Thinking Outside the Kitchen

DENPASAR - Ngurah Sutedja leans forward in his chair and stretches his arm out to point through the window of his office, tucked in a well-lit corner of his expansive kitchen at the John Hardy workshop in Mambal, a sleepy inland farming community in central Bali. Beyond the glass, encased in a bamboo window frame, is the almost completed construction of a second kitchen devoted to what he describes as ‘pignics.’

Several men busy about carrying freshly-cut lengths of bamboo, while behind us the noise and energy resonating from Mr. Sutedja’s kitchen sound like the surging of waves breaking against rocks, as his kitchen team of twelve chefs, six stewards, and four service men and women prepare the daily organic lunch for the workshop’s seven hundred and eighty-five employees.

The ‘pignic’ kitchen, explains Mr. Sutedja, stems both from one of John Hardy’s seemingly constant stream of ideas, and also from a challenge extended to him by Cynthia, John’s energetic, striking and seemingly omniscient wife. “John came up with the idea to do a special lunch, and a few days later Cynthia ate babi guling in Jimbaran and returned home saying that it was the best she had ever had, that the skin was just perfectly crispy,” states Mr. Sutedja while laughing. “Of course I thought that I could do better, so we had to try it here at the workshop.”

But his challenge was larger than merely preparing Bali’s best babi guling – which is in itself no small feat – he had also to overcome cultural differences in preparing and serving pork in a diverse and multi-cultural work environment where Hindus, Muslims, and Christians strive to design, create and produce some of the world’s most exciting and beautiful jewelry.

Mr. Sutedja thought the problem through, and as he has consistently done during the past eight years that he has been working with John Hardy, he arrived at an innovative solution. He and his team built a special ‘pignic’ kitchen, a totally separate and self-contained environment in which to butcher, prepare and serve what is arguably the island’s best babi guling.

Mr. Sutedja’s creativity and novel approach to problem solving are nurtured in the workshop’s positive and natural environment. The property, framed by traditionally built mud walls, and containing organic vegetable gardens, fishponds, fresh fruits, and innovative bamboo-based architecture, inspires a rigorous and highly conceptual form of thinking.

The John Hardy concept of sustainability is an idea that permeates all aspects of life and labor at the workshop, from the silver designers to the gardeners and the kitchen, where one of the most distinctive elements of sustainability is used everyday.

The story goes that a while back the kitchen cooked with gas burners. A sudden lack of gas supplies on the island coincided with a special guest visit to the workshop, and Mr. Sutedja was forced to find a new way to prepare lunch. He ordered that fires be lit and dry wood be collected, and in this manner the kitchen prepared the VIP lunch. Just before the food was to be served, John Hardy himself came into the kitchen and took note of the wood fires.

“He asked me why I was cooking with wood instead of the gas burners,” smiles Mr. Sutedja. “I just explained to him that this way was the traditional Balinese way of cooking, and that it tasted better.”

After this John Hardy and Mr. Sutedja met frequently to discuss the kitchen and how to improve it in an environmentally sound, more efficient, and traditional manner. They experimented with several ideas before hitting on the rice husk stoves that are on prominent display and in daily use in Mr. Sutedja’s kitchen.

The stoves are simply creations that burn on discarded rice husk. A sack of rice husk costs Rp. 1,000, and Mr. Sutedja’s kitchen uses ten sacks per day to serve lunches and dinners to more than eight hundred people. He calculates his weekly rice husk expenditures as between Rp. 50,000 and 60,000, whereas before he spent Rp. 1,000,000 per week in cooking with gas stoves. And the food, all locally produced and mostly organic, apparently tastes much better when cooked in this way.

The rice husk stoves and the ‘pignic’ kitchen are but two examples of Mr. Sutedja’s creative thinking, something that he describes as having evolved from the nurturing and pressured demands of life at the John Hardy workshop, where constant innovation and a quest for a better way are institutionalized concepts.

“He is very creative,” states PR Manager Agatha Belinda. “We frequently encounter many challenges here. For example, we had to get ready for an event with two hundred people and wanted to do something organic. Pak Ngurah came up with the idea to use hollowed bamboo stalks as glasses and rolled lemon grass as straws. He always finds solutions to whatever problems or issues we throw at him.”

