Sermon on a Beer Crate

(First published in the Bali Advertiser, August 30, 2006)

“So when even was come, the lord of the vineyard saith unto his steward, Call the laborers, and give them their hire, beginning from the last unto the first.” – St. Matthew 20:8

A friend came over downhearted a few weeks ago. She had been working three jobs and the day before all three of the do-gooder organizations she worked for had told her they couldn’t pay her. Another friend used to complain that an employer often expected her to stay late without extra pay – but docked her whenever she took time off for a ceremony or illness.

Another Balinese woman I know once worked for a Western boss who never did get around to paying her the rate agreed at the start of the employer-employee relationship. It was always, “Can you wait a few more days?” or “This is all I can afford this month. I’ll make it up to you later.”

I’ve heard the stories time and again from maids, secretaries, personal assistants, and yayasan staff. They are hired at a starting rate – sometimes below market – with promises of an increase in a few months when things get going. The increase never comes. Paydays are delayed. Meanwhile, the expatriate boss – who is so pressed for cash, as employees are told – leads the usual “Bali” life of bars, cars, spas, and restaurant dinners.

What’s funny is to then hear the fly-by-night entrepreneurs and charity doyennes complain about the difficulty of getting good help, how the Balinese and other Indonesians are so poor at planning ahead, how the Balinese have no business sense.

Some of it may just be incompetent money management. It doesn’t seem like it costs much to start and operate a business in Bali, and people jump right in. Also, a lot of people starting businesses in Bali are primarily right-brained – and must assume they get a free pass for being “artists.” Sad to say, artists still have to pay the bills and the help, even in Bali.

Then with yayasans and non-profit organizations, the hired staff may be expected to have the same altruistic devotion and hair-shirt mentality as the foreign do-gooders. And maybe many yayasan workers do feel bad they can’t volunteer to work for a good cause for nothing, but they may need money and help just as much as the people the yayasan is set up to assist.

And some expatriates have a neurotic fear that every Balinese dreams of getting both hands in a foreigner’s pockets. A couple of years ago, before I took to the clean life, my afternoon beers and cigarettes were delivered by my landlord’s son. He’d tack on an extra 1,000 rupiah a bottle to run to the local store. After the daily runs had become established, though, he went into business for himself. He’d buy a case of Bintang at the supermarket, keep the beers in the family fridge, and instead of making 1,000 rupiah a bottle, his take was almost 3,000 rupiah per serving – because the home delivery price didn’t change. I was kind of proud of him and me, too, when his parents reported a few months later that he’d saved his first million rupiahs.

When I related this to a new neighbor, suggesting she make use of my young go-getter beer merchant, as several other people in the area already did, she was certain it was just the sort of trickery the Balinese are born to. She begrudged the little enterpriser’s profit increase to 30 US cents per unit by the cut in his supply costs, maybe thinking that an American little boy, some young would-be Donald Trump, would pass on any savings to customers. Part of the Bali boy’s cunning, apparently, too, was that he had been born cute. They are sneaky like that.

It isn’t the responsibility of visitors and long-term residents to repair the Indonesian economy or get the government and local business community to raise the standards set for minimum pay. But if you caught the statistic reported in the August 20 Jakarta Post, that the number of poor families in Indonesia increased to 19.2 million in August from 17.8 million this January – a rise to almost 40 percent of the total 52.3 million families in the country – and want to do something about it, don’t start another yayasan. Just pay your house help and business employees a fair and equitable local wage, pay them on time, and maybe give something extra at the usual bonus times. An unexpected 100,000 rupiah is only US$10 or so to us “rich” foreigners; to local workers, it can be up to 20 percent or more of their usual monthly income.

And if you happen to live in Penestanan and aren’t yet reformed, start taking home beer deliveries. I know a beer merchant who’s suffered a drop in sales volume.

