From Feb 24th to Mar 22nd, as part of a team of 10 IBM colleagues, I'm working with a Government Institution of the West Java Province of Indonesia. I'm documenting this experience through this blog, including key cultural aspects such as best practices, customs, cuisine, environment, etc. This is an IBM Corporate Service Corps global initiative. We are the fourth team working in Indonesia.
Your comments and questions will be key to broaden my perspective and make this space richer.
This
is the time when you start looking back at the duties and the hopes for
your assignment, experiencing a mix of feelings: on one hand a sense of fulfillment for
what was achieved in terms of personal and business goals, experiences,
etc., and at the same time the awareness that this time off our "normal"
life is coming to an end, as this coming Friday we are leaving Hotel
Magnolia, our clients, Bandung and ultimately Indonesia.
The head of BPPT and his leadership team
Today we had a
meeting with the head of BPPT and his leadership team. We spent three hours presenting and discussing the outcomes of our project. In a nutshell, our main contribution has been to help BPPT extract their
collective knowledge and to consolidate, develop and agree on (at all
levels of the organization) a set of joint BPPT / IBM recommendations to
support BPPT's transformation.
Today's meeting has been an additional, "final" confirmation that our joint efforts had an impact on BPPT and their perception of IBM as something more than "just" an IT company.
This photo: the best gift we could receive
I
underline the word "joint", because this was the key to success. From
the very beginning we worked as a true joint team with our BPPT
counterparts Bpk. Deni, Bpk. Agung and Bpk. Sahal as well as the BPPT coordinators. If I have to mention
one thing that Flavia, Terry and I are bringing home from this
assignment, with no doubts is how easily, productively and with pleasure
we worked together with all people at BPPT, despite our knowledge and
experience come from countries that are at the opposite side of the
world.
This photo on the right is an icon of the climate we lived in these last three weeks.
Thank you BPPT team, we owe you a wonderful experience!
Ciwidey is a small village up in the mountains, about 2.5 hours drive from downtown Bandung. The village is a perfect place to get landscape views of tea plantations, get your wish for strawberries become true and admire Kawah Putih, a lake formed out of one of the two craters of the Mount Patuha volcano.
Dead trees at Kawah Putih
We arrived early at Kawah Putih. The lake is 2430 meters above sea level so in the morning the air is chillier despite the equatorial sun.
As soon as you start going down the path to the lake, you feel the very strong smell of sulfur due to the good deal of steam and sulfurous gas bubbling from the lake. Of course there are a number of stalls selling paper masks! The place is impressive. The color of the water is beautiful and called for a swim, but did not sound as a great idea...
Sulfurous steam
Sulfur "stones"
The morning was filled with some adventure... after jump starting our mini bus we headed to the Kampung Strawberry resort, where we moved into our bungalows under a pouring rain, which - lucky us! - as usual did not last long!
Yolande, Trupty and Maej
What would you think of doing at Kampung Strawberry Resort? How about strawberry picking?
The "toll booth"
The property
Several farmers turned part of their strawberry plantations into an attraction for tourists, where it is fairly easy for us lazy "urbans" to pick strawberries without bending too much...
Saturday afternoon devoted to getting our skin refreshed in a hot spring pool. Being a vulcanic area there are a number of them around Bandung. This one is more of a pool than a real hot spring, but it seemed to be very popular around locals!
On Sunday we headed back to Bandung going through a carpet of tea fields. The harvested tea is packed in large roll bags before being loaded on the tracks that will take millions of tea leaves to the factory for processing:
Patenggang Lake
Last but not least, we could not miss a boat ride on a more "normal" volcanic lake surrounded by tea fields.
Boats and tea plantation on Patenggang lake
Tourists on Patenggang lake
Did you notice my shirt? Today is St Patrick. Best wishes to our colleagues David (Irish) and Terry (American of Irish origins).
We spent the last 3 days together with our counterparts at BPPT summarizing all input received and organizing it in main areas of required change. The result of this effort is a robust set of recommendations that we will be reviewing with the head of BPPT and his leadership team next Monday. These are the changes that BPPT will need to undertake to meet its 2018 roadmap.
A key note is that these recommendations are based on the collective knowledge of the BTTP teams. Our contribution has consisted in helping BPPT extract and organize this knowledge, facilitating at all levels a discussion on needs and priorities.
