Friday, December 4, 2015

It appears I may have opened the floodgates. I got a message from someone else on Facebook asking me if I would help them out with a school English project. They needed to interview a foreigner. I noticed that this person was friends with Rama, so they probably attend the same school. Rama told them about meeting me, and this person asked me if I could help him in the same way. It raises yet another interesting question, one that I thought about from the very beginning. It’s clear that foreigners are in short supply in Tanjungbalai and Kisaran. Fidrah even said that I was the first foreigner he’d ever seen in the town in his life. So why would their English teacher assign them the task of interviewing a foreigner? If I hadn’t shown up one day on my bicycle, where would they find this mythical foreigner? It would be like a teacher telling their students to interview Bigfoot or a Yeti. Great idea, but how are you going to find one? Another mystery.

Since I was dealing with this student through messages over our phone, it was easier for me to take control of the conversation and I nailed down a time and place for our meeting: today at 1:30. The students are going to come to the hotel and then we’ll leave from here. Or perhaps, the students from the first group coached him up and told him it was important to actually tell me when they were going to come. I was pleased to agree to do it, but I’m not in the best shape today. I went out for a long walk in the hot sun yesterday, and it did me in. Or something did me in. I developed a bad headache, and it has stuck with me through the entire night. My eyes are on fire despite going to bed early and staying in bed a long time. Perhaps I didn’t get much restful sleep in that time. I just feel weak and a bit nauseated. I don’t know what is going on. It could be nothing. It could be anything. So many weird things go on with my body these days that you could convince me that I have any of a long list of deadly diseases and conditions. And it’s probably just me getting older. While I was in Malaysia, I noticed how thin my arms and legs were getting. The flesh that would normally sit in certain places was just melting away, and I ended up with hollows in my arms and legs where nicely rounded flesh used to be. A few days ago, I was down in the lobby wearing a tank top and shorts, and the staff at the hotel took some selfies with me. In the pictures, I’m so thin I look like a concentration camp survivor or a cancer victim. You can see the hollows in my elbows and how flat and skinny my arms are. They’re terrible pictures. Either I’m sick and have some kind of wasting disease, I’m just getting older, or I need to hit the gym and build up my arms – do something more physical than carry a camera and type on a keyboard. I’ve even been losing my balance lately – something that usually happens only to people in their seventies and eighties. I’ll get out of bed or step through a door, and then I just start going over like a sailing ship in a strong wind. It’s weird. My brain also doesn’t seem to function the way it used to. I forget things. I noticed that I make a lot of typing mistakes, too. I go back and reread what I write and I have to fix a lot of mistakes. But even then, I miss a lot of them. I used to type with much greater accuracy. (That could be the keyboard on this computer. It’s very sensitive and hard to use.)

Well, yesterday was another day for walking around and taking pictures. For this, my smartphone and modern technology came into its own again. I was thinking about where to go, and I had the idea to turn on the satellite view on the map on my phone. Before that, I was just looking at the standard street map view. With satellite view, everything changed, and I got a very good idea of what the terrain was like around Tanjungbalai. I could see buildings and land and boats, and I noticed a thick cluster of houses and boats at a place along the river about 2.5 kilometers away. Without satellite view, I never would have seen this or gone there.

The route to get there took me across the bridge with all the food and drinks stands. I’ve crossed that bridge many times now, and I’ve always stopped at the same one for a fruit juice. They have some plastic chairs and their drinks pretty good. Whenever I stop there, I end up posing for a bunch of selfies. People driving by on their scooters will stop and then come up to me and ask if they can take a picture with me. Then they thank me and get back on their scooter and drive away. It’s usually groups of students, but grown men and women do it, too. Something I haven’t mentioned before is that all these selfies make me wish I had fixed my broken tooth long ago. I’ve never worried about my broken tooth. I don’t smile that often, if ever, and my impression (rightly or wrongly) is that it’s rarely visible. I’ve had such poor luck with just about everything that I have a “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” policy. My tooth doesn’t hurt at all. It doesn’t bother me in any way, so why bother spending all the money to fix it? It turns out that I was wrong about that. Had I gotten it fixed in Taiwan, it wouldn’t have cost that much money at all. But I wasn’t aware of that. I thought it would cost five hundred dollars. And I figured that in the attempt to drill into the stump of the tooth, something would go wrong. The stump would shatter, something would go wrong, and I’d end up making things far worse. So I just left it. But now I’m posing for selfies all the time, and not only am I encouraged to smile with a big teeth-exposing smile, I often feel like smiling anyway. But I don’t because I know I will look like a gap-toothed hillbilly. Of course that doesn’t matter here. The state of teeth here is largely atrocious. People my age are lucky to have any teeth left at all. Even young people have really bad teeth. It’s something I’ve noticed because I take so many pictures of children and then I zoom in on their faces to check the focus. I really notice how bad their teeth are. Even people that have healthy teeth don’t look great. Their teeth are often crooked and snaggly. But usually they are brown and rotting and look terrible. It makes me wonder about the difference. Are teeth in Canada that much better, or is it because we all have fake teeth? If they had proper dental care here, would their teeth actually be healthier and better, or would they all just have caps and bridges and fake teeth?