For his part, Mr. Sutedja remains modest. He is quick to smile and even quicker to praise his kitchen team for their hard work and innovation. If sustainability is about creative problem solving and using resources in fundamentally new ways, it is safe to say that Ngurah Sutedja is at the absolute fore-front of innovation in Bali; and as a Balinese from Gianyar, he hopes that more and more people take note.

“These are my challenges,” he says softly, “but there are many more problems that we must also solve together through cooperation and hard work.”

(Originally published in The Bali Times.)

From Haunted House to Tourist's House

-By A.A. Gede Ngurah Termana

When I think about my childhood, I am reminded of my friends and me happily searching for dragon flies around the banks of a river bordering a hill in my village. Although most of my time was spent in the city for schooling, the promise of these moments are what made me enthusiastic about returning to the village. Vast rolling green hills, the melodic singing of the birds, squirrels jumping between the coconut trees, the trickling of the pure river water, and the pounding current of the waterfall all became unforgettable memories or my childhood. Nevertheless, those days would turn dark and end when my friends and I would hear the shouting of our parents, “Time to come home! It’s already dark, there’s tenget out there!”

Tenget is a word that strikes fear into the hearts of the Balinese. Tenget identifies a place where one is not allowed to be after dark, or where one should not build a house; it is even a place well known for “eating” children. It is indeed a place that incites fear, and a story that I frequently heard in my youth was of children who often disappeared in a tenget area. This is not just an old wives’ tale told to children by their parents to keep them from playing outside too late. It is an actual Balinese belief because the Balinese believe in ghosts, often referred to as bhutakala. Bhutakala balance the natural cosmic life of Bali. The belief goes so far as to see a tenget area as a sort of haunted house. “Don’t play there if you don’t want to disappear,” my grandmother used to say.

Of course, a place referred to as tenget also becomes an “unproductive” place. Don’t expect to find a “For Sale” sign on a piece of land described as tenget; even if there was one it would go unnoticed and collect dust. An area such as this is seldom manicured by its owners, and rarely made into a rice paddy or garden. It is often left to grow naturally fertilized by the wanderings of cows and dogs. Usually this type of land has difficult contours which are not ideal foundations to build upon, such as steep slopes or areas too close to sandy beaches. However, it is not unusual for a place such as this to have amazing panoramic views.

A month ago I invited several American college students to my village for their orientation as part of a summer internship program in Bali. We spent the last day of the orientation swimming in the same river that I used to play in when I was a child. I spoke with them about the many foreigners who had built villas in my village. While noting this my thoughts returned to when I was a child, and I compared my childhood thoughts and impressions of tenget areas with the here and now, where places that were once called tenget have been transformed into large and beautiful buildings. “Oh, that place, it has already become a tourist’s house,” states my neighbor Pak Wayan.

“Villa” is a foreign word for most of the people in my village, one that is not an intimate part of their daily vocabulary. “The tourist’s house” is what they say when referring to a particular villa. “Yup, that’s definitely a tourist’s house. See, the person who lives there is a German tourist,” explains Pak Wayan. Of course, a tourist here means a person from overseas who has come to enjoy the natural beauty and exoticism of Bali. Tourists are often called tamu (guests), but this term is only reserved for foreigners. If an Indonesian arrives in Bali with the same purpose of enjoying the pleasures of the island, s/he will be called Nak Jawa, meaning Javanese, whether s/he is from Sulawesi, Sumatra or Kalimantan. This is because of the bias of tourism; Identification as a non-Indonesian comes first and foremost, and a non-Balinese secondly. Therefore, if you are a foreigner that has already lived in Bali for some time and owns a “tourist’s house” in Bali, it means that you will be called a tourist or tamu. It doesn’t matter if you are already married to a Balinese, can speak high Balinese or have even converted to Hinduism, you will remain a tourist; and of course the service that you receive will always be “different” because you are a tamu.

Agung is a young architect who has just finished his first villa project. He also still refers to villas as tourists’ houses. However his vocabulary is somewhat different from Pak Wayan’s, who defines a villa as a tourist’s house simply because of who inhabits it “Of course, that’s a tourist’s house. See, there is a pool and air conditioning. If it were a Balinese house, it would be full of ukiran (traditional artistic reliefs),” explains Agung. For Agung, and many like him, what is important is his reputation as an architect. He must explore and clarify the many variables that separate modernity and tradition with regard to the differences between a tourist’s house and a Balinese house. “Being able to get a villa project means that one is already an internationally qualified architect,” he explains. Before I could properly think this through, Agung adds enthusiastically: “In Bali, an architect can not be really called an architect if s/he has not yet received a villa project.”

