Kiva Stories from the Field

Going Home

I first went to Belimbingsari Village for a funeral. The father of two of DINARI Foundation’s staff, Gede Mustika and his sister Yulia, had suffered a stroke and died shortly thereafter. A rented van transported the staff from DINARI’s headquarters, and the mood seemed surprisingly cheerful during the three-hour trip to West Bali. I was reminded of school field trips as people passed around puffed-corn snacks and jokingly reclined their seats into their neighbors’ laps.

At the Christian service, Gede Mustika and Yulia wore white shirts, colorful sarongs and kains, sashes tied at the waist. At times, Yulia wept silently, but Gede Mustika remained solemn and composed. DINARI’s staff referred to him as Pak Gede, a title of respect given when he became manager of DINARI’s branch office in Melaya, the town just south of Belimbingsari.

Pak Gede and Yulia grew up in Belimbingsari, as had three quarters of DINARI’s staff. For many, the funeral trip had been a homecoming.

Pak Gede at his father's burial

Belimbingsari is the only exclusively Christian village in Bali. A narrow paved street runs through the community with dirt roads branching off of it. The three hundred inhabitants live in small, well-maintained houses with close-cropped grass lawns in front. The homes are separated by groves of tall coconut trees. People’s dogs roam the street and lie listlessly on the warm asphalt. Seventy years ago, Belimbingsari was a jungle.

In 1939, the Hindu majority in Bali’s capital of Denpasar banished newly converted Christians to the remote wilderness of West Bali. I was told that tigers inhabited the jungle, and it was assumed that the exiles would not survive.

Fifty people settled in Belimbingsari. They cut down trees to make roads and farmland, and they harvested coconuts. They built homes, and the tigers did not attack.

Their children inherited the land and prospered, becoming successful farmers and opening hotels and other businesses around Melaya. This second generation could afford to send their children, including many of DINARI’s staff, to universities in Denpasar and Jakarta. Pak Alit, DINARI’s executive director, told me that his father sent him and all his siblings to university with the income from selling coconuts.

Pak Alit did not return to Belimbingsari after earning his degree as an agricultural engineer. He settled outside of Denpasar where DINARI was founded in 1992. Seven years later, he hired four new employees, including Pak Gede, and opened the Melaya branch to begin offering agricultural loans and technical training to cow and pig breeders.

Before joining DINARI, Pak Gede and many others from Belimbingsari had worked in the tourism industry. Several lost their jobs after the 2002 bombings. Zeruya, now one of the supervisors for DINARI’s loan officers, sold crackers to food stalls from his motorbike before Pak Gede offered him a job in 2005. DINARI’s work in West Bali steadily increased, and the staff grew to twenty as the client base ballooned into the thousands.

Zeruya told me it had been difficult for him when he left his village previously to find work. He was happy to again be close to his parents, and he thought Belimbingsari was a good place to raise his two daughters.

“They can run everywhere,” he said. “Not like in Denpasar.”

But there is no university in Melaya, and he expects his children will obtain their higher education in Bali’s capital.

“There is no choice,” he said.

A portable pig

Nearly two months after the funeral, I returned to West Bali to interview DINARI’s clients. In Belimbingsari, I stayed in the guesthouse at DINARI’s Business Development Services Center, where clients received training about animal husbandry and furniture making.

I ate my dinner in Melaya as there were no food stalls in Belimbingsari, and one night I chatted with the couple who ran a restaurant. The husband had grown up in Belimbingsari and initially opened his establishment in the village, but he moved to Melaya to attract more customers.

“There are only old people living there,” he said. “And dogs.” He laughed. “Watch out for the dogs!”

Many of DINARI’s staff in Melaya asked me if I minded staying alone in the guesthouse. Zeruya teased me that he saw strangers lurking there. To me, Belimbingsari felt a bit like a retirement community, but people spoke about it as if it were a ghost town.

I told everyone, sincerely, that I really liked Belimbingsari. The pace was slower. With no other motorbikes in sight, I found myself singing Walking in Memphis during my morning commute. People smiled and waved to me from their lawns. At the guesthouse, mango trees bore fruit as big as footballs. A convenience store owner delighted when I told her my name was Lander, not landung, the Balinese word for “tall.” She invited me to stay at her house for my (theoretical) honeymoon.

