Rongkhla Tiger Festival

Last month some friends and I visited Nongtalang, a village south of Jowai where they speak the War language. My Pnar friends were going to document and record clips for the news channel, and I went along for the experience. A couple of my Australian friends came as well, since the event was a local festival that happens relatively rarely. This festival is called Rongkhla, and can only occur after a large cat has been killed ("khla" means 'tiger'). You can read more about the festival at my friend Rev. Mohrman's blog here.

We really enjoyed the festivities - the dancers wore very colorful clothes and the music was lively. Most of the dancers wore traditional clothes, and people who liked their dancing would clip money to their shirts. It was quite an exciting experience. After the main event, the cat was carried down to the edge of town where the memorial stones stand, and at the end of the day the meat of the animal was thrown out to the onlookers. We were told that if you can eat a piece of the meat it brings good luck for the rest of the year.

For some video of the event (including where I got to drive on the Indian side of the road), check out this link or watch below: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5VVfpkjNkDE

Nartiang Monoliths

Last week my friend Ruhi took me along with some other friends to Nartiang, which was once the summer capital of the Jaintia kings, who ruled most of this area from the 1500's until they were deposed by the British East India Trading Company in the late 1800s. When the power shifted, trade shifted as well, so that the once-prosperous town of Nartiang is a quiet backwater.

However, it still boasts the finest collection of monoliths in the area, on a special site where the king's soldiers gathered and erected large stones and set huge flat slabs on smaller rocks to create stalls where people could display their goods and elders could gather for meetings. It was quite an incredible experience. From pictures I had seen the stones looked rather small, but once there for myself I could see that it was more like a giant's playground. Just to give you an idea of the scale, here I am standing on a huge rock slab next to one of the stones. If you come to northeast India, this is one sight you won't want to miss.

Below is some video from our visit: http://youtu.be/YDk-IwlIwfU

Krangsuri Falls

Earlier this week my friend Peter was in town looking for speakers of a different language. To aid in his search I introduced him to Ma Jowai, an older Pnar gentleman who knows a lot of people and has been helping me learn Pnar. Ma Jowai invited us to go with him to another waterfall, Krangsuri. So on wednesday we hit the road. Along the way we stopped to take pictures at an ancient bridge made by the Jaintia kings in the 1600-1700s. Just to give you an idea of the scale of the blocks they used, here's a picture of me and Ma Jowai on the bridge.

We continued on to the falls - it was a beautiful day for visiting the falls, with warm sun and slight breeze. Peter and I marveled at the stonework for the path on the way down, and another bridge along the way with a really cool arch. We walked around on the top of the falls, where the water escaped through the holes in the sandstone. I scoped out a spot to jump from when there's more water. The drop is only about 30 feet, and the water was so clear you could see where the boulders were.

Down at the bottom the overhang was pretty extreme, thus the word "krang" in Pnar, which describes this kind of cave. I'm told that the word "suri" is a form of "churi", which is the old word for sword, as this is the place where the Jaintia king's soldiers would sharpen their swords. I'm looking forward to coming back in the summer, when the water is more extreme.

Rynji Waterfall

On Sunday some friends and I visited Rynji waterfall near Larymbai here in the Jaintia Hills. Seven of us borrowed a friend's Gypsy jeep and drove an hour and a half to the area where the waterfall was, carrying drinks and food along with us for a cookout. Once we reached the river where the falls were, our path took a slight detour through the stream and up the other bank before we finally reached a parking spot at the head of the path to the waterfall.

The waterfall was really beautiful, and huge. We started a campfire above the falls next to a small lake, and as lunch cooked (have I told you how good Pnar food is?) we explored the rocks, had some drinks, and generally chilled out. It was awesome to be with friends and try to understand what they were saying in Pnar. I found I could catch most of it, and could even respond - my production skills definitely need work. The bag of styrofoam plates we had brought blew into the lake, so I stripped down and jumped in after it and almost froze to death. Fortunately the sun was shining and the wind dried me off pretty quickly so I could change into warm clothes once I got out.

On the way back after a really fun day, at the ford where we crossed earlier a couple big Tata trucks were blocking the road, getting washed in the river. So we took a breather and hung out on the rocks where some of the locals were making dinner. I took the chance to scale a huge rock and bathe in the sun (from which I took this picture). What a wonderful day!

Jowai

After a week in Shillong with some friends, I arrived in Jowai. This is a busy town that serves as the gateway from the Jaintia Hills district to the rest of India. There's a lot of coal mined in the area and all the big multicolored Tata trucks ply their slow way along the windy one-lane roads through the town. I spent one night with my friend Henry in Nongbah village, which is where Kiang Nongbah, the famous freedom fighter of the Pnar, hails from. I stayed in Henry's wife's house, which is just up the hill from the house where Kiang Nongbah lived, which is now home to the village headman. Henry told me that all of Kiang's family was hunted by the British, so that to this day no one knows who his descendants are.

