Bebekan 13

The "more than rudimentary" houses have sprouted like mushrooms in the last month in Bebekan.

Tuesday October 17. Thirty-seven houses have already been built. Asep and I spent the afternoon drawing up a new inventory, going from house to house and noting what is missing. Assessment : as of October 17, not a single resident of Bebekan is living under a tent or a plastic tarp. (You can see the photographs on the blog: bebekanvillage.blogspot.com). But there are still 17 MTR houses to be built for the families who are piling up in other people's house or are living in cattle sheds (the cows were relocated under plastic tarps). Since our objective is to rehouse all the villagers before the arrival of the rainy season and before the festivities marking the end of the Ramadhan month (late October), we have hired this week ten more carpenters (all from Bebekan) to speed up the work. This week, it rained during two nights, just at the moment of the “sahur”, the call to drink and eat before the beginning of the fast, around 3 AM. Fortunately, it was not a heavy rain, but the first signs of the arrival of the monsoon are there, one of which is a burning and violent wind which often rises in gusts around midday.

For one month, Asep went almost every day to Bebekan to supervise the construction work and the deliveries of wood, cement, bamboo and “gedek” (bamboo partitions). And also to listen to the complaints of the villagers some of whom were of course angry that they had not received as much as their neighbor, either because their house was less damaged or because they were able to salvage more materials. Thanks to a friend of Asep, Imam, who is very well connected to the network of the Sufi Koranic schools (pesantren), we ordered all the wood from a former master of one of these schools, who for his retirement planted coconut trees on his land in Western Java. For each order, Asep went to the local wood-cutter to choose each coconut beam with one of the expert carpenters of Bebekan. The closer to the center of the trunk a beam is cut, the more tender it will be and therefore unfit for construction. One has to choose carefully.

Once the bamboo was delivered, certain villagers started to complain, saying that the first people who were served chose the best bamboos, those that were the most straight and smooth. In order to solve this problem, we made bundles of twenty or fifty bamboos, bound together, and each house received one or more of these, without having the possibility to sort them. Cement : on several occasions Vincent took care of the delivery with his van. Abbot and Nicole sent us a new shipment of bamboos and “gedek” and bought a second grinder (we had bought only one) and this should now speed up the work of the twenty carpenters.

And yet, as of today, there is still no help coming from the international NGOs or from the government. It is still the same story as on the first day of the earthquake. However, governmental assistance for rebuilding should happen very soon. Every day the newspapers say that it will arrive and that, in a first phase, each house will receive the amount of 4 million rupiah (approximately 380 euros). If the people of Bebekan ever get this help, they will in any event not have the time (nor the required funds) to rebuild a solid and complete house before the arrival of the rainy season. The general plan for the future is to transform the MTR house as a kitchen with a terrace, and to build next to this wooden structure a dining room and some rooms made of bricks. According to the villagers, it will be very good for the beams because they will be protected and sealed by the kitchen fumes (the women of Bebekan still use coconut barks as cooking fuel).

Sand : we had ordered a truckload of it and the truck was supposed to go round the village and to deliver a pile in front of each house which needed sand as specified in the inventory. But the poor driver of the truck had to go round several times and endure the discussions of the villagers, so that he delivered only one quarter of the load and he returned the money for the undelivered sand. Next week we will do a new inventory and put in a new order : this time Asep will accompany the truck driver. Sand and cement are intended for the families which were not eligible for a wooden MTR house because they had been able to recover one or two rooms of their brick house. Or for the families which had concrete beams instead of wooden ones, in order to allow them to rebuild the damaged ones. Sometimes, for example, a house needs four concrete beams, because it still has two of them. We always use as reference a 3m by 6m house with 6 beams, plus a 6m by 2m terrace with 3 beams. In this case, the terrace is completed with coconut-wood beams.

We had some difficult cases to deal with. An old man did not want to bring down his house which was severely cracked, as did so many other people of Bebekan. Since the beginning, he keeps replastering it, trying to seal the open cracks with cement. He thus keeps asking us for more cement bags : he destroys part of a wall, puts iron bars inside it and fills it with cement. But it is a bottomless well, because on the night of Monday October 16, a new small earthquake was strong enough to generate more cracks in his house. Maybe we should be more firm : we will advise him to bring down his house for good and and we will build for him a MTR house with wooden beams and pillars. To be followed.

