by Orana Velarde | Oct 1, 2015 | 2015, Culture, Indonesia, Travel, World Interviews
Sit back and take a trip with us to the Pacific, where World Mom, Orana Velarde, reports on the majestic Balinese culture…
Every place in the world has icons that represent it, an image recreated in all sorts of knickknacks and souvenirs for visitors to take home; usually a part of the culture that has much more meaning than can be inferred from a multicolored T-Shirt or fridge magnet. When visiting Paris, it is the Eiffel Tower. But since our family moved to the island of Bali, we have become acquainted with the cultural icons and mythical ceremonial creatures, Barong and Rangda, that ti s known for.
Barong is the king of all the spirits that strive for good on the island and looks like a mix between a dog and a lion covered with long thick hair and fiery eyes adorned with sparkly mirrors. His ultimate enemy is the evil widow witch, Rangda, with whom he fights to restore balance to the universe. She is embodied as an old disfigured woman with a long evil tongue, huge beady eyes and clawed fingers.
The most common representation of the Barong and his enemy Rangda is the Barong dance, in which dancers dress as the creatures to tell the story of the vengeful widow (Rangda) whom fueled by fury sets out to destroy the entire village that defied her. The village emissary fights her with good magic and turns into the Barong, saving the soldiers and the villagers from Rangda’s evil wrath.
For the sake of mass tourism, there are Barong dances held every night in the artist town of Ubud, but the original Calonarang ceremony and dance is only held in village temples and accompanied by spiritual trances and ritual offerings. These can last hours and late into the night, with a procession to the village graveyard and lots of Gamelan music.
It is believed that once you are at the ceremony you cannot leave, because the spirits are roaming the village and you wouldn’t want to run into them.
Just like there are tourist-centered Barong dances, there is also a mass production of Barong and Rangda masks for tourists to buy and for hotels and other cultural places to use as decoration. But the masks and costumes that are worn to animate the Barong and the Rangda are ceremonially crafted and hold all kinds of special connotations. The barong masks can only be made from the wood of the Pule Tree and permission must be asked of the spirits before the tree is cut down.
Most temples grow their own Pule tree so that when it is large enough, they can use it to make Barong masks that will belong to the temple.Out of one tree, depending on the size, two or three Barong masks can be crafted; these will be the Barong of that temple as if they were brothers. Once every Balinese year (210 days) they must come back to the temple for a Calonarang ceremony. When not in use, the ceremonial masks are wrapped in cloth and put away in baskets to keep the magic contained.
A few months ago my husband was invited to a real Barong dance (shown below) in a village about an hour away from our home. He told me it was one of the most surreal experiences he had ever had. The dancers were in trance and the masks and costumes of Barong and Rangda were impressively powerful. The ceremony lasted all night and ended almost at dawn.
And my kiddos love finding Barong masks all over the island. They like it even more when they find an entire Barong costume in a holding podium so they can climb inside it.
Barong and Rangda have become symbols for the island of Bali, just like the Eiffel tower for Paris and Macchu Picchu for Peru. If you are ever in Bali you should definitely see a Barong dance, but if you by chance get invited to a Calonarang Ceremony, be prepared for the experience of a lifetime.
What is your city, town or region known for where you live? What graces the local souvenirs?
This is an original post to World Moms Blog by World Mom, Orana Velarde in Bali, Indonesia.
Photo credits to the author.
by Melanie Oda (Japan) | Oct 16, 2014 | 2014, Awareness, Being Thankful, Child Care, Childhood, Cultural Differences, Culture, Expat Life, Eye on Culture, Family, Health, Hospital, International, Japan, Kids, Life Balance, Life Lesson, Living Abroad, Milestones, Motherhood, Parenting, World Motherhood, Younger Children
My 6 year-old daughter had her tonsils and adenoids out over summer vacation. She had been diagnosed with sleep apnea several months earlier and since nothing else was helping, finally I reluctantly agreed to the surgery.
I was reluctant because hospital “culture” in Japan is very different from the US, where I am from, and because I knew I would be up against another cultural wall in regards to care for my older child.
