Tom Pepinsky

Author: tompepinsky

  • Elephants!

    Yesterday we went to an elephant reserve where they keep domesticated elephants.  It was so cool.  We went with the other Fulbrighters here and the staff from the Malaysian American Commission on Educational Exchange.  The place was about two hours from KL, most of it on a new, really nice highway.  It was kind of in the middle of nowhere, though, so the last few miles were on a rough, bumpy road that wasn’t really meant for buses like we were in.

    There are about 1500 wild elephants remaining in peninsular Malaysia, but they are rapidly losing their habitat as people clear jungle to make rubber plantations.  Asian elephants are a protected species now, meaning that when the wild animals wander onto plantations and destroy vast tracts of them they can no longer be shot on sight, which is a very good thing.  However, this leads to the problem of trying to relocate the elephants to natural parks where they can roam undisturbed.  There’s a team trained to do this, and they have to come in and sedate the poor animals to try and move them safely.  As the informational video we saw said, moving a partially sedated elephant is not an easy thing to do.  However, as elephants are highly social animals, they can be comforted by the presence of other elephants.  That’s where the trained ones come in.  They bring in a few of the trained elephants who bond with the scared, woozy, wild animal and help to soothe it so that it can be moved with a little less trauma.  This is a really neat idea, but it is still very stressful on the animals being relocated.

    When the domesticated animals aren’t at work, they hang out at this place where people can come visit, feed, and ride on them.  They had one gigantic animal, one pretty big one, and three little ones.  We got to feed them fruit and veggies and pet them which was amazing.    Elephants always look big in zoos, but when you are standing right next to one which is at least 9 feet tall, they really are even more impressive.  Even the little ones were almost as tall as a person.  Their trunks are also unbelievably strong and dextrious, and it was really fun having them grab bananas and pieces of melon from us.  After feeding time they let people ride on them, big people on the big elephant and little people on a  little elephant.  Then everyone got in the water and got to scrub at them with coarse brushes, which they seem to really like.  One of the funniest things that happened was that the big one farted a few times on its way out of the water.  It was very loud and very smelly.  Yes, we are almost 26 years old, but it was just too funny.

    And what would a trip like this be without pictures?  We took a whole lot, so check them out for some pachyderm fun.

  • More Language, Good Movie

    Two somewhat related notes.  To begin with, we have encountered some more funny language bits.  The first comes from a book about the culture of leadership on Java–which I am reading in order to be able to argue that culture doesn’t explain anything in my dissertation, it’s all plain old corruption.  Anyway, one thing about modern Indonesia that we found interesting is the culture of the preman or jago.  Preman comes from the Dutch words for "free man," but refers to local criminals in urban and rural areas who can extract a sort of protection racket in their immediate neighborhood.  You still find these a lot in Java, although modern preman can be different.  For instance, there were a couple of guys who lived outside of our apartment complex and charged taxis a nominal fee to wait there for people to call them, even though they have no actual claim to that piece of property, they just got there first and it belongs to them now.  The word jago, literally "rooster" or "game cock," is another colorful term for a preman.

    No really, we have a point.  In this book, one of the authors made a point that the culture of leadership–whatever that means–is one of premanism.  The author then proceeded to trot out some other terms for preman, including the term tukang pukul.  To understand what this means, tukang means "tradesman" or "dealer," like tukang sayur is a vegetable seller or tukang sate is a satay seller.  Pukul means "punch" or "blow."  So, tukang pukul literally means "dealer in beatings."  What a great word.

    We also learned yesterday that there are some words in Indonesian that are swear words in Malay.  Some guy at the library stopped me and chatted me up for some unknown reason, and let me in on this little tidbit.  It seems that memerlukan and membutuhkan, which in Indonesian both mean "to require," are not synonyms in Malay, and that membutuhkan in Malay is a very dirty word.  True enough, we looked it up in an English-Malay dictionary, and it is not listed.  Naughty.

    Continuing on our theme, last night we went with friends to see a popular new Malaysian movie called Sepet.  We did not know what the title means, but quickly it became clear that sepet is the Malay rendition of the Indonesian word sipit.  Among other things, sipit is an adjective that describes the eyes of East Asians.  With as little prejudice as possible, it is best to translate it as "slanty."  In Indonesia and Malaysia, a common way that people will say that you can tell the difference between a Chinese Indonesian/Malaysian and an "indigenous" one is through matanya sipit, or "slanty eyes."  At any rate, this was a very good movie, even if it did contain just about every Malaysian theme possible–race, religion, class, discrimination, forbidden love, crime, prejudice, languages, etc.  It tells the story of (yes) a young Malay woman who falls in love with a young Chinese man.  There is a bit of a twist on the normal here: the Chinese man is working class, while the Malay woman is firmly upper middle class.  It was quite a wonderful movie, though, highly enjoyable, and thankfully subtitled in English, even the parts that were spoken in English.  If it comes to an international film festival near you, check it out.