The next morning I returned to Jowai where some other friends helped me find a room near the Presbyterian Mission Hospital. I've enjoyed staying there for the past week or so, though the room is rather bare. At a local woodworking shop I ordered a small dresser, and another friend may be able to build me a rack for hanging clothes. My time has been spent working on a phonology paper and building a dictionary for Jowai-Pnar and getting example sentences. I'm hoping to begin recording traditional stories in the next week or two.

NEILS 7, Guwahati

I arrived in India last weekend in time to attend the NEILS 7 conference. The abbreviation is short for the North-East Indian Linguistics Society, and this year there were quite a few great presentations on the many and diverse languages of the northeast area. I got to meet quite a few local linguists from Guwahati, as well as those from farther afield in India (JNU, Mysore, Kerala), from Switzerland, France, and a few working on Burmese languages, and quite a few from Australia (ANU and Melbourne U). It was great to meet others working in this area, and after the conference ended I got a ride from Guwahati to Shillong with some of the folks from ANU who will be working near Shillong. In the picture below from left to right: Peter Appleby, myself, Paul Sidwell, and Keren Baker, at a lookout point just outside Shillong.

Tioman Island

Here's some video from a vacation to Tioman Island. I went with a few friends a couple weeks ago - apparently we hit the only weekend with gorgeous weather. It was really amazing. Unfortunately my camera battery died and I didn't get any pictures, but at least the videocamera worked.

http://youtu.be/JWyq8MzGB0E

Desaru Day Trip

This past Saturday I took a day trip to Desaru in Malaysia. We had an awesome tour guide named Shirley, who guided us through the scenic bits of the journey, via the chocolate shop, then Henry showed us his fruit farm (we filled up on all sorts of fruit including many kinds of durian) and we also visited an ostrich farm (and I fed a cassowary!) and took a river cruise to see the endangered fireflies. Lighting the wishing lantern was the perfect end to a day full of feasting and fellowship. Here's a short vid:

http://youtu.be/rCSUZx4Fm2c

Men vs. Wild (Malaysia)

This past weekend my friend Sam and I took an overnight trek through the jungles of Malaysia. While not quite a "Man vs. Wild" equivalent, we did manage to have an adventure. We took some tips from AngryAngmo.com's 2009 blog post about Kota Tinngi forest reserve in southern Malaysia, not too far from Singapore. Our criteria were location (close to Singapore), challenge (packing everything in and out), safety (we didn't want to die), and scenery (waterfalls). Kota Tinngi met all that criteria quite nicely, though the blog post didn't quite prepare us for everything we found.

We met up at Johor Bahru for breakfast at the Oldtown Coffee shop just inside the City Centre mall at the border, and then proceeded to hire a taxi to the Kota Tinngi waterfall park. The taxi price was a bit more than what the blog stated, but inflation is expected, of course. It took about an hour to get to the Kota Tinngi waterfall.

Once we arrived, we almost entered the park, but the lady said there was no camping, so we checked the blog post and realized that it said to follow the river/stream just in front of the park. We weren't clear whether to walk upstream in the river itself, but managed to find a path along the bank that wound through a palm-tree grove, following a group of day-hikers, until finally we had to cross the river in order to stay on the trail, which we discovered to be marked with red and white striped plastic bags.

The trail itself was pretty well marked from then on, and it was a pretty easy hike to the first real waterfall (crossing the stream occasionally), where we left the day-hikers. Here's a group shot of us all together. On our own, Sam and I continued upstream, and this is where the going got quite a bit tougher. At several points we were in the river itself, wet up to the waist, as we followed the markers. Had that been more clear in the blog post, we would have been sure to bring slightly different footgear. A word to the wise who follow - plan to get wet! As it was, we soaked our tennis shoes and clothes through, and simply had to be extremely careful when climbing the rocks and waterfalls, as many of the surfaces were slick from the water.

The climb was very picturesque, and since it was our first time, there were a few places where we had to pause to search for the trail marker. Where none was evident at first, we simply continued along the river until we spotted one. There were also well-placed rope at spots where it would otherwise have been difficult to climb. We weren't prepared for the amount of bouldering/climbing that we had to do, but took it in stride. Fortunately, it didn't rain - had it done so we might have called off the hike.

It took us about 3 hours, with rest stops periodically, to make it to the top, where the river and the terrain pretty much leveled out. We set up camp on a slight hill next to the stream. Someone had strung a clothesline between two trees, which we used to hang our wet clothes on, and then took a rest in the pool next to the camp. It was relaxing after the climb. We did some exploring around the camp, noticed some deer tracks (we saw the deer later that night coming down for a drink at the stream) and saw a buzzard flying around. Dinner we cooked on our SuperCat alcohol stove - quite filling and tasty noodles - then made a fire and sat around talking for the rest of the evening.

