Estonia – the new international meeting hub

Posted on July 31, 2012 by Berit ja Terje

Arriving in Estonia is magical. After being away from home for almost two years, I enjoy all the tiny details that were never important to me before Indonesia.

Here are trees and green fields everywhere. The cities are full of parks and the highways are packed with forests for endless number of kilometers.

Here is so much fresh food, fresh air and fresh ideas around.

Here people care about you, not about who you date, who leaves your house after 10pm, who your parents are or if you go to church every weekend.

Here when it’s hot I can wear a cooling dress with no sleaves without anyone staring at me. Or actually do anything without getting too much attention.

Here you can get privacy. Go swimming in a lake, naked, and be alone; walk in a forest and be alone; even when at a party you decide to be alone, you have the chance.

Here everything is so close and mobile. I can travel around festivals throughout the country and still meet the same friendly faces, who have been looping on the road since the days got warm.

Here are festivals each weekend, using full Estonia as a kind of stage for excitement – from the prison halls, from the rooftops to the huge crop fields in the countryside.

And the funniest thing – all my friends from around the world are suddenly in Estonia. Marie, who I met in Indonesia; Taras, from the time I lived in Russia; Patrick whose couch I surfed on in Kuala Lumpur and a long list of others coming to visit this new international meeting hub in Europe .

Zone of freedoms: how a boy becomes a waria at Berlin Wall

Posted on July 23, 2012 by Berit ja Terje

When mentioning our fatherly careful uncle that some of these nights in Sorong I’m going out to Tembok Berlin (translates as Berlin Wall), his eyes filled with fear – this is dangerous, people are drunk there, orang mabuk!
A lovely waria Miranda also warned me that sometimes you can be attacked with a knife at Tembok. But Tembok is precisely the place where most of the waria in Sorong gather at night, so there is no question for me – I have to get there. Tembok Berlin is the heart of the city that runs, as the name says, as a wall along the coast current. This is the city’s most popular place for enjoyment and rendezvous (“tempat Santai”). Here we have great gorengans, coffee, tea, grilled bananas and luxurious durian. This is the meeting point for all young people in love and all secret lovers. Among others, both female and male prostitutes hang out here, and latter being even more popular, because having a same sex partner can become a good smoke cover.
“People who pass by then just think that you’re meeting some old school friend. Nobody knows that this will be followed by sex, so your family relations will not be at risk, even if you’re having an extramarital partners,” my friend, who’s active in the local gay scene, told me. And it does not mean that the customer is necessarily gay himself.

But after all, this place is called Berlin Wall and there has to be a reason other than just being a wall. This here is the house of liberties of Sorong. On the one side of the wall we have the city, cars passing by and the numerous sweet aunties selling snacks and coffee, people chatting, having good time. But the other side is wilder – here we’ve got warm see breeze, green waves in constant move, along some trash and young people secretly making out. The zone of freedoms along the Berlin Wall.

It was there were I met a sweet young native papuan waria from Biak. Her story seem to be quite representative for the case of papuan waria – she had escaped from her family to another city, because the family couldn’t cope with the child’s non-conforming gender identity. So here she is now – hanging out with the waria of the city, trying to learn about her new life, and the salon work. Her dream is to open her private salon one day. To finance her life, she also comes here at nights to prostitute, just like her friends. When after an exhausting night she returns home, she prays. For her sins. When I asked her, what exactly she sees as her sin she has to pray for – is it her being a waria, is it sex work or is it something else? She replies: “This here…” While all other warias are joking and laughing just next to us, she tells me with glassy eyes that she only does it for money. She doesn’t get any satisfaction from it.

“Miss Angola!”cries another sparkling waria to sheer up my papuan friend, when she walks across the street in her sexy short pants. She rolls some hips as a reply to the girls laughing. Of course, our gender expression is constructed under various forces, just as feminist philosopher Simone de Beauvoir has stated that one is not born a women, but becomes a women. What I experienced at Tempok Berlin could rather be seen as how a “boy” becomes a waria. It’s how a waria becomes to be here at the local Berlin Wall – zone of freedoms for some, zone of sins for others, zone of pain and hopelessness for some. Whatever it is – we have to break on through to the other side. Here that would be to the side of green waves and warm see breeze. Sounds like freedom, right? Yet so often the other side comes along with random sex for random money, wanted or unwanted, that takes place between the piles of hopeless trash on the beach.

