Tentena, Week 6

The Language I’m Really Trying to Learn Isn’t Indonesian At All, and Other Reasons why Lian’s a Super Smart Cookie 

For a second this week, I kind of hit a wall.  We returned from the Togeans to find that Lian’s resident 19-year-old nanny/cook, Eka, had left for Palu to unwillingly marry the father of her unborn child in attempts to uphold the honor of her family and self.  This was a tragedy for her and she had wept openly about in the weeks leading up to the event.  More importantly, though, it was a tragedy for me.  Eka’s an amazing cook and during the transition to the new lady, I spent three full days eating nothing but white rice, fried bananas, fish bones, and some curried jack fruit.   What I learned is that full belly starvation is real; I have no ability to sustain myself in the absence of veg and protein.  What I also learned is that if I want more veg and protein, I should just tell Lian and she’ll take care of it.  Really, Hanna, no one has time for your could-have-been-avoided-nutrient-deficient-emotional-meltodwns. 

Look: other people advocate against
women & children violence too!

We now have a selection of three different kinds of vegetables at every meal. 

To add to this, working through my survey results this week, trying get a grasp on the women’s attitudes towards DV and gender roles here, was overwhelming.  I kept trying to find a linear correlation amidst the scatter plot of answers I was visualizing but nothing was emerging.  Over 90% of the respondents believed that it is not okay for a husband to take out a bad day by physically hurting his wife, but over a quarter agreed or weren’t sure whether or not physical discipline could help bring order back to a marriage. 

Jaime’s doing a lot of reading up on DV law here this week via her favorite book in the world, Indonesian Law & Society (“favorite” as defined by a woman who brought Rethinking Negotiation Leadership 2.0 to the Togeans as her beach read), so the two of us have talked about what’s driven the thinking here.  She discovered that prior to 2004 (when an official DV law was enacted), any violence against women was treated as a crime against morality: on par with animal abuse, prostitution, gambling, etc.  To violate a woman’s safety, security, and liberty was not to violate universally determined human rights, but to instead violate a general code of conduct, a social order. 

With this things began to make more sense.  For the most part, women are in favor of birth control not because it’s indicative of personal liberty, body-ownership, and reproductive rights, they’re for it because they’ve been told that population control is good for society.  In fact, there are quite successful campaigns here advocating that “2 [kids] is enough,” and at 2.1, the fertility rate in Indonesia is the exact same as the States’.  No, a husband should not take his bad day out by physically hurting his wife—that’s not helpful and violence could lead to divorce (another deviation from order)—but a wife should also and absolutely be able to control her husband’s temper.  A good wife obeys her husband, she reports everything she does to him, and in return, should be protected by him.  Protection is important, and abused women should definitely be protected by law (Kita negara adalah negara hukum, “Our country is a country of law,” as many women have explained….ironic considering that Jaime and I frequently refer to this place as a lawless society) but less than half agreed that it’s actually okay for a woman who experiences DV to get a divorce. 

This adherence to the social order thing is an adherence to a thinking extraordinarily far removed from everything I know.  Much of it comes from the religious & government zealot education here that does nothing to encourage free and liberal thinking; everything to encourage patriarchy, conformity, and obedience.  That mindset is how you best integrate here and how you best survive.  People believe, quite unquestioningly, what they are told by leaders and I am flailing a bit in how you work within this to promote human safety and wellbeing.  Especially when I feel that, on one hand, maintenance of the social order here contributes to an unyielding amount of internalized and gender-based oppression and, on the other, that the disruption of social order here very recently resulted in a violent conflict that left many murdered and many more displaced. 

When I met with Lian to discuss next steps for me, she asked me to do another survey—this time for the religious leaders—assessing their feelings on DV.  I was pretty hesitant.  What good are these surveys bringing us?  I’m so perplexed by the inconsistency of answers, I’m not sure how they are helpful, and I don’t know what to do with them.  Some of it just seems like lip service.  I don’t even know where you start having a conversation about individual human rights amidst this extremely collectivistic thinking. 

"Candid" photo of me putting the finishing touches on survey 2.

Lian gave me a “welcome to my world” look and explained that she understood.  She, too, had been there.  She had gone off to school in Yokyakarta, been exposed to free thought, to personal and civil liberties, to the knowledge that the bible or qa’ran was not the ultimate charter on human rights, and had come back struggling to match those ideas to this society.  So when I cried out, it’s a totally different language!  She smiled and said, yes, it is, but through these surveys we’re learning to speak their language.  And she’s totally right.  The only way to truly have a conversation on gender-based violence in a place like Central Sulawesi is to find out how Central Sulawesians perceive the problem for themselves. 

Assessing Religious Leaders’ Attitudes on Domestic Violence Survey, here I come.