Peneliti Tamu

While searching for the mailing address of my sponsor institution, I stumbled upon my photograph and inclusion on the list of Staff as a Visiting Researcher: http://www.pusdep.usd.ac.id/en/staf.php
They do a good job of trying to professionalize me.

I would identify more as a common guest/coffee drinker/wifi borrower/gossiper.

So, ever since the shift to Dry Season, its been raining every afternoon from 3PM onwards. Dry?? Come on!? I demand the old, distinct seasons back!

I've included a few random photographs taken along the street in Yogya -- the top show's the street running along Pasar Beringharjo, Jogja's central market. Below, there is a random painting and a portrait of a becak/rickshaw driver with whom I had a brief conversation about getting married to and having babies with a woman from Yogyakarta. When I made it clear that I'm not interested in either of those things, he decided that we should focus our time and energy on creating a portrait.

Last night, I saw Green Zone. It was difficult to watch, and particularly upsetting to watch amongst an Islamic-majority audience. Indonesians have a particularly difficult time applying for visas to travel to the US, and although many people have a positive outlook on the future of US-Indonesian relations (largely due to the election of Obama, or Mas Barry as they know him), there remains a deep skepticism about the level of tolerance towards Muslims in the US. The complexity of the US military intervention peaks when a US military officer successfully protects a controversial Iraqi General from assassination by fellow US militia, only to see the General murdered by a fellow Iraqi whom the US officer had recruited to be his interpreter. In response to the look of shock on the US officer's face, the interpreter explains, "You  shouldn't even be here, these are not your decisions to make" (or something to that effect).

So, while the film emphasizes the enormous mess the US military made in Iraq, the film suggests that, with or without US intervention, Iraq would have been a mess. The US may have just made it messier and killed people faster and to a greater degree.

Hopefully the environment-compromising move to open oil-drilling along our coastlines will help us avoid more stupid actions in the Middle East in the future.

And I'm just hoping that Green Zone doesn't amp-up anti-American sentiment amongst the less-critical viewing population in Indonesia, who could easily take the film as an indictment of all US citizens.
At least for a while, it was getting easy to be an American living abroad...