Snail Mails

Anytime packages from Basiem or Agats arrived in Bayun, the mail bundle was always the first I checked. Most of the time, I was disappointed. Sometimes I called Basiem, Agats, or even Ewer—the Ursulin Sisters—by radio and asked the people to check their mail boxes for my letters and to make sure the letters for me were not left behind there.

Occasionally letters went missing. A letter from me would move between so many places. From Bayun, it went to Basiem in an aluminum box by boat to Basiem; then to Agats with similar transport mode; next to Ewer as previous; further to AMA Sentani by Cessna plane; finally to the Post Office of Sentani by car. It went through Jakarta before arrived in the post office of Yogyakarta—where Nuning, my Indonesian best friend, studied—or of the USA, where William Katherine Ward lived. They letter from them would have the route.

For the first year, I only received one letter per month on the average—there were months with no letter. Living in Bayun was joyful but also hard. The hardest was living with the loneliness. There were only four straight hairs in Bayun: the American priest I stopped talking to and the Sisters from Moluccas who did not understand what I felt or thought. Reading novels before bed helped reduce the aloneness in the evening, but did not drive away the loneliness. However, in the second year, letters came much more in number and frequency.

During the yearly holiday in Java, I sent a letter to daily KOMPAS—it was not a complaint about its delayed delivery. I had hesitated to send it because it went to the column of matchmaking. It only required the members to be 27 or older for men, 25 for women, and plus a copy of ID card. I was legitimate for it.

A month after returning from holiday, I received a big envelope from KOMPAS. It contained 57 letters from the people who were interested in having relationship with me; one of them was a man! I read them all and decided to reply to 12 of them. There were more letters of interest coming but in the end I only had a regular correspondence with five of them.

I wrote them my life in Pari and they wrote me back many questions. They could not imagine what it looked like the life without car, television, newspaper, magazine, electricity, market, and shop. To one person, I could write a 20-page letter in one mail and I had asked her to save my mails because I wanted them back when we met.

I met her a year later in Jakarta but it did not work out. She stopped sending me mail since then, and even did not respond to my request of sending me back my letters or their copies. I was sad but was not carried out. I met another correspondent but it did not work out either; this time it was my turn not to respond to her next mails. I felt bad because of violating my own principle: ‘do not treat people with the way you do not like to be treated’. Finding ‘Miss Right’ or “Mr. Right’ by mass media is not easy.