After a good night's sleep (it rained a bit, but we stayed relatively dry), we took our time getting up, ate breakfast, and headed back. Going down was faster (though still a bit treacherous from the wet), only about an hour or two, and we stopped several times to swim in the waterfall pools. On returning we found a taxi to take us back to JB, had a late lunch, and headed home to Singapore. All in all, a great weekend!

Josh Garrels and Context

It has taken me awhile to write this post, but first let me say that if you haven't heard Josh Garrels' new album "Love, War, and the Sea In Between", you should check it out here: http://www.noisetrade.com/joshgarrels

I was really looking forward to hearing this album, as I've been kept updated by his newsletter and run into him in various times and places in the last couple years - Lancaster, Bushnell, North Carolina. So when he announced it was out and available as a free download, I got it. At the time, I was on fieldwork in India, and internet connection was a bit spotty so I sat in a friend's internet cafe in Shillong for 2 hours in order to get the whole (large) file. It's a testament to the world's increasing globalization that even that was possible, as it probably wouldn't have been even a year or two ago.

So this was the context in which I put my earbuds in, turned on my ipod, and listened to the whole album in one shot. And... it kind of fell flat. I wasn't sure what to think, since I've always liked the music Josh makes, and all the reviews I read beforehand had nothing but good things to say about the album. So I forgot about it and continued to work on documenting Pnar.

About a month later I had been in the US for my sister's wedding, which was pretty awesome, and after two weeks I was on my way to NYC to catch the airplane back to Singapore. On the greyhound bus I had just finished a large portion of the 40+ page paper I was working on, and needed a break. I found Josh's album on my ipod and started to listen. It was really good! I remember we had just got on the NJ turnpike to head into NYC, and I thought - "why is this so much better than when I listened to it in India?!"

It struck me that in India, a lot of the things that Josh writes/sings about, and even the music styles he uses, simply didn't connect with the world I was experiencing. It was as if the issues he deals with have no grounding in a non-western, non-american context. Which totally makes sense - I think how my music doesn't necessarily translate to people outside my own particular contexts. I think that speaks to the role of the artist as both a creator and reflector of culture, and thus how important it is to know the context to which you intend to speak, which Josh seems to have figured out pretty well.

At the same time, we would like to say that art transcends culture, and that this is our goal as artists. But how well does that work? Take your art outside your own culture and I guess you'll find out.

A Package from a friend

I got home last Thursday to find a package waiting for me! Anyone who has ever received a parcel overseas knows that it just brightens your whole day, and this was no exception. My good friend Joy Ike sent it to me from Pittsburgh, and included some wonderful goodies and music to help me get by "with a little help from my friends". One of my flat-mates recorded video of my opening it to find some savory and not-so-savory treats. Incredible-ness. I was/am astounded.

http://youtu.be/IJQO2P0LK-s

New Albums

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W51IrxP-_bM

I've been in the throes of paper-writing for two of my classes, and the papers are due next Friday, December 10th. However, I did want to give an update on the extra-curricular activities I've been involved in, most notably recording songs for another album or two. You can watch the video above for a preview.

My main project is a new solo album of 12 songs which will tentatively be titled 'Home' as many of the songs deal with this theme. I've had some really crazy experiences over the last year and a half (some of which are on this blog) with touring to promote my first album, trying to figure out direction, experiencing intimacy and loss, and traveling half-way around the world, which have really made me ponder the meaning of home. What is it and how do I get there? In this album I suppose I continue one of the themes from the first album, 'Breathe Deep'.

The second set of songs are more worship-oriented prayers and psalms that I've written mostly over the course of the last year as I've struggled with the theme of 'home'. They're directly or indirectly influenced by the time I've spent alone with God, fellowship with friends, and particularly encouraged by the album of sacred songs, '12 Gates', that I worked on with Matthew Monticchio and others. There's two kinds of these tunes - new hymns (some of which we've done in church) and general worship songs (some of which could be congregational). So I'm not sure if that'll turn into two EPs or if I'll just release a full-length album. I welcome your feedback!

It's been really great to record guitar and vocals with the guys at SoundFarm here in Singapore, and later this week I'll be doing another session to get vocals. I'll be taking the tracks back with me to the US for Christmas, where I'm hoping my friend Ross can lay down some drums while I'm there, and maybe I can get some other musicians to contribute as well. I'll try to upload some samples as the arrangements get finalized.

Karaoke!

