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| Indonesia's largest post office, Jakarta |
This is a story about an amazing care package and my foray into the Indonesian postal system. It has a little something for everyone, including what it's like to give a grown-up beef jerky for the first time. Please, read on.
Sometime around Miles' first birthday (which was a year ago), my sister sent him a present. After a while with no package, I forgot it was coming. Then I received a letter from the Indonesian Postal System explaining that a package was being held in quarantine and that I needed to come to the headquarters to pay duty and pick it up. Well who could resist that invitation?
Because I had been living here long enough to know it was a terrible idea to embark on such a mission without proper reinforcement, I asked my Indonesian friend, Amy, to come with me. I met Amy when I posted an ad for a nanny and hired her after one of her previous employers wrote this to me, "I would not have survived my first year in Jakarta without that woman." I soon realized Amy could solve any problem, pretty much anytime. Before long I was asking her to accompany me all over town to help me translate, negotiate, and maneuver this insane city. I credit her with teaching me to drive here. First of all she was brave enough to get in the car with me. Second of all, she offered this helpful advice, "Miss Sarah, just fill the space in the road. That's how you drive like an Indonesian."
She eventually stopped working for us in order to open her own café. We dutifully accepted her invitation to eat there so that we could make her "famous." But Amy and I have stayed friends and have had many adventures, including quite a successful run at rescuing abandoned and mistreated animals. Whole other story.
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| Amy's café. Miles is sitting in the lap of Amy's daughter, Mya, top left. Amy is bottom right with her youngest son, Rainn. |
Anyway, Amy and I set out for the post office headquarters, which is an absolute monster of a building. I know because I traipsed all over it in the course of the subsequent three hours.
We located the quarantine office and I handed over my summons. We were told to wait. There we found a display of various items that, presumably, had been confiscated: hard woods, grains...We waited so long, I asked Amy if she could find out what was going on. She returned to tell me that they were having trouble locating the package.
Frankly, I've been to enough post offices in this world to know there is a certain universality about the speed with which postal work gets done. And I had a small baby waiting for me at home.
So off we went in search of the searching postal workers and found them in a giant room with floor to ceiling boxes. They were picking them up one at a time to look for my package. As far as I could tell, there was zero order to this exercise.
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Diving for packages with Indonesia's finest
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Without asking permission, we joined in the process. Someone in charge protested but I convinced him to let us help because I was pretty sure "I'd recognize the box." Finally it was found..in a box I absolutely did not recognize. I followed it into a new room where it was ceremoniously opened. Before the tape was off I was already hedging. I said, "listen this is from my sister. She sent a present for my son and I think she maybe just added a bag of quinoa or something. No big deal. All I really want is the present. Did I mention it's for my son? He's really cute. Look, here's a picture."
The customs official reacted to none of this, probably because of our sizable language barrier. He grabbed a scale and he opened that box.
It's now been a year but I remember this moment well. A "bag of quinoa" was the least of my concerns. One by one the official removed a multitude of items, all of which looked like potential contraband: a bag of barley, polenta, gourmet pancake mix, a bean soup mix, beef jerky: it was like my sister walked into her pantry and just swept her arm across a few shelves and into that box. Oh and yes, somewhere in there was also a present for Miles.
Each item was weighed and a careful note was ticked onto a clip board. I was really embarrassed because I wanted to be the perfect foreigner and not make any postal officials mad. But, I also really wanted that polenta. I started to calculate in my head how much it was all worth to me. What would I pay to be able to walk into the house and tell my southern husband, "honey, look! we can make grits!"
Our customs friend did a bunch of calculations on a large calculator and explained that I would need to pay a duty on each item in order to "import" it and I also needed to pay the postage for the letter that was sent to me notifying me of this box. Sigh. "What are we talking about here?" He pushed a receipt across the table. All told, I was out Rp8,000, which is about $0.60.
It's hard to adequately describe how satisfied I was with this outcome. I felt like I had just conquered all post offices everywhere. Of course, the celebration was mildly premature b/c we then had to take the receipt upstairs to the cashier's office and, once paid and stamped, take it down stairs to the receiving hall, where the package was walked from the desk where we had left it over to another desk where we were allowed to pick it up. It felt a bit like a sketch on
Saturday Night Live.
When we were back in the car I told Amy that my sister paid sixty bucks or so to send it. That's roughly the equivalent to what an Indonesia making minimum wage would earn in one week, so you can imagine her response. She rifled through the box. "What's this?" She held up the beef jerky.
"You've never had beef jerky?" She shook her head so I opened it and said, "you need to try this. It will change your world."
After a few moments she turned around from the front seat and said, "this is amazing. I'd pay so much more than Rp600,000 for this!"