This surgery, that requires a one-night stay in the hospital in either the US or UK (according to some quick research on my part,) here in Japan means seven nights in the hospital.
Since hospital rooms are shared, parents are not allowed to stay over night for any except the youngest of patients. Parents are expected to provide clean laundry and cutlery for the patient every day.
The children’s ward had a strict daily schedule, with times when they we’re confined to their beds (which literally had bars like a prison cell,) and times when, if they were well enough, they were allowed to use the playroom.
But absolutely under no circumstances whatever could they leave the children’s ward. And visitors under the age of 15 were not allowed in the ward.
This was a conundrum for me. I have a 9 year old son, who was on summer vacation at the time, and a husband who works 12 hour days, on a good day.
Hospital culture in Japan is strangely at odds with the wider culture in general. A high percentage of children co-sleep with their parents well into their elementary years. That is the cultural norm.
However, the hospital where my daughter had surgery, would not allow parents to spend the night with children over 2 years old.
This particular hospital allows parents of small children to stay until they fall asleep, but for my daughter, that may actually have been worse. Come lights out at 8pm, there was more crying in the children’s ward than from the nursery down the hall.
I had another child waiting at his friend’s house or at Baba’s (grandmother’s) house for me to come home, after all. My husband tried to get home from work at a decent hour, but I think he made it by 7pm once.
The day after the surgery, when my daughter was still feeling ill from the effects of the anesthesia and started bleeding from her nose, I was very grateful that she was in the hospital where I could have a professional attend to any concerns with the push of a nurse-call button.
Around Day 3, though, I could feel myself beginning to fall apart, fiber by fiber. The stress and plain old-fashioned exhaustion were starting to get to me.
My son at home was starting to feel the effects of being shuffled from place to place numerous times a day. My daughter wasn’t sleeping well and wanted to come home. I begged the doctor to discharge her a bit early, even a few hours would be great. His response was that the other child in the same room who’d had the same surgery on the same day was not recovering as well, and it would be upsetting for her if mine left earlier.
Excuse me, what? I thought, blinking several times, sure I had misheard. But I hadn’t.
On the day she was finally discharged, the nurses and staff presented her with a postcard, complete with a photo of her post-op, “to remember them by.” My first instinct was to burn it. Who would want to remember this? But I kept it, an ironic little reminder of the Japanese tendency to have “entrance” and “exit” ceremonies for everything.
I was reminded of a speech the principal of a junior high gave to the student body to announce that I was leaving: “People enter our lives, and at some point we must be parted. We should cherish each of these events.” Perhaps one day my daughter will value the card.
For now, she gets angry every time she sees it. The poor little girl has been waking up at night just “making sure I’m at home” for the past several weeks.
But now I look at the card and I feel profoundly thankful that my kids are, for the most part, healthy and happy. I don’t know how parents, who have to juggle (and it is a juggling with knives-type event, not harmless bean bags) a child’s hospitalization—along with the mundane tasks of everyday life that just keep coming, even when we are least able to deal with them—do it.
I say a little prayer for you every night, moms I do not know, and wish you strength and patience and space to breathe.
Has your child ever been hospitalized? What was it like for you, as a parent?
This is an original post to World Moms Blog from our mother of two in Japan, Melanie Oda.
The image used in this post is credited to the author.
If you ask Melanie Oda where she is from, she will answer "Georgia." (Unless you ask her in Japanese. Then she will say "America.") It sounds nice, and it's a one-word answer, which is what most people expect. The truth is more complex. She moved around several small towns in the south growing up. Such is life when your father is a Southern Baptist preacher of the hellfire and brimstone variety.
She came to Japan in 2000 as an assistant language teacher, and has never managed to leave. She currently resides in Yokohama, on the outskirts of Tokyo (but please don't tell anyone she described it that way! Citizens of Yokohama have a lot of pride). No one is more surprised to find her here, married to a Japanese man and with two bilingual children (aged four and seven), than herself. And possibly her mother.
