Staying Local in West Java

By Zoë Smith

I scoop the wrinkled, wind-beaten hand in mine and touch it lightly to my forehead as I bow my head.

The old lady in front of me blushed and dipped her head in reply, pressing a coconut into my hand. I ducked back into the shadows and watched as the woman and her daughter fed tubes of bamboo into the oven and poured a thick, dark liquid into the pot above it.

This is the sap collected from the coconut trees; a sweet sugar that is boiled and reduced to produce the palm sugar blocks that sell like hot cakes at the local market.

For us, it’s was a pre-dinner treat, dribbling over slices of fresh coconut — delicious hot treacle that would make even the most hardened sugar-addict weak at the knees.

I was huddled, along with two other volunteers and our host, in a tiny bamboo hut and having trekked for an hour up the slippery, muddy rice paddies to get here, we were exhausted. The rice plantation is one of many in Cianjur, one of Indonesia’s principal rice-growing regions, located in West Java.

It’s a sprawling region of tiered rice paddies, sloping tea plantations and lush green hills speckled with the bobbing heads of farm-workers in their conical hats. The few people in this room are the only westerners in town – participants in a local volunteer scheme that allows English-speakers to donate their time to local schools and, in return, experience firsthand the lifestyle of rural Indonesia.

A homestay with a heart

Irwan Kumis, a local teacher and tour guide, is the co-founder of the Volunteer in Java homestay scheme and one of several local hosts who offer a room and meals to visitors in exchange for a minimal sum of money and a heart full of enthusiasm.

For him, it’s an opportunity to connect his students with English speakers and explore his own travel aspirations through his guests.

For volunteers like myself, it’s a gateway to a side of Indonesia that would be impossible to experience otherwise – a chance to sleep in a local, Indonesian-style house, sample fresh, home-cooked fare and socialize with a group of inquisitive and friendly young Indonesians.

From the early-hour call of the muezzin that draws the locals to prayer, to the fresh heaps of papaya, pineapple and sweet green tea that appear as soon as I drag myself out of bed, this is an experience that drags you headfirst into the local lifestyle. I scooped cool water from the mandi to wash, snacked on sweet rice crackers and munched through more parcels of sticky rice than I care to remember.

I learned Bahasa phrases from Indonesian pop songs with one of our local guides, bartered for handfuls of galingale at the local food market and clung unsteadily to the back of my host’s motorcycle as we navigated the zooming traffic.

In the evenings I joined my host at the local bar where he snuck a few sips of beer into our soda glasses beneath the table and we watched a live band sing American pop songs for our benefit. In short, this was anything but a package holiday.

Giving something back

The homestay counts cultural exchange high on its list of priorities and visiting the local schools provides a way for local children to gain a real insight into the western lifestyles that they so often idolize.

During my stay I held basic question and answer classes with the younger students and conversational classes with the older teenagers who impressed me time and time again with their astute observations, cheeky sense of humor and a remarkable grasp of the English language.

The classes were easy and fun, aided by local teachers where necessary so there’s ample opportunity for both experienced teachers and first-timers to get involved and make a contribution.

At the end of our class, I was accosted for photographs and Facebook addresses and was even dragged to the local fast food haunt with some of the girls. They convinced me to try their favorite snack- – delicious thick buttery pancakes oozing with chocolate and cheese (yes, cheese!), a bizarre yet surprisingly delicious treat.

Cianjur: the lost city of West Java

It’s not all about the volunteering though. Kumis has ensured his scheme stays small and flexible enough to allow his guests the freedom of creating their own schedules. In essence, you can ‘work’ as little or as much as you want and be as busy or as undisturbed as you wish.

He’s similarly flexible with the length of your stay – some guests have stayed little more than a weekend, others for months on end. For the majority, a few mornings teaching in the schools and a few days exploring the sights is a fair compromise.

In spite of its mere paragraph in the Lonely Planet, Cianjur has a horde of sights to offer the inquisitive traveler from sprawling botanical gardens to remote floating fishing villages to visiting a local tea plantation and exploring the factory where the leaves are dried, pressed and crushed.

I even had the opportunity to accompany one of our guides to his home village, a sprawling neighborhood of rickety bamboo structures adorned with satellite dishes, where the locals posed excitedly for photos with me, cooked up a delicious spread of local dishes and insisted that I catch my own fish for dinner, a task that proved much harder than it sounds.

Working the Rice Fields of West Java

I also got the chance to help out in the rice fields for a morning, an experience that found me knee-deep in squelchy mud and shaded beneath a conical hat, undertaking some of the most back-crippling and sweat-inducing work I’ve ever attempted! Not one for the weak-hearted, but an unmissable insight into the work of the awe-inspiring local women.

A new perspective on Indonesia

And so, after a week that has somehow seemed endless and far-too-short all at the same time, I found myself on the final excursion of my stay, the taste of the palm sugar still tickling the back of my throat as I awaited our home-cooked lunch. We sat cross-legged on tatami mats as a cluster of heaped dishes are laid out around us – rice steamed in banana leaves, caramelized tempeh with hot chili spices, a tower of stir-fried vegetables dripping with sweet soy.

From between the slats of bamboo a dozen charcoal eyes are watching us, darting from our pale, chubby arms to our fair hair. I caught the eye of a boy no older than 10 and raised my hand to wave to him.

There was a shuffling and a chorus giggles as the kids scurried around the side of the building. The boy stepped up to the door, tripping into the room as his friends pushed him ahead and peered nervously over his shoulders.

He blushed furiously and bowed to me. “Hello, miss” he grinned, tugging at the frayed hem of his shorts. The girls behind him coweed shyly beneath their headscarves, whispering in rapid Bahasa to the nominated speaker.

“Do you have Facebook?” he asked quickly and I couldn’t help but laugh. Indonesia, for all its religious heritage and traditional practices, still has one foot very firmly in the modern world.

Zoë Smith is an ESL teacher, NGO worker and writer currently based in Australia. She is also the winner of the 2011 World Nomads/Rough Guides Travel Writing Scholarship.

Volunteer In Java (email) offers guests the chance to stay in a homestay environment in Kampung, a small neighborhood of Cianjur, West Java. All homestays are with English speakers and include accommodation, 3 meals a day and unlimited Internet and laundry services for 75,000 rupiahs a day (at the time of writing around US$8-9). Some tours may incur an extra cost for fuel.