Like Standing between a Grizzly and Its Cub

Addison, the man who once bested Miss South Carolina in a karaoke contest (it's true), just brightened my Christmas with this new single release.

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Southeast Asians eat a lot of rice. You get it.

But do you really? It’s certainly the bulk of every meal, and the Indonesian government suggests I’ll have eaten 693 pounds of it by the time I finish service. But there’s more. Rice is so important to Indonesians that its significance transcends diet. To understand, suspend rationality, and accept this: it’s gastronomically impossible to feel full after a riceless meal. Where I live, most villagers believe that's true, and as a result, they’re fiercely invested in the grain.

It doesn’t matter that corn and cassava may be cheaper and readily available. Indonesians won’t settle for substitutes. It’s pony up for the good stuff or go home. NPR’s Planet Money just published a podcast on how of a perceived shortage sparked both a run on rice and a tripling of global prices from $350/ton to $1200/ton in 2007. High prices were no hurdle for demand. Stephen Colbert noted that even in America,

“CostCo and Sam’s Club are now both rationing rice. You can’t buy more than eighty pounds in a single visit. Only eighty pounds! How am I supposed to make my famous kiddy pool jambalaya!”

Now you get it: Southeast Asians really care about their grain. And extrapolating further, you can imagine that standing between an Indonesian and his grain is like standing between a grizzly mom and its newborn cub. Outcome? Trouble.

***

And that’s more or less what drew a few hundred angry demonstrators, some tv cameras, and sixty police to my village office on Monday. The background: it’s Javanese tradition for well-off community members to donate a certain portion of their harvests to the poor. These farmers bring a share of their unrefined rice—called beras—to the local village office. The officials are then charged with distributing the rice to the needy.

At least they’re supposed to…

My community suspects at least one of the administrators has been embezzling rice to benefit friends and family (pretty common here). So they stormed the office, forced their way in, and demanded a hearing. The police then pulled up in their regency paddywagons and kept order. Women and children flocked to the spectacle, and even though the shouting got heated (heard from my house), nobody was arrested or hurt. And though I have no idea how the situation will play out, it’s safe to say that the grizzly mother-cub metaphor has really struck home. If you’re interested in more, you can run this Indonesian article through Google Translate for a better scoop.

On to this week in photos…

Yes, they do wear those.

A neighbor chopping down his mango tree in the rain because it had
the audacity to drop a limb on his roof.

Local paddy and local volcano.

Kids eating chocolate... real chocolate.

New friends.

Old friends.