On the far side of the bridge, I heard a loud voice coming through a set of loudspeakers. To my dismay, I saw that by going down the small street toward the village, I would be passing right by a very large gathering of people in full Muslim dress. I don’t know what the gathering was about, but it’s a safe bet that it was religious, and most of the people there were women. On top of that, there were armed men everywhere. These armed men were just lounging about in the shade and they were all friendly, but even so, if you had to choose your audience as you walk around with a camera, your first choice wouldn’t be a bunch of soldiers. I also wouldn’t choose to be walking past a large religious meeting of women. I’m very comfortable around Islam, of course. Guinea is an Islamic country, and I got an intense crash course in the religion there. More important, it was the chance to just be in an Islamic country and start to think of it as normal. People were people first. The fact that they went to a mosque instead of a church and the women covered their hair was simply incidental. You just get accustomed to that. Even so, I’m not immune to the media reports of everything that is going on around the world. I can’t help but feel a bit more cautious in an Islamic society. People here have asked me if I was American, and they have been very glad to learn I was Canadian, and I get a lecture about how much they hate Americans. Now that I have a large number of local people as Facebook friends, I see what they are posting on the Internet. I don’t understand the words, but the photographs are often of bloody and injured children. It’s pretty clear that these are supposed to be victims of American drone strikes, and they are talking about ISIS and Syria and the Middle East. So even though this place isn’t politicized or extremist in any way, there’s no escaping that being in an Islamic country is a bit different from being in a Hindu or a Buddhist country right now. So I’m careful, particularly around women.

I also treat soldiers with some respect. I stop and chat with everyone who says hello to me, and I made sure to do the same with these soldiers. I shook their hands, and I made sure they understood that I was a tourist and that I wasn’t going to this meeting. I was going down the road to photograph some fishing boats. When I talk with soldiers and police officers, I often do have the feeling that their questions are a bit more official than questions coming from regular people. It might be my imagination, but the questions seem a bit closer to an interrogation than a casual chat. So I treat them that way, and I give them the respect that they might feel they deserve. There was no problem with my being there, and I said goodbye to the soldiers and walked down the road. To be honest, my photographer’s heart yearned to go into this meeting and take pictures. There were so many interesting-looking people in there. But I just walked past.

As a photo walkabout, this trip wasn’t that fruitful. I don’t know why that would be. I didn’t get as many opportunities to take pictures of people as I usually get. And the pictures I did take were poorly exposed. Things just didn’t feel right for some reason. But it was still an interesting walk. I found the area with all the boats, and it turns out that it was a kind of shipyard where they built and repaired the local fishing boats. I got my best pictures there, and, sadly, all my best pictures were taken with my smartphone. My smartphone actually does a better job of exposing pictures than my Olympus does. Sad but true. Considering how much time I spend taking pictures, it’s embarrassing how bad they are. I should be able to take much better pictures and know a lot more about what I’m doing. But I just don’t. When I’m faced with poor lighting, I really don’t know how to fix it. When I get a nice picture, it’s usually because the lighting was perfect to begin with. I don’t know how to fix bad lighting.

I was quite popular among the children again, and I gathered up a very noisy group as I walked along. I was a little bit bothered by it. It’s not like it’s a good time to have thirty screaming children all around you wherever you go. But it wasn’t terrible, either. It wasn’t like Ethiopia where the kids were throwing rocks at me and demanding money and grabbing at everything trying to steal it. These were good kids, and they really just wanted to have their picture taken and to follow me around and see what I did. The arrival of a foreigner in their little village probably never happened in their lifetime if ever before.

I eventually reached the end of my time, and I had to retrace my steps. The sun was going down, and I wanted to cross the bridge at a time when the sunlight was just right. As it turned out, the pictures I took were horrible, and I don’t know why. Oh, well. I stopped for another fruit juice, and I stayed there until it was quite dark. I took lots of selfies with people passing by as the sun was going down. I stopped for martabak mesir at my favorite restaurant. Then I walked around a bit and shot some video of the nightlife and then had a mie tiaw at another restaurant to top off my dinner. I uploaded a couple of pictures to Facebook, and then it was time for bed. All in all, it was a good day, though it led to the raging headache and a very bad night. I thought by this time, I’d be on the road and cycling to my next destination, but I’m enjoying my time here very much.

Tags: Sumatra Part 01