You can read more about her misadventures in Asia on her blog, HamakkoMommy.
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by Melanie Oda (Japan) | Jan 30, 2014 | Childhood, Japan, Preschool, Younger Children
A Work in Progress
One of the first things I noticed when I moved to Japan, standing as I did in many a cold gym on a drafty stage being stared at by bored students, is that in Japan even small changes are deemed deserving of a ceremony of some sort. I worked as an assistant language teacher dispatched by the board of education to seven different junior high schools. On my first day at each and every one of those schools, an assembly was held to welcome me. The principal gave a little speech. I gave a little speech. The head English teacher and a student representative gave a little speech, too.
On my last day, a very similar ceremony was held. Except that this time I got flowers. Seven bouquets of flowers and me trying to leave town…. I tried at other jobs, when other coworkers were leaving, to explain that these giant bouquets, while beautiful, were actually not desirable for someone who was (more often than not) preparing to leave the country.
“The flowers,” I was told, “Are not for the person leaving. They are for the people staying behind.”
Now that I’m a mom, I’ve noticed that Japanese school children’s lives are chock-full of ceremonies. It starts with preschool, when they have an entrance ceremony. Then a closing-of-first-term ceremony, an opening-of-second-term ceremony, then closing-of-second-term ceremony. It seems endless. But for the preschooler, it culminates in graduation and the send-off to end all send-offs, the “Wakare-kai,” a kind of Sayonara Party.
Now I don’t know about where you are from, but I have no memory whatsoever of having a preschool graduation, much less an after party. My parents may have privately celebrated my ascension into free (!) public schooling after I’d gone to bed at night, but I don’t think there was much to it.
Here?
(Hold on a second while I get a cold compress for my splitting headache….)
At my daughter’s preschool, it’s a huge deal. And it’s all put on by the moms. I don’t think this experience is rare for a Japanese preschool, but to me it feels totally over the top.
It starts off in October (a full six months before The Day), with each mother being assigned to a committee. And I do mean everyone, including, for example, my friend who has three kids under six and another on the way. There are a host of different committees, the lunch committee, the keeping-children-in-line committee, the video committee, the slide show committee, the teacher’s present committee, etc. I’m on the decoration committee.
It seems like it would be simple enough. Maybe some paper chains and balloons? But no. There will be a balloon archway for the teachers to walk through. We will decorate the back wall with scenes (we have to draw) of the momentous events that have transpired in our 6-year-olds lives at preschool. (I’m in charge of drawing a poster for sports day and the yearly school play.) There will be a podium decorated with paper mâché animals, mobiles hanging from the ceilings (no clue how we are supposed to get those up there,) flowers and tinsel on the walls, etc., etc., etc.
I’ve already spent hours in meetings that I feel we’re pretty pointless, not to mention hours on actual decorations, and I’m sure there will be an hour or two on the day for decorating and cleaning up.
I’m having a hard time thinking of any of this as being more than wasted time. But I have to wonder if, like the flowers being given to the leaving teacher, the send-off party is not actually for the children at all.
What kind of ceremonies are held at schools in your country? To what extent are parents involved?
This is an original post by World Moms Blog contributor, Melanie Oda in Japan, of Hamakko Mommy.
Photo credit to the author.
If you ask Melanie Oda where she is from, she will answer "Georgia." (Unless you ask her in Japanese. Then she will say "America.") It sounds nice, and it's a one-word answer, which is what most people expect. The truth is more complex. She moved around several small towns in the south growing up. Such is life when your father is a Southern Baptist preacher of the hellfire and brimstone variety.
She came to Japan in 2000 as an assistant language teacher, and has never managed to leave. She currently resides in Yokohama, on the outskirts of Tokyo (but please don't tell anyone she described it that way! Citizens of Yokohama have a lot of pride). No one is more surprised to find her here, married to a Japanese man and with two bilingual children (aged four and seven), than herself. And possibly her mother.
You can read more about her misadventures in Asia on her blog, HamakkoMommy.
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