Wednesday, November 16, 2011

Notions of cleanliness

I am constantly impressed by the devotion of average people in the country of Indonesia. Yesterday, after a long day of class, a sat next to a teacher who is only a few years older than me. He seemed a little tired like myself.

"Ngantuk? (Tired?)" I asked.

"Ya," he said, but there was more to it than that. In SMA Muhammadiyah, the dry erase markers run out of fluid on a pretty regular basis, so they must be refilled constantly. Throughout the day, one can see students outside the teacher's room, popping the ends off the markers and pouring dry-erase fluid onto the exposed sponge-thing in the middle. On occasion, students overfill the markers, leading to an explosion of ink when first uncapped (this has happened to me twice now). I tend to erase my mistakes with my hands, so my fingers are usually a funny gray color by the end of the day anyway (though on occasion I end up with big black streaks on my face, prompting my students to giggle more than usual). In short, these ink explosions are a minor inconvenience for me.

My fellow teacher however, explained to me that he was feeling a bit frustrated. Muslims, before entering a mosque or place of prayer, must wash their hands, feet, and face so that they may be clean in the presence of Allah. He kept looking at his hands, which were temporarily stained a dark dry-erase gray.

"I have to wash my hands a few times when I get home," he explained. "One of the students overfilled a marker, and it spilled all over my hands and I couldn't wash it off, so when I went to pray after class, I didn't feel clean. It wasn't satisfying, my praying. I felt dirty."

Other than a paltry "Oh..." I didn't really know what to say. I was raised Catholic, but I never felt much in the way of conviction or devotion stemming from the religion. I have always respected people who could find solace in their God, maybe because that consolation has always escaped me. Nowadays, I offer the term "atheist" as a shorthand to denote my beliefs, though I have not told this to anyone in the town of Genteng. When people inquire about my religion I say, "Saya Katolik KTP," which means, "It says Catholic on my i.d. card." So there I sat, a clandestine non-believer utterly astounded at how such a small annoyance could wreck this person's emotional and spiritual state of mind. The people around me pray pretty consistently, and I didn't realize until then how vital those small moments of quiet can be.