Copyright © 2006 Lee Roy LeRoi

Put Another Dime in the Jukebox, Baby, and I'll Shoot You

(First published in Bali Advertiser, August 16, 2006)

“Dead or Alive.” – how U.S. President George W. Bush once wanted Osama bin Laden

Maybe it is a good thing guns are hard to come by in most Asian countries, because there is a high level of satisfaction in putting a .45 slug through an entertainment system when it is blaring at 3 o’clock in the morning. At least I have imagined it to be so ever since living four years behind a University of Oklahoma fraternity house in the early nineties. Once a week, it seemed, I’d lie awake imagining the mayhem that would end the noise.

Now we have moved recently and are not hidden back in the rice fields. A small art shop across the way is where the local Bali boys gather at night after they have done hustling for transport work and mining for gold strikes amongst the tourist ladies. It wouldn’t be bad if their after-midnight conversations weren’t accompanied by music blasting over a Kijang stereo. It’s enough to turn me into a raging, run-amok shootist. Fortunately, my home defense is made up of a couple of ‘Walking Tall’ sticks and a fat dog.

So far I have satisfied myself with shouted requests to kill the music. I try to be polite and not sound too much like a raving, mad foreigner. It only makes it worse that everyone in my own household gets the giggles when I start to stalk and stomp in the wee hours.

“What are they doing to my Bali?” is the troubling question that is sometimes not far away. Maybe I’d prefer to look out on a moonlit early morning and see the local youths leading cows out to the paddies to plow in the cool part of the day. Or maybe I’d like to see them squatting through the witching hours, swapping village gossip and fighting mock rooster battles. Their late night noise, for some reason, irks more knowing that they have just ended an evening playing bad reggae and chatting up Japanese women -- as if that somehow makes them less Balinese.

It was easier to fantasize about taking out an early morning yoga dance class that met near one place we used to live. The noisemakers were foreigners, for one thing. It was no trouble at all to think that they were “ruining Bali” – although I never could reconcile their spiritual demeanor of the afternoons with their early morning shouts, hoo-rahs, and poundings. What did that have to do with yoga at 7 o’clock in the morning? I had always thought yoga a quiet pursuit. Woe unto them if I had ever found one of the RPGs of my dreams.

Not all nighttime or early morning noise throws me into a rage. I can sleep to a frog chorus and other natural night noises. My tolerance line for man-made ruckuses, though, is an arbitrary, “cultural” one. I don’t mind a temple gamelan or a raspy voice over a scratchy loudspeaker late into the night. I don’t mind the occasional bazaar concert serenading the countryside for kilometers around. If the noise can be judged part of Balinese or community tradition, then I can accept it with equanimity; if it is associated with the tourist trade, or can be seen a result of a “detrimental” Western influence, then I cannot forgive or forget.

Thus, the local wannabes playing all night a couple of times a year in a village bazaar are tolerable. The same wannabes playing all night every week in an Ubud establishment are not – at least, not within the range of my sensitive sleeping eardrums. This does not make any sense. “Culturally pure” noise keeps me awake, too. Shouldn’t I be upset at any noise that disturbs the night hours? Maybe I could be more tolerant of cultural intrusion if it were some good old Johnny Cash and not always covers of the same three reggae songs. As long as we are going to have Western influence, can’t we make it Country and Western?

Now I suppose some weak-hearted, weak-kneed artsy-fartsy type is going to write in to say I shouldn’t even joke about shooting people … or their radios. And I wonder myself about the appropriateness of such a vengeance fantasy with Israel and Hezbollah seriously trying to blast each other to bits, dozens of people dying every day in Iraq, and two shooters just being arrested in Phoenix, Arizona after a year of what one of them called “random recreational violence.”

But give up joking about shooting somebody? That would be giving into the terrorists, wouldn’t it? It’d be letting them win, right? Agree or I’ll shoot you. Call it the TV Western influence.

