day one here

7:10am July 2, 2009 Ubud, Indonesia

Earplugs are my best friend. I never wore them when I went to shows as a kid, but someone suggested I take some to Africa and they were so right. Bali, like Senegal, is full of life all the time. That means that, at night, there are frogs and dogs, and other unknown noises, and at dawn there are roosters and geese and donkeys and sheep. It is really loud. I remember waking up with the mussein (the call to prayer) at dawn in Senegal one morning and, half asleep, thinking that the cacophony of animals from miles around was the sound of a stadium full of people cheering. That’s how loud it is. And, so far, Bali is no different. I wore earplugs to bed last night to quiet the sound of the frogs and sheep and people next door, and I woke up this morning to maybe 200 geese chuckling to themselves in the open field behind the room where I am sleeping. Its beautiful, and it makes me think how dead our land is at home that we don’t hear the sounds of life outside all the time, and also, it can be kind of annoying. So, I reiterate, earplugs are my best friend.

And, um, p.s., I might never come home. This place is crazy beautiful. A driver from the clinic picked me up at the airport. I embarrassed myself by trying to climb into the passenger side of the front seat, to discover its right hand drive here. The embarrassment didn’t last long, however, as I was quickly absorbed into watching the fascinating dance of car versus scooter on the road. There are SO MANY scooters here. Women ride them in high heels, people carry their groceries in their laps on their scooters. People ride with their baby wedged, helmetless, between them, or riding on the lap of the driver of the scooter. I saw one family, with their 2 or 3 year old daughter riding on her father’s lap, with both her feet and her hands extended straight in front of her all pressed against the steering column, face scrunched into hard determination like she was daring the scooter to go faster. I was grinning from ear to ear at that sight. Her mom saw me see her daughter and she laughed and waved and all three of them smiled and gave me a thumbs up as they zoomed by. Everywhere here, there is beauty. Along the road, I passed so many shops selling ornate carved doors and benches, I saw statues of all sizes, one place that made these amazing shelves out of the hulls of long boats, hanging basket swings… seriously, so much beautiful stuff that I’ll never be able to bring home with me. We could all fill a shipping container and have the most beautifully decorated houses imaginable. Who’s in?

Even the streetlights here are beautiful. The fronts of people’s houses are unbelievable. Everywhere is holy, a shrine, a place to leave offerings. We were doing 90 miles an hour on the two lane highway, bobbing and weaving between scooters, otherwise I’d have taken pictures. But oh, there will be pictures.

We arrived at the clinic about an hour after we left the airport. Ubud is in the center of Bali and, if you consider that I landed on the southern coast, that gives you a sense of how small this island is. The clinic was quiet, a western woman was laboring with her husband, still talking and laughing at 6cm. I met the midwife who runs the clinic, some of the people who help her, and was taken in by the volunteer coordinator and his wife, a couple from Ohio who are here for 6 months to a year to help out. Their house is across from the clinic, down a long driveway that I suppose probably isn’t a driveway, and part of a compound of three or four houses all surrounding a courtyard with trees and statuary and grass and a fountain. Once again, this is just “typical” Balinese architecture, and its like a dream to me. There were kittens in the yard chasing mice and it began to rain, which was pretty magical in the humid heat. The coordinator and his wife are young, late twenties, and sweet. They put my bags in their extra bedroom, sat me down on pillows around a low coffee table and gave me water and handed me delivery menus. WHAT? Yeah, delivery menus. From a Mexican restaurant, an Italian restaurant, or a hippy groovy health food store. I opted for the latter, ordered minestrone soup and a passion fruit, coconut, date smoothie (grand total $3.90), and we sat around the table and talked while we waited for my order. I have good news. First, food is going to be better and easier than it was in Senegal. Second, there are flushing European style toilets (at least, so far). Third, there was running hot water for me to take a shower. The running hot water is less common here, but it is so warm here that a cold shower isn’t the end of the world. The point is I didn’t have to take a bucket shower in a dank, dark cement room; I luxuriated in a bathtub.

The coordinator and his wife went to go out with the clinic’s acupuncturist and left me to get settled in. I was pretty stoked: I’d eaten and bathed, and was going to spend the night in an actual bed, in a room with screens on the windows, and electricity. This was so much better than I was prepared for. I climbed into bed, put in my earplugs, and fell quickly to sleep. I’d been up for nearly 48 hours.