Hot, hot, hot in Papua

Posted on July 21, 2012 by Berit ja Terje

For a superficial traveler, Sorong might appear to be quite boring destination – the city known as the gate to Papua is spread around the long motorway paralleling the beach, but it gets another level of thrill once you’re there for quite some time – the daily struggle with heat and malariaquitos.

Everywhere is the center of the city, and people walk and ride the ojek (the motorbike taxis) or yellow busses. Public transport has been something to miss in most parts of Indonesia, but Papua is doing better – there’s some space here, and some good ways to move besides having a personal motor.

Besides bursting into my fieldworks of transgender already the very first evening here, I quickly grow a fascination for the local fruits. Each day I was passing by the market and later fell into juices of sweet mangos, bananas and pineapples. They are incredible in Papua, probably due to the fertile ground and sunny air. This is the sweet part of it, but it also has another. The weather is booming hot here – i’ve been sweating tons of water, having showers at least three times a day, and feeling constant lack of air, as it’s so hot, so humid, so dusty, so strong. We were also sweating at night-time, when the sun was gone long ago, but it was still hot. And my body was constantly waisted. To sleep less that seven hours was absolutely impossible. And as they say, the mosquitos with malaria are sneaking around. It was quite common to hear remarks such as:

“Oh, I’ve been in bed for three days – because of malaria!”

“Oh, I am not in a good mood, probably having malaria fever again…”

“Oh, this poor little girl has no father, the father died of malaria couple of years ago…”
So I swallowed the malaria pill once again, but it did not do any good. Rather it made me existentially loaded and worrisome, so that after couple of days I decided to stop it all. Just keep the pills ready in your pocket once you get bitten by the malariaquito – but don’t screw up your body and mind with these strong pills daily.

Pink plastic love, white plastic sand

Posted on July 18, 2012 by Berit ja Terje

Papua got me from the very first steps on this world’s second biggest island – New Guinea at the edge of the world map with its African beats, that were running on the dusty streets along with the yellow angot-buses, locally known as taxis.

As we stepped off from the ferry after three days on the sea, it felt as if we were entering another country. This here was not the Indonesia I used to know. Here we have some other rules of the game, this here is Papua.

The first marry little bus charmed us with the interior colored in pink. There was a man dressed in pink T-shirt, holding his hand on a pink gearshift and tiny pillows of pink LOVE were running over the front window, where there was written just one word: CINTA – and that means LOVE, of course. The driver turned the base louder and we head across the pale white streets that had tarnished under the sharp sun. I can hardly say that love was in the air – it all rather reminded me of that fake plastic love, that can be manufactured. But I was high on my heels just because I had finally reached Papua – and it was all about to begin. Only later on I realized that perhaps these very first minutes here had some symbolic function to play leading me into my new life in Segeri. As everywhere, where love is so desirable and needed, and yet so hard to achieve, it has to be written within the endless simulacrums, kitch, in the romance of the secondary experiences and hopeless fantasies. Until it takes over the real… But whatsoever – we’re all living it. Just as the people in Papua, just as the warias, just as us.

Our old friend Eka from Sulawesi wanted us to meet some people of her family here. Going on with the flow, we ended up staying a few days with an uncle that was sharing a small simple house with his daughter-in-law and her sweet child. The house was very basically furnished, we were always eating on the floor, and she was cooking on the floor, and washing dishes were we all had shower and took a piss.

Our uncle had been married four times. ”A relationship ends, I get married again. Another relationship ends, I marry again,” he was stating smiling. He works as a driver with a very old and rusted minivan. Each morning he leaves the city, taking people to the nature – and he doesn’t need to drive much until the road ends, and the wild takes over; in Papua you hardly travel by land. In the afternoon they return, with piles of bananas and other goods from the lushy hillsides filling up the minibus completely. He’s a gentle and sincere man, knowing how to explain stuff just like an ideal grandfather, even if it was something very basic, or something more multifaceted, like for example warias. He was always finishing his thoughtful descriptions with a statement: “…so this is a waria.”