The road in Belimbingsari

I admittedly did get a little spooked driving back at night. The coconut trees loomed over the road and threw big shadows from the street lights, making me feel like I was in tiger territory. My chest tightened as I passed under the imposing gate being built at the village entrance.

The new gate

According to Zeruya, all Balinese villages with sufficient funds erected gates to welcome visitors. But this gate appeared to have been lifted from a medieval fortress. In 2000, when riots on the nearby island of Lombok targeted Chinese-Christians, a mob of Muslims gathered outside Belimbingsari, threatening to attack the community. A rice farmer from the village cut down trees to make a blockade near the location of the gate. He then crouched behind another felled log further back, a hundred Molotov cocktails at the ready.

Although Islam is a minority religion in Bali, half of Melaya’s population practiced it. Most came from the island of Java hoping to find work. They boarded ferries and crossed the narrow Bali Strait to the port of Gilimanuk, fifteen kilometers northwest of Melaya. According to the rice farmer, some Muslims resented Christians for their business successes.

The mob at the gate eventually dispersed after Hindus came to protect the villagers. Despite Belimbingsari’s origin, I was told that Hindi people and Christians were now on good terms.

Many of DINARI’s clients were Muslim. They chatted amicably with Zeruya and the other staff members and did not appear resentful in any way. One store owner did seem bitter, but her animosity was directed at her estranged husband, not DINARI. The man had run off with another woman and Rp. 10 million from a government bank loan.

I asked this store owner and other clients about their dreams for the future. When I had posed the same question to borrowers from Denpasar, many of whom were also Muslim, they told me they hoped to move back to Java where they had family and owned land and homes.

The clients in Melaya hesitated at first to answer, but when Zeruya persisted, they responded that they wanted to improve their living situation. If they rented, they hoped to buy a house. If they were already home owners, they wanted to renovate the kitchen, tile the floor or plaster the walls. They had no intention of leaving Bali.

Recently, DINARI entered a partnership with the Indonesian branch of Habitat for Humanity. The two organizations set the ambitious goal of constructing five thousand homes in West Bali over the next five years.

A mockup of the "Growing Home" project

The project is called Rumah Tumbuh, or “Growing Home.” Habitat for Humanity provides no-interest loans to DINARI, which then offers construction financing to existing clients. Initially, borrowers in a community each receive Rp. three million ($250). Using local materials, the people help each other to build “core homes” approximately thirty square meters in size and new outhouses. If a homeowner saves money in the future and qualifies for additional loans, he or she can build out additional rooms. It is hoped that each home will “grow” to 108 square meters, at which point the house can connect to the bathroom.

A core home

As DINARI helped its clients around Melaya put down roots in their communities, I wondered about the future of Belimbingsari. Zeruya did not seem overly concerned. Many of the staff already owned land in the village and planned to retire there. I was told that the place got hopping during Easter and Christmas, and I was invited to come back for the Christmas Day service.

I plan to tour Bali by motorbike for a few weeks after my Kiva tenure, and hopefully I can plan my route to be in West Bali on Christmas Day. If I arrive the night before and no one is stirring, I plan to gun my Yamahawg under the new gate until the engine growls like a big cat.

Ferdinand, DINARI’s Kiva coordinator and my friend and shepherd in Bali

This is my last post as an active Kiva Fellow. Writing about my experiences has proven one of the most rewarding and enjoyable aspects of my tenure, and I am sincerely grateful to those of you who have read my posts and offered such thoughtful comments. My future is presently unsettled, but I hope that I can continue to have world adventures, find inspiring stories and share them with people like you. I encourage you one more time to watch for new loans from the DINARI Foundation: http://www.kiva.org/app.php?page=businesses&partner_id=82&status=fundRaising&sortBy=New+to+Old&_tpg=fb

8 December 2008 at 22:19 lburr 5 comments

Rai’s Way

Across from DINARI Foundation’s office, there is a large concrete lot with two long warehouses lining the perimeter. In the middle of the lot, blue tarps covered three mounds that were perhaps fifteen feet in diameter. In the morning, workers removed the tarps, revealing piles of what looked like sand as high as the men’s waists. Two of the men wheeled out mechanized plows and bulldozed the piles, gradually spreading the material across the concrete in messy spirals. A third worker appeared with a bandanna covering his nose and mouth, looking like a bandit. He and the others used large curved rakes to spread the sand in a thin even layer across the ground.

