ONE BALINESE VILLAGE (part 4)
Meet the locals of Munduk village in Bali as I did in 1995 when I taught English to the staff of Puri Lumbung. This excerpt is taken from my book, Memoirs of a Middle-aged Hummingbird, published in 2006.
Cock fighting is a major preoccupation of Indonesia. Mr. Ketut M. is a pioneer in the cross-breeding of wild chickens and local chickens. Indonesians prize these chickens because they combine the best qualities of each. Wild chickens have bright, iridescent colors and a sound, which is shorter and sweeter to the Indonesian ear. The rooster’s crown has no ridges. Being wild, it is difficult for humans to approach them, and they are resistant to breeding in captivity. A mixed rooster has an attractive body, a sweet sound, vague ridges on the crown, and is more tame toward humans.
While a local chicken might be worth $30 U.S., and a wild chicken worth $150, a mixed chicken can bring perhaps $1500 U.S. Buyers come to Mr. M. from as far away as Java as well as from Balinese villages. Training a wild chicken to get used to a local chicken requires patience and the natural skill Mr. M. possesses to calm the chickens so that they accept his handling them. He has devised a “family planning” technique of attaching a rubber shield over the hen’s opening so that she cannot be impregnated by chance. In this way, he can carefully control the mating to produce the highest quality stock.
Along the main street, you can see women crocheting. Women like Made (pronouced Maday) Y. are using skills taught by their mothers to earn extra money. Made’s sister has a shop in the heavily-touristed Kuta area of Bali. Made and other village women provide a supply of pocketbooks, vests, and blouses for the shop. After mornings tending the rice paddies and clove trees, coffee beans and fruit trees, Made spends three to six hours sewing.
She is mother to three grown children, but when she was ten years old, she was trained as a dancer. Coming from a father who was a musician, she was asked to become a dancer for the village. Not only is this an honor since only the prettiest and healthiest are chosen, but it is also a social obligation to the village. Every Balinese village has a dance group and musicians, but Munduk in particular has a reputation for producing talented performers.
Both the music and the dance movements resemble nothing that can be compared to any western form I know. The movements, especially of the fingers, require years of practice from a young age. The dances often tell a story eloquently. Made performed such traditional dances and remembers it as an exciting time as well as a healthy time since dancing is such good exercise.
As with all aspects of Balinese life, the gods are a part of dancing. The dancers pray before dancing and draw energy and support to communicate with society through their dancing. In return, dancers and musicians are honored by the villagers.
Normally, the women stop performing when they marry. They then become instructors to those just learning. Made trained her eldest daughter, among other girls, to dance. Although she hasn’t danced in many years now, she retains the grace and form of a dancer as she gardens, crochets, sews, and weaves floor rugs from bamboo.
I first met Mr. Nyoman B. in 1989 when he was the Director of the tourism school in Nusa Dua, Bali. We kept in touch annually and, when I was ready to leave Macau, he invited me to teach English to the staff of Puri Lumbung in his village of Munduk. He could offer me no salary, but gave me free room and board for the two months allowed on a visa.
While in Munduk, I came to see the mixture that Mr. B. had become. While many of his boyhood friends were content to spend hours playing the gamelan, Mr. B.’s father forbade him to play and insisted on high education. By middle-age, Mr. B. had traveled a good portion of the world, and had lived in other countries. Did he still fit into the traditional, unsophisticated, non-technological village of Munduk, which did not even have phone service in 1995? Surprisingly, yes. Mr. B. still felt very much connected to his native village, as well as determined to improve it financially, environmentally, and spiritually. Because of his knowledge of how to get grant money to fund projects, he was constantly designing projects. Some included funding for the wild/local chicken breeding, planting vegetation that did not dry out the soil as did clove trees, building a local crafts center for Munduk. He had already brought selected artists to Munduk for one month to create new forms of art there such as a sculpture made from plastics and trash.
The villagers respect and admire him. To me, he personifies what the Balinese culture has been able to do by integrating traditional culture with new ideas and broader vision. On one particular day, Mr. B. inspected some new tourist cottages that had just been completed at Puri Lumbung. When he inspected the workmanship, he was disappointed. And yet, he felt great pride in the accomplishment. He explained it this way, “I have a western eye and a Balinese eye. When I look at the cottages with my western eye, I can see all the imperfections and sloppiness. However, when I look with my Balinese eye, I marvel that these workmen can achieve what they have without ever having seen a modern bathroom, or a western structure.”
And so, he is quite able to live in both worlds, feeling grounded in Balinese culture and being western in the breadth of his experiences.
Tags: Bali; Puri Lumbung in Munduk; Balinese village culture, Munduk, Travel