Cultural corner. In several government offices Friday starts with physical activities to which most of the employees participate.
At BPPT some people get energized by aerobics and some choose soccer instead. We felt it to be a great initiative and.. we joined the group!
One day of work and one day of holiday!
Monday at BPPT: after the brainstorming and review sessions that we had in the past 2 weeks about new services and quality improvements that BPPT plans to deploy in the next future, we spent the day with the BPPT coordinators working on the changes required. We collected a lot of input. Together with our BPPT counterparts - Bapak Deni, Bapak Agung and Bapak Sahal - we will spend the next couple of days to synthesize and organize the input, and prepare a summary recommendation for the head of BPPT and his leadership team.
Today is Neypi, a Hindu festivity mainly celebrated in Bali (where most of the Hindu population resides). Neypi literally means silence. In Bali everyone stays quietly indoors "to convince the evil spirits that the island is uninhabited". In all of Indonesia is a National Holiday, but there is no silence outside Bali! So most of us took the chance to catch up on pending things and to do some shopping!
Speaking of religion... a real highlight for Indonesia is the outstanding level of tolerance and integration between religions. Islam is the religion of 80% of the population, but there are substantial Buddhist, Hindu, Christian and animist populations. Each religious festivity is celebrated as a National Holiday by everyone in Indonesia.
Weekend in Yogyakarta (Yogya or Jogja), the cradle of Javanese civilization and cultural heart of Java.
Borobudur
Rumah Palagan Hotel
THE DAY has been Saturday. At 6.30am (yes, you got it right, six thirty in the morning!), the Jogja team (Flavia, Karen, Manuel, Nitin, Sergio, Terry, Trupty, and Victor) left the hotel to go to Borobudur, the largest and most famous Buddhist temple in the world.
The temple was built over a period of 75 years in the 8th and 9th centuries by the kingdom of Sailendra, out of an estimated 2 million blocks of stone. It was abandoned in the 14th century for reasons that still remain a mystery and for centuries lay hidden in the jungle under layers of volcanic ash.
The place is impressive. We hired a guide that helped us interpret a fraction of the thousands of symbols represented in the building structure and decorations.
Kraton Palace
From Borobudur we (well, actually the driver that we hired for the whole day) drove for about an hour to return to downtown Yogyakarta (even if distances are limited, traffic is awful in most Indonesian cities) to visit the Kraton Palace, the residence of the sultan of Yogyakarta (the spiritual leader of the local Muslim community).
He is the first in his dynasty to have had only one wife and no sons (he has 5 daughters).. The tour guide told us that despite the lack of male offspring, the current sultan chose not to marry more than one wife to be an example to his community.
We had lunch in a wonderful restaurant, owned (according to our driver) by a relative of the sultan.
Water Castle
Water Castle
Two kilometers away from the Kraton Palace is the Taman Sari Water Castle, the place where the forefathers of the current sultan were coming - among other reasons - to swim and relax (now is a national monument). There are 3 pools: one was used for the children, one for the wives, and one for the sultan himself (that would choose which of the wives should share the pool with him at any given time). At the beginning of the century the pool had to be fairly busy... Sultan Hamengku Buwono VIII (the grandfather), had 8 wives and 42 children!
On the way to Prambanan we visited a batik factory (and shop!). We experienced first hand the process to create a batik cloth.
First the design is traced onto the fabric:
Then wax is applied over the penciled pattern. Almost always the original cloth is white or beige. The wax will prevent the pattern to be colored. Sometimes the was is applied without any drawing being penciled ahead of time. This of course requires additional expertise...
Sometimes wax is applied using a stamp:
Next, the cloth is dyed in the first dye bath. The area of the cloth where the wax was applied in the previous step will remain white.
The wax is then removed from the fabric by immersing it in boiling water:
The next steps are a repetition of the three previous steps. New wax is applied where color should not affect the fabric in the next dye bath. This can be over white portions remained in the cloth, or on parts of the newly colored cloth. Of course where the wax was never applied the new color will sum up to the previous one (e.g., if the first bath was red and the new bath is blue, the resulting color will be violet). Then new color is applied, wax is removed, new wax is applied, etc. as many times as required depending on the complexity of the design.