The lot across from DINARI Foundation

The men then disappeared into one of the warehouses. They returned with rectangular mops and swept the sand back into piles. The entire process would repeat throughout the day, interrupted by breaks when the workers squatted in the shade, arms draped over their knees. Sometimes trucks came and unloaded more material. Once a customer entered the lot and left with a big white sack strapped to her bicycle and another balanced on her head. At four o’clock in the afternoon, the men placed the tarps back on the piles, and activity ceased until the following morning.

When Rai came, he explained that the mounds were rice, not sand. The lot was part of a rice mill, and the men were drying the rice in the sun, which helped remove the husks. Farmers like Rai brought their crops there. In exchange for ten percent of the farmers’ supply, the mill processed the rice and the farmers could then sell it for twice the price of “rough rice.” In a one-hectare plot (about two and a half acres), most farmers could harvest five to six tons of rice during a four-month season. Rai’s record was 15.3 tons in 85 days.

He began farming ten years ago when he was twenty-seven years old, renting a small plot surrounded by buildings in Bali’s capital of Denpasar. At the time, he owned an art gallery in Kuta, the touristic heart of Bali. He sold his own paintings and ceramics, and he also designed jewelry and landscapes.

His family came from Blimbingsari, a rural Christian village in western Bali, and his father worked in Bali’s national park.

“Every day, I learn about nature,” Rai told me. He had wavy black hair that flowed down to his khaki shorts and dark stubble that reached up to his prominent nose and cheekbones. My first impression was of a Native American shaman, but his tan New Balances and ankle-high socks befitted a country club staff member.

His grandfather was a rice farmer, and Rai would watch him farm in the traditional way, burning the old stalks and flooding the paddies.

“As a child, I see this, and I think this is wrong.”

Rai studied economics and cinematography in college and never received formal agricultural training. But he read on his own about plant ecology, oxygenation and organic farming. He was concerned that traditional farming in Bali polluted the environment and strained its natural resources. He learned that burning the spent rice fields killed microorganisms necessary to aerate the soil. He began testing farming methods from Thailand and Madagascar, incorporating techniques that worked and disregarding those that didn’t.

“I have no rule,” he told me.

Most farmers filled their paddies with twenty centimeters of water. Rai speculated that with less water, the new stalks would receive more sunlight and oxygen. He irrigated his field with just one centimeter of water, and the stalks produced twice as many shoots. Less water also allowed the soil organisms to flourish and enrich the soil.

Ardi, one of the staff at DINARI, also grew up in Blimbingsari. He told me he would help his father plant rice. At the start of each season, he would follow behind his father, dropping five seeds in every hole. The method required 40 kilos of rice seed per hectare, at a cost of Rp. 2 million (approximately $200). Rai found that the rice grew better if he planted just one seed at each point, and he needed just 12 kilos of seed.

Rai began composting his discarded rice stalks instead of burning them. He cut up the stalks and mixed them with sawdust, cow dung, and rice husks. He added microorganisms he had collected from various trees, grasses, and bamboo bark. He then covered the mixture with a tarp for two weeks. The chemical processes released so much energy that the compost would measure 70° Celsius, so he had to open up the tarp after the first week to let everything cool down.

Rai understood that burning the rice fields wasn’t sustainable and required additional fertilizer to make up the nutrient deficit. A kilo of fertilizer cost about Rp. 3,000. At first, farmers might only require a ton of fertilizer per hectare, but every year they would have to buy more as they depleted the natural soil.

Burning also released pesticides that had been sprayed on the crops. Mothers often carried their babies with them when they worked in the field, and many infants died as a result from a bleeding disorder. Rather than applying chemical pesticides, Rai protected his rice with lemongrass, watered-down pineapple juice and leaves from the neem plant. I had seen neem extract bottled in a swanky natural foods store, claiming to treat diarrhea and inflammation.

