NOVEMBER 22, 2014 |  ALEX MEETS WORLD

        In the commuter village of Karangklubut, west Lombok, 56 years ago, Wayan Subrata was born, one of who became three children who lived with Wayan’s mother and father in their one-room house of earth and grass.

        Wayan had been born into poverty. His parents worked farming rice and corn on someone else’s plantation, an ironic work since Wayan’s family usually didn’t eat rice. Often, they’d have just one meal a day that consisted of jackfruit, mangoes, and other fruits.

        As Wayan grew older, he had to sleep outside on the house porch. There was not enough room on his family’s one, mattress-less bed to support all five members of it, and when he was about seven (old enough to reach over his head and touch his fingertips to his ear), Wayan began school in an earthen building from seven to 10 a.m. every weekday morning.

          However, by his third year, Wayan had dropped out. Indonesia was a newly independent country without enough money to fund public schools, and Wayan’s family no longer had enough to pay his school fees or even to buy him a uniform, so his life changed from leisurely afternoons of hide and seek in the street with friends and walks around gardens in search of mangroves and ripe coconuts to one of constant work.

        Wayan became a carpenter’s apprentice, and, until he was 13, he traveled from village to village around Lombok learning carpentry while eating and staying in the houses of those under whom he studied. Carpentry was never something Wayan had planned on doing, but he needed money. He had to get a job.

          Wayan would work for weeks, sometimes for a month at a time until the job was done. Then, he’d wait for the next work project to arise. He was only ever home in Karangklubut for a month at a time, so once the promise of a higher income led Wayan from Lombok to Denpasar, he was already used to being away from his family.

          Wayan moved after arranging a job for himself in Denpasar. Aside from the extra money, Wayan was in search of adventure on an island across the water from his own. Using the money he’d made from carpentry, Wayan traveled across the Lombok Strait for two thousand rupiah on a big ferry with his wife (the marriage had been arranged by their parents; Wayan never even has had a girlfriend) and three children, a journey that today takes an hour and 15 minutes but that back then lasted more than double the time. The ferry landed in Padang Bai, from where he took a car to Denpasar.

          He moved into a small house on his boss’ garden, where he lived for free, and he stayed two years in Bali’s capital working more than he ever had.

          Though it was a little hard being so far from his family, Wayan never thought of returning to Lombok, and in fact, the hardest part about the move wasn’t homesickness. It was that life in Denpasar was just so much more complicated than in Lombok. On his home island where every place was a village, Wayan didn’t have so many expenses as he did out in the city. In Denpasar, he had to pay for everything!

          Life was more relaxed in Lombok. Denpasar was not nearly as busy and crowded as it is today, but there, Wayan was always working. With his higher salary though, Wayan was doing much better for himself in Bali than he was back home. At nights after work, Wayan would wind down with a nice drink of coconut wine.

          But it all ended when, one day, Wayan met a man on Batam Street, a man from Nusa Penida who promised that he had a job for Wayan, the construction of a house. If Wayan went to Nusa Penida, the man ensured him that he could make money even greater than what he was getting in Denpasar.

          Wayan, eager to make more, agreed to the offer, and Wayan, soon, found himself on a one engine canoe on its way to Nusa Penida. The trip took two to five hours. These were the days before Maruti Express, and only after all that time, only after he had already moved beneath the leaky roof of a house owned by the man he’d met on Batam Street did he learn that the man had lied. There was no job.

          Wayan lived in the house for four months before moving to the land on the beach, where he’s stayed for the past 26 years since. He built his house himself, one of very few houses at a time when Nusa Penida was even much emptier than it is today, but in spite of this success, the first couple of years Wayan lived in Nusa Penida he remembers as the most difficult of his life.

          For the first four months, he had no house of his own. He had no friends, nothing to do, no work, and because he was a stranger to the island, there was no one who wanted to help him.

          He could do nothing but wait for work. At a time when 10 meters square of land cost 125 rupiah, Wayan had gone to Nusa Penida with 350, which he mostly spent on food, but the money was running out fast. The first school tuition payment for his children he had to pay for with a ring because he had nothing else of value to give to the school. The ring was to make sure that his children had a uniform, the lack of which had come along with the end of Wayan’s own school career.

          It got so bad that, for a month, Wayan was forced to leave his wife and kids to go to Nusa Lembongan to build a school, a job that gave just an okay wage.

          Wayan’s only other source of income was farming seaweed, which was one of the reasons he decided to move to the beach. Together with his wife, Wayan worked his seaweed farm whenever the tide was low enough, sometimes in the early in the morning sometimes late at night. It was a schedule determined by nature, but the farm never made them all that much money.

          Wayan was trapped on Nusa Penida. He didn’t have the funds to go back to Denpasar, where everything was more expensive, but with time, Wayan’s luck changed.

          There are many more houses on Nusa Penida now and many more carpenters to build them, which means that competition for Wayan’s work has increased, but with his four children all grown-up, Wayan, now, has a chance to relax more than ever before.

          Wayan’s one son is a truck driver in Denpasar. His youngest daughter is a masseuse, and the other two are married: one in Lombok and one in Denpasar. All four of Wayan’s children do their best to support their father with money that comes his way as they get it.

          “Santai. Santai,” Wayan said of his life today. Relaxed. Relaxed.

          At seven o’clock in the morning, Wayan, if he has no carpenter’s project, heads off to the harbor in Toyapakeh on the second hand motor bike he bought last year from the profits (four million rupiah) of the calf of his one breeding cow. There, he looks for tourists in need of transport, which he provides for up to two people at a time for a small fee. The rest of the day, after taking care of his cow and the one pig he also owns or sometimes after making a few rupiah fixing a passing motor biker’s flat tire, Wayan is free to relax at home with his wife, who since they stopped farming seaweed two years ago is retired from work.

          Sometimes, Wayan relaxes with the friends he has since made on Nusa Penida, or he goes fishing. The thing Wayan looks forward to most about every day is that happy feeling he gets whenever he catches a fish from the beach in front of his house.

          Wayan, unlike his wife, has no plans to retire.

          “As long as I’m strong, I will work,” he said in Indonesian. Though he claims to be the oldest carpenter on the island, Wayan brags that he can still lift a weight of up to 165 pounds. He said he maintains his health by drinking fresh water. Even if he wakes up in the night, Wayan makes sure to serve himself a drink of water. There isn’t any coconut wine for him in Nusa Penida.

          Wayan would also like to get back into farming, but the seaweed farming industry isn’t what it used to be. Maruti has made a faster passage between Bali and Nusa Penida, but oil from speedboats has also decreased the quality of farming in the area. The change that incited the end of Wayan’s farming career however was not the oil but the expense.

          In the eighties, a seaweed farmer would get everything (nets, line, seed) from the crop distributor free of charge, but nowadays, a farmer has to invest in his own supplies. Thing is, Wayan has no money to invest. Nets are more expensive, and with his farm about 100 meters from the coast, growth is better, but his crop is also more susceptible to fishes, which a net is necessary for keeping out.

          For nets, line, and seed, Wayan estimates he’ll need two million rupiah to resurrect his now dormant farm.

          Although his life has eased up, Wayan still does not make very much money. With his children’s support, he is middle class. However, Wayan would like to stay in Nusa Penida for the rest of his life, he said. He is happy with his life there. He hasn’t a lot of money, but he said, he gets to relax most of the time, and he gets to live on the beach. Of the three islands he’s lived on, Nusa Penida, Wayan said, is his favorite. Bali was hard work, even Lombok was hard, but Nusa Penida is relaxed. Wayan’s life on Nusa Penida is santai.