A Tough Question

In Magic Lounge, the drinking den where we sprawl on orange sofas and use their satellite internet after a day on the beaches of Kuta, Lombok, A approaches me tentatively.

He has something to tell me. Or maybe ask me.

“Excuse me, ibu,” he says. “I have just had a baby!”

“Oh! Congratulations,” I say. “How old?”

“Just twenty days,” he says.

“Oh,” I say. “Still little. Much happiness.”

“Yes,” he says.

And pauses.

Sasaks are a bit more tentative about personal questions than the Balinese, though, as all over Indonesia, soon after they get to the “how old are you?” stage they get to the “where is your husband?” stage. But he’s clearly building up to something.

Z has completed 500 words of story, 300 words of blog post and three Mathletics exercises in record time, after receiving a parental rocket about self-discipline and a South Park ban. He is now gaming vigorously while text-chatting on Skype with his father.

“Your son is clever!” he says. “How I can make my son clever like your son?”

“Clever?” I say. “Thank you.”

“Ya!” he says. “He can use a laptop at ten years old. He’s good at maths. What do I need to feed my son to make him clever like yours?”

A’s question throws me, more than a little. This confrontation between the developed West and Lombok, Indonesia, which, for all its burgeoning sophistication is still at heart a simple, rural region of a developing country.

What do I say?

First ensure that your child is born in a wealthy country and has access to technology from birth? That he has access to books, free schooling with small class sizes, university-educated parents, grandparents, carers?

None of this is achievable for A. He’s a young dad. They all are, here.

I’d say he’s 21, probably. 24, maybe, at a push. His son’s future survival, with infant mortality rates here, is still not yet guaranteed.

But I need to answer A’s question in the spirit it is intended.

“First,” I say. “You need to feed him breast, not bottle, for as long as you can.”

“You,” he says. “How long you breastfeed him?”

This opens up another can of worms. We’re not good at breastfeeding in the West, largely because so many women work outside the home and, unlike here, babies and children aren’t welcome in the workplace.

Plus, when you’re paying for childcare by the hour, as I was, the notion of spending a swathe of one’s working day expressing milk is, well, expensive.

I did it. But it didn’t take Z long to work out that the delivery system on a bottle was faster.

“Me?” I say. “Well, only five months. You see, I had to work, so other people looked after him, so he was on the bottle soon. The way you do it here is good.”

At our guesthouse, the lovely little 2-year-old we play with is still firmly breast fed.

“Till one, two years?” he says.

“Exactly,” I say.

The role of dietitian comes easier to me in Lombok since Sasaks are slenderer than many Indonesians, so Z does not look like a scrawny child in need of feeding up here, just tall and on the slim side.

“Then, not too much rice,” I say.

“Rice is bad?” he asks, with a note of horror. Rice is virtually a sacred substance here.

The default Indonesian diet –- unfortunately being replaced by instant noodles packed with salt and MSG –- is a paper packet of rice with a smidgen of meat or fish and spices smeared over the top, or perhaps an egg.

“No,” I say. “Rice isn’t bad. But when you eat too much rice you don’t eat the things that are good for you, that make you clever. You need to feed him lots of meat, fish, vegetables, fruit…”

Vegetables are served here. But they’re sort of a garnish, known by the generic term sayur, rather than a component of the diet. Our fondness for salad has brought us a curious audience in more out of the way places, as we mainline vast quantities of sayur, UNCOOKED!

“So, lots of fish,” he says.

This is achievable, here by the sea. You can buy a big, yummy, pre-cooked reef fish from stands by the roadside for 5000 rupiah, for a fraction of that sum raw in the market.

The daily wage for a builder/cook/restaurant worker is 35,000 rupiah, skilled workers, such as drivers, pull in 50,000 rupiah: a litre of dilute petrol from the streetside stands comes in at 5,000 rupiah. There’s 9,000 rupiah to the dollar.

“Yes,” I say. I want to explain about the fish oils that are supposed to be good for the brain, but my Indonesian’s struggling. “Yes,” I say again. “Lots of fish and vegetables will make him clever.”

He is genuinely happy. Clearly, this has been worrying him.

I recall a similar conversation in Kenya, when Z was five, with a smart, switched on woman who would have gone a long, long way outside the third world.

“You know why African babies don’t cry?” she asked.

“Because they’re with their mothers the whole time?” I say.

“No,” she says. “They have no stimulation. Look at your child. From when he is born, he has toys, he has stimulation. Now he’s reading big books. This is not something we can provide for our children.”

I don’t want to see the array of plastic and wooden crap with which we deluge our infants from long before they can even reach for them, let alone hold them, as essential to development. But she had a point.

And it brings to mind another guy I chatted to in Kenya.

“People think Africans are laid back,” he says. “But we’re not laid back. The reason we lie around like this all day is that our society has massive unemployment. There are no jobs here.”

I tell him about the call centres, then making their way out of Europe to Asia. “I hope they come to Africa,” he says.

They haven’t, yet.

“Me,” A says. “I’m not good at maths.”

“I don’t know,” I say. “Maybe your teacher wasn’t good at teaching?”

This is an alien concept to him, or maybe my Indonesian’s not holding up. “You need a good teacher to be good at maths,” I say. “Make sure your son has a good teacher…” I begin.

As if that is going to be achievable for him, in this tiny village. “A private teacher?” he says. “This is what I need for my son, a private teacher?”

“No,” I say. “Just a good school, with a good teacher.”

It doesn’t make sense to him. The teacher’s authority is not something that is questioned.

A’s innocent question has brought me into full and uncomfortable confrontation with my own privilege. The conversation rattles me.

Because I am not so entirely thoughtless that I cannot see the fundamental global inequities which means we can travel and live well in A’s country for less than it would take me to pay rent or mortgage in my home city.

My son and I can travel, learn, live, eat well, surf, dive, because Lombok is poor. My son’s opportunities exist because A’s son’s opportunities are limited.

I like the freedom of being able to work as I travel, to earn from anywhere in the world, the joy of location independence. And it’s something people who want to write have done for many decades, now — base themselves somewhere where it is cheap to live.

But for a moment the realization that sitting in his bar with our laptops, as I earn in a couple of hours more than A earns in a month of long, long hours, and Z accesses educational opportunities that will remain, most likely, far out of A’s son’s reach, hits me hard with its plain unfairness.

It’s a tough question he’s asked me. Tougher, I think, than either of us realizes.