Rai’s methods required time and careful planning, and the results were not immediate. But over the span of a few seasons, yields increased from 60% to 200%. Initially, the costs were similar to traditional farming, but by sparing traditional fertilizers and pesticides, Rai could eventually save millions of rupiahs for every hectare planted. His rice also grew faster, so he could plant four harvests each year instead of three. And because the rice was organic, he could sell it for twice the price of the conventional variety.

Rai in the rice paddy

“Your story is bullsh*t,” one farmer announced when Rai tried to explain his approach.

Most farmers believed that organic farming produced smaller yields, and few believed him. Some people got angry at his seemingly outrageous claims. Rai once ran away after a man brandished a knife at him. Rai decided to set up demonstrations, renting small farming plots in the villages and growing his own rice.

“My crops are like this,” he said, raising his hand level with his chest. He then dropped his hand below his waist. “And theirs’ are this. Then they listen.” His laugh was somehow both guttural and giggly.

Maybe only one farmer out a hundred would adopt his method at first, but gradually he won more and more converts. Farmers began visiting Rai to seek advice, often staying until the early morning hours. His wife ran out of coffee. Exasperated, she brought out a kettle of hot water one night, announced she was going to bed, and told Rai to get his own coffee.

Sometimes he was so busy he forgot to eat. His wife packed lunchboxes and implored him to drink more water. He recently spent three days in the hospital after contracting typhus.

“Perhaps I work too hard,” he admitted.

He wanted to “open minds”, to fundamentally change how Balinese people viewed farming and farmers. Most Balinese people looked down on farmers as dirty, poor, and stupid. Because the traditional way of farming was simplistic and shortsighted, Rai believed it instilled a mindset in farmers that served to justify the stereotype.

The rice field behind my guesthouse

Rai once received a call from one of his daughter’s teachers, who suspected his child had played a prank. His children attended good schools with expensive tuition, and most of the students came from affluent families. The children had been asked to write down their parents’ occupations, and the teacher did not believe Rai’s daughter when she wrote that her father was a farmer. Rai happily confirmed that his daughter was telling the truth. Later, when his daughter brought her schoolwork home, he saw that the teacher had crossed out “farmer” and written “businessman.”

Few young people chose farming as a career, instead seeking better wages in Bali’s cities and tourist areas. Often they would earn only Rp. 750,000, or $75, in a month.

“It’s crazy,” he said, smiling in disbelief. “Go to the city be a crime.”

He lamented that Bali had squandered its position as a rice producer and now had to import rice from the island of Java. He thought Bali’s shift from agriculture to tourism had been disastrous, as evidenced by the economic collapse following the 2002 bombings.

Rai’s own finances imploded after the terrorist acts. Vendors who previously bought his ceramics stopped ordering and began importing from Vietnam. Rai was forced to close his art gallery in which he had invested Rp. 500 million of his own money.

He couldn’t earn enough to feed his family, and it was not yet time to harvest his crops. He ate only one meal a day but didn’t tell his wife for fear she would get upset. He pleaded with his mother to send milk for his daughter. He tried giving her tea in the nighttime, but she told him she could taste the difference.

“It is sweet, but it is not milk.” As Rai recounted the story, his eyes moistened.

Even though he didn’t have any money, he arranged for a local television station to auction ten of his paintings for the families of the bombing victims. He raised Rp. 300 million.

Gradually, as he harvested his crops and the economy recovered, Rai rebuilt his life. He began dedicating most of his time to farming. He worked every day, three for his own livelihood and four to help the farming communities. After farmers implemented his approach, he would expand to new areas, renting farmland all over Bali in places like Klunkung, Karangasem, Tabanan, Singaraja, and Nagara. He spent half his money providing for his family and the other half for social work. He bought a car and a motorbike and sent his children to good schools, but he had no savings left over.

His friends told him he was crazy to spend so much money on his social work. He asked them how they kept good conscience while their neighbors lived in poverty.

“How come (can) you eat? How come (can) you loving?”

While growing up in Blimbingsari, Rai went to school with several children from the local orphanage. Sometimes a dozen would come to his home to study. When his mother came home, she demanded to know why all the food was gone. Rai recalled how, when he explained to his mother where his friends lived, “she not angry anymore.”