In their own ways Pak Wayan and Agung realize that a modern identity for the Balinese and Bali itself is dependent on tourism. That is to say that if Bali and the Balinese are already involved in tourism, it follows that they can be identified as modern; or borrowing from Agung’s term, it means they have already achieved “international qualification.” On the other hand, from Pak Wayan’s definition of the word “tourist” it can be understood that tourism will always be indistinguishable from the idea of a tamu, meaning that which is not intimate with the Balinese way of life and thought. The culture of tourism is much like a tourist’s house; one can have a house in Bali but one will always be distanced from the life of the Balinese.

I am reminded of a conversation with my late grandmother. “Grandma, have you already seen the tourist’s house above the river in our village?” I asked her. “Damn tourists,” she replied, “they don’t make any sense! How can they build a house on land that’s tenget?” I could only laugh hearing her answer. I wish I could go back and ask her: “If that is so, where do the bhutakala (ghosts) live now?” But, never mind, my grandmother has already passed away to… who knows, maybe even the formerly tenget area that is now a ‘tourist’s house’ in our village.

NOTE:
We would like to thank our good friend and colleague AA Gede Ngurah Termana for contributing this piece. Termana, a native of Kesiman, East Denpasar, studied journalism and English literature in Jogjakarta. He is currently working on several journalism and film projects in Bali and beyond.

A Letter from Pulau Serangan

SERANGAN, BALI-
Ni Made Ariani was born as Edah in this impoverished island of fishermen on Bali’s south-eastern coast. In order to marry her Hindu husband she converted from Islam to Hinduism and adopted a Balinese Hindu name, much as her mother before her converted from Hinduism to Islam in order to marry Ni Made’s father. And if Ni Made’s daughter, now a ten year old honors student at one of the island’s primary schools, should later marry a Muslim, she too will convert to Islam from her native Hinduism.

In an Indonesia and world increasingly concerned with sectarian divisions, Serangan stands as a model of a multi-faith community living in harmony; one of many thousands of similar communities throughout this vast archipelagic nation. Ni Made’s story is not unique. Young people from both the Hindu and Muslim villages of Serangan frequently intermarry, and births, weddings, and funerals are well attended by Hindus and Muslims alike.

To reach Serangan from Denpasar, Bali’s provincial capital, the visitor passes the ancient and important temple of Pura Dalem Sakenan, where Hindus from all over Bali gather for the important religious festival of Kuningan. Beyond the temple lay Serangan’s six Hindu villages and temples, and their neighboring Bugis Muslim village and mosque. The populations of both communities interact, intermingle, observe each other’s festive occaisons, and get along very nicely.

“For a very long time the Hindus and Bugis of Serangan have been very close, just like this,” explains I Nyoman Nener, the husband of Ni Made Ariani, as he holds his two index fingers extended and pressing together. “The Bugis were given their land by Badung centuries ago, and the descendants of Badung still come to the Bugis village to talk and pay their respects.”

A protracted war in the seventeenth century between the Balinese Hindu Kingdoms of Badung and Mengwi saw the Kingdom of Badung request military assistance from seafaring Bugis fishing communities originally from southern Sulawesi. After several decisive battles the Kingdom of Badung triumphed, and the Bugis were given a parcel of land on present day Serangan Island in a token of the Kingdom’s gratitude for their martial assistance.

Those Bugis seafarers who settled on Serangan had until then roamed the archipelagic seas, settling helter-skelter along the coasts of several islands along the routes of their fishing grounds. They built a village and mosque on their given lands, and both continue to stand inhabitted and populated to this day.

The colonial period came and went, and Indonesia achieved independence. With it Bali became a province of the modern Indonesian Republic. Throughout those centuries the population of Serangan enjoyed peace and prosperity on what was an almost idyllic tropical island; they fished in small colorfully painted and hand-carved traditional vessels, known as jukung, and farmed and cultivated small family garden plots.

In the early 1970s tourism became a leading industry in Bali. During the later years of that decade, and throughout the 1980s and early 1990s, jukung would daily ferry up to several hundred foreigners across the thin straight seperating Serangan and the neighboring coastal town of Sanur. With these foreign visitors Serangan prospered; the island was an excellent day-trip, offering sun and golden sand beaches with fine snorkeling.

