During your initial walks or trips through Indonesia,
you may not have noticed immediately that cleanliness is deeply ingrained in
our lives. Much of that has to to with Islam, the religion of the vast majority,
more than 80 percent, of Indonesians. Islam stresses that we have to be clean,
both inside and out. Cleanliness and purity go hand in hand. And modesty too.
We’ll talk about that in more detail later.
Although most Indonesians
realize that life abroad is different, there is one thing that we will never be
able to accept: using our left hand to give or receive something. From our
perspective the right hand is the only right hand. The left hand, on the other
hand, is the inferior one, because we use it to clean ourselves after using the
toilet. Please always use your right hand, wherever and with whomever you are
to give and to accept things. For most people that will not be too difficult,
but if you happen to be left handed it is essential to re-program your brain a
bit. You will not find it easy to identify people in Indonesia who are
left-handed. At home and in schools, as soon as an adult detects that a child
prefers the use of its left hand, it is forced to use its right hand.
The head, the seat of our mind,
our psyche, our psyche, our personality and maybe even of our soul is
considered a very private part of one’s body. Children are not allowed to touch
the head of adults, including their parents. Adults will touch relatives or know
each other well. In all other cases, to be touched by the head is insulting.
Talking about toilet and
bathrooms, the rule in Indonesia is that a clean toilet is a wet toilet. All
toilets and bathrooms cleaning easy. Other Indonesia travelers may have warned
you that in most bathrooms and toilets you will not find tissues. These
seasoned travelers may have urged you to bring your own supply of toilet paper.
And so, we see that many tourists travel with at least one toilet roll in their
backpack or in their briefcase. And they are happy that they did so, because
indeed toilet paper in toilet is hard to find (although it is widely available
in supermarkets and even in small neighborhood stores). What you will find
instead is a plastic scoop (gayung)
and a bucket or small tub with water. How many tourists must have been in tears
and despair during a toilet visit, discovering the absence of their trusted
toilet tissue, when it was too late?
On the other hand, how many
Indonesians, during an overseas trip must have looked desperately for water
during a toilet session? We can only guess, but toilet visits must be one of
the most fundamental contributors to culture shock. And yet it is all so easy
when you know it. Indonesians use water to clean themselves. We use the gayung to scoop water from the tub or
from the bucket and splash it freely where the cleaning needs to be done. We hold
the scoop in our right hand and do the cleaning with the left hand. Easy as can
be. Maybe foreigners should try it at home first. Nowadays there is a more
contemporary alternative to the gayung. It’s
like a mini shower on a hose. Before using it, test to see whether it works and
how strong the water flow is. Too strong a flow can really hurt. When using the
toilet don’t worry about splashing the water all over the place, including the
toilet seat and the floor. Like we said, a clean toilet is a wet toilet.
Traditionally in Indonesia we
have what, in Europe, is sometimes called a French toilet. It’s the toilet; low
by the ground, with two foot rests. To use it, one is supposed to squat here.
The regular, western toilet is always available in hotels, railway stations and
airports, although in public places its maintenance may not be excellent, to
say the least.
At home we also use the scoop
and the small tub of water to take a shower, if a shower is not available. We
never use the tub to sit in. Some tourists who assumed that the tub is to get
into, quickly found out that it is to small to do anything else than try and
get out agains. We stand outside the tub and scoop the water all over us. In
our climate it is the most refreshing manual shower you can imagine.
We take at least two such
showers a day. One in the morning, getting ready for work and one coming home in the afrernoon to wash off
all the heat and the dust of the day, so that we feel refreshed when we relax
during the last part of the day in the company of the family. Walking through
the neighborhoods, either in the morning or in the late afternoon you may be
surprised to see women dressed in what appears to be baby dolls or nightgowns.
Indeed many women like to do that after their afternoon shower. Sometimes we
can even see men dressed in pyamas, sitting on the porch. The explanations is
we do not associate nightdress with the confinement of the bedroom.
Traditionally we don’t make a difference between clothes for the night. Many
Indonesians, when it is time to go to bed, will simply go and lie down with
whatever they wear at that time.
We hope that you won’t find our
bathroom and bedroom culture appalling or gross. Apologies if you do. To us, it
is the best way and anything but appalling. It is linked to other traits of
behavior in Indonesia, such as the concepts of halus or refinement, modesty, forgiveness and avoiding
confrontations.
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