Indonesian Rhapsody

The daily afternoon rain is drowning out the prayer calls from the mosque just across the street from my new home, here in northern Bandung, Western Java, Indonesia. These first two weeks have been filled to the brim with activities, new friends and new impressions.

Grocery Store, Cafe, DVD shop and Tailor - all on my street Jalan Bangbayang.

View from my roof top to the east.

Last night I went to a dinner at the house of my initial friends and connection here in Indonesia, Any and David. They live with their adorable daughter Nira in eastern Bandung, on a mountainside with a great view over the ancient crater bowl that now is jam-packed with humans and human constructions. Bandung is one of the most densely populated regions in Asia and has the highest growth rate of all urban areas in Indonesia - A very challenging place to be working with environmental education and social transformation. David runs an NGO that focuses on environmental education with programs ranging from “nature-immersion” (where urbanites are taken into nature) to the construction and diffusion of rural biogas plants. Any has started her own organisation focusing on training and facilitation processes of social transformation. They are now looking for land to build an eco-village and “immersion-center” where they plan to live and work together with their friends.

Work, work, work in the djungle. David (in white t-shirt) and colleagues at a 4 day, intensive annual meeting in the mountains south of Bandung this past weekend.

Being the only tall, blond, long-noosed person in my neighbourhood I have very quickly become the talk of the town. Walking down the street I get more smiles and greetings than I have got in a lifetime in Sweden and the US. The other day I was in a traditional market several km away from my house and was asked if I was “bule” (white foreigner) Isak that lives up the road! Chess is played everywhere and very well so I am getting my fair share of intellectual clobbering every week from the street masters. I play soccer with Isan, Yusep, Mahmoud and the other children on my street. They are my mentors in the Indonesian language which I am picking up slowly but steadily. However, misinterpretations and misunderstanding abound. On my first day in Bandung I went for a hike to a waterfall and found a sign with the text WC/Mushola. Naturally my interpretation was that Mushola is the Indonesian word for toilet. The following day I was at a meeting with my new colleagues and asked where the “Mushola” was. A bit perplexed they showed me the room and it took me a few moments to realize that this was no toilet but a Muslim prayer-room! Apparently toilet and prayer rooms are often situated in the same place – a phenomena no one has been able to explain to me as of yet.

My new team mates and friends outside my house.

What is Mushola?

For those of you who don’t know, and those of you who have forgotten, I am here to do my field-work and research for my Masters thesis on small scale rural biogas technology. I am working with two local organisations, local technicians and dairy farmers in villages north of Bandung. The biogas systems installed utilize cow manure to produce biogas for cooking and organic fertilizer, through anaerobic digestion. The design used is often referred to as the plastic-bag model and is constructed using locally available material (such as PE plastic, PVC pipes, plastic water bottles etc.). The capital cost is low enough for the cow-farmers to afford to invest in the system without financial aid or government subsidies (not more than 100 USD for a family-sized system). After a recent discussion with my new colleagues here in Indonesia, I will be focusing my efforts on developing an appropriate design for a multi-family system, making it possible for villagers without cows of their own, to also have biogas. I will also have a number of volunteers helping me with data collection etc. If you want to get a better idea of what I will be doing in the coming month, read the short invitation to volunteers that I wrote today, which can be found below.

Three generations of cooking technology. Wood stove, LPG stove and a biogas stove built by local technician and genius Wawa.

Village meeting to introduce biogas technology to cow farmers in Cireyod. This is probably where the multi-family system I am designing will be installed.

I’m now off to a birthday party for my neighbour. I have prepared a Sangria with a little bit of everything and have high hopes to learn some Indonesian Dangdut tunes (Indonesian country) from her musician friends that are supposed to be there.