Top 10 Ways to Tell You've Been in Bali Too Long

1. You don't even notice when rats from the beautiful rice fields scamper past you while you're eating.
2. You wear a parka when the temperature gets below 80 degrees Fahrenheit.
3. You fight to be the first to get a serving of fatty chunks of daging babi (pig meat) with little wiry hairs sticking out of it at ceremonial feasts
4. You don't think twice about sitting sideways in your best sarong on the back of a speeding motorcycle on your way to temple while balancing a fruit offering on your head and holding your toddler on your lap
5. You can't function without two pembantus (housekeepers), a gardener and a security guard
6. Even your Balinese friends start complaining that you have stretched "jam karet" (rubber time) to the limit, and could you at least try to show up in the same month as the appointment?
7. The builders finished your new house two years ago, but you won't move in, because you are still waiting for the pemangku (local priest) to choose an auspicious date for the new house blessing
8. You find yourself arguing with the pisang goreng vendor about a 100 rupiah (one cent) overcharge
9. Your sequined flip flops and your fringed sarong pass as formal wear
10. You find yourself telling your overseas customers you'll get back to them in two months to fill their orders, because you have to prepare for (pick a ceremony below, or use one of the other 200 million ceremonies in Bali):
a) a cremation (this one usually buys the most time)
b) Galungan (this is almost as good as a cremation for buying time)
c) Kuningan (okay, okay, this one really goes hand in hand with Galungan, but tardy vendors usually cite them separately to emphasize the burden of their societal commitments)
d) odalan (temple anniversary)
e) Saraswati (Count on the fact that most of your customers won't realize this one doesn't take much prep - after all, what do they know?)
f) the three-month ceremony of your child
e) the six-month ceremony of your child
g) the catch-all, general "family ceremony" option, possibly mixed with a monthly full-moon or dark-moon ceremony

Top 10 Ways to Tell You Live in San Francisco

1. You marvel at the really cheap deal your friends got on the $600,000 house they just purchased

2. You don't blink when a 6'5" drag queen in a tiara, a pink chiffon dress and sequined stilettos asks to borrow your comb in the Ladies' room

3. You regularly scream at the @$*#$&^#cable cars to get out of your way as you drive down California St. toward downtown, the same cable cars you thought were so quaint when you first moved here

4. You would not consider eating even a burger at a place without an 8-page wine list (that is if you ate burgers, which, of course, you don't)

5. You are late for your tantric yoga class because you got stuck in the anti-war protest traffic on the way back from the seminar by the Dalai Lama

6. Your toddler has been on waiting lists for eight preschools for the last six months, because the schools feel he does not show enough leadership ability to have the right stuff

7. Your toddler finally does get into a desirable preschool, and it costs you more than you paid in college tuition at your Ivy League university

8. You would eat food from any random street vendor when vacationing in Asia, but you would die before Wonder bread or iceberg lettuce passed your lips

9. It dawns on you that you don't know one single person who is actually an employee at the Silicon Valley company where you work - you are surrounded by consultants and contractors. Come to think of it, you are a contractor.

10. You consider Howard Dean right wing

Warmth (Bali, 2005)

I remember riding through the rice fields north of Ubud on the back of Tut's motorcycle when everything was new, years ago. He pretended to show me houses for rent, and I pretended I needed his help. We stopped along the road in the gathering twilight, alone except for a farmer in a broad straw hat and a hiked-up sarong, herding his ducks home from the rice fields, and some children chasing each other in the shadow of a distant, ancient, Hindu temple. We laughed, and we talked, and we watched each other's signals - the age old dance. 'Tut with his ready laugh, his clever jokes and his wry, wicked wit.

Since then, Ketut and I have been through a lot; we know we could never live together, we bicker and we drive each other crazy. I've tried to say good-bye to him a hundred times, but still we are bound to each other, though we don't quite understand how. Even my old friend Abang, who knows what I'm thinking before I do, can't figure out this one - "What's with you guys?" he asks. But I don't have an answer, except that somehow, when I wasn't looking, Ketut became family.

The last time I saw Ketut was in April, when he helped me pack my bags to head back to the States. He was going to accompany me to the airport, but when Wayan arrived with the car, we saw there was no room for Ketut, due to the size of my large bags. I had yet to return the motorcyle I had rented three months before from Putuh, and Wayan went ahead in the car to wait for me at Putuh's. Ketut and I started off down the road, he on his motorcycle, and me not behind him, but on my own motorcyle this time. We stopped at a warung across the road to say our last good-bye.

Now Ketut is in the hospital with a serious illness, and he has just returned from Singapore where he had an operation. I talked with him on the phone tonight, Ketut in hot, tropical Bali, and he asked me to send him a warm coat, because he is so cold.

Tsunami (Aceh, 2005)

When I first met Abang in Ubud, Bali, he was a party in a bottle, a fun-loving DJ with wildly colored hair, tattoos and piercings. We became unlikely friends, even at times crying on each others shoulders about love affairs gone wrong. As the years passed, I saw him mature into a deeply caring, intelligent and resourceful man who under the auspices of IDEP, a local NGO, met with village elders throughout Bali to help them understand disaster planning (Bali is prone to earthquakes and volcanic eruptions).

After the deadly tsunami swept through Southeast Asia, killing hundreds of thousands, Abang found himself called into service by IDEP to help coordinate on-the-ground efforts to get aid fast to the stricken Aceh region of Sumatra. He interviewed medical personnel, building contractors and other Indonesian would-be volunteers who could communicate with the local populace. He probed to see if they could take the strain of living in the jungle in shacks with no niceties and little contact with the outside world for three months before their replacements arrived.

But one day when I called Abang on his cell phone, I found him not in Bali, but in the middle of the jungles of Aceh. I was immediately concerned for his safety, not just because of the fear of further earthquakes and tsunamis, but because of the fierce hostilities between Aceh rebels and the unrelenting Indonesian military.

There was “still a war going on,” Abang told me. “People come in with knife and bullet wounds, and sometimes the military comes to the clinic and questions us.” He told me there were “lots of heavy guns”.

He had brought three medical volunteers with him, and they were in the midst of building a wooden clinic. Although it was weeks after the tsunami had hit, he said there was still a lot of flooding, not helped by the fact that it rained almost continuously. He was keeping the infrastructure running, which included driving 10 hours over bad roads to pick up food.

Even though this particular clinic was mid-wife oriented, and even though it was still being built, all kinds of patients went (and still go) there. The volunteers treated people with injuries caused by the tsunami and its aftermath, and also people with long-standing problems who took advantage of the fact doctors had arrived in their midst. Malaria was a problem; the clinic was treating malarial patients when I spoke with Abang, but he didn’t seem concerned about catching it himself.

If you’ve ever spent time in Indonesia, you know that family members often accompany patients at the hospital, and the clinic was no different. At night, Abang said, when the relatives came, they had about 50 people staying all night there. He was obviously enjoying the experience deep in the jungle, talking with people who had been through so much and doing what he could to help.

Abang said, “Everyone has lost people, everyone has horrible stories, but the people are great and smiling and want to give you things even though they've lost everything. They are mostly rebuilding their villages themselves. Many NGOs come and run into a little adversity and quit and leave.”

He talked a lot about the children. “The kids don’t so much talk about their experiences as draw them,” he told me. “I can see the tsunami through their drawings.” He held a drawing contest, not tsunami-related, just a kids' drawing contest, but the children drew the horrors they had seen, of course. He put the drawings up on a wall....