A House in Yogya

By Kath Taplin s19
Wife of ANU student David Osborne

We were able to be part of ACICIS due to Dave being a student with ANU, specifically with the Asian Studies faculty. When he was offered the year in Asia, we jumped at the opportunity. I resigned from a legal position in Canberra, we pulled our (then) 1 year old daughter out of childcare (and from the arms of loving grandparents) and set off for a great family adventure. Having spoken with lecturers and returned students, we were both excited and apprehensive. While we'd both spent years living and travelling overseas before, we'd spent most of that time in Europe and America, and those past adventures were in pre-baby days! Our worries at that stage were: available health care, unanticipated costs for a family living overseas for a year, how our bub would deal with the heat, tropical illnesses, and, yes personal security. Paranoid first time parent travellers, basically.

We saved and saved our pennies in the lead up, got the best health insurance we could afford, got our little girl every immunisation available and read up on Indo (including dorky websites on 'families living in Indo' - but they were all Jakarta related, so were not overwhelmingly helpful). We comforted ourselves by buying some gadgets we thought may help, such as a 4.5kg travel cot for our bub. (This turned out to be great - mozzie proof - and some places we stayed have nothing for a kiddy to bunk in.) Other things that were useful to pack for a little'un were effective, non-toxic mozzie repellent suitable for young kids (eg: Autan), ditto sunscreen, and lightweight cotton long sleeved clothes for all.

We packed really light. We were way under our baggage allowance which made stopovers easier. We later had to purchase a bit of stuff in Yogya, but most things are readily available and cheap. Somewhat embarrassingly, we brought a pram (I say this because I've never backpacked with a pram before.) It was a worthwhile investment: lightweight and great for Yasmin to sleep in while we bummed around at airports, malls etc. The pram has since been on sailboats, with us to Malaysia, etc. (no, we didn't take it up Merapi, nor to Aceh.) Basically worth considering taking for a small kid.

Another thing we found very useful to bring was our little daughter's favourite foods for the first week, to supplement whatever we could find during that hectic start up period. Anyone who has a young kid knows that big changes in diet can lead to battles that are highly undesirable, especially when combined with travel fatigue. After a week you pretty much have it sussed out how to feed your family. You find Malioboro mall and hotels like the Yogyakarta Plaza, so you can treat your jet lagged little culture vulture to a weekly treat of something sans spice! When I went back and visited Yogya recently, I noticed they're building a Carrefours supermarket there (French chain). This may bring further relief to travelling families with western palated tots who need easing into Indo style food. (I know this all sounds like guff to travellers without kids, but believe me, travelling with a bub really is something you can't fully understand until you've been there.)

When we arrived in Yogya, ACICIS had the first couple of days sorted out. We were put up in a basic hotel, and fed and watered. Despite being well looked after, these first days were hard-ish, because Dave had to process a gazillion administrative and visa documents (x3) while he also madly scoped Yogya for a house. I (embarrassingly) had no Indonesian language skills whatsoever (this despite my grandmother being Indonesian born and bred,) and I had a bub who had no idea where she was, and who wasn't too happy. Nevertheless, these first hectic days washed over us. In retrospect, a better way to approach the first couple of days in Indo would have been to RELAX and not try to find a home so urgently. Families might be well advised to book into a nice-ish hotel for the first couple of weeks, settle the kid(s) in, and check out where in the city your family might want to base itself. We can see, looking back, that we should have taken a bit of pressure off ourselves and not looked so hard and fast for a house to contract, which is a fair bit of work. Unattached students will quickly find kos' and fun social scenes naturally - families have a slower start. Your first days will be different, because you're setting up for many (no worries because the rewards come later - being a family in a wonderful caring neighbourhood in Yogya, with your kid(s) playing with Indonesian neighbours, prattling away fluently in Indonesian, and making their little kid friendships is SO good).

We set up in Pogong Baru. It wasn't our first choice, but, through a friend of a friend of a friend (as it works in Indonesia) we were taken to a house in a quiet little street that had no stairs and a closed-in garden - perfect for a little person just starting to walk. We signed a contract that had little meaning to us: no familiar conditions and clauses, no rental board. We paid AU$4,000 for one year, for 4 rooms, in a fairly well kept place. Over the year our landlord was great, primarily because we were extremely friendly to him, and he to us. That's not to say there weren't moments of firm handed negotiation by all, but subtlety and grace prevailed and he was a good, fair landlord when it came to times of roof fixing and fence mending, etc. We think this sort of experience is fairly common with landlords. (By the way, we left Pak Prayoto's (the landlord's) number with ACICIS in Yoyga. But don't worry if you can't get him, you will find a place. It is strange not to work through real estate agents and to adapt to working via 'word of mouth' but it really does work in Yogya.)

