Thursday, December 3, 2015­­

I’ve written a lot and thought a lot in recent days about cross-cultural communication problems, and yesterday was another perfect example of that. It involves the woman, Rismah, who had come to the hotel before to ask me to speak to her English class. I had heard nothing from Rismah since except a vague message on my phone about how she hoped that I would be able to talk to her friends sometime. Well, I went about my day yesterday and then quite late, I went out for lunch. I returned to my hotel around 3:00 or 3:30 and I found six Indonesian students sitting in the lobby and waiting for me. This was Rismah and her English class. They had just shown up totally unannounced. Even more serious, this was no casual meeting. This was the official meeting with the English class that Rismah had asked me about. They had shown up with scripts in their hands, and the idea was that we would sit down in a formal setting and they would interview me and videotape the conversation. It was a class project on which they would be graded.

And even more serious, most of them had jobs and they had taken the day off in order to be here. One of them didn’t even live in Tanjungbalai. He lived in Kisaran and had driven for over an hour to be here. Therefore, a lot of planning and organizing and communicating had gone into this little gathering. Yet, no one had informed the most important person – me. They had just shown up with the vague hope that I would be there and that I would be available. That is so strange that I can barely wrap my head around the concept. I don’t mean that it was impolite or inconveniencing me in any way. I have all the time in the world, and I was more than pleased to help them and be involved in their project. However, it was so risky for them. That’s what confused me. It was pure chance that I even showed up at the hotel at that time. I could easily have been gone for the whole afternoon walking around and taking pictures. In fact, I almost always am. I just happened to be feeling a bit ill, and I wasn’t up to a long excursion. And even after my lunch, it was a complete accident that I went back to the hotel. My original idea was to go from the restaurant to my favorite juice stand and then from there do a bit of shopping. I can’t even remember now why I went back to the hotel first. But luckily I did. Otherwise, all these Indonesians would have made all that effort for nothing.

So why didn’t it occur to Rismah to contact me and set up a time? I can’t even guess. It’s possible – remotely possible – that in her mind it was presumptuous to contact me and establish an official time. Perhaps in her mind it was more polite to just show up and not make it official. It’s also possible that she was just too shy. But the evidence doesn’t support any of that. We were already in contact through Facebook on my phone and had sent messages back and forth. She had had no problem just showing up at the hotel the previous day and talking to me by herself. I’ve been thinking back over our conversations to see if I missed something, but there really wasn’t anything.

If I had to trace the problem back to its source, I’d say it started when I began to question Rismah about the day for what I thought was a visit to her classroom. She had mentioned Friday as a possible day. At that time, I thought I might be leaving Tanjungbalai before then. So asked if it was possible to do it on any other day – the next day or Thursday perhaps. In my mind, I was just going to her school and visiting with her teachers. It wasn’t a big deal. When I did this with Sri, I wasn’t even allowed to be inside the classroom, and all I did was sit around by myself most of the time and then pose for pictures. So it didn’t seem very important. And nothing Rismah said indicated that it was any different. She was very casual about it all, and she never mentioned anything about me being interviewed on camera.

It took a while for this group to get their act together even after I showed up at the hotel (by lucky accident). Then it was decided that we would all go to a cafe together. They needed a somewhat quiet place where we could talk and they could record video on their cell phones. To my surprise, I learned that they’d all driven there on scooters. I’m a little hazy in my recollection now, but I think there were five women and one man. I got on the back of the man’s scooter and the whole bunch of us set off in a group. I eventually thought of them as the Motorcycle English Club (even though technically they were riding scooters). We drove to a cafe that one of them knew about. But when we got there, we discovered that it was closed for renovations. At this point, it hardly puzzled me at all that they hadn’t even bothered to figure out where we were going to go in advance. If they were willing to just show up on the odd chance that I would be at the hotel, it makes sense that they’d also neglect to figure out where to go in advance.

Once the first cafe was out, we got back on the scooters and drove for quite a long time along the main road heading out of Tanjungbalai. I was getting worried that we were going to drive all the way to Kisaran. But we eventually turned into a parking area in front of a fairly modern coffee shop and restaurant. It had outdoor seating, but we went inside and arranged ourselves along some tables. I really had no idea what was going on or what we were there to do at this point. It was still all a mystery. I did try to ask questions. I wanted to do a good job for them, and the more I knew about the project, the more helpful I could be. But no matter how many questions I asked, I really didn’t understand what was going on. At that point, I still had no real idea of who they even were or what kind of school they attended.

