Tuesday, November 24, 2015

It is 7:30 in the morning as I sit on the bed in my little hotel room. I just made a cup of coffee on my new campstove. I know for most people, stuff is just stuff, but I have to say that I love my new stove systems. I changed everything while I was in Kuala Lumpur. In the past, I’ve used a variety of stoves, and all of them failed me in some way. My favorite stove has always been the Trangia. It is an alcohol-based stove from Sweden. I’ve owned my Trangia stove for more than 25 years. The problem (if it has one) is that the base and windshield are a bit bulky. So I purchased a new stove base called a ClikStand. It takes up zero space and is made of titanium, so it is extremely light. It works perfectly.

I also purchased an MSR Whisperlite Universal stove. So far, I love it. I can use it with cannister gas or liquid fuels. At the moment, I have a cannister that I brought with me from Malaysia. It is so convenient. I wish I had brought along an extra cannister or two, since I can’t buy them here in Indonesia. The cannister I’m using now won’t last long. Anyway, the cup of coffee was very good, and I’ll likely have another one soon.

The skies are grey today, so there might be a lot of rain. We shall see. That won’t bother me. I have things I can do that don’t involve cycling or walking around in the burning hot sun. That is what I did again yesterday, and I had a rather interesting time. I set off on foot and walked across the main bridge that connects Tanjungbalai with the road going out to the ferry dock and Asahan. On my ride the other day, I’d noticed a large market nearby, and my plan was to walk to this market with my camera. However, I never got that far. Once I crossed the bridge, I started finding things to photograph and then I turned down a side street into a local neighborhood and that is as far as I got.

My first stop was to photograph a set of three people selling clams and shellfish at the side of the road. I have no idea what any of these marine creatures were or how they were prepared and eaten, but they are great to photograph. They weren’t kept in water but were simply piled up on plastic sheets on the ground. They were all still alive, and occasionally, there would be some movement and a few of these clams or shells would topple over and roll down the pile. This always startled me. These clams and shells don’t look like they’re alive and it takes me by surprise when they open or move in any way. As I said, I just don’t get seafood. I suppose if I were Tom Hanks trapped on a deserted island, I’d learn to eat seafood to survive. But it wouldn’t be my first choice.

From the seafood sellers, I turned down a small street and found myself in a quiet neighborhood, and I stayed there for the rest of the day. I ran into an endless stream of people that wanted to talk with me and have their picture taken with me. Truth be told, the picture taking got more than a little tiresome. A crowd of fifteen people would gather around me for a picture, which is fine. However, each of those fifteen people has their own camera phone, and it takes a long time to cycle through them so that everyone gets a picture for their Facebook page. The most intense such encounter involved a woman thrusting her baby at me. I was expected to hold the baby amidst this crowd and pose for pictures. I didn’t mind, but I was a little worried. I had two pairs of glasses around my neck on cords (my big sunglasses and my reading glasses). I had my Olympus camera on a strap around one shoulder. I had my huge pannier bag on straps on my back. I was hot and sweaty and slippery. It wasn’t easy to safely hold this baby amongst all this gear and all these straps. And in a funny twist, my arms began to ache with the strain of holding this chunky baby. The baby made this picture irresistible, and everyone wanted one. The mother of the baby actually left and went to her house to get her own camera phone, leaving me with her baby on the street surrounded by about fifty clamoring people. This is one picture I wanted for myself, and since I couldn’t get at my Canon camera, I had no choice but to give up my Olympus. I figured the risk was worth it. When set up properly, the Olympus is easy for anyone to use. Just point and press the button. But it was too much for the local people. No matter how much instruction they were given, no one managed to press down the shutter button to take a picture. They just aren’t used to cameras like that anymore. People use only smartphones. Now that I think of it, the Olympus works the same way. You can just press the screen with your finger to take a picture. I could have done it that way. But I thought pressing the shutter button would be easy.