The Balinese rice association, however, was still angry at him. The market price for conventional rice was Rp. 7,000 per kilo, and the price for organic rice was twice that. But Rai sold his rice for Rp. 3,000.

“When I can grow so much rice, it is enough.”

I wanted to make sure I understood him correctly, that he voluntarily sold his rice for a fraction of what it was worth.

“That is why my friends say I’m crazy.” He laughed, scrunching his cheeks so that his eyes squinted.

I asked whether he could have a greater impact if he sold his rice at the market price, since he would have more funds for his social work. Poor people subsisted on rice, he told me, and he thought his first priority should be to help them, rather than just help farmers increase their production and hope this would lower the price of rice. But he struggled with the decision.

“It keeps me up at night,” he said.

A few months ago, Rai borrowed Rp. 9 million from DINARI Foundation when he ran out of funds. He wanted to rent a plot of farmland in the nearby town of Sempidi, hoping to convert more farmers to his sustainable agricultural practices.

He told me that banks also looked down on farmers and would not lend to them. Farmers were forced to borrow from “bloodsuckers” who charged 10% interest rates, often leaving the farmers with little or no profit at harvest time. Rai hoped that by lowering farmers’ costs, he could cut out the bloodsuckers.

Rai invited me to join him the following afternoon to watch him instruct several Sempidi farmers how to make compost. I saw this as evidence that his DINARI-financed project had proven successful. I agreed and gave him my energy bar before he left, worrying whether he would have time to eat.

The next day, as I followed him on my motorbike, he pointed out a driveway full of sand-colored rice, drying in the afternoon sun. His hair was tied up in a samurai’s bun that peaked out from beneath his helmet, and his unbuckled chinstrap flapped in the wind.

We pulled into the farmer’s house and parked in a grass lawn beneath a tree. There was a small dirt yard in back, and we sat a bamboo bench and one of the farmers’ wives brought us donuts and sweetened coffee. The farmer’s rice paddy lay beyond.

There was a pile of dried rice stalks on the ground, and two farmers began chopping them up on small wooden cutting boards. At times, the knives synchronized into a percussive duet. There were two sacks and a red plastic bag next to the pile, and Rai opened them to show me the compost ingredients: wood chips from a carpenter’s shop, coconut fibers, and rice husks. A pile of cow manure lay behind the rice stalks.

Inspecting the composting ingredients

As the farmers continued the prep work, Rai and I walked along the edge of the rice paddy. He knelt by one of the shallow pools and pointed out resting tadpoles. Frogs lived in the water now that the farmers had stopped using conventional pesticides. He showed me a neem tree growing behind a farmer’s house, its leaves fanning out in a modest circle. A number of farmers had learned of Rai’s techniques and begun poaching branches.

He explained that the paddy would be re-terraced to improve the irrigation system, and the farmers would work together to improve each other’s land.

“Hundred years ago, farmers work together. Now, they work together again.”

We checked back on Rai’s students, and Rai retrieved a plastic liter-size bottle filled with brown liquid. The bottle housed Rai’s microorganisms and would be sufficient for two hectares. Rai poured the brew into a bucket and mixed in sugar and water. The farmers could buy soil bacteria, but it was very expensive, so Rai would show them how to make it themselves.

After the farmers had combined the dry composting ingredients, the microorganism concoction was funneled into a canister and sprayed on top. The farmers took hoes and spent the next fifteen minutes vigorously mixing everything together. An old farmer, wearing a hat but no shirt, earnestly raked the pile until the veins on his sinewy arms swelled. Rai swept in the scattered remains, and finally a blue tarp was placed over the pile and weighted down with rocks.

A farmer mixing the compost

The farmers listened for a while as Rai smoked a cigarette and discussed his methods, and then gradually they left. Other men from the village began arriving with roosters, children, or both. They sat on the grass lawn, and I watched as the men decided which cocks would fight one another. The two owners then fluffed up roosters’ feathery manes. The men took turns holding each bird’s neck out for the other cock to peck, and the fight commenced when the roosters were worked into a sufficient frenzy. Sometimes the birds went at each others’ heads, and other times they launched into flying kicks.

