Budi

Budi is young. Small, but well proportioned, strong. Black, Muse-styled hair (dangerously close to an “emo”). Black shiny eyes that can show chasms of concentration or puzzlement. When following siamangs, he gives 100%, tries to stay with the focal. It is only normal sometimes to lose them. He walks twice as much as the rest of us. Cannot find peace (for intensity reminds me of my dog Ciro with the ball). Murmuring, or asking quietly aloud “Dimana?” (“where is him?”), with a typical, lovely cadence. When he has a doubt, about the identity of an animal or its activity, he asserts his guess, then, with exactly the same confident tone he asserts all of the other possibilities, with increasing speed. E.g.:

“What is the female doing?”
“She is… Feeding!… Resting!.. Suckling! Moving!Grooming! Grooming! The female is grooming!”
(reminds me the exam scene of Ecce Bombo, cult movie by Nanni Moretti)

He plays the guitar very well. I ordered him (jokingly) to learn this very popular Indonesian song, so that he can teach it to me. He smiled, then laughed, we will see how it goes.
He is quick, he learned to use the computer program much faster even than the “educated” assistants, those who went to secondary school. He is impatient when others have to fill in the data and are slow. He is the youngest and last arrived, lowest in the hierarchy, but in these cases he is completely oblivious to it, and also the others don’t react badly. He laughs at my jokes, he has learned to expect them also in the middle of serious work. And he is good at laughing, responding, without losing concentration (others completely forget about the data collection, stand there, adding up to the funny topic, the arm holding the PDA hanging, forgotten).

He tells me about his past. Of course touched by the relocation programs, he lived all around Java before coming to Sumatra. He traveled, saw some world. His sister traveled too, she has worked for years in Egypt (Mesir, usually countries have similar names in every language, not in this case..), Kuwait. She washed dishes, and she is tough, respected. She married Rahman, the stoic WCS assistant (who named his daughter Nectarinia, scientific name of a colibri’-like bird.. hmm, the forest can make you lose perspective..)
Before coming to Sumatra, Budi was a martabak-maker. Martabaks deserve their own post. During Lebaran, when everybody else stayed home with the family, he drove to cool Krui, with his friends, on their bikes. He wears cool t-shirts. He has a friend from France, Pierre, who gets angry when they call him mister, as he is not married yet, and studies the social organization of isolated kampungs. Yet, when you talk about music, he likes Avril Lavigne; about TV, he likes Tom and Jerry; about wild pigs, he tells you the story of the gold chain..

This mixture of coolness, street-wisdom, and utter naivety, is adorable. Now, I have already been made fun of for being the stereotype anthropologist in the field. Imagine after I write this, eheh..