is great, but staying in one place is how the deepest impacts are made. That, I think, is one lesson I will try to take with me from Sumba.
