Being in a Balinese Ramadan

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School Life

High School (grade 9-12) Service Trips
(this is a no brainer!)

All high school students do a service trip in their high school years, and I was curious as to what they do on these trips so attended the presentations. These are not like the residential trips we have in the UK, they offer a service to the community to which they visit. It was amazing. The groups were formed of young people across the different year groups who presented their experiences on the trip – with complete honesty and it wasn’t always easy. Here is a breakdown of where the service trips took place and a snippet of their activities :

1. West Bali Mangroves plantations – A greenstone project by one of the high school students who graduates this year and wishes for the work to continue as a service trip in future years. The students help plant mangroves.
2. Malang – restoring an old building near the sea and installing solar panels. Seeing the results of surfboards from previous visits being used by local children who wanted to show off their skills.
3. Lombok – Teaching local children English, doing fun games and activities – candle making, dodge ball, Batik crafting, Origami and bracelet making.
4. North Bali Reef Conservation – while learning about reef conservation, the young people were incredibly glad to see that local women had stepped in to help with this.
5. Gili shark spotting – monitoring sharks and swimming with them. They found a new one and named it!
6. Nusa Lembongan – volunteering at the seaweed farm. learning about seaweed farming and working alongside the farmers.

I wonder if we can turn our school trips in the UK into service trips for our communities and planet? Especially around growing food and sustainability.

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Learning For Now

The school is currently creating a faculty to promote learning through biomimicry (looking for solutions to todays problems by observing our natural world) and generative work – something I am familiar with as a generative practitioner (thanks to Steven Gilligan, Robert Dilts and Judith Delozier). It is so good to see this happening here and I am excited that Anisa and her fellow students will be one of the first students to pilot the programme.

All answers lie within nature (including for us humans – inside!) and it works in cycles. Seasons (where they exist), our bodies especially the female body and our monthly cycles, our days and nights. Life is a cycle. This ramadan has brought me more awareness of cycles by observing the 5 daily prayers. Helping me to stop and be still before the break of dawn, when the sun is at its highest point, mid afternoon, at sunset and at night. Having to stop, pray, remember, reflect and meditate – just 5 mins at its simplest. As someone who used to be so busy doing the doing, this really has been a huge realisation – and I’m far from perfect!

One of the speakers at the school said that nature doesn’t have straight lines or corners, so how do we expect our children to adhere to straight and sometimes rigid “rules”. To be straight and rigid and perfect. Their gifts are random and emerge through the chaos – all of ours do. We are in relationship with everything inside and outside of ourselves and unless we allow our children to explore, how will they learn in the truest sense of the word? Traditional learning environments are too structured and it was only when I began my professional training that I discovered other ways – which do not fit in a traditional classroom. Facilitating this way has been a real gift and an honour. I was told that Balinese dance instructors teach from the back. They teach intuitively – rather than through instruction. What a wonderful example. Another parent shared this week that the education system has been around for around 200 years, and in this time – it hasn’t changed! Doesn’t this feel strange? Wrong even? Surely education needs to evolve?

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Nyepi

Balinese New Year (Nyepi) is a fascinating religious and cultural affair. It is a 2 day event where preparations begin months in advance. The young people in the community come together in their different banjars (effectively the hyperlocal village councils) to create Ogoh Ogohs. These are creations of monsters which are used to collect evil spirits on the eve of Nyepi. There is a lot of banging which happens in and around the house which is believed to cause the spirits in the house to go into the Ogoh Ogoh. These are then paraded down the local high street. Different banjars’ do different things – some even have punch ups! Around midnight on the same evening these Ogoh Ogohs are burnt at the local ceremony – where fire is seen as an element of purification. From 6am the next morning, to 6am on the day after, no one is allowed to turn on lights, light a fire (or cook or clean), use tech or go onto the street. The streets are policed! Even the airport is closed. The result, a 60% saving on electricity for the New Year. The next day everyone heads to the beaches, the mountains or the malls – so it is congested and busy everywhere.

Having learnt about Nyepi and with it being very close to Eid after a month of fasting, we opted to leave Bali. This also coincided with Anisa being off school for a week before Term 4 begins. We thought we would try a Sultanate, so we headed to Brunei for the last few days of Ramadan and Eid, and when we looked at the map we saw how close we were to Borneo and decided to spend a few days there to learn about endangered animals. First-hand experiences which will change the shape of all our lives forever. More on this in the next Blog.

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A Community Treasure – Audrey!

She is one of the most extraordinary women I think I have ever met, and no one knows her as she’s tucked away in her quiet little world in Sibang village, Bali : “Keeping my Ego in check” – I know the feeling!

She worked as a professor/lecturer in Berkley University in California where she met her first husband who was Iraqi Christian. She has 3 children with him and later in life had another son, when she was 60 years of age. She is now 83 years old. He son graduated at the Green School and is now working in the Fire Department in New York, while she remained in Bali.