The neighborhood cockfight

It was past six o’clock, and the sun had dropped below the distant trees. Between rounds, I looked over at Rai. He was sitting on the bamboo bench with his back to the action, smoking another cigarette and speaking with the last man and woman who remained with him. If not for me, he might have stayed long into the night.

Rai transporting microorganisms

While I always welcome your comments, I would also like to ask for your assistance this time. I have offered to help Rai find organizations involved in sustainable farming that might be interested in supporting his efforts. My knowledge of agricultural organizations is minimal, so I would be grateful for any suggestions you might have. You can leave a comment on this blog or on Rai’s profile on Kiva:

http://partners.kiva.org/app.php?page=businesses&action=about&id=62697

Please expect a new post from me in about two weeks. I encourage you to watch for new loans from the DINARI Foundation here: http://www.kiva.org/app.php?page=businesses&partner_id=82&status=fundRaising&sortBy=New+to+Old&_tpg=fb

25 November 2008 at 08:11 lburr 11 comments

The Sari of Kerti Moses

Kerti Moses and his wife Endang had one of the biggest homes I had seen in almost fifty visits to DINARI Foundation’s clients. The exposed concrete foundation elevated the house above the nearby dwelling of one of the couple’s workers. The entire floor was covered in big ceramic tiles printed like green marble, and the white walls still had a lingering freshness in parts. Inside was a big room with high exposed rafters and smaller bedrooms adjoining it. The main room was empty save for a table in one corner and a TV against the far wall. Behind this wall was a dim hallway with a narrow kitchen at one end and a bathroom at the other with a curtain for privacy. I was surprised to find that it had a Western-style toilet and furthermore that it flushed.

The windows to the main room did not provide much light, leaving it cool and dark. We spent most of the afternoon sitting on the long patio outside, overlooking the yard where hens bobbed and clucked and roosters made insistent pronouncements. The couple had lived in that yard when they first moved to the village of Bunutan, in a hut made from bamboo walls and a thatched-grass roof.

I had first met Kerti Moses and Endang a few days before in the Foundation’s office. Ardi, a supervisor for DINARI’s loan officers, had asked me if I wanted to interview one of his clients.

“They are fishermen from East Bali,” he said. “Perhaps we go there someday, on a weekend, he takes us fishing.” Ardi had a way of raising one eyebrow when he spoke that made his faint smile mischievous.

I expected to encounter leathery skin and sinewy arms, weather-beaten faces expressing simple wisdom from years hauling fish from the sea. Instead, the couple looked like the proprietors of a bed-and-breakfast. They were short and squat, their skin was smooth, and their shirts looked fresh. Kerti Moses was thirty-nine years old and Endang was forty.

Kerti Moses and Endang at DINARI

Most borrowers reacted to me with amused bewilderment, but Kerti Moses and his wife stayed still and composed in their seats as I bounded down the stairs. Kerti Moses kept a serious countenance while I told him about my role interviewing clients for Kiva. His face was distinguished, almost handsome. Both he and his wife understood English, but Endang had a better command of the language and did most of the talking. When I introduced myself, her mouth was closed in a slight frown, but her words came out like a warm soft breeze when she spoke.

“This is first time I heard about joint business between DINARI and Kiva. I am happy for this.”

I learned that Kerti Moses was a fisherman without a boat. He fished every morning and afternoon, borrowing another man’s vessel and splitting the day’s catch. He was in the process of building two of his own boats and was seeking a loan of Rp. 27 million (roughly $2,700) to outfit them: Rp. 18 million for two motors, Rp. 4 million for each net, and a Rp. 1 million cushion.

The couple’s story intrigued me as we spoke. In one of my sporadic attempts to learn Indonesian, I had received a very helpful explanation of the word sari from Ferdinand, DINARI’s Kiva representative. The word in turns meant juice, nectar, pollen and essence. If you asked someone for the sari of their statement, it was a polite way of asking to get to the point. It signified the most important part of the noun to which it referred.

Most of my interviews with DINARI’s clients lasted about ten minutes, enough time perhaps to take an x-ray of their lives but not enough to really understand them. I wanted to spend time with Kerti Moses and Endang in their home in Karangasem Province, and I wanted to videotape them for Kiva’s media department. I hoped that by spending the day with the couple, their sari would be laid bare for me. We set a date for Saturday.