A waitress came by and gave us menus. There was confusion surrounding that, as well, because they kept leaving things up to me. And I had no basis on which to make decisions. They even asked me if I wanted to get food. Luckily, I had just eaten and I said no. Had I succumbed to their pressure and ordered a meal, it would have interfered with the project. Because we were there for an official interview. But they pressed me hard to have food anyway. I resisted, and we all ordered drinks. I ordered a vanilla milkshake. Then came some more discussion on their part, and to my surprise, half of them got up and moved to other tables on the other side of the room. What the heck was going on?

Then things became clearer. This group of six students actually consisted of two groups of three. Each group had prepared a list of questions to ask me. I caught a glimpse of the list, and I saw that a name had been written beside each question. So I was going to sit down with each group in turn, and they would ask me the questions in a certain order. The man (I can’t remember his name) told me that I should speak as long as possible. They wanted long answers. I tried to find out just how strict the parameters were. Could they, for example, have a follow-up question? Could each question lead to a mini-conversation, or could they only ask the question as written and then be quiet? But I got no answer to that question either. I would just have to play it by ear.

As far as the videotaping went, a student from the other group just stood nearby holding a smartphone and aimed it at us. I was a little surprised at that. They had mentioned the videotaping enough that I was expecting some kind of tripod and a real camera of some sort and maybe even lighting. But we were going low-tech. I almost interfered at this point because it was perfectly clear to me that the audio on this smartphone was not going to be any good. The woman was standing too far away, it was too noisy in the room, and I was facing in the wrong direction. There is no way that phone was going to be able to pick up my voice. And my voice was the whole point to the exercise. I was going to suggest turning on the voice recorder on my phone and putting it on the table between us to get a good audio recording, but I held my tongue. I think it was a great idea, but who knows what problems and confusion would result from me saying anything. I’d just have to leave it to them.

The questions were fairly straightforward. They asked me questions about my name and my age and where I was from and what I was doing in Tanjungbalai. They asked me for my opinion about Indonesian food and about Tanjungbalai in general. They asked me where I’d been in Indonesia. It was pretty much the same conversation that I have a couple dozen times a day. It occurred to me that as an English exercise, the roles should have been reversed. Their questions were written down in advance and all they had to do was read them. I had the difficult part – long impromptu answers in English. All they had to do was sit there and listen, and, to be honest, they often didn’t even do that. They were so worried about the next question on the list that they didn’t bother listening to me and instead looked down at the paper to read the next question in advance. And it is far from clear how much of my answer they even understood. I kept my English simple and I spoke clearly, and I tried to be entertaining, but I still saw their eyes glaze over as they lost the thread of my reply. A true test of English ability would have been for ME to ask the questions and for THEM to answer.

Despite all of this, I think the interview with the first group went fairly well. And I think I gave good value as their foreigner. Then everyone switched places and the second group interviewed me. This interview did not go as well. They were not as well prepared, and they jumped into the subsequent questions on the list much too fast without giving me a chance to expand on my answer. It felt rushed, and it was clear that they weren’t really listening to me anyway. The English ability of this second group seemed much lower, and I even had to ask them to repeat the questions several times. I had trouble understanding their pronunciation, and some of the questions were worded strangely.

I forgot to mention one key moment. This occurred before the interviews started. There was some awkwardness and hesitation, and then the man (who was kind of the spokesman for the group) asked me how much I expected to get paid. He didn’t word it quite like that, but that’s what he meant. He even said that they didn’t have much money, but he wanted to know what sort of compensation I expected. This, frankly, astonished me. It speaks to how far apart our perceptions were. Obviously, I hadn’t the slightest thought in my head about being paid for this. Why would I? It took me aback that this would even occur to them.

The topic of money came up enough times to press home how important it was in their lives. As part of the interview, I mentioned that I had been to Bali a long time ago. They all laughed and joked about how they dreamed of going to Bali, but they would never have enough money to go there. I became concerned about money, and I worried that this cafe was going to be a financial burden to them. We had all ordered just drinks, but each drink cost the equivalent of a meal anywhere else. It wasn’t a cheap place. So I wondered if I should offer to pay for everyone. I would have done so except that I realized I didn’t have enough money in my wallet. I usually carry a lot of cash, but just a day or two earlier, I had decided to organize my wallet and kind of thief-proof it. I wanted to make sure that if my wallet was stolen or lost, I wouldn’t lose anything important. So I cleaned it out and ended up with not much money in it anymore. And when it came time to settle the bill, I wasn’t even sure if I should make the gesture of trying to pay for my milkshake. After all, they had just offered to pay me for my time. Wouldn’t it be weird, then, to try to pay for my own drink?

