Ramadan has come, and my sanity wanes…

Ramadan is the Muslim month of fasting each year. It lasts 30 days, but the exact date changes, like Easter, based on the moon cycles. It is mandated to fast from 3 AM before sunrise to 6 PM after sunset, including no water. The purpose is much like Lent, a time of repentance and reflection about one’s life. Fasting carries the same meaning for Muslims as it does for Christians, purification and feeling closer to God. Not that I can say that I have ever felt that the very limited number of times I have fasted…

Anyways, after these long 30 days of fasting is the Muslim New Year, called Idul Fitri. From what I have read, this is the biggest celebration of the year for Muslims. They buy new clothes, visit family, and have feasts! Lots of celebrating, thanks to the end of fasting and the promise of a new year, free of sin.

Unfortunately, my Ramadan experience (keep in mind, I’m only 2 days in…) has not been so great.

Top reasons that I believe Ramadan and I will not be buddies:

(Keep in mind these dissents are all personal feelings toward sleep and fasting and have nothing to actually do with Islam itself! So far, I have had a really great time learning about Islam!)

#1: From approximately 1:00 AM to 2:30 AM every morning for the next 30 days, a group of teenage boys will walk the streets and bang on drums and play traditional music instruments louder than humanly possible to wake people up to eat before sunrise. So I’ll be awake in the middle of my beauty sleep every night for the next 30 days (update: not every night apparently, the last 2 nights have been silent…). Which is really confusing and resulted in me missing the first 3 AM breakfast with my family because I was startled awake at 1 AM, only to say, “Hey, why are they waking people up now, we still have 2 hours until breakfast,” and promptly go back to sleep, missing breakfast because there is no 3 AM wake up call. What the heck!? I get that the 1 AM wake up call is for moms and women to cook the breakfast, but still…

#2: I was feeling pressured to try fasting with everyone from 3 AM to 6 PM (sunrise to sundown, including no water…). Not pressured by any adults, but my darn 13-year old neighbor, who kept asking me if I was going to fast or if I wasn’t strong enough. Normally I’d try to let that roll off my back, but she gets to me, constantly talking about me in Javanese so I can’t understand, and laughing, so I can only assume that she’s making fun of something weird I did. Ugh. Also, pressure from stories of other Peace Corps volunteers. From what I heard, everyone in the last two groups fasts during Ramadan, so I felt pressured to not be the one volunteer not fasting. Not to mention pressure from the anthropologist in me trying to fit into the surrounding community….

So this pressure resulted in me trying to fast for the first day. That’s what I told people, I’ll try fasting the first day and see. This announcement was met with a mix of delight (my 13 year old host brother who may be the sweetest teenage boy I’ve every met), confusion (my host sister-in-law and host mom), wondering why I’d fast if I don’t need to, and mockery (by that darn 13 year old neighbor girl “Apakah Miss Sarah kuat?” “Is Miss Sarah strong enough?”)

Day one of fasting. Wake up half an hour late to the 3 AM breakfast, so I eat some rice and cold tempe alone. Back to bed.

8 AM-2 PM: Wake up again. Wander downstairs to see what my family will be up to. Same old, same old, they are cleaning and chilling. I decide if I’m about to fast for the next too-long amount of time, I’m taking it easy. Retreat to my room for the next 6 hours, where I proceed to watch a lot of Big Bang Theory, sleep, and read the last book of The Hunger Games. Thank gosh for bringing a computer and kindle, after all that fuss I put up pre-departure about wanting to be cut off from everything.

2 PM: I can’t take it anymore. I’m starting to feel the lightheadedness that plagued me for 2 years during college, which will bring on really scary vision shifts. I was going to break fast early anyways to go to church, what’s another 3 hours early? I eat some crackers, peanut butter, and an orange, and then go meet my Javanese language tutor.

3 PM: I’m starting to feel dizzy again. That little bit of peanut butter protein will not sustain me! But how to tactfully tell my Muslim tutor I can’t study any more, I need to go eat? Luckily he points out that I’m looking pretty pale, and while he goes to pray the afternoon prayer, I eat a little. And feel like a total jerk. I manage to hold back tears at my failure to fast one day when I go into the kitchen and get some of the food that my host sister-in-law is cooking, the food that she won’t be eating for another 2 hours…I go upstairs and eat in private, feeling like crap. The teasing of the 13-year-old neighbor is true, Miss Sarah is not strong enough. What’s more, I feel like I’ve let down my community by not being in solidarity with them. It doesn’t feel sufficient to say, “I’m Christian, I don’t have to.” Because let’s face it, Christians do fast…okay, every now and then. Maybe. But I feel like a dumb American, doing just yet another thing to stand out…this time, eating.

5:30 PM: My family invites me downstairs to break fast. I feel like crap, a little dizzy, crazy stomach. But I go, get a plate with a little food, but I can’t bring myself to eat. What’s up? Usually I feel like this, wanting to puke, if I wait too long to eat, but I ate at 3, which should have made this feeling go away. It’s not going away. I apologize after sitting with my family for about 5 minutes. Retreat back upstairs. Don’t eat anything else, because it makes me sick to think about doing so.

5:30-9 PM: Fitfully sleep and think about how I have to deal with the world of fasting tomorrow, and the next day, and the next…

9 PM: Vomit all contents of my stomach into my trash can. Yet another reason I am happy I am not in the Peace Corps in a hot hut with no electricity. I’m on a cushy mattress with a fan blowing cool air at me.

9 PM – 1:30 AM: Sleep

1:30 AM- 2:30 AM: Fitfully sleep and think about how much I’m going to dislike the next month as I listen to the loud drumming outside.

