I'll be home for Christmas

There are some that dream and sing of a white Christmas, of fires and sleighs and hot chocolate.  My Christmas this year involved none of these.  And yet, I am home.

Gamelan music blares from a mosque loudspeaker, echoing across the rice fields and red tile roofs and banana trees to the white tile-and-concrete open porch on top of our house.   The street sellers call out advertising their wares, and we can hear neighborhood conversations and passing motorcycles as clearly as if they were in the house with us.  The clouds announce rain soon, as they have almost every day, and promise a glorious show for tonight – colorful tropical sunset drowning behind the mountains in the maghrib call to prayer.  These last two weeks our family has been together in a country we moved to over 18 years ago, where I haven’t visited in a long time and my sisters-in-law are getting to experience for the first time.

It’s been six years since I’ve been to Indonesia.  I flew into Jakarta in darkness, blind to the scattered green-blue of the islands and ocean below.  I approached the immigration desk in the Jakarta airport ready to fall back on English if I needed, and found myself chatting casually with the officials in fluent Indonesian as passing tourists shot me strange glances out of the corners of their eyes.  I don’t look like someone who is coming home.  My white skin and blond hair bleached lighter by the African sun stand out among the creamy brown skin and black hair of everyone else.  I am at least a foot taller than every Indonesian woman in the airport.  And yet, the language and culture, even the accent, have come back easily from somewhere I had stored them away after high school.  In another week I’ll store them back again, in a rattan and batik treasure chest in the back of my brain, and pull out the bright and flamboyant bits of Togolese culture and gutteral Ewe I’ve learned so far.

I told Immigration I was pulang kampung (returning home to my village for a visit).  It’s been more true than they could have guessed, and than I could have known.  This time has been an amazing mish-mash of time with family, classic Indonesian-style adventures, incredible food that always somehow seems to involve white rice and coconut milk and ginger, childhood memories, and soaking in the beauty of the island.  Even as my definitions of home shift and shift again and I realize I may never again be able to call Java home, I can say with full confidence that it is good to be home for Christmas.