Friendship on the Subayang river

by Giulia Zaninelli (Italy)

Making a local connection Indonesia

I was in Indonesia for the second time in my life; several years after my first visit as a student to Sumatra, I woke up again on the same island but in a totally different province. Doing research also means learning to be alone and loneliness can easly become a great friend in times of crisis. Spent days in the hotel, a brand new building located in the center of a provincial city with no tourist attraction worth visiting according to the inhabitants themselves. Moving from one room to another of my temporary home, writing articles and reviews, chatting with concierges and passing tourists after 3 weeks I managed to organize meetings with “potential interlocutors” who would eventually become key players in my field research . Among them I met a young boy of my age, Arga, who lived with his family in the small village of Tanjung Belit on the border between the province of Riau and West Sumatra. Arga proved to be a nice person, friendly and above all interested in helping me during the research so it was instantaneous to choose that territory as an important place to carry out my field observations, make interviews and live with the Melayu population. Arriving from the main road, the village showed itself in all its beauty, nestled in a bend of the Subayang river furrowed by small, very fast canoes that carried any object: scooters, seeds, clothes, fruit and vegetables, engines and spare parts. Seen from the top of the hill, the houses of the village looked like thin red pins among a luxuriant, green and shiny vegetation in the morning light. Coconut, oil palms, bananas and fruit trees dominated a landscape enriched by the swift movements of children in the water and fishermen. I lived in this village for about a month with a family who could boast an incredible job differentiation for being a small village: school teachers, oil palm growers, nurses, taxi drivers, village councilors. Home life was organized by Ibu Asmalaila who managed the economic aspects of domestic daily life by going to the market for vegetables and fruits, school books for her grandchildren and clothes for her daughters and cooking a huge amount of spicy food. Traditional dishes such as rendang, nasi goreng, mie goreng, gado-gado and many seasonal fruit, from durians to rambutans suprise me at the table every day. Often I sat outside the house in the hope that someone would pass by to spend the boring days together: lack of interviewers, the unavoidable daily activities of the people in the plantations or at the river and the constant electrical blackouts led me to rethink my choices and research as a whole. Arga was my closest friend during those days and helped me immensely to find people available for interviews and filming and together we went looking for panoramic scenarios in which planning future meetings. Often we were at his house with his wife Rina to have a coffee to discuss the village, what had happened during the day or to talk about development and planting projects in the village. In our wanderings among oil palm and rubber plantations, drinking a coffee or smoking a cigarette, attending village meetings and whatsapp messages, Arga and I have made a great friendship that continues today, even after my return to Italy. In order to keep on working on my research project I am planning to go back to Tanjung Belit for some months to have the chance to meet again my great friend Arga because I am still curious about the life in the village, the difficulties of young workers and above all I am fascinated by the jungle and the romantic river Subayang.