In 1990 the Province issued a permit intended to promote tourism development on the island. A suitable purchase price per hectare was determined in which to buy land from the islanders. Yet many of the islanders refused to sell their land, describing it as the inheritance of future generations, even as the price was raised incrementally. In response to this local authorities set up a command post on the island and began a campaign, according to local conservationist and activist I Wayan Patut, “of intimidation and extortion in order to encourage the islanders to sell.”

By 1995 several dozens of hectares had been sold, and a consortium of developers was formed. Its stated aims were conservation and tourism development on the island. In order to realize this a plan was formed to enlarge the island by reclaiming land from the sea up to 300 meters from the existing coastline."

Dredging began in July of 1996 and a 2.5 kilometer long breakwater was built circling the area to be reclaimed. The breakwater was then slowly filled with sand and dredged coral. In all, the reclamation enlarged the island from its original 112 to 365 hectares, and the island’s topography and ecology changed profoundly and rapidly.

For the fishermen and women of this island, where schooling is not considered a priority, the many changes wrought by the project catalyzed a vastly different economic living situation. “I’ve never been to school, all I know is the sea,” states local woman Ni Made Lungsur. “Now it is much harder to make a living. Our island has changed.”

In many ways, both of the island’s religious communities felt they had been cheated and manipulated by the project. A proposal to build atop both the Hindu and Muslim cemeteries by the consortium, for example, met with furious local resistance and both communities were united in their outrage. Both communities also experienced a prolonged campaign of intimidation from the command post during the land grab, and, states Mr. Patut: “Occaisonally a community member would be defamed and denounced as a member of the banned Indonesian Communist Party (PKI) when he refused to sell.” Several prominent members of both the Muslim and Hindu communities were even arrested when confronted and pressured to sell their land.

“Yes, it is true that the reclamation project changed our way of life here. But it also diversified the people of Serangan,” explains Bapak Abdul Rahman, a prominent member of Serangan’s Bugis Muslim community. “Everyone is a fishermen here. But because of the project the younger people are now more in touch with the modern world. They go to school and study in order to get jobs. We can not depend on the sea anymore as our principal source of income.”

The Buginese village and its 350 year-old mosque stand nestled between Hindu banjars near the island’s north-eastern coast. As the day’s heat dissipates and the sun begins it evening fall to the western horizon, Serangan’s Muslim community emerges from its dwellings and the young and old mingle in the small alleys of the village. They sit on doorsteps and in the shaded raised pavilions known locally as bale. Hindu and Muslim fishermen return from the sea carrying their catch, their wives navigating the island’s small alleys while balancing on their heads large baskets full of harvested sea weed, or bulung. Children of both faiths play together, cruising up and down the narrow streets on old bicycles, kicking small soccer balls, and carrying around their infant siblings.

“Serangan is a very unique place,” continues Bapak Abdul Rahman. “For centuries now the Hindu banjars and the Bugis village have existed peacefully. This is because we have structures in place, between the elders of both communities, to talk and avoid conflict. If there is a problem between the youth, we quickly settle it. Emotions are not permitted to rise. We take immediate action to ensure that problems are resolved quickly and collaboratively. I learned this as a child while watching my father, and the young will learn it now from us.”

"Indigenous institutions and customary laws are very much alive in Indonesia, and these are very effective outlets of peaceful conflict resolution,” explains A. Ruwindrijarto, the President of Perkumpulan Telapak, a nation-wide network of social and environment activists with its main office in Bogor, West Java. “These people may not be interested in the political debates. The problems of daily living are often more clear and present to them. Yet the politics of these ideas are very connected with indigenous communities and their institutions in a holistic view.”

The sun finally sets over western shores of Serangan. Traditional Balinese Hindu gamelan music begins to drift through the darkening breeze, mixing with the local mosque’s maghrib call to prayer. Ni Made begins to prepare the evening meal in her home. Later she and her youngest child, an energetic boy of two, navigate slowly the many small alleys that make up Serangan en route to her parents’ home in the Bugis village, calling out to friends and waving and smiling at passersby. It is, after all, just another evening in Serangan, where for centuries Hindus and Muslims have lived together peacefully.

(originally published in The Jakarta Post)