“Bunutan, it is not like this,” Ardi said as he pointed out the car window toward the lush dense vegetation. We had left the new coastal highway and turned north, and the road wound over several hills. In the valleys below sat the silver rectangular pools of rice paddies.

“By Kerti Moses, it is very dry.”

As we made our way down the last pass, it looked like the moisture had been sucked out of both land and sky. A few wispy clouds hung in the air, and corn had replaced rice in the grayish brown soil. The hillsides in the distance were covered with a thin dry scrub.

We drove along what was now the eastern coast, and Ardi pointed out men shuffle-stepping on raised wooden vats, breaking apart the salt produced in the region. I was disappointed to see a number of signs in English advertising hotel vacancies and villas to rent. I had wanted this authentic Bali all to myself.

Rice paddies on the way to Bunutan...

...and upon our arrival

Kerti Moses met us on his motorbike, and Ardi navigated the car across a dry riverbed. We parked, and Kerti Moses led us to his house where Endang greeted us and I met two of their boys. The couple, I learned, had seven children, three “original” and four adopted from the village.

Endang cautioned us to avoid the droppings one of the chickens had deposited on the tiles. She quickly scooped up the waste with a paper towel, and Ardi picked out a clean spot to lie down and nap while I stretched out my legs.

As I sat with the couple, two children came up the steps dressed in school uniforms, white shirts and maroon ties and shorts. I thought they might belong to the Kerti Moses clan, but they left after Endang gave them pink pills and soda to swallow them.

“We give the children in the village medicine,” she said. It was part of the couple’s Christian ministry work. Endang also taught English classes twice a week, and the couple distributed their well water free of charge. Before they built their well, they had collected rainwater.

For lunch, Endang cooked the customary nasi campur, steamed white rice with meat and vegetable dishes. There was also platter of grilled whole “small tuna,” which Kerti Moses had caught that morning. They looked delectable but were quite dry.

Eating their freshly picked papaya

After eating, Kerti Moses took me along a short path that bordered his field. In addition to fishing, he also farmed, and he pointed out the big leaves sprouting from his sweet potato plants and plucked a massive orange-yellow papaya from one of the trees. Further along were old sties where Kerti Moses had raised and sold pigs with his first loan from DINARI, and beyond was a small shed where he stored vegetables and bags of rice. It looked like a pigmy hut, and it was the original house and Endang had built when they moved to the village. They lived there for over a year, gradually constructing their present home when they could save enough to buy materials. They transplanted the hut after their new home was ready.

Kerti Moses was originally from Bunutan, but it had taken him sixteen tumultuous years to return. In 1989, while he was still a teenager, he was sentenced to serve nineteen years in prison.

“I was fighting my friend,” Kerti Moses told me. “My friend died.”

He said those three words impassively. I imagined he had repeated them countless times in the past twenty years. I wondered if their significance had gradually eroded, or if the words affected him deeply, on a level I could not see or feel. I did not have the courage to ask.

It was in prison that Kerti Moses met his future wife. Endang was a social worker helping to fulfill inmates’ requests, often seeking permission for family visits. Many of the prisoners were Australian, and she worked with an Australian pastor who befriended Kerti Moses. When Endang first met her future husband, she didn’t realize he was a prisoner.

“He was handsome and very clean,” she said. “My heart touched his heart.” He gave her a Kuala bear doll.

It was also in prison that Kerti Moses became a Christian. He came from a Hindu family, but he said that he had known nothing about his past religion. When the Australian pastor told him about Jesus Christ, Kerti Moses told me he believed. When he prayed, his prayers were answered. After serving just three and a half years, he was released from prison.

Kerti Moses and Endang married soon after and moved to Bali’s capital city of Denpasar. Kerti Moses began making woodcarvings that resembled antiques, and his business took off. He eventually had fifteen workers and owned two art shops in the tourist area of Kuta.

He made a hand gesture like a kamikaze airplane to demonstrate how the 2002 bombing devastated his business. He and Endang couldn’t pay their bills or the employees’ wages, and they were forced to sell their motorbike and home.