3:30 AM: Wake up to a grumbling stomach. Shakily walk downstairs to try to eat something. But almost puke again in the kitchen when I see food. Guess I’m not ready to eat yet.

6:00 AM: Make plain pasta and slink back upstairs to eat my noodles over the course of the next 8 hours as I rest and have a self-pity party. Throw in a 2-hour stint in which I chat with the neighbors, do some laundry, and shower, but right back to bed because I’m too weak to stand any longer.

5:30 PM (present time): Feel much better, still a little weak, about to go down and eat my first proper meal in 36 hours and can’t wait!

The next 2 days: my sickness relapses, with a stomach ache and trips to the bathroom…for those of you who know me well, you know that I love to eat, so a loss of appetite is a big indication that I have got a bug living in my stomach. Not literally…at least not that I know of…

Have I made it clear enough why Ramadan and I have yet to make peace?!

To top it off, school will run from 7 AM to 10:30 AM every day, leaving me hours on end of boredom. Luckily, that’s only for 2 weeks, because then, yay, we have another full 2 weeks of school off in which everyone will still be fasting so lounging around. I can’t leave my community (Peace Corps rules for the first 3 months at site), so I’ll be finding new ways to fill my time, I guess.

I know, I know. This is all terribly negative and I hope the Peace Corps will not kick me out for being insensitive, but really the issue I’m having is with my own feelings about fasting, and annoyance at being sick. I’m still not sure what made me sick, though my leg cramps for 12+ hours point to food poisoning. What food?! The one orange or a little rice I ate??

Anyways, the main disappointment I have with not being able to fast is that it will set me apart from the community. And I’m trying so hard to fit in. I’ve even told my ibu (“mom”) that she has to tell me when it’s more respectful for me to wear a head covering to Muslim gatherings. I want to be respectful. I’m trying to eat like an Indonesian (though I’ve taken up oatmeal for breakfast, I can’t do plain white rice three times…), sleep like an Indonesian (aka naps in the afternoon!), clean like an Indonesian (washing clothes by hand), etc. But this fasting is one thing that I find myself unable to do for 2 reasons. First, I physically can’t do it, 13 hours of being active with no food (I was drinking water even during my brief fasting yesterday). Second, as much as I want to fit in, I have to recognize that above all, fasting is done for a spiritual purpose, and my purposes for fasting here were community-based, not spiritual. I have never found spirituality through fasting (though again, my fasting experience is very, very limited). And as a practicing Christian, I cannot justify following a month of fasting if the drive and motivation has not come from my heart and religious motivations. I feel it is a betrayal to say that I am fasting if I am merely doing it to fit in.

Unfortunately, that last (and most accurate) reason that I have chosen not to fast is really hard to convey to anyone because I don’t speak Indonesian well enough. And when I was able to talk to my tutor in English about this yesterday, he laughed. So I think either a) he’s immature, b) he thought it was an excuse not to fast, or c) a collective culture doesn’t think this way, choosing whether or not to fast because one’s heart is in it. You fast because everyone around you is fasting, not to mention it is one of the five pillars of your religion, mandated to be a “good” Muslim.

Sigh.

I now understand the response of one of the volunteers who’s been here for a year. When I told her that this feels like “posh corps” because I’m living in a beautiful, clean, electricity-and-running water-equipped house, she responded not to let that fool me, it is still hard to be here.

The physical hardships of sweating and heat exhaustion that I expected, maybe even sorta wanted to try to contend with to push myself, are not nearly as bad as I had expected. Honestly, the physical hardship is virtually non-existent.

But what I am finding is the emotional and cultural strain of being here is more than I expected, and it creeps up at unexpected times to break me.

The frustration of an inability to communicate my most important feelings with anyone other than English speaking-Indonesians or other volunteers. And even the relief in getting to speak to them is only a reminder of my inadequacy at the Indonesian language.

The self-esteem blow I experience day in and day out as I constantly have to say, “Saya tidak mengerti” (I don’t understand). This phrase, probably said by me more than anything else, is usually met with so much patience and the attempt to use other words until I do understand. But the emotional blow is almost unbearable to a confident Carleton grad who is not used to saying, “I don’t get it” at the simplest things. I yearn for the Indonesians I have met to magically speak English, come to the US, and see that I am not dumb. Don’t get me wrong, no one says anything but how smart and beautiful I am, but that is largely cultural. At the end of the day, when you feel stupid because you don’t understand a simple thing someone is saying to you, all the “you are so beautiful” comments cannot counteract feeling like an idiot.

The unyielding stares and shouts of “Hello!” (half of the time that “Hello!” is followed by “Mister!”) are reason enough for me not to live here after 2 years. I am patient to respond hello, allow my picture to be taken, and play the part of celebrity, but it doesn’t mean in any way that I like it. There are 2 major consolation points, though. Whereas in West Africa I was always called the toubab or batoure (white person in Senegal and Togo, respectively), Indonesians rarely call me bule. I am eternally grateful for this, as being objectified as race sucks. Additionally, and frankly to my shock, Indonesians do not automatically assume that I am American. I get Dutch a lot because of my pale features and because the Dutch colonized Indonesia, but I’ve had people ask me if I am German or French surprisingly often, too. Thank you, Indonesia!

So the Peace Corps is changing. Now there is technology, phones (thank gosh, how did volunteers 20 years ago stay sane not having contact with any Americans!), spring mattresses, fans, and grocery stores with oatmeal and spaghetti.  But the Peace Corps, I am quickly realizing, is still hard. It is emotionally and culturally isolating. It exhausts my patience. It breeds new hobbies out of sheer boredom. But most of all, it continues to make me a better person. 2 years in Indonesian...work your magic!