Held Hostage in Borneo by an Oral Presentation (Palangkaraya, 2005)

Excerpts from an email sent home December 30, 2005 titled "Held Hostage in Borneo by an Oral Presentation" and from an email sent on January 4, 2006 titled "Pacifying the Immigration Officers":

I arrived here in Palangkaraya yesterday and will be here until January 5th, when I must go to Jakarta for 5 days so I can give at least one presentation in order to satisfy the Indonesian Institute of Sciences (LIPI). One day a few weeks ago Happy, one of our security guys at Tuanan, suddenly showed up at my camp to say that I had to go to Tuanan immediately to have urgent communication with one of our Indonesian counterparts in Jakarta. Of course communication with Jakarta is impossible from the forest, but after a series of radio communications we found out enough to know that LIPI would not grant me permission to go home or extend my visa for another 6 months unless I agreed to give a presentation at UNAS in Jakarta…

Nicole, getting into a typical kamar kecil (i.e. WC, toilet)
in Katunjung, the village across the big river from my site

It was weird to miss the holidays this year. Of course there is no Thanksgiving…and I worked over Christmas, best a person can who has a nearly-broken metatarsal. I was sure I had broken part of my foot, as I couldn’t feel anything or walk for about 5 days over Christmas, although now it is just black and blue and I was even able to follow orangutans just before returning to the city. We have 2 toilet rooms about 5 meters over the swamp at my site, and while I was in one of them the floor, which had apparently rotted, fell from under me. I was able to catch my fall enough that I didn’t end up in the swamp, but was positioned rather awkwardly, one half of my body still in the toilet room, the other half suspended from it, until my cook eventually heard my screams over the noise of the generator…


New Years Eve here in Palangkaraya. Licen and Happy (Indonesian friends), Anne and Fleur (Dutch friends) and I went “downtown”, where there were surprisingly good fireworks at midnight and people blew their noisemakers constantly for two days straight. We even got ourselves invited to a private party held in a Simpati store (where you buy handphone minutes). That was weird, yet fun, but not as weird as the lack of alcohol on New Years Eve…we had lots of really good avocado juice with chocolate…

After 3 days of going back and forth a total of about 25 times to the immigration office to fill out various paperwork, I am finally finished at immigration and got my passport back and all of the necessary permits so I can fly to Jakarta as scheduled tomorrow morning. This turned out to be a minor miracle [I will now summarize a very long explanation from my original email explaining the exhausting process of obtaining permission to leave the country] -  I first visited the immigration office on a Monday morning, but I was told that I should have come earlier and they wouldn’t be able to finish processing the paperwork until maybe Thursday or Friday. It actually wasn’t possible for me to have come any earlier, but I was told at Immigration that I would have to change my plane tickets to fly to Jakarta and then onto the states. I explained that this was impossible, since I had to give a presentation for LIPI (the Indonesian Institutes of Sciences) in Jakarta and the next 4 days before my scheduled ticket to the US are Indonesian holidays (when no one works).  I was basically told too bad for me, but the Immigration officer said he didn’t care…but I told him that I would run around and get all of the letters they had newly requested I obtain and the 6 red-background photos in different sizes that the immigration officer wanted all in that same day, to give him time to change his mind. 

I was told that if I got everything done that day and before their 2pm closing time, he would think about it and maybe I would be allowed to leave on time. Thankfully my friend helped – we had to interrupt a very important meeting being held at the MAWAS office 4 times just to change various words of their sponsor letter each time that Immigration fussed about something and the trip to the office took about 20 minutes each time…the most memorable excuse was that my signature was too long because it was supposed to smoosh into an impossibly small space. But unlike most Indonesians, who use just one typically short name, I have a comparatively long Welsh/German name. I did get the Immigration officer to smile after he told me that the “passport size” red-background photos I had were a few centimeters too large and I would have to get new ones that same day. He seemed to think this was pretty funny and smiled. And it was made clear to me that had I not spoken in Indonesian this process would have taken at least a week. A good thing I speak Indonesian!

When I did eventually get to Jakarta, on my way to the airport to fly home to the US I first met a Bluebird (the best/most reliable of the Indonesian taxi companies) taxi driver named Suparman. I actually ended up in a cab with the same driver a few years later (you don’t forget a name like that).