Some of my friends recently had a birthday party celebration at K-Box, which is a local karaoke shop. They provide a full buffet with pretty good food and plenty of it, all you can eat desserts and ice-cream. It was really good. They also had a large selection of songs to choose from so I was able to sing songs in English (Hotel California, I Will Always Love You, etc..) and try to follow along as my friends sang in Mandarin and Cantonese. It was pretty cool - by the end I had learned some new Chinese characters. Here's a short video of the room we rented.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9fPhMxM5PBc

Pulau Ubin

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7PeNM_LkBVk

NTU's Graduate Student Club organized an outing to the local island Pulau Ubin, which is just off the coast of Singapore. We took a 10-minute ferry ride (after a 45-minute bus ride) to get to this island, where granite is still quarried, and rented bikes for the day. It was good clean fun and we even saw some wildlife. Some monkeys, a wild pig, lizards, birds - the usual, I suppose. As you can tell from the video, I got the best bike.

Afterwards we got ice cream at a local vendor's stall and talked about life, culture, philosophy, and politics (among other things). As one of my twitter friends (@veve4heart) commented after seeing the video, "Ok...two things, A. It looks HOT over there...and B. Any country with Mint Chocolate Chip ice cream can't be all bad." Right on both counts! Ice cream is one of many reasons to come to Singapore.

Jiao Zi - Chinese Dumplings

The other day, some friends invited me to where they were staying for Chinese dumplings. Having experienced the dumplings before, but not having made any myself, it was quite the experience. First they made me knead the dough (with all my baking and clay-kneading experience I was happy to oblige) and then we rolled out the dough and filled it with meat filling before cooking the dumplings. It reminded me a bit of the meat pies that I would help my mom with in Ghana - though instead of wheat-based flour we used rice flour, and instead of baking them we boiled/steamed them.

Chinese Hot Pot

My friend HaoShu and I (see a post below for a link to his books) were invited by another friend for dinner at his house, with his family and a couple others. Dennis lives in a condo and invited us to come early and swim. It was a pretty neat pool, complete with waterfall (have you ever gotten a massage from a waterfall? pretty much the greatest thing ever).

Needless to say, we were pretty famished by the time dinner rolled around. Chinese 'hot pot' (huo guo) is a traditional meal prepared in a single pot. Raw ingredients are selected and people just put in what they want and it boils up. It's usually meat followed by vegetables and noodles, but everyone has their own way of doing it. While the food is cooking, you just sit around and talk and catch up. It was lots of fun! Watch the video above to see how it's done.

Eating Durian

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=07QuaJJFNeo

While I was staying with Ming-San and Rose and their family, I had the opportunity to try Durian, which is the favorite fruit of Malaysians and Indonesians. It smells a bit like rot, but if you can think of it as old fruit rather than old other things, you are well on your way to enjoying its flavor.

We got four different kinds: King, Pork Fat, Butter and Malaysia 100-year-old Tree, and I got to taste each of them. Durian is rather a unique flavor in general - a bit like really thick, heavy, rich pecan ice-cream. But the texture is a bit more like mango, and depending on the size of the individual fruit the seeds can be rather large. The seeds are brown (and bitter-tasting, I'm told), but surrounded by a yellow-white pulp (again, the color varies depending on the individual fruit).

The King and Butter kinds were very creamy and mild, slightly sweet, while the Pork Fat had slightly more of a bite to it. The Malaysia 100-year-old Tree was the most flavorful - you could almost taste coffee or bits and pieces of other fruits/flavors. It was pretty interesting. I might have to try it again at some point. The flavor was pretty rich though - 4 seeds (1 from each) were all I could handle.

New Old Hymns

A short essay I wrote about writing hymns has just been posted on the New Old Hymns blog/site, an effort by Sandra McCracken and other Nashville-based musicians and theologians. Check it out and give your feedback, let us know what you think, and spend some time on the site checking out the other great resources!

http://www.newoldhymns.com/why_write_hymns/

Broken World

Yesterday I heard that a friend died. Aimee was a fellow MK who grew up with my friend Katrina in Taiwan. I go to church in Lancaster with some of her cousins. We met a couple years ago around Christmas time when they were visiting the cousins and we road-tripped up to State College area to visit Katrina and her family - she didn't like driving, so I drove. Over the past couple years we kept in touch and I visited her in Charlotte, NC where she was working as a teacher. We went out to eat on my 26th birthday.

On thursday around 7am a pickup truck crossed the center-line and smashed into her head-on. Both cars were traveling at about 55mph. They still don't know why the driver of the other vehicle crossed the line. Apparently the driver doesn't remember either, and there's no evidence of drugs/alchohol or cellphone use. She was on her way to school. She was 25.

I wrote a song last night, but it doesn't do justice to the injustice of death. When my brother died 13 years ago I couldn't find the right words either. Maybe in a million years I'll be able to. Right now all I can do is strain to produce depth of emotion to express the pain of this broken world. I would despair if I didn't know the Intercessor.

New Recordings!

The recordings I did for 'Of Whales' are now finalized and mastered by my friend Mark Peteritas! Check out the Of Whales Myspace site to listen to the recordings! Feedback is ALWAYS welcome. =)