Prambanan
At 4.00pm we left the batik factory/shop to reach Prambanan, the largest and most beautiful Hindu temple complex in Indonesia. 15 km north-east of Yogyakarta, the complex was built in the 9th century and designed as three concentric squares, holding overall 224 temples (most of them were severally damaged by the 2006 earthquake). The inner square contains 16 temples, the most significant being the three temples dedicated to the three great Hindu divinities (Shiva, Vishnu and Brahma) and three small temples dedicated to the animals serving them (Bull for Siva, Eagle for Brahma and Swan for Vishnu). The main temples of Shiva, Vishnu and Brahma are decorated with reliefs illustrating the Ramayana period (history of the Hindu hero Rama, written around 300).
You would need to spend days in each of these sites to fully appreciate the history carved in these stones. Not having time... what best way to complete this intense day than watching a representation of the Ramayana epic at the Yogyakarta Cultural Center?
We spent yesterday and today meeting with BPPT's department heads to review the findings of the brainstorming session we had last Tuesday with the coordinators.
We asked the department heads to prioritize the opportunities and confirm/amend the issues identified by the coordinators.
We got an interesting comment: they expressed their surprise about recognizing IBM not "just" as an IT company, but also carrying business and organizational consultancy competencies. They plan to replicate the methodology we used of (among other things) getting input from all levels of the organizations to identify opportunities and issues to drive BPPT's transformation process.
Cultural corner: BATIK. It is impossible to visit or live in Indonesia and not be exposed to a batik, especially if you work here. Friday is batik day. Everyone - yes, everyone - wears a batik on Friday at the office.
The word batik is thought to be derived from the word 'ambatik' which translated means 'a cloth with little dots'. It is a very old technique to decorate fabric. Molten wax is applied to the fabric to prevent dye penetrating the cloth, those portions of the fabric free of wax accepting the dye. By repeating the process many times, complex multicolored patterns can be produced (more to come when we will be visiting some batik factory in Yogyakarta this weekend). Today, the word batik is often used to indicate a shirt with short or long sleeves, that both men and women can buy in many different colors and patterns. Javanese traditional batik, especially from Yogyakarta and Surakarta, has notable meanings rooted to the Javanese conceptualization of the universe. Traditional colors include indigo, dark brown, and white, which represent the three major Hindu Gods (Brahmā, Vishnu, and Śiva). This is related to the fact that natural dyes are most commonly available in indigo and brown. Certain patterns can only be worn by nobility; traditionally, wider stripes or wavy lines of greater width indicated higher rank. Consequently, during Javanese ceremonies, one could determine the royal lineage of a person by the cloth he or she was wearing.
Other regions of Indonesia have their own unique patterns that normally take themes from everyday lives, incorporating patterns such as flowers, nature, animals, folklore or people.
Depending on the quality of the art work, craftsmanship, and fabric quality, batik can be priced from some dollars (for fake poor quality batik) to several thousand dollars (for the finest batik which probably took several months to make).
Today is my birthday (!!!), this is why the mayor invited us to a private visit at the town hall (if you have believed this for only one second, stop reading this blog).
The truth is, the IBM team was invited together with the local Rotary club to meet the major for an exchange session.
We summarized IBM's contribution in helping the development of the city of Bandung and more in general the West Java Province, and we had a question and answer session to get the major's point of view on the city issues and priorities.
Very very interesting meeting! A mix of political and (for us) cultural happening.
The highlight of the day, though, for me has been celebrating my birthday in Indonesia with this team. I could not serve better justice to describe the party night than copying Flavia's entry in the team blog.
... The best time of the day was the BIRTHDAY CELEBRATION of my
friend, the lovely Italian SERGIO BERNARDI who makes me laugh every day!!! As a true Italian, he
decided to spend his birthday night doing one of his passions: cooking!
Two wonderful dishes came out: calamari pasta & zucchini pasta!
Sergio and his hobby: cooking!
Everyone helped out under Sergio's direction!!!
Even our Indonesian friend (and team translator), Prima, went to the kitchen!
What a result!!! Delicious!!! (the bottle is olive oil he brought from Italy)
Happy team with the wonderful dinner!
The surprise cake we bought!
"Selamat Ulang Tahun , Sergio!" = "Happy Birthday, Sergio!"
And
"Dua Puluh Lima, come on!" = "25.000, come on!", because he became
famous for this sentence after trying to bargain our taxi ride for
25.000 rupiahs!