“We were bankrupt,” Endang said, shaking her head.

They stayed outside a friend’s house and tried to earn money as construction workers, but it was very difficult. One of Endang’s children was just a baby at the time. Endang asked her husband to move back to his village. He resisted, since she came from Jakarta and had no farming experience. But she persisted, and in 2005,after the second bombing, they moved.

Summit of Fishermen

Two years ago, they met some of DINARI’s staff doing ministry work in Bunutan. The couple took out their first loan of Rp. 5 million to buy pigs. The venture proved unsuccessful because the pig feed, made from rice husks, was very expensive. A year later, Kerti Moses decided to start raising cattle. With the deed from their land as collateral, he and Endang took out a Rp. 10 million loan from DINARI and bought three cows.

“After the cows,” Endang said, smiling and sweeping her hands upward, “Everything is changing.”

They bought each cow for between Rp. 3-4 million, kept the animals for a year, and then sold them at a market for between Rp. 5-6 million. According to Kerti Moses, the predominantly Hindu people in East Bali “eat everything,” including beef. The costs to raise the animals were low, since the cows ate the grass that grew on the land and never got sick. The couple’s house took shape, they were able to finance the purchase of a motorbike, and they developed their ministry. I wanted to see the cows, but they were in the hills.

The couple now has five cows, which provide a monthly income of Rp. 1.5 million ($150). This seemed quite modest to me, given the couple’s large family and their active ministry. A rubbish collector I had interviewed in Denpasar earned the same amount and was hardly thriving. But the couple supplements their income selling crops, fish, and the occasional rooster for cockfighting, and Endang told me that school costs were much lower in Bunutan than in Denpasar. Still, Kerti Moses told me he hoped to have enough cows to double his income.

At two o’clock, village children started arriving for their English class. Endang had told me she dreamed of opening a free school for the children, and she seemed like a natural teacher, even though her own education stopped when she turned twelve. The children called her “Mama Endang,” and she had an energetic, no-nonsense authority that spurred the children on through rounds of the alphabet and Christian songs. Kerti Moses watched on attentively.

I thanked the couple and told them that Ardi and I should be heading back. I was anticipating a hug from Endang, but she politely shook my hand and quickly returned to the class.

Kerti Moses offered to show us one of his boats before we left. We parked the car on a hillside overlooking the ocean and walked down a steep path through the brush to a stony beach. Kerti Moses’ boat had a long narrow hull, made of a single tree taken from his property. There were runners on both sides for balance, making the vessel resemble a waterbug. He showed me some secondhand motors under a lean-to that had Pinocchio-nose shafts leading to the propellers. Kerti Moses intended to buy new motors with his loan.

Boat motors on the beach

I thanked him again for his time, and he shook my hand briskly with a faint smile and took off on his motorbike before Ardi had started the car.

On the way back, I felt drained from the long day, dehydrated but also dissatisfied. The roosters had wreaked havoc on the audio of my recording, and Kerti Moses had been a difficult subject to interview on film. He fidgeted, slumped out of view of the camera, yawned while his wife spoke and sprung from his chair to answer phone calls and shoo away the chickens. But it was more than that. I was admittedly, guiltily drawn to their suffering, to Kerti Moses’ prison experience, his involvement in his friend’s death, Endang’s having to cook outside a friend’s house in the grime of Denpasar. It was not simply Schadenfreude, a morbid fascination with the couple’s past misery. To understand them now, I thought I needed to know what life had been like before. But they had given me only fleeting glimpses of their past struggles, articulated matter-of-factly.

Endang had told me that they were happy, that they loved their village and their work. Kerti Moses seemed far too industrious to spend much time dwelling on the past. Perhaps, as I found myself searching for the sari of my own experience in Bali, he had borrowed a boat and gone fishing.

Kerti Moses

A Parting Thought

As always, I would love to hear any thoughts, comments, or suggestions. I hope you check back in about two weeks, and in the meantime I encourage you to check out new loans from the DINARI Foundation: http://www.kiva.org/app.php?page=businesses&partner_id=82&status=fundRaising&sortBy=New+to+Old&_tpg=fb

10 November 2008 at 05:14 lburr 11 comments