Volunteering in Bali, August 2012

Mandol and Sambal and my foot.  Food and my foot.  These are the two most memorable things about staying at the ‘farm’ in Bali.

After chilling in our Terima Cost for a few weeks with Kim and Dan and their entourage, we all jumped in a van with all of the surfboards and other such accoutrements and went off to the East.  Away from the beaches for Sean and I, back to Korea and NZ for all the kiwis. 

Arriving at a volunteering situation is always a little awkward, we’re never sure if this is going to be fun, or comfortable, or how hard the work will be, or how rewarding.  Or what the company will be like, what kind of social setting there is.  There are so many things that could make a volunteering period either awesome or just bad.  This one was good and bad. 

First impressions: we’re greeted by three dogs: one that looks healthy and good; one with a gimp leg; and one with a nasty swollen infection on her snout.  Nasty-Face-McGee is pretty sweet and has an inclination to licking knees.   We knock on the gate and we can see a mud pit on the left, a wood workshop on the right, and a long dirt path leading to the back of the narrow, long property.  The path is lined with mud house after mud house, on both sides, right to the back where there’s a kitchen and the house of the owner and a few skinny trees in the back yard. 

The owner isn’t there, and there are no other volunteers, but there are two Indonesian guys, both from Java, who are our hosts and soon-to-be-friends, who greet us and show us around.  Arif’s domain is the wood workshop (the guy with the 'economics' t-shirt in this picture).  He lives above it, up a ladder to a room on stilts, and spends most of his time there producing commissioned work while a few cats stare at him and lounge around.  Supri (the one pimpin with his arms around me and his friend) lives in an adjacent neighbourhood with his wife and kids, but works in the adjacent property doing construction there.  And he’s in charge of pointing Sean and I to the various stuff that has to be done on the property.  Which is everything. 

            The property is covered and layered an accumulation of unfinished projects.  Buildings that aren’t quite finished, walls that are incomplete and don’t reach ceilings, rooms that have been left unused and gather dirt, roofs that are falling apart.  Volunteers who’ve come and gone probably have built things but not stayed long enough to finish projects, and not had attention to detail while they were making things.  Building with cob can produce really beautiful and interesting buildings, but these look thrown together in a sloppy kind of way and left that way.  Supri and Arif have tons of stories of people who’ve been there and how they party, go to the beach, have fun in the mud pits. 

            So that’s what the place was like.  Sean and I spent our time there working a few hours a day, not having a real schedule, and kind of doing what we think aught to be done.  From the owner’s order, Supri got Sean on a building project, so he made mud and built a wall for a shower that was previously decaying and falling apart.  I suggested that I make the kitchen look better (this is the kitchen, post-improvements).  The walls there weren’t finished, so every day there was a new layer of dust on the counters, tables and floor.  So I learned that mixing school glue and water and painting the walls with that makes them sealed and complete.  There ware also huge sections of the walls and benches that were ‘finished’ with colourful mosaics of broken tile pieces.  But they’d been left too long, so most of the pieces were coated in mud and looked really terrible.  So that was my project.  By the time I was done, all those tiles were clean, and the walls were painted with glue to keep them from falling apart. 

            In our spare time we did all kinds of stuff.  We had a motorcycle rented for the whole time there, so we drove around the rice paddies, went to the beach which was just as un-swimmable as the ones near Canggu, went to the market and bought stuff, and went on a couple of day trips out.  And cooking.  Lots and lots of cooking.  Supri and Arif and their friends showed us how to make a few of the staples of Indonesian cuisine.  Sambal is this spicy red condiment of sorts that people put on every meal they eat.  Lol, they even put it on the spaghetti that Sean cooked.  The stuff is ridiculously spicy and really delicious.  The way it’s made is by chopping all the ingredients (tomatoes, chilli peppers, onion), frying them, blending all of it, and frying it again.  Sounds simple because it is.  Another thing Sean learned to cook was mandol, or tempeh balls.  It was really funny learning this one because two of the ingredients were mystery ingredients that weren’t in the dictionary.  We eventually figured it out by going to markets and asking other people.  But at the time, we were cooking with garlic, saffron, mystery balls called ketumbar, and laos, and tempeh of course.  Turns out that the mystery balls were coriander, and laos is galingale. 