I woke up sometime in the middle of the night, of course. I hate that feeling. I had lost an earplug and a couple mosquitoes were making lunch out of me, but I was too tired to do much about it. I finally got back to sleep and woke up again with the geese at about 5:45am (which I think is 2:45pm at home the day before?). I’m glad to be getting on a (sort of) normal sleep/wake schedule from the start. I crept out of my room to pee (my room is through the coordinator and his wife’s room) and out onto the patio to go to the kitchen for more water. One of the Balinese who tend to the compound was there in ceremonial dress, waving incense over a shrine, and scattering fresh flowers over the sidewalk. “Morning, Bob” I thought to myself and I smiled and waved to him. Now, back in bed, waiting for the house to stir, I’m considering the weeks ahead of me and finding that I don’t really want to absorb how long I’ll be here. It’s beautiful, for sure, but lets acknowledge that I’m a homebody and traveling alone is tough. So I’ve decided I’m taking it in two-week increments. Just get through the next two weeks. I think I can do that.

Today, the plan is to get me more settled in. I’m going to buy a sim card for my cell phone, try to find a house to rent, and hopefully I’ll decide on my form of transportation. It’s a toss up between a scooter and a bicycle. I’m voting bicycle for now, but the scooters were so fast and looked fun (and certainly more dangerous), so I’m undecided at the moment. Of course.

4:42pm July 2, 2009

We walked into Ubud this morning and got breakfast (omelet, toast, fruit, watermelon juice, macchiato for $6.75 –and that’s expensive). I saw my first monkeys: two adults with a baby. I tried taking a photograph of them, and while I was distracted doing it, another one in a tree above me started to pee on me. I’m taking it as a good omen. The walk was long and along the way we stopped to get a sim card for my iphone (thank god my phone is hacked and therefore unlocked because the old Razr I brought wasn’t unlocked and didn’t work), so I now have an Indonesian phone number (if anyone wants to rack up minutes and make international calls or send me text messages of pure love). We also stopped and met up with the two Australian women who also arrived yesterday. One is an old timey homebirth midwife, and her daughter is a doctor who was specializing in Obstetrics, but has decided she can’t hang with hospital birth anymore. I liked them immediately. We all enjoyed breakfast together and were joined by another Aussie midwife and we spent about an hour just talking birth. That’s something that I don’t realize I love so much until I’m doing it and then I can’t stop. After breakfast, we looked for a house for me. There wasn’t much to rent, unfortunately, so I’ve decided on a room in a wing of the family compound of a woman who works at the clinic. It’s $10 a night and it feels like a good choice. I’m informed that her family is from the high caste, and living with her is akin to living with royalty. Okay then. I had my heart set on a house of my own, but I don’t have to stay in this room if I find something else. And even if I don’t, I’ll move into a guesthouse on the same compound in 10 days that is more removed from the main house and also has a kitchen, so it’ll be almost like a house. One thing I love about the city here so far is that it appears to all be along a couple main roads. But if you turn down a driveway or an alley, it’s actually this huge labyrinth of compounds, temples and fields. Its so totally what a nerdy little girl like I was (okay, like I AM) used to dream about when inventing magical places for myself. And the beauty! I know I’ve said it already but, unless you’ve been here, you don’t know what I mean. Its not pretty or quaint and old like Napa Valley or Italy or something. It is STUNNING, and the place where I am moving into is no exception.

We stopped by the clinic while we were looking for houses. I was planning to go back to the coordinator’s house where my things are to take care of some stuff, but one of the women in labor at the clinic was at 9cm and I got pulled into the birth room. She had her baby about an hour and a half later, I caught the gorgeous little girl in water, with the woman who runs the clinic at my shoulder. The placenta didn’t come, however, and I saw my first manual extraction, which I will spare you the details of, suffice to say it is rare, and entails reaching all the way up into the uterus to get the darn placenta when it refuses to come. Its dangerous, very painful for the mother, pretty fancy, and I was glad to see it, even if I’m not glad that it had to happen. I may practice for the next 25 years and never see another one. Fingers crossed. Anyway, that’s the news... I’m surprisingly un-jetlagged, and happy here so far. I miss home and I miss my loved ones (you know who you are) like crazy and I keep thinking how much I wish ANY of you were here to see this with me. It’s amazing. Photos soon. I’ve got to go move out of the coordinator’s house now, though. ☺