teefs and fishes

Part of my function for my NGO is to visit project activities in the field, taking notes, talking to beneficiaries, snapping photos, sort of as an internal (and wholly biased) journalist for the organization. It is always a good time to be the white person who inexplicably turns up at, for instance, a breastfeeding discussion group so if you can handle all the attention, requests for your cell phone number, and prying questions (as well as shaking every single hand there, often including people who just happen to be hanging out), it is a fun job.

This week I did just this, spending a few days traveling up and down the North Coast visiting various project sites. I went to a tooth brushing training, a unit on how to combat malnutrition using community-tried practices, a vocational training program launch, and a village where we built some houses. Interesting experiences abounded.

The tooth brushing campaign was predictably cute. It took place at a school that my NGO had rebuilt post-tsunami, just a couple simple buildings in the middle of a paddy ringed village (actually about the least clarifying description one can give of an Indonesian village: there was a paddy). After a puppet show on the material (lo, be still my heart!) all the kids received toothbrushes, toothpaste, and plastic cups, before lining up for the brushing ‘practice.’ It was abundantly clear that toothpaste is a new substance for the kids, as it ended up everywhere—faces, fingers, noses. Things only kept getting worse as they unsuccessfully tried to wipe it off, only to end up with more on their hands and I walked around dispensing tissues for the strong of heart who would chance taking anything from this towering foreigner. The rest of the time I spent with a star-struck principal especially enthused to tell me all about his theories on the Indoensian snack industry: long, sustained ramblings about the use of addictive chemicals to create what he termed ‘fanatical snacking.’

Later on down the road I went to training for midwives in ‘Positive Deviance’ and its application to combating malnutrition. It basically describes children that live and grow in families that are impoverished and the practices that help them succeed in spite of poverty. It is an interesting way for the development community to address problems because it looks a resources that are available to the entire community, not those that require external aid. The solutions are generated by the community and are thereby what those in the biz (warning, buzzwords imminent) would call ‘sustainable’ and ‘culturally appropriate.’

This method has even more traction in Aceh (and Indonesia) because, as it turns out, many of the rich are the ones who are malnourished. A large part of this is related to classist views and taboos about foods. For instance: tiny fish. These little fish are a great source of vitamins because they are so small that they are just eaten dried and whole.

I can recall in Sukadana that this was how many in our community got their calcium, often from the mixture of peanuts, chili, and tempe that was served with many meals. Well as it turns out, the Indonesian rich view these little fish, along with plenty of other foods like tempe and some veggies as well as certain preparations, as ‘garbage’ and ‘for the poor.’ My NGO facilitates midwives in the identification of these strategies and then trains them to communicate the information with the entire community. I was simply surprised that even in Indonesia, where the cuisine appears so linear to an outsider, society still finds such simple (and unfortunately in this case ill-advised) stratefiers.