            Ultimately, of all the things we learned to cook, the only one we’ll be able to reproduce is the spicy sauce.  We learned that making tempeh is a long arduous process that involves a specific yeast that we can’t really buy anywhere.  Perhaps we’ll try to make it again in Canada with a bunch of different yeasts.  A science experiment of sorts, with different batches. 

            My foot.  Oh, my foot.  It’s healed now with a lovely scar that loves a good scratch.  And now I have an obsessive habit of keeping track of every nail that is used in construction.  Gathering them together and making sure that none goes astray.  Because you never know when a nail will find its way into somebody. 

            Apparently the mud pit at the ‘farm’ had in the past enveloped a stray nail.  A long, long time ago.  And this nail over time oxidised and because half rust, half original nail.  The mud pit must have worked long and hard to produces this specimen, this nail which was to find its way directly into my life through the sole of my foot.  Stomping mud to break down the clay with Supri and Sean was abruptly interrupted, from a fun laughing process it was very quickly denigrated to a screaming, swearing, and painful situation… a situation that was sharp and rusty and an inch into the bottom of my right foot.  Well, I tell you what, it’s the most painful thing I’ve ever experienced, and I hope it stays that way.  The first thing that crossed my mind, other than GET THE MOTHERFUCKER OUT OF ME, was a sense of admiration for people who’ve had encounters with bullets and other such penetrating objects.  Well, I keeled over and stuck my foot in the air and yelled and Sean and Supri to get the motherfucker out of me (it was not time for subtleties or politeness), and Sean went straight to it.  One strong yank at the thing got it a centimetre out.  Then Sean held the flesh on my foot down so it didn’t rip while taking the nail out, while Supri gave it the final and most satisfying yank.  Satisfying for him, but it certainly didn’t make the pain subside.  Torn flesh is really a unique and unpleasant thing. 

            Then, as I pondered tetanus and wondered what it even was and if I was indeed inoculated, and I contemplated the Indonesian hospital system and how clean and reliable it is or isn’t, Sean and Supri had a quick conversation about our plan of action.  The conclusion: get this Leah onto a scooter, and to a clinic.  Independent doctors’ offices are cleaner and more efficient, it turns out, but more expensive.  Speed was on my mind, so we chose that. 

            I’ll keep the doctor bit short because I wasn’t looking.  Sean was looking, and I told him to keep his mouth shut about what the doctor was doing, because otherwise I’d throw up.  There was a tetanus shot, a local anaesthetic, and various sharp tools for prodding, grabbing, tweezing, and pinching.  Half an hour later we were $150 poorer, and 100% more confident in the prospects of our future, and there was 100% less rusty nail bits in my body.  Armed with bandages and antibiotics, and advice to come back in a week and to somehow shower without getting my foot wet, we got back on the scooter and back home.  This is when my task shifted from building with mud to cleaning the kitchen. 

            Hmm, what else can I say about our time at the farm?  We ate well, worked most days, had lots of scooter time and very little walking time after the nail incident.  Our money-saving potential was utterly destroyed by that trip to the doctor.  Our happy belly potential was undeniably increased when we discovered that our friends could teach us how to cook.  We had many long afternoons in the kitchen with Arif and Supri and their friends, cooking and hanging out and enjoying all the good stuff we made.  We learned that having a mud oven might not be a part of our plan for our house anymore, since it requires preposterous amounts of wood to get it hot enough to cook something.  And we learned a lot about how we want to run our homestead, or more so how to not run it.  We gained a lot of respect for Anke and Aoi and their work ethic, and their ability to complete projects beautifully while all their volunteers have fun.