The family along with the neighbors took us straight to the beach, as it was Sunday. This is s day off for all Papua, and the crowds were taking good use of the amazing tropical beach, which is just around the corner from Segeri. This here was another kind of enjoyment what I saw – something that could never be together with the westeners (how bad I hate to use these categories). Here we see no bikinis, no sunbathing, but we play with the water and and sand, we feel happy, as their faces seemed to say. I felt quite happy too, but just couldn’t get myself too high on that beauty, because even this was too much of plastic. There was so much plastic trash on the beach, that I almost failed the feeling of being in nature, being connected. Oh dear cart of modernity, where the hell are you riding?!

But all in all, I was fascinated by it, fascinated by Papua.

Mad ferry to Papua, triple loaded

Posted on July 13, 2012 by Berit ja Terje

Things just couldn’t get any smoother, less hot nor more comfortable, when leaving Makassar and Sulawesi for good and heading on to the wild and wicked corner of Indonesian archipelago, to the land which stereotypically provokes thoughts of cannibalism and naked people living up on trees.

I stress again, stereotypically. Yet the truth was that we were going to Papua, and oh, I had been looking forward to get there for years. But the truth was also, that I had no idea how harsh it can be to get there!

As it was mid-January, there were huge crowds heading to back Papua to work after some Christmas holiday break at there families in surrounding islands, like Maluku and Sulawesi. Namely, Papua is probably the most well-off area in Indonesia, where there’s plenty of mineral resources, thus the need for work force and not so many people to carry out the need. The population in Papua is not more than 3 million, while the land is huge. The rates of pay are supposedly double from what is paid elsewhere in Indonesia, but also everything is more expensive. But at least – money is moving.

So together with around 4500 people in the ferry that is normally meant for 1500 people (indeed!) we were heading towards the promised land. It took us 3 days and 3 nights. People were sleeping everywhere – inside, outside, in the corridors, on the stairs, heads and legs all together, in this heat and humidity, along with rats and cockroaches, but pleased by the warm sea breeze and great view over Maluku islands.

Crowds queuing up for the ferry. Ferry overloaded, sweat, stink and party everywhere.

Short stopover at Ambon, Maluku – great chance to stock up with some sweet fruits from local market.

I only had one problem with the ride – and that was my health. For all the travels I’ve done in my life, rough times in South America, Russia, Africa – I have never had much trouble with myself. Traveling mode does its job to keep me fit in whatever circumstances. But perhaps this was all too different here, as I was not only traveling for my own self-interests and joy, but I had a job to do here, I was here to conduct some fieldworks, I had some serious responsibility, and I was so very passionate about it, and still I was all alone doing the rough travel as always, where you have to improvise and figure out the next step every moment in this heat and sweat, so lovely when I come to think about it again.

But the moldy rooms I had been sleeping in the village of Sulawesi, had caused some allergic reaction n me, which couldn’t get any better with the lack of sleep and pressure from the police and all the guys that wanted to meet and talk to me, get married or pose together for some photos. Life had been a mess. Which is common for a traveler, and I love it, but I was far from my best.

Another thing you should never do when feeling weak and sick – take some pills of malaria. As Papua is a serious area of malaria threat, I did that mistake, and that bloody pill did nothing but knocked me down for another three days. I was so weak I could barely move, nor breathe. But this was a great excuse for us to hassle out a room in the ferry’s hospital after a night we had shared with hundreds of people and thousands of cockroaches. Even though I was sick as hell, we still had to bribe to get it. This, by the way, is a very common practice on these ferries, as most of the crew prefers to earn some extra rather than sleep in their bed, so they give it away for passengers for 500 000 rp or 2 million rp, however, everybody’s happy.

Buginese princess: the making of it

Posted on July 6, 2012 by Berit ja Terje

A sufficient amount income for the warias who work in salons, comes actually not from daily hairstyling, but from wedding preparations. Every other week, if not more often, this is the waria who makes the bride and groom pretty and decorates the wedding room. Already at our very first meeting Jaka was thinking that we should do a make-up session, to make a Buginese bride out of me.