Copyright © 2006 Lee Roy LeRoi

With Us or Against Us? Americans and Soccer

(First published in Bali Advertiser, August 2, 2006)

“World soccer rules desperately need an overhaul; in that regard, they would do well to look to the USA, which designs its game rules to ensure that the better team comes out on top.” – Thomas Rice, in a letter sent to USAToday.com

A friend and I have been trying to figure out why Americans -- that is citizens of the United States of America and not citizens of any other American country -- don’t appreciate the game of soccer, aside from the fact that they aren’t any good at it.

“Some of my male friends think the game is too hard to follow, or there’s not enough scoring. Or they just say that they don’t get it,” my friend says. She’s working on a theory of “a parallel between a country’s political history and its love of the game.”

The basic tenet is that people in countries with long histories of political unrest and uncertainty – such as some South American and European countries – are better able to understand, play, and cheer the game. Whereas in the US, with its relative political stability the past 200 years, the orderly, controlled, chess-like American football is the popular game.

She might be onto something, although I’m not sure the theory works in Asia, where the developed, orderly countries of Japan and South Korea are the football powerhouses, not the basket-case countries of Southeast Asia. But my friend would seem to have no less an adherent to her theory than Claudio Reyna, captain of Team USA the past three World Cup campaigns.

“When I see youth soccer, I see too much organization, too many kids standing around in line waiting to shoot," Reyna said in a recent interview with Sports Illustrated (as carried in an Associated Press article July 14).

Another theory I read of several years ago is that Americans have no feeling for real football because it is mostly a game of failure. That is, most Americans cannot believe anything good can have happened in a game that ended in a 0-0 draw, when it may have been all end-to-end action, with sparkling mid-field play and many near misses. Americans are too oriented towards results to enjoy such a game was the thinking, and I’m willing to go along with that, too.

But I fear the attitude displayed by the USAToday letter writer is more common. Americans don’t take to the game simply because it is not American. They can sit through the four hours it takes to play the official 60 minutes of an American football match, with all its timeouts, half-times, and commercial breaks for quarters and two-minute warnings. They can watch a baseball game into extra innings -- debating the wisdom of pinch-runners, pinch-hitters, suicide bunts, squeeze plays, and the hit-and-run -- much of the time while absolutely nothing is happening on the field. They will hang on until the last tenth-of-a-second tick of a basketball game in which the final 10 minutes is a series of trips to the foul line as the trailing team tries to mount a comeback. And then they’ll lecture the world on what needs to be done to make soccer a better, more exciting game?

It reminds me of the mother watching the military parade, proud her son is the only one in step.

There are the obvious parallels to be drawn in the American reaction and attitude towards real football and the US diplomatic approach to the rest of the world the past several years. And is there a whiff of racist nationalism of the kind that allowed Americans for decades to ignore, even ridicule, its domestic Negro baseball leagues, Asian and Cuban baseball, European basketball, and any sports – badminton, ping pong, rugby, skiing – at which the best and brightest stars are seldom homegrown American boys? Would a bicycle race ever have received coast-to-coast coverage in the US had not Lance Armstrong recovered from cancer and dominated and won the most famous of all cycling races for a record seven straight years?

But if we are going to make nasty insinuations, let’s go for the real low blow. Real football isn’t a major US sport, because soccer is too lean a game. Americans like their goals and their scores like they like their chicken. They want them to come in Herculean, super-sized buckets. They are not satisfied with preparations that rely on quality, style, presentation, and build-up. They want all-you-can-stuff-into-yourself buffets, jumbo, big-gulp drinks, 72-ounce, Texas-sized slabs of goals. It is un-American, un-thankful, ungrateful to walk away from a table wanting more, or from a stadium or living room couch not completely satiated with games, scores, wrap-ups, and half-time extravaganzas -- without several whole enchiladas as it were.

Man! It must really bite now that some itty-bitty, little Japanese guy has been beating all American comers in the annual Nathan’s Famous Fourth of July hot dog eating contest the past five years. How beautifully ironic is that? Shall we say it?

Must be hard to stomach.

Copyright © 2006 Lee Roy LeRoi