More confusion came when the interviews were over. The interviews didn’t take that long, really, and I assumed that we would then relax and talk and enjoy ourselves. They’d all told me, for example, that I was the very first foreigner they’d ever spoken to. The man had even said that I was the first foreigner he’d ever seen in Tanjungbalai or Kisaran. So I thought they’d want to just talk for a while. After all, we hadn’t even finished our drinks yet. But they were packing up and practically rushing me out the door. It was really weird. The idea, apparently, was to show me a local beach – one of the local sights. I was resistant to that idea, and pressed for more information. I honestly couldn’t see why we had to rush off anywhere. It felt like we’d just arrived at this cafe. And then I learned that this beach was over an hour away by scooter. They wanted to drive there as a group. But I had no idea why they thought this was a good idea. It was past five o’clock. It was going to be dark long before we got to the beach. What would we do when we go there? We’d just have to turn around and drive back. It would be two and a half hours of me just sitting on the back of this guy’s scooter unable to talk to anyone. The idea seemed insane to me. It boggled my mind that this whole group thought it was a good idea. Anyway, I fought off that insanity successfully, but I was unable to stop the wholesale rush for the door.

We ended up piling back onto the scooters and driving to the local square. It’s kind of a grassy park and there were lots of rides for children, food stalls, and even a couple of stages for performances. I thought we were going to hang out there and chat. But when we got there, they all just stopped their scooters and did nothing. They were unsure of what to do. The man asked me if I wanted something to eat. I didn’t, as it happened, but I said sure. I could eat. What else were we going to do anyway? I thought we’d park the scooters and walk around the park and sample food from the different stalls. But once I said yes to food, we all just drove out of the park and back into traffic. It was soooo confusing. We drove around the park and then stopped at a single, solitary food stand at the side of the road. This made no sense to me at all. But then I learned that this food stand actually belonged to one of the students, Rama. This is where she usually worked. In fact, she had had to shut down the food stand that afternoon in order to meet with me and do the interview.

I liked the idea of having a snack from Rama’s food stand. But the overall situation was still kind of weird. There were chairs at her food stand, but they were all in a long row along a narrow strip of raised concrete. So we couldn’t sit in a circle or engage in any kind of conversation. I ended up sitting at the far end of the row with just the man beside me while all the women talked among themselves in Indonesian. I felt, again, like I wasn’t giving good value here. But I saw no way to organize things so that I was sitting more in the group and could talk to everyone. For that, we should have stayed in the air conditioned and fancy cafe where we’d already paid for expensive drinks. But here we were sitting in uncomfortable chairs at the side of the road in the hot sun with noisy traffic roaring by. Even stranger, I suddenly realized we were sitting right across the road from the Honda dealership I had visited many days ago. I spent time there and had had my picture taken a couple dozen times with all the Honda employees. They all saw me sitting there with the Motorcycle English Club, and there was a lot of shouting and teasing and noise. It was all kind of unsatisfactory and rushed.

Then, much later, as the Facebook friend requests started to roll in, I saw a set of photographs of Rama celebrating her birthday with her family. Today was her birthday! And instead of enjoying it with her friends and family, she had spent a good chunk of the afternoon preparing a free meal for a foreigner at her usual food stand. I felt terrible when I saw that. Deep down I think that what happened was that Rismah had already organized things so that this interview would take place on Friday. That was the original plan and everyone was free on Friday and it was convenient for everyone. But then she never actually set a time or a date or responded to my questions about when would be a good time. At one point in our rambling conversation, I had tossed out the idea that even “tomorrow” would be fine. Rismah had seized on that idea, rearranged everything, contacted all her fellow students, and they’d all – at great inconvenience – taken time off work in order to meet me the very next day. And this was all because she thought that’s what I wanted. And this day was not just inconvenient for everyone but it was actually one student’s birthday.

I’m exhausted just writing all of that down. It was such a strange experience. At every step, Rismah and her fellow students tried to do nice things for me. Yet, everything they did had the opposite effect. It made things worse and awkward and uncomfortable. While trying to make me comfortable, they made me uncomfortable. While trying to make me happy, they made me unhappy. While trying to give me a nice present, they gave me a burden. It was a perfect example of how difficult it is to communicate across cultural and language barriers.

Tags: Sumatra Part 01