When I looked at the photographs of some other brides I had seem before, I thought this is a way to big job we can experiment with. But Jaka told me to relax and give her an hour. And so we did it.

Pardon my narcissism if it looks this way, but I wanted to share the whole process with you. The making of it. The making of a Buginese princess. It took around one hour to cover all my face with powder, attach some fake eye-lashes, paint my forehead, my eyes, my lips, make my hair amazing and dress me up. Jaka could explain every detail of my outfit, some for Allah, some for adat (the local culture).

I felt I was turned into a princess, a Buginese princess, that has to do all the dirty work in the kitchen and elsewhere, but still, she always has to be a beautiful princess and smile. And later when already married, get pregnant, and smile. Just as most of the women in the world, just as we are so often expected.

All photos by Minna Hint

Makassar: pleasantly mad

Posted on July 4, 2012 by Berit ja Terje

Jaka is a chill-out waria in her 40s. She has a quite popular salon in downtown Makassar, where she keeps herself busy from morning til night. Once I caught him straightening girls’ hair until 2am.

Makassar, Sulawesi

But she always wakes up early in the morning, brings fish from the market, serves the first customers, cooks the fish, she is social with all her friends who constantly come over to hang out in her salon. And it’s always raining in Makassar, so it’s a good spot to wait until another shower is done and they can make a move.

As it was Saturday night, and this is the night when all people in Indonesia take it all with fun, some young even say they go hancur – they go crazy. So Jaka took out her high heels and we went for a rendez-vous in downtown. The city was full of young people, there were crowds of guys with all their crazy motorbikes. Built up and wild, retro machines, and the busy bikers with their blinking motorbikes. There was also a lot of crowd hanging around the waria hot-spot. Jaka knows the girls, but she’s already grown out from nightlife of the youth. She doesn’t bother anymore to go out that often. She has a salon to keep and a boyfriend with whom she feels happy with.

We stayed at her salon for couple of days, and truly enjoyed the company of Jaka.

Jaka and Minna

Makassar: who gets the business, and who don’t

Posted on July 3, 2012 by Berit ja Terje

I had met Jaka already previous time in Makassar. She had a pretty popular salon in downtown, pleasantly busy each day. Eka suggested we can stay at her salon and get to know her better. Eka was her junior.

On the way to Makassar, we met a party of warias around the area. We stopped and had a chat, I took a photo.

But Eka had to hurry, because she had an important meeting in one of the big hotels of the city. Makassar is the capital of Sulawesi, and its huge. There are big roads and colorful neighborhoods, something for everybody, including the rich fucks, as the anarchists would see it. Eka was sitting attentively behind the desk together with couple of other ladies from the village, who are running good in business and have some extras to invest. The hotel had some 20 floors, we all were served expensive fruit cocktails and chocolate cake – rarity in Sulawesi. There was young and smiling man explaining on a fake iPad how the money they give starts to grow. Like a tree. It’s growing. They could all see it in the graphics. The arrow moves up, more money is coming back. Especially when you give in bigger sum.

But how?

They never asked.

Eka has played with investing before – she has got already two cars. “From internet,” as she puts it. Maybe she’s been the lucky first one, or maybe this is the reality of Indonesia? Economic crash has not touched this base here, Indonesia is booming, but it still has a long way to rise.

Actually I was invited to come over to Makassar to screen “Wariazone”. Professor Halilintar Latief, the largest researcher on bissu on earth, and that’s true, invited people from various background and different religions to see the documentary and have an open discussion on the matter of the waria in Indonesia. Makassar is a well-known hub for warias, although lately they are crying more of the lack of basic economic needs. There is so many people, so many warias and competition is high. Even when you open a salon. It feels unsafe to work on the street. And again I can’t help of seeing the social reality that is behind this situation, that is creating it. This is because of the narrow zone for the waria that is left out there. This is exactly the socially constructed playground the warias are trapped in and which thus also shapes their identity. Zone, zone, wariazone.