Ursulines in Indonesia

Irian Jaya was hot and sticky. There would be six months of rain, then six months of dry weather. We would finish the fresh water we had collected in a huge rain barrel and wonder where we would get water next, and then the rain would come. There was no indoor plumbing or refrigeration. We sisters brought in our own food. We had rice from local sources, and we’d get spam in a can. Every so often we’d go to somewhere and buy as many as six dozen eggs. The eggs could last a long time without refrigeration. Sometimes someone would sell us an egg from a jungle chicken or an ostrich egg that the people had brought back from the jungle. One ostrich egg is equivalent in size to about two dozen ordinary chicken eggs.   In both Agats and Ewer, we nuns collected our drinking water in large rain barrels. But every family had a plot of land assigned to it in the jungle, and that land had springs, so the Asmati people would get their fresh water there. Some of it was several hours away on foot, so they would occasionally stay there overnight. I was only in the jungle a couple of times, but that’s where the people would go to find food. They were hunter-gatherers and did not plant. Sometimes they would cook leaves that they found on trees. Or they would eat fruit, the same fruit, when it was in season, not the variety we assume we need. They ate the grain from sago palm trees for basic carbohydrates. The work they did just to get this staple was strenuous: They would chop down a sago palm tree and open the trunk, then dig out the sago from the pith of the tree. Then they would pack it in the braided bags they had made from young palm branches. After getting it all together in the jungle, they would bring it back to the village, where they rolled it into balls and roasted the balls on a stick over an open fire. They would peel the top skin off and eat that top layer while they continued cooking the rest over the fire –roasting, peeling, and eating each layer as soon as it was cooked, all while sitting around the fire. Sometimes they ate two meals a day, although in general they simply ate when hungry and did not have a fixed mealtime. But they did always eat together. The supply of food from one of these events would last about three weeks. Then they would go back to the jungle and do it all over again. The people also cultivated worms. They would take them back, cook them, and feast on them. But some would pop a live one into their mouths while they were on their way back to the village. They ate fish, but no meat unless someone shot a big animal, which happened maybe once a year. Fish they could get easily. Often they would get tiny shrimp and come home with sacks full. The women did that, using canoes. The men would get the bigger fish.