We didn't get a car (took buses and becaks) but Dave eventually succumbed to a motor bike. We had heard so many crashed bike / brain damage / lost a leg stories from our Indonesian neighbours that I was suitably nervous. Students did occasionally have accidents. But, of course, Dave loved it.

Dave also loved the study and everyone he met doing it. It was all he expected - such a mixed group of people with diverse backgrounds and opinions. His language skills soared and researching and travelling rocked his world. For me - after four months at home I was going fairly loopy. We had anticipated this though, and Dave spent some of his time at Universitas Gadga Mada locating a course for me to enrol in for the second six months of our year there. My language skills were not up to study-in-Indonesian levels, but Dave found me a superb Religious and Cultural Studies Masters course at the UGM Cross Cultural and Religious Studies Centre. It was the best course of study I have ever done, and made my year. I studied alongside amazingly talented Indonesian students who opened up my brain and shoved in excellent new perceptions by the bucketload. I miss that learning even now, working in a great job in Jakarta. There is just something mind blowing about studying religion and culture alongside pious, super-skilled Indonesians! So, for the couples or families making the ACICIS year-long journey, think about what the 'one following' is going to do. I did volunteer work with kiddies through Wisma Bahasa language school, Indonesian classes, and the Masters work at UGM. The latter was the Best Thing Ever.

The worst thing that happened all year was the fateful week our daughter contracted amoebic dysentery. We all got sick at home, apparently from soup made from boiled tap water (dumb), and she fared the worse. Dave and I went down with fevers and kidney ache that was out of this world. We were consoled only because Yasmin didn't seem affected. Then, about 10 hours after us, she went from sitting upright playing, to falling flat on the floor. Sickness hits kids hard. We nursed her at home for a night, not having heaps of faith in the hospitals we'd already tried out with previous episodes of dislocations and diarrhoea. By the next morning she was barely moving (diarrhoea induced dehydration) and we called an ambulance. The Doc in the ambulance hit us up for a bribe on the way in - we had to stop at an ATM because we didn't have enough cash at hand. Pantai Rapi hospital gave even worse attention than we expected, and we basically begged the insurer to get us to better care, which, thankfully, they organised pronto. We were in Singapore by 3am the next morning, and Yas had a week of serious treatment. In retrospect we should have acted a lot earlier to get her to good care. We could have had an extremely bad result, and it took her a long time to get really well again. In fact, only a month later she had a relapse, and instead of waiting for the insurer we flew her straight to Sydney. The insurer eventually reimbursed us the five grand for the second trip, but the episodes illustrated for us the importance of having some savings before you take a really little kid somewhere with stretched medical services.

We eventually found good medical care in Yogya - Dr Paulos' clinic was set up in the month before we left. Lots of people go to him now (we have given ACICIS his contact details). Dr Paulos' clinic is now the only place to go in Yogya, in our humble but now relatively experienced opinion.

One more thing. We hired a couple of people to help us at home. They were keen for work and we were desperate for some child care. Of course, they did so much more than that. Some people seemed to be really worried about being 'ripped off' by staff, or taken for a ride, or something. Our experience with staff added greatly to our overall experience in Indonesia as we were able to really learn from them and share with them. We left feeling that we really had developed a strong relationship with the people who were in our lives day to day, helping us greatly, and sharing how they saw life in Indonesia - how they were able to live in such a ever-changing, wild country. We had nothing but positive and fun experiences.

It's hard to know what else to write about. The year in Indonesia is amply 'do-able' with a family, and we have had the time of our lives. That said, we have also had some of the hardest times of our lives! The challenges for a family to reorder itself overseas are massive. What do we do - how do we do it - even when do we do it - all your assumptions about day to day living are jumbled up for a good while. We were new parents, so lacked experience in the first place. A more experienced family might have a different experience... guess everyone does actually. It's up to your little family unit to figure it out together and to make a new life in an amazing new land.

We certainly must have loved something about it, because we now live in Jakarta (at the moment Dave's working at INFID and I'm working at the Australian Embassy). Jakarta is in some ways an easier place to live - getting medicines, foods and services is a lot easier here.

But it doesn't have the soul, the heart, the music and the spirit of Yogya. What a place.