'Rough Scientist' McCallie has Indonesia on her mind

Bruce Emond, The Jakarta Post/Jakarta

Whether it's trekking through a frigid ravine in New Zealand or making ends meet at the exotic end of the world in Zanzibar, it's perhaps always a case of "been there, done that" for Ellen McCallie.

For the American, one of the band of scientists on the BBC show Rough Science who try to solve confounding scientific problems in remote corners of the globe, was an American Field Service (AFS) student at SMA 5 in Bogor, West Java, in 1987-88.

Bogor, just an hour's drive from Jakarta, was hardly a wild tropical outpost, but it was still a world away from the then 18-year-old's native St. Louis, Missouri, especially during what she terms the "U.S.-centric Reagan years". "As I neared the end of high school in the U.S., I just couldn't believe that everyone lived like we did, using the quantity of resources as we did each day and looking at life in the short term -- our lives and maybe that of our children," McCallie said from her home in London, where she is studying science education at King's College.

"I applied to be an exchange student because I wanted to see how other people lived, what others valued, and how they looked at the world and, in particular, its natural resources. I couldn't have ended up in a better place for that."

Indonesia proved the ideal place to have her eyes opened to how the rest of the world lives.

"I loved my time in Indonesia because it was real. I lived with two fabulous families, Ibu and Bapak Sridodo and Ibu Rin. I attended school, helped around the house, went on family trips and ate jajan (snacks) with friends."

Like most AFS students, McCallie found out that her experience was not destined to be leisurely days with friends and a new family. After the initial honeymoon of getting to know everybody, students and their host families have to get down to the tricky business of living a normal life together.

"The toughest part of living in Indonesia for me was all the restrictions. 'Women don't do this. Indonesians don't do that.' It takes a long time to understand the context in which rules operate," she said.

"For the first three months, I felt like I kept doing things wrong. I felt very limited. In time, one learns to work within some limitations and to identify where limitations actually give freedom -- as well as when limitations should be completely broken through ...."

It became a process of taking one day at a time.

"Some days were great, other days were really hard," she remembered. "Isn't that how life is? I'm just so thankful that families were willing to take in a student from another country and to share their lives. It's not easy to have another person in your house, especially when the person is a teenager! And the person is going to be there for a year!"

There were also the something-lost-in-translation days. "I once thought both the dog and I were going to the hospital to get shots, but it turned out it was just the dog, because we're going to the vet."

But there were other, more meaningful moments, like the conversations with her host mother, Ibu Tati, as they set the table for dinner or waited for a minivan.

"I learned quite a bit about how commitment and independence are interwoven. These conversations guided me through the next couple of years as I made career decisions as a single female working in a male-dominated field in cultures that were not my own," she said.

"I learned to ask for help and guidance as well. My friends from SMA 5 were amazingly patient and a lot of fun. Some days, Susi, who lived around the corner, would just shake her head -- I wasn't making sense again. Was it the language or the cultural concepts that caused the confusion? Sometimes it would take months before we knew." Now 35, she believes being an exchange student was "the best thing I ever did".

"Once you go abroad, learn another language, live with a family in a culture that is not your own, and learn to think and feel in ways you never knew were possible, you realize how possible everything is. Life becomes a set of opportunities, of endless possibilities waiting to be experienced or figured out."

The experience also armed her well for the future, both studying at Grinnell College, a small, liberal arts college in the cornfields of Iowa (although, fortuitously, ethnomusicologist Roger Vetter, an expert on Javanese gamelan, had joined the college the year before), conducting research for five years in the Amazon in Brazil and then doing her master's at Cornell.

"Such experiences also give other people confidence in you. When I applied to do botanical research in the Amazon when I was a second-year college student, professors were willing to take me seriously. They said, 'If she can live abroad for a year in an area very different from the U.S. and love it, then she can handle the Amazon.'"

She finally got the chance to return to Indonesia in 1996-97 for her master's thesis on alternatives to slash-and-burn agriculture in Kupang, East Nusa Tenggara.

What does she love about Indonesia?

"The land, the sky, the plants and animals .... I loved the way of living and the people I lived with, was friends with, those I met along the way. I loved speaking another language. I enjoyed bouncing between languages based on what I was talking about -- I have different emotions in Indonesian than I do in English."

Those cultural lessons she learned as an AFS-er in Bogor have been of use in the Amazon, Kupang and wherever she has found herself.

"You have to observe, listen, don't assume you know what is going on, learn the language from people and use it in context. Don't be afraid to make mistakes, but always apologize immediately when you realize you goofed, keep trying and ask for help."