Eastern Palms and Orange Dawns

How did I get here?

Must have been the fall off of my bike a few minutes ago. I sit on the porch of a Javanese longhouse, and try to gather my thoughts, take it all in. When my mind finally helps itself out of relative vagueness and my eyes come to, I see the middle-aged woman seated across from me, tending to the deep cut on my knee.

Kindly and learned though her face may be, she seems the kind of woman you don't speak to unless granted outright permission to. I ask the boy next to me for her name.

Bunga. Malay for Flower. As she gently swabs my wound with herbal Ubat Gamat, I remember why the Indonesians, in spite of their voluminous diversity, are the warmest, most welcoming people I have ever come to know on my many trips. They regard outsiders never with that very same epithet; here, you are one of them, a local, a villager, a rakyat.

Bunga so deeply embraces that philosophy and as she ties off the gauze, she gives me a stare that tells me more than her words might. She tells me to watch out. To take care. As any mother would to her children, she insistently offers the three of us foreign rakyats lunch -- Rujak Cingur, a wondrous implosion of raw and cooked vegetables, ripe and unripe fruits so gloriously topped off with a spicy banana peanut sauce.

But Bunga is a mother. A mother to eighteen children -- not all her own. Bunga, the flower to her worker bees, had over the years adopted many of the village's children, most of whom had, out of hardship and neglect, been either orphaned or abandoned. One of the orphans, Nursiah, seated neatly and adorably in her batik in a lotus position chasing the last pieces of Rujak from her banana leaf, tells me that Bunga should be the next president of Indonesia.

"She could make food for everyone, from here to Bali."

Eastern Java, more than anywhere in the country, possesses a painterly orange air to it, a happy warmth that blankets its people with smiles all 365 days of the year. And what a people they are! Warm, pert, but above all, comfortingly human.

It's the little things. The way Nugroho, the long-haired rocker/waiter at Pecel Ayu, a green-tiled restaurant in Genteng, gently places in front of me the playfully spicy Soto Madura.

Or the way Syapik, the local Sufi mystic, explains to me why and how Java can cure Westerners' depression. "We've never understood how people can carry such heavy emotions around."

You need to smile more, he tells me. Even at palm trees and the orange dawn in the morning.