Sand is a problem not only because of the delivery in the village. There is a sand shortage in Yogyakarta because of the huge demand for the rebuilding of the thousands of houses destroyed by the earthquake. Furthermore, since we have kept contact with the Merapi volcano and its inhabitants from the very first day of the earthquake, we were very quickly confronted with an interesting dilemma : in the villages around Idem Kali (the place which witnessed the big volcanic cloud and the lava flows and where the disaster bunker is located), 70% of the income of the villagers comes from the collection of sand. Over a period of several months, before and after the earthquake, the Merapi volcano, in a permanent state of eruption, has generously spit tons and tons of sand… as if it knew that the south of Yogyakarta would very soon have a great need for it ! The predators did not wait very long to show up : bulldozers arrived at Kali Idem a few weeks ago, pretending that they had the mission to dig out of the river the accumulated sand in order to prevent the coming rains from triggering mud flows. In fact, they came to dig up sand which they will resell in the south. Moreover, as I live halfway on the slopes of the volcano, I saw each morning at the gasoline station near my home dozens of trucks carrying the flags of the European Commission : they would go up empty to the volcano and come down full of sand. Some truck drivers have even written in big letters behind their truck the word : PREDATOR! International NGOs are obviously not concerned about where these trucks take the sand and what damage they can inflict. The bulldozers cause two catastrophes: 1) as they dig without any discrimination, they harm the whole fragile ecosystem of the lava river, and in particular they damage the underground water network; 2) they steal the work of the hundreds of villagers living traditionally off the collection of sand.

For three weeks, these peasants have blocked and paralyzed the bulldozers. They even carried their protest to court. The problem is that they are not organized in a co-operative and that they themselves never had the “official” right to collect sand. It was taken for granted as a sort of common law. In addition this sand, considering the huge quantities available, its very high quality, plus the enormous demand generated by the rebuilding in South Yogya devastated by the earthquake, this sand is deeply coveted by both the governor of the special province of Yogyakarta (the sultan) and the mayor of the Sleman commune (located all around the volcano). A law says that what comes from the river belongs to the province and what comes from the volcano belongs to the commune. However this sand is as much part of the river where it lies as it is part of the volcano which spewed it out and on whose slopes it rests! But finally, thanks to the intervention of the head of the Koranic school Al Qodir, located in the middle of the sand villages on the volcano, the mayor ordered the bulldozers to temporarily leave Kali Idem, while awaiting the decision of the court. An ordinance was passed, stating that one could not draw sand at a depth of more than one meter. And that obviously prohibits the intervention of the bulldozers. But the villagers do not dare go back to collecting sand because they are afraid of the reprisals of the henchmen of the company which rented the bulldozers and which has already lost a lot of money with the immobilization of the giant machines. The truck drivers also refuse to drive their truck loaded with sand down south for fear of being lynched on the way by these henchmen. Moreover the villagers want to obtain through the courts the statutory right to collect sand in order to be able to legally oppose the plundering of the bulldozers.

When the head of the Al Qodir Koranic school warned us about the whole issue, we decided to support these villagers juridically and help them organize themselves in a co-operative and present a united front at court. We cannot blindly go on rebuilding the village of Bebekan which will soon be a big consumer of sand, and to be unaware of the drama this demand will cause at the top of the volcano. This situation reminds me of the poem of Jacques Prévert, The Guard of the Lighthouse loves birds too much :
“Thousands of birds fly towards the bright light,
thousands fall,
thousands crash into the tower,
thousands are blinded and stunned,
and thousands die.
The guard cannot stand such horrors
he loves the birds too much,
so he tells himself :
Too bad, I don't care !
And he turns off the beacon light.
Far away a cargo ship sinks,
a cargo ship coming from the islands,
loaded with thousands of birds,
thousands of birds from the islands,
thousands of drowned birds.”

Back to the home front. A few days before the beginning of the fasting month, the village celebrated Ancestors Day (Nyadran) in Bebekan : after an evening vigil they shared a communal meal the next morning at the top of the hill, in the cemetery. More than five hundred men, women, children were present. I was sitting besides the guardian of the tombs, Pak Hadi, who is also the spiritual leader of the Reog group and who lost an arm in a soybean peeling machine. Pak Hadi is the man of shadow and light of Bebekan. He told me during Ancestors Day that many people of the surrounding villages wished to be buried in the cemetery of Bebekan because it was on a hill, as is the cemetery of Imogiri where all the sultans of Central Java are buried. And in fact some people have succeeded in doing just that. I suddenly had a strange image of Bebekan: as if formerly this hill and its slopes were only one cemetery. The fact is that, on the slopes, one can still find old abandoned tombs in the middle of the teak and melinjo trees and the bamboo groves. People of Bebekan were perhaps grave-diggers in the past, belonging to a sort of untouchable subcaste at the time of the Hindu kingdoms. They lived at the edge of the tombs, like squatters. Then they had children, their numbers multiplied and they clung where they could on the remaining grounds, on the slopes and at the foot of the hillside. But the base of the hillside is very narrow. The plain begins right away, covered with green rice fields which do not belong to them. When we have finished constructing all the MTR houses, I hope that I will finally have the time to collect the testimony of the old villagers about their history. And to transmit it to you.

