Take it from the villagers

Take it from the villagers

JAKARTA (JP): Doing something pointless, as Joice Maynard put it, can take you away from the pressure of daily routine. And that's exactly what I did after finishing an assignment in East Java a while ago. I went to a small village called Panggul on a public bus.

As the bus crawled along the hilly road, and more and more passengers got in, I began to think that I had made a mistake. Being squeezed in the crowded bus was not only pointless, but also murder. The twenty-four-seat bus was occupied by more than forty foul-smelling passengers. "Exactly what am I doing here?" I kept asking myself angrily.

Halfway to the destination, a middle-aged woman joined the crowd and put her merchandise, consisting of various snacks, on the lap of a man sitting next to me. "Nyuwun sewu," she apologized sweetly. (I know, I should have given my seat to her, but it wasn't the right time to play gentleman. I had a long and rough ride to go).

I didn't have to wait long until another woman got in and authoritatively put a basket full of chicks on my lap with the standard "nyuwun sewu". A basket-full of noisy and rotten chickens, for Pete's sake! I could have blown my stack! But the man next to me didn't show a trace of difficulty holding onto the merchandise. "Lha, wis ngene iki," he said, meaning that there was nothing we could do about it. "There is no way they could stand the bus turbulence with the burden," he added understandingly.

I was amazed at how the passengers put up with inconvenience. The crowd, heat, noise and jolts didn't make them furious. No complaint, no angry remark. Instead, they chatted gaily as if they were on a joy ride.

At Dongko, the bus was stopped by the driver's wife carrying their baby daughter. He spent five minutes talking to his wife. I thought the passengers would get mad, but they didn't. In fact, when the driver kissed his daughter, one of them shouted, "And one for Momma, please," and the others roared with laughter.

In big cities, people complain about any inconvenience. You complain when your coffee is too sweet or too black, when your maid or your driver makes a mistake, when there is a boring show on TV and when your children wake up late. But peasants face it with humor.

Staggering to my hotel room that afternoon, smelling like a chicken, I found that the room hadn't been cleaned and the maid had forgot to take my laundry. I was ready to raise hell, but then the faces of the passengers in the bus flashed into my mind.

"Nyuwun sewu, Mas," I said, smiling to the manager, "If your people do not have anything better to do, could you please have them make my bed?"

My trip I to the village wasn't totally pointless. It taught me how to deal with inconvenience. I still keep a page from the peasants' book.

-- Carl Chairul