Chialili

Introducing Chialili, who lives next door with her husband Benny. They run an independent mobile phone shop and sell a few knickknacks and plastic toys. The shop is a bit off the beaten path, being at the edge of the urban area, but I have watched their business flourish over the last six months that they have been in residence. They started off with toys and gradually moved up to phones, being a more profitable commodity. I have seen others com and go from this shop front, unable to generate the necessary business volume to pay the rent, but this charming Chinese couple seem to have cracked it.

This gorgeous smile was not generated just for the benefit of blip, Lili wears this smile all day long, as does Benny. Their friendly demeanor I recon is largely responsible for their successful business.

Benny and Lili have been most intrigued by my photographic adventures, watching me snap passing pedestrians to climbing on stools to snap geckos to spending hours with my head in the bush, photographing spiders. The spinning the wet mop blip really had them scratching their heads, as did watching me sitting in a stool in the torrential rain, photographing the flood waters flowing down the street. Every morning they greet me, with my head and knees wrapped, with my mud caked tatty shorts and T-shirt, as I set off on yet another insect safari. They have been well entertained.

This morning, I met Benny as he arrived back from the shops and he presented me with a fruit for no reason other than being neighborly. A few weeks ago, I was having problems starting the bike engine. He came out with a handful of tools and within minutes had found the problem and replaced the faulty sparkplug with his spare. He would not accept any payment, not even for the spare part, just being neighborly.

Living in Indonesia kind of reminds me of how things were living in England forty years ago, when the front door was opened in the morning and neighbors wandered in and out to drink copious amounts of tea, all day long. A time when the daily scrubbed front step was the status symbol of a good housewife. Where did we go wrong!

Dave