Before the baby craziness struck, I was called over to a small government building. Inside, I found a group of five or six medical professionals (I assume most or all were nurses) looking after many young mothers and their babies. It was a regularly scheduled health clinic and the mothers had come to have their babies weighed and measured and otherwise checked over. Each mother had a comprehensive book in which they kept records of their baby’s health and development. I posed for pictures with the nurses and then I took a picture of them in turn. Interestingly enough, about an hour later I found myself at another medical center. I was called inside for a similar experience, and it turned out to be the headquarters for the nurses I’d met at the clinic. They returned from that clinic and were suprised to see me again. I had a limited conversation with one of the nurses about the care of the mothers and their babies. I also asked her about a poster I saw on the wall. The poster showed the effects of the disease filariasis. I had become interested in filariasis while I was in the Philippines and I did a fair amount of reading about it. It is a horrible condition caused by a parasitical flatworm that takes up residence in the human lymphatic system. These worms reproduce and die in the lymph nodes and then block them. The result is that the extremities start to swell up and and the skin thickens and breaks and this leads to all kinds of infections and other problems. It’s a truly terrible thing, and there is no cure. The flatworm itself has a complicated lifecycle that involves transmission of larvae and eggs through mosquito bites. Unfortunately, mosquitoes are a big problem here where large numbers of people live in slums built over the top of tidal flats. Mosquitoes breed there, and their houses are wide open so that mosquitoes can come and go easily at night. For reasons that I don’t understand, filariasis is not transmitted through a single infected mosquito bite. If you are bitten by one infected mosquito, it likely won’t transmit the disease. You have to have prolonged and constant contact with infected mosquitoes for the flatworms to take hold in your body. So the victims of the disease tend to be people living in these communities. The children generally acquire it when they are very young, and the disease manifests itself in later childhood or young adulthood.

The nurse said that one person in one thousand was infected with filariasis in Indonesia. I have no idea if that number is accurate. I also don’t know if that means just infected or if that means suffering from advanced symptoms. There is a worldwide effort underway (called Envision) at the moment to eradicate filariasis. It involves adminstering a range of drugs that control the growth of the larvae in the bloodstream. If they can stop the larvae from maturing, they can prevent its transmission to the next generation. It’s highly successful, but it’s one of those things where you have to treat everybody to stop it. You don’t cure the disease. You just break the cycle of its transmission. And once that cycle is broken, it just goes away. But it takes a lot of coordination and a massive effort to accomplish this. I read a lot about it before, but I forget the details. Apparently, Indonesia is part of this program and the goal is to eradicate filariasis by the year 2020.

It seemed to be my day for government encounters, because on my walk, I was also called into a few other government offices. No one in these places ever spoke any English, so I never learned what these places were. People indicated that I should sit down and they’d bring me some water to drink. Then would come the picture-taking session. And then I’d say goodbye without any idea of what the place was.

I also visited a school. I just happened to be walking past an elementary school when a type of security guard or official spotted me and waved me over. I didn’t know if my presence in the school would be welcomed or not, but I followed him inside. An effort was made to find an English speaker, and they produced a young teacher who spoke a few words. Unfortunately, he spoke just that – only a few words, and I wasn’t able to communicate with anyone. I was asked to take a seat inside the main office or teacher’s lounge while an effort was made to find out who I was and why I was at their school. This was always an amusing moment. I was at their school through no effort on my part. I was just walking by. THEY had invited me in. But now that I was in the school, they wanted to know why I was there. They thought I must have a “mission” or be an official visitor of some kind. My attempt to explain that I was just a tourist and that THEY had invited me fell on deaf ears. But it didn’t really matter. What mattered were the pictures, and they took lots of those. All the teachers took turns sitting on the sofa beside me and had their picture taken. Eventually a friendly man that I took to be the principal sat beside me, and he told me to smile better for the pictures. I never did get my own picture of me with the teachers, but I took a nice shot of the teachers themselves. They made a very pleasant-looking and very well-dressed group.

While all this was going on, large numbers of young students crowded in the doorway and jostled with each other to get a good look at me. Leaving the school was not easy, as I had to make my way through a rambunctious and picture-crazy group of loud students. They were held back at the gate of the school while I was let through. I took a picture of them through the gate, and they looked to be quite out of control. It’s a funny picture because it hints at the total chaos to come when the guard then physically opened the gate. I felt tempted to run for my life.

I continued my walk and had lots more pleasant though confusing encounters with local people. This community was surrounded on all sides by water, and I came across lots of fishing boats, and I took some pictures of those. I eventually got disoriented and managed to get out only with the help of my smartphone’s GPS and the maps. I stopped at the main market area for a lovely mango juice, and then I walked back across the bridge and back to the Asahan Hotel. It doesn’t sound like much perhaps, but I was exhauasted after this excursion and wasn’t good for much else for the rest of the day. I thought I would go out again in the late afternoon when the sun was low in the sky, but I was too tired. Late afternoon led to evening when I had martabak mesir and mie tiaw for dinner. Then it was back to my room to review the pictures I’d taken and upload a few of them to Facebook.

And so ended another day in Tanjungbalai.

 

Tags: Sumatra Part 01