So you wanna be an expat

Every time I travel to the jungle, I spend the first few days professing my deep spiritual connection to it and my need to move permanently out of capitalist America and into the simple, natural life. I choose which jungle lodge jacob and I are going to buy and take over, and I make all kinds of promises to Jacob about "as soon as the mortgage is paid off in 13 years" and "once my pension is vested" and "oh, who needs a pension anyway, they're probably not going to exist by the time I retire." And then, usually about three days and 30 mosquito bites in, I'm saying things like, "the dogs couldn't survive here" and "where would we get tortillas?? We can't live without tortillas!" (When in South American jungles, replace "tortillas" with "Brie". So I'm not actually cut out to live in the jungle, I can admit that. (I can only admit that right now because I'm on day 8 in the jungle and fully feeling reality. Ask me again after a few months of being home, and I'll deny ever writing this). 

In all our travels, we've met a lot of people who have relocated to the jungle from the western world, with varying degrees of success. I consider a successful relocation to be one where the person has integrated into the local community and adds to that community positively. When they are truly living in the jungle and working side by side with the locals. We have also seen expatriation that is just another form of colonization, where the expats simply live in a very western manner and employ the locals to run their business and maintain their quality of life while they get to be surrounded by beauty and monkeys. I don't consider this to be a successful relocation, and we try not to give our money to these establishments. 

But we have run across the most successful relocation we've ever seen up here in remote Northern Bali, and I am so grateful that I got to spend time in this village. Thank you to Nikki Moylan for sharing this AirBnB listing with me because I wouldn't have found it on my own. We stayed three nights in a small cabin with Simon, formerly of London, who is now helping run a social experiment up here in a remote village that until a few years ago got no tourism at all. Simon has one of those classic expat stories: he came to volunteer for three months to get away from his hectic London life and just never left. Unlike me, Simon really was meant to live in the jungle, which becomes strikingly obvious when you spend a little time with him and observe his completely relaxed, go with the flow demeanor (I only go with flows that are flowing exactly where I want them to. Why did I ever think I could cut it out here??) Simon could have very easily become just another one of the thousands of expats in Bali who are (sorry) simply leeching off the land and people of Bali in order to live in paradise. But he didn't. The first thing he did right was that he didn't buy land and take it from the locals. He fell in love with a particular village and, respecting the local culture, went to the village leader asking if anyone had land they would contract out to him that he could live on. The leader had some land himself to rent out, and Simon was able to get to know half the families in the village through building his house here. He then settled into the village with a job for green development, slowly learned the customs, languages (he's one of only about 6 or 7 westerners who actually speak Balinese), and religious practices (he's now a fully practicing Hindu), and became part of the community. He was not involved in tourism until the village leaders came to him saying they wanted to bring some tourism to the village without changing the village culture the way it has in so much of Bali and asking him for help to do it. He then quit his job and went all in helping build up this project that we are staying in. The way it works is that everything stays local. Local landowners contract out their land in return for part of the profits, local investors (no foreigners) fund the project in return for part of the profits, local builders build the cabins and locals are trained to staff them. When tourists come, we are coming to experience remote Bali rainforest and village life. The locals apply the amazing skills they have to giving us cultural experiences, and in that way we inject money into the village. We were taken to the village for a once-a-year ceremony honoring the goddess of education and knowledge, and then taken up to the large village temple and walked through the prayer ceremony, getting all our questions answered about Hinduism. Another local man came up to the cabin and taught a wood carving lesson, and oh man, if that doesn't make you appreciate the mastery that goes into all the intricate Balinese woodwork. You can also learn weaving from a local woman and take a Balinese cooking class. 

Jacob dressed for the temple

Offerings for prayer

Priests leading the ceremony

Jacob's finished product!

