On the Saturday I had bottled my banana wine and taken a few bottles down to the local bar for tasting purposes, then West Ham had played and beat Sunderland with a couple of goals from their young academy players and so that deserved a bit of celebrating, by which time we'd run out of wine and had to move on to beer and after that it all gets a little hazy. So I was feeling a little groggy, to say the least, when I woke up on Sunday morning.
Clutching a mug of coffee like it was a life-preserver and approaching my swaying desk, I looked forward to scanning the match reports and forums until the coffee had cut through the fug. The last thing I needed, I thought with hindsight, was a crowd of my neighbours calling me out from my home to go and help clear a bit of wasteland covered in hostile foliage and rubble which was home to legions of angry insects, in the steaming sun, with a hangover. But that's what they did.
Gotong royong is the Indonesian term for the local community gathering together to help complete a job or project; it's a wonderful concept and I'm all for it. Just not today. I knew that this was a great chance to meet and bond with my neighbours and it's the sort of thing that I would probably have extolled the virtues of in the pub while bemoaning the lack of community spirit in England, nobody talking to the people in their street, shutting themselves up in their houses, not taking pride in their environment etc. Just... not today!
The task was an admirable one. There was a bit of waste ground in our complex which we would clear to make space for a recreation area; somewhere to play badminton and football, and I feel that my idea of a swimming pool and sauna was not treated with the seriousness that it deserved. However, this area was rather overgrown. Things just grow in Indonesia, you see; buckets of rain, plenty of sunshine and good fertile soil mean that you have to beat back nature with a large stick rather regularly or it's liable to take over; left much longer and the orangutans would be moving into our recreation area.
So, in we went. Some armed with the appropriate gardening tools, others with large machetes and cleavers. I had a kitchen knife and a hangover. It was only nine in the morning but the sun was already strong and I was sweating banana wine by the bottle. Angry red ants were making their displeasure quite clear upon my exposed legs and feet and I didn't possess any more suitable garden-wear. Still, I had to show willing and I ploughed into the job with the gusto of the drunk or the deranged. I must have been trying to impress because I found myself hacking away at a particularly sturdy bush with a knife whose closest encounter with wilful vegetation to date, was a lettuce. At some point during this mindless chopping I noticed that my hand was crimson and that I had punctured it on the splintered point of a branch.
Walking casually away from the bush, my hand dripping blood, I hoped that somebody would see my injury without me having to run around in circles and falling into a dead faint. Fortunately it was spotted immediately and my fellow workers gathered around while I was patched up with a bandage.
“Just a little scratch,” I said bravely to the crowd while faintly wondering if you could get tetanus from a jumped-up weed. They nodded and I could see that they were impressed with my stiff upper lip, even if the lower one was trembling. We stopped to drink some lychee juice and munch on some tomatoes that we'd found growing amongst the rubble; you see what I mean about Indonesia's fecundity? We sat for a while in the shade, with me toying with the idea of fetching some banana wine, when I began to feel rather uncomfortable in parts of my body that I wished to inspect privately.
I sauntered nonchalantly off to my house where I immediately dropped my shorts and let out a little girly scream. My inner thighs and nether regions were covered in a horrible, yellow, lumpy, itching rash. I squealed again when I discovered the same thing on my arms and under my armpits. I peeled off my clothes and darted into the bathroom where I flung water upon myself in some frantic notion that it might do some good, which it didn't. And then I stood for a while dripping and itching while absurd and horrible theories involving leprosy and witchcraft hurtled through my mind as I tried to figure out what I'd contracted.
Some time later Novi arrived and found me stood motionless and naked in the bathroom with my arms and legs akimbo and a distraught expression on my face. Ants, she decided after I had hysterically gestured to my ugly curse. Well, I wasn't impressed with such a mundane explanation and sent her off to the garden to pick some Aloe Vera which I gingerly applied to my spreading rash before perching carefully on a seat, staring in silent horror at my new disease and wondering how Sunday morning could have turned out so badly.
Eventually, after about an hour of itchy hand-wringing, while I tried to imagine what my new friends would think of me shirking off the job so soon, and what the possibility was of me exposing my genitalia to them for proof, the Aloe Vera began to have some effect and the rash started to subside. There was only one possible ending to a morning like this.
“Novi, we're going to the pub.”
As I swaggered out of the house, my legs bowed like a cowboy, the neighbours pounced on me again. “We've decided that we can't finish this ourselves,” they informed me. “So we're going to club together and pay for some workmen to finish it. A hundred thousand Rupiah each should do it.”
“You fucking slanty-eyed, yellow-skinned fuckers have made me miss my fucking morning coffee and two hours of hungover self-pity to get sunburnt, stabbed and horribly disfigured by some fucking tropical skin disease only for you to tell me that it was for fuck all! AND NOW YOU WANT ME TO PAY FOR THE PRIVELEDGE?!?!” Is what I didn't scream. Instead I smiled and handed over the money, arranged myself carefully on my motorbike and set off with the prime intent of getting another hangover.
I have since found a nasty lump on my wrist and one of my toes has swollen to twice its size and turned an unhealthy shade of red.
Gotong
royong my arse.
“Changed your soap or washing powder recently? New clothes?” I asked when Novi complained of itchy arms, legs and back. I inspected the rash critically and it resembled eczema; I'm an expert you see, suffer from it myself if I use too strong a soap. She claimed she hadn't changed any of these things and I peered at her suspiciously over a pair of spectacles that I don't possess. “Stop using soap for a couple of weeks and use plenty of unperfumed moisturiser. If it hasn't cleared up in a week or two make another appointment. Next!”
Despite my diagnosis, Novi went to the local doctor who mumbled something incoherent and gave her some universal placebo which, several days later had done nothing to relieve the symptoms.
“Quack,” I said
“What?”
“Never mind. Just stop the soap and use the moisturiser.”
She managed a few itchy days before going to another doctor who told her that she had eczema and should stop using soap and apply plenty of moisturiser. Novi put up with my intolerable smugness admirably for a week or so but the rash didn't go away, so her mother hauled her, unwillingly, to the local dukun (a sort of witchdoctor).
“Somebody doesn't like you,” he announced. “They have put a curse on you.”
“Who?” Asked a formidable mother rather menacingly.
“I know but cannot tell you.” How convenient thinks I. “But I can remove the curse.”
The next day, I pressed an understandably reluctant Novi to tell me what had happened. The dukun had sent them off to buy some particular flowers which he put into some water and incanted over; she was to use this to wash with. I was already scoffing before she told me the next part. She had to grate a blessed potato and apply it to her afflicted areas and keep it on overnight. I was incredulous at this preposterous hocus pocus and somewhat bemused at the idea of trying to keep grated potato stuck to one's body during the night and the mess it would cause in bed.
Two days later the rash had gone.
