Tim bagus

The Aceh programme team having a staff meeting. Normally on a Friday I don’t expect to achieve huge amounts of productivity as much of the day for men is spent praying. Shops and restaurants are supposed to close from late morning until around 2pm for all adult males to attend the mosque for jummah prayer.
 
Interesting discussions today with Luc, a Belgian who is living and working here on another environmental project, and who has an Indonesian wife. The way Indonesia is governed is on a gradual shift towards conservatism, even in provinces away from Aceh’s sharia law, which is a change from an earlier tendency to liberalise. He fears that in the decades to come, this will create the polarisation that we are seeing in other parts of the world whereby half the population maintains strict traditions and more conservative views, whereas those who were already liberalising feel constrained and frustrated.
 
Indonesians are comparatively laid back so I am not sure how protests for regime change would manifest themselves, although Indonesia is much more democratic in terms of free speech than many other countries. An environmental NGO office is not an accurate snapshot of Indonesian society and we rarely discuss political (however Trump’s election has been universally panned in Aceh) or social views although I expect my colleagues are at the more liberal end of Acehnese society. During the discussion with Luc he explained there are countless and constant ways that Acehnese defy sharia law such as loitering in the shadows of the office and re-appearing around the time when the mosque is emptying, or slipping through the backdoor of a closed restaurant and tucking into lunch. Sure enough I glimpsed people flitting about the office as the imam sermonised across the neighbourhood, in small acts of not what I would call defiance, but more like ‘I can’t really be arsed to go to the mosque today’. No one quizzes where people have been when prayer time is over; people simply drift back to work and we can release the pause switch on our torturous proposal writing.
 
I feel sakit (ill). When I mentioned it to Rina in the office she noted someone else had gone home early as she also was feeling ropy, likely because the weather is ‘not so hot’. By that logic, anyone living at a latitude more northerly or southerly than 20 degrees would feel permanently sick, and I instead put the sketchiness down to the packet of ‘almond and cheese’ sweet crackers I was gifted earlier.
 
Earlier this week Rina was telling me about her childhood and her first penfriend Andrea James (born 1978) from Norwich. Rina’s birth name was Dewi (meaning ‘goddess’ – a common female name here) but she was sick a lot as a child, which parents take to mean a child’s birth name is not correct. So she was renamed Rozana. And then it became Rina when she got to school.