You can take woodcarving and cooking classes in other places throughout Indonesia, but they are often commercialized, and much of the time, you are paying a large fee to the hotel or tour operator, and the local teaching the lesson gets very little of that. In this project, all of the fee for the classes go to the locals who teach them. Simon runs the cabins on this property, usually even renting out his own house (he sleeps in whatever bed is free, and when no beds are free, he sleeps in a cupboard in the kitchen. With a duck. Yea, he's meant to be here and I'm meant to be at Disneyland.), and he is working with the village to set up other cabin compounds on other people's properties, all run without a westerner profiting. It's delicious. And they are close to having the successful model fully fleshed out and ready to be shared with other villages who are interested. So I was pretty much in love with this place and thinking that Simon could do no wrong. Then the other day Jacob and I were wandering past Simon's house, and we saw a wire cage. I was curious about what would be in the cage since all the chickens are jungle chickens and roam free, so I got close enough to see there was a rather large grey monkey in this rather small cage. The cage had two other sections closed off by doors, but even with them, it was a small enclosure. My heart sank. So he's great to the people, but he has an exotic pet! I immediately tried to imagine up scenarios that would make this ok, but I couldn't come up with one where that cage was ok. If she was a rescue monkey, why couldn't she be released? Or there's so much land, why couldn't a decent enclosure be made for her if she couldn't be released? Or why couldn't she go to a sanctuary? I could tell the monkey didn't like us being there, so we left quietly and I vowed to find out more. Later that night I asked, and thank goodness I did! Lola the rescue monkey has such a heart breaking story. She came to Simon through a rescue organization that he works with to release animals into the mountain up here. They release things like pythons and eagles high up the mountain away from humans. She is native to Sumatra, but was bought by a woman for a pet when she was a cute baby. Once she grew to be too large and unmanageable, the woman locked her in a small dark room for years. She was finally rescued, but has absolutely no hope of rehabilitation and release. She has never been around any other monkeys and doesn't identify as a monkey. She's in that small cage because she has a fear of large open spaces. Simon has been slowly enlarging the cage by adding the other sections, but he has to do it with doors that she can open and close because when she's in a large space that she can't make smaller, she panics. Because of being traumatized by a woman, she hates all women (hence her clearly wanting me gone when I saw her), but is very affectionate toward men. Every morning, Simon sits outside her cage and lets her go through his hair while he reads his emails until she is done with her social time, and then he spends more time with her every evening. Her story is tragic, but she has the best possible situation now. Lola definitely reminded me of the importance of seeking to understand before jumping to conclusions. Now if only everyone could be as awesome as Simon, the world would be a better place. PS - funny Lola story that Simon told us that I just have to share. Every year at the first big rain, millions of termites come out of their underground nests and fly around for a day and make one more reason why I can't actually live in the jungle. Then at the end of the day they drop their wings, drop to the ground and have a massive termite orgy before burrowing back underground for a year. At least the ones that land on the dirt do. The ones that land on roads or, you know, open air houses, just form a massive layer of dead bug on all hard surfaces. But apparently, these dead termites are one of Lola's favorite delicacies. Simon says he sweeps up an entire bucketful of termites, hands it over to Lola and runs away for about 5 minutes because she is truly disgusting in her ecstasy. She shovels the termites into her mouth with both hands, has them hanging out of her mouth and between her teeth, and makes legitimate sex noises in her pleasure. Bahahaha! PPS - our driver took us to his home and taught us something new about Balinese Hindu culture. Each village has a large (and beautiful) village temple for coming together for ceremonies. Each home and workplace (like a rice paddy) has a tiny temple (single structures that look like shrines) to pray at, and extended families all live together in compounds which each also have a temple that is smaller than the village temple but no less intricate. Now we understand why we are seeing so many temples of varying sizes! Here are some pictures of his extended family temple: 

PPPS - an example of expats causing harm by refusing to integrate into local life: Bali is full of dogs. The Bali dog is one of the most ancient breeds, and can be tracked back to the 1500s. Dogs here are used as physical and spiritual guard dogs. And dog shelters are overflowing. Despite the wealth of adoptable dogs, many expats want small, impractical western dogs instead. When locals realized that they could sell westerners these dogs at exorbitant prices, they all began breeding Pomeranians. So expats created a market for breeding dogs on an island that has a surplus of dogs already, and now that the market is saturated, most local families have a tiny Pomeranian chained up in the house because if it steps foot outside, it will immediately be eaten. (Our driver introduced us to Kiki, their tiny yapper on a chain.) Can I get a collective eye roll? For those with interest, here is the rescue organization that Simon works with, Friends of National Parks Foundation:

http://www.fnpf.org And if you ever want to stay in a mountain cabin in remote Bali, here is Simon's Airbnb profile with links to all the cabins: 

https://www.airbnb.com/users/show/4170888