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Mine is an embarrassingly kinetic personality. I can’t see a plane without wanting to board it, hear about an issue without writing about it or meet a politician without interviewing him or her. 

Constant movement is the hallmark of my existence, and increasingly that of many other Southeast Asians. Lately, however, I’ve been overwhelmed by an intense desire to slow down — especially when I’m near rice fields. I’m not sure whether it’s age or something cultural, but rice fields provoke a strange longing for permanence and reluctance to move.

I had arrived in Manado for the Asean Economic Ministers’ gathering. Thankfully, however, I was able to slip away from the crowd and visit the rural home of a local religious leader, Pastor Nico Gara. We reached his house after a picturesque 30-minute drive from the conference venue, heading north past the airport and deep into the countryside.

It had just rained and the entire village was coated with a thin film of moisture that glistened in the afternoon sun. Many of the homes were older wooden structures and on stilts with shutters. Interspersed between the homes were a number of churches — First Adventist, Pentecostal, Catholic — as well as the local denomination, Gereja Masehi Injili Minahasa, Pastor Nico’s church.

Arriving at the house, we sat down overlooking a broad expanse of irrigated land with rice fields and kale. Nico began telling me about the village, introducing me in turn to the different members of his family: his wife, daughter (who just completed her studies in Germany), sisters-in-law and his father. The old man was particularly impressive. Well into his 70s, he still worked the fields daily.

On one side of the backyard, Nico had built a structure for swiftlets, the current rage across the archipelago. In fact, he said he’d taken a half-day course on breeding the birds in Gresik, East Java, a few months before. As we talked, the swifts, most of which had left the shelter, were pirouetting in circles above the fields.

When we talked about farming practices, Pak Nico pointed out that the local coconut palms were now far more popular than the more stumpy hybridized palms. “People,” he said, “no longer plant the hybrid coconut palms. They’re not as hardy and the fruit aren’t so good.”

Since copra, or dried coconut (along with cloves for kretek cigarettes), is a major local industry, I listened carefully. It was a bucolic Southeast Asian scene: rice fields, water buffalo, fish ponds, fruit trees and coconut palms swaying gently in the breeze. My worries melted away and I was momentarily stilled by the sense of peace.

Eventually, our talk shifted to Manado in general. Located in the northern tip of Sulawesi Island, it’s closer to the Philippines than to Jakarta. The majority of the province’s population of 2.27 million are Protestant; I even saw signs for a Filipino church, El-Shaddai.

Like much of provincial Indonesia, it’s an area rich in natural resources: gold, fisheries and agriculture, the immense fertility a product of the rich volcanic soil. Indeed, nearby Mount Soputan had been spewing ash and lava for the past few months, periodically disrupting air traffic.

I was interested in hearing how Manado had managed to remain so peaceful during the Reformasi period when other parts of eastern Indonesia like Maluku, Ambon and Poso had not been so fortunate. A local newspaper editor who was with us, Tommy Waworundeng, felt that Manado had benefited from its high level of education. Literacy was almost universal and the Human Development Index ranking was the second highest in the country after Jakarta.

While Pak Nico agreed, he believed his own interfaith initiatives had also been a major steadying influence. “We have well-established networks that can intervene to calm down any religious provocation,” he said. “We act quickly and responsibly. There are times when people deliberately feed lies to the two different religious communities in order to create trouble. We have to step in, calm the situation down and tell the truth.”

Nico surprised me when he said that the meetings between the province’s Catholics and Protestants were often more fraught than, say, a Christian-Muslim gathering. It disturbed me: could intrafaith disputes, in addition to interfaith conflicts, be another problem for Indonesia?

After all, the bitterness of the Muslim-Ahmadiyah contention elsewhere in Indonesia suggests that this problem is not limited to the Christians.

Still, with such a magnificent backdrop, it wasn’t hard to agree that Manado’s reputation for stability — what locals call aman, tetap aman (safe, stay safe) — was well earned.

 

Karim Raslan is a writer who divides his time between Malaysia and Indonesia.