Another great moment at Bebekan: the visit on October 4 of Sheik Bentounès, a man of Algerian origins who is the head of the Alawiya Sufi brotherhood. I had met him a few years ago in his house in the south of France, at a time when Sarkozy, wishing to create the Muslim Council of France, consulted him frequently. At the end of our interview, he had entrusted me with several Arabic books written by his grandfather and told me that he wished these books would one day be translated in Indonesian and that he also wished to come himself to Indonesia. I finally succeeded in translating and publishing in Indonesian his book titled : “Sufism, Heart of Islam”. In fact, I was rereading and correcting the Indonesian translation when the earthquake shook Yogyakarta, on May 27. With the support of the French embassy in Jakarta, we succeeded in organizing a small tour of Sheik Bentounès in Bali, Yogyakarta, Jakarta and… Bebekan. On that occasion, in Bebekan, the women of the village cooked a communal meal for the breaking of the fast. Traditionally, during the month of Ramadhan, each evening two families cooks that meal for all the village and it is shared by all. But this year, because of the earthquake, this tradition was suspended because the villagers were too busy dealing with their destroyed houses. We bought food for all the village on the evening of the arrival of Sheik Bentounès, but the women decided to serve the meal in small ready-made paper boxes, in order to avoid having to wash all the dishes and to be available for the meeting with Sheik Bentounès. They literally occupied the square of the mosque, as if they had tacitly decided that the Sheik had come for them, the women; as for the men of Bebekan, they were held at a sizable distance as if they were intruders. First, a young man of the village, Toto, delivered a sermon about the duty of giving alms (zakat) at the end of the Ramadhan month, alms which are not necessarily money but can also be acts of kindness and assistance. Then Sheik Bentounès showed a film on the meetings of “dhikr” (repetitive prayer of the names of God, comparable to mantras) in the Alawiya brotherhood in the town of Mostaganem in Algeria. At the end of the meeting, he promised to the women of Bebekan to support their project of setting up an “emping” co-operative. The young people of the “Hadroh” group opened and closed the meeting, playing their tambourines and singing poems. On the previous evening, Sheik Bentounès had also gone to the Al Qodir Koranic school located on the volcano in order to symbolically connect the victims of the earthquake in the south to the volcanic sand peasants in the north. In addition, this Koranic school is directed by a very eccentric, pious and altogether pragmatic man, Kyai Masrur. He created this boarding school ten years ago in order to shelter the poorest children of all the Indonesian islands and the street children of Yogyakarta. But he is also the “spiritual guide” of one of the most famous pop musicians of Indonesia, Dhani, a member of the Dewa band.

His disciples led Sheik Bentounès through the plantations of “salak” (a fruit with a snakeskin bark) and peppers, and through the rice fields to a large field where Indonesian resistance fighters and Dutch colonial forces fought each other at the end of the 1940s. It is on this large field that Kyai Masrur, on the model of the “pesantren” (Koranic boarding school) reserved for children and young people, wants to build a spiritual retreat center for the elderly, so that they can learn how to grow old without being afraid of death. There will be a network of social, human and spiritual support in coordination with the Koranic boarding school whose children and young people will take care of the old people. And reciprocally. Kyai Masrur also actively supports the peasants in their fight against the sand predators. I believe that it was for Sheik Bentounès and the boarders of the Koranic school a very special and emotional meeting. The father of Kyai Masrur, a very short and old man, smoking cigarettes with a very long cigarette-holder, declared: “We have met our initiatory chain.” Afterwards, Sheik Bentounès spoke with clarity and intelligence about Islam in France. He added that he came from the same country as Zidane and that Zidane was a very dear friend of his. That was another reason for the young people of the Koranic school to feel close to Sheik Bentounès.

Back to Bebekan. Pak Miskijo, the only severely wounded person of the village, has been working for more than a month as one of the carpenters constructing the MTR houses. But his hip is still bothering him and causing him much pain. He is still walking with the help of crutches. On the other hand, he was one of the first people to obtain a MTR house. His wife has already planted bonsais and flowers in front of the terrace. The doctor who treated him two months ago had told us to wait two months to see whether the bones would resettle by themselves. Meanwhile, on the advice of Abbot, Pak Miskijo went to see a very qualified female bone-setter who has treated successfully a huge number of fractures amongst the victims of the earthquake. But her intervention on Pak Miskijo did not have any effect. After the celebrations of the end of the Ramadhan month, I will therefore make an appointment with the doctor who operated the double open fracture of my daughter (she was wounded at the time of a secondary earthquake in August). He proved to be a very good surgeon, although I did not choose him since my daughter had an emergency operation in the middle of the night. I will trust his diagnostic. If Pak Miskijo must be re-operated again, it should be in a public hospital since he is a victim of the earthquake. But if for obscure bureaucratic reasons this doesn't happen, we are keeping some money asides to pay for his operation.

As a final statement, let me quote the introductory sentence from the book of Sheik Bentounès: “What is the essence of Sufism ? ” Abu Said Ibn Abi'l Khair answered: “What you have in mind, give it up; what you have in your hand, give it away; what occurs to you, do not dodge it.”