I can’t even begin to describe her home. A museum? A library? A professors educational den? A real treasure trove of books and antiques. With literature several hundred years old – Greek and Arabic. She has a whole bookshelf on women from the Arabic world. She lives with her 2 dogs and a recent little puppy called Stella. An American woman who converted to islam in Cordoba – quietly, with no fan fare or witnesses – this lady has an amazing spirit. She remembers so much more than I can even try to preserve in my tiny mind, attended the UN conference on the question of Palestine and probably knows more about the Arab world than most people I know.

She has an incredible array of children’s books and reads them to children who come to visit her in her home. Her most favourite thing in the world.

Smart, witty, full of life and a ball of love, I just had to invite her to do a podcast with me. She jumped at the chance. Watch this space as I intend to get her story out there very soon! You can read more about her in this published article – which is one of many.

She coined the phrase “Children need to be Bio-Centric – not ego-Centric”. I’d say adults do too!

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Ramadan

Ramadan has been a blessing in Bali – a real community celebration. Here are some of pictures of our month. We had a wonderful guest join us, courtesy of Ozge who hosts couch surfers and had a young Palestinian doctor from Jakarta stay with her for a few days in Ramadan. Her family are currently in a camp in the south of Gaza. hoping they will survive the current onslaught. I know it’s a generalisation, but the spirit and hope Palestinians have really does inspire me. She was just so happy to be amongst us and spoke little of her home – which I am sure is incredibly difficult to speak about. A desperately horrific situation which can be prevented – even now!

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Tech Update

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Anisa’s reflections

Hi

I love Bali so much.

In Ramadan i did 28 fasts out of 30 which i thought was ok but next year i will do them all.

In my literacy class i had to do a presentation for the fifth graders in a group, individually or in partners. I did it in partners with my friend Ludi. The presentation had to be about something to do with horror or suspense. I was actually quite excited about this and we had to use some dramatic devices. We decided to do a radio talk and it was going to be a murder mystery. I wrote the story and what we were going to say on the radio and then i sent the story to Ludi along with all the characters so she could make character and drug cards because i wanted the story to be about someone planting wrong medication and faking that the murder happened because of a drug overdose. Then we chose a room upstairs which has bean bags and tables and I started to prepared it. We had prebooked a skeleton from the science lab so we carried it up the stairs and put it in a corner of the room (green warung) and i put some clues in it and around the room turning that corner into a ” gardener’s hut” then I turned the other places in the room into other characters rooms .I was skeptical when we got a group of fifth graders because they looked a teeny bit mean and i think i was more scared than they were. However instead of laughing at my American accent which i had talked on the radio they just listened very seriously. And i was very happy because it went quite well. My teacher was there for the whole time too which was scary, but she got to pretend to be a police officer which was a bonus. The fifth graders got a feedback sheet in the end which they filled out.

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Suleiman’s Balinese Ramadan

Experiencing Ramadan in Bali this year was a very different experience to being in the UK.

For those that don’t know, Ramadan is the 30-day period every year where we fast between the hours of sunrise and sunset. No food and no water during daylight hours. As Ramadan is based on the lunar calendar, the dates go backwards roughly 11 days every year. 15 years ago, this would mean fasting at the height of the British summer (approx. 3am-9:30pm). This year we started on the first day of March and ended on the 30^th, so a shorter period of fasting each day (approx. 5am – 6:30pm).

The key challenges are with physiology and sleep:

• Physiology: I can’t talk for everyone who fasts, but my body changes quite quickly to accommodate the lack of nutrition. My stomach shrinks within a day or two, so at Iftar (evening breaking of fast) all the food I have fantasised about eating is suddenly not able to be consumed in the quantities I dreamed of! We won’t mention digestion and constipation, but again the body adapts fairly seamlessly to the new routine. Lack of water and liquid becomes more of an issue than lack of food.
• Sleep: This year, we went to sleep around 10:30pm and got up at 4:15am to ensure we could complete breakfast by 5am. Anisa and Mahnaz had no problems with appetite directly after waking up at that hour, but I struggled with anything other than porridge or fruit. It was then time – after a short prayer – to go back to sleep, but wake up again at 7:30am to prepare for school. I can sleep for Britain at the Olympics, but the constant stop-start meant that for all of us (especially Anisa) the month was characterised by much less sleep than usual. In the UK there would usually be prayers to attend between roughly 8-10pm, but that wasn’t practical given my working hours and how few and far away mosques are here.

Given the above, why is it a month that we all relish and enjoy, and whose departure we mourn?

1. Time: The month is a chance to reset and reflect on life, and our relationship with the world around us and the resources we are lucky to be able to access. We have a new-found respect for food and water. We know – if we have fasted before – that we can do this, it’s just the first couple of days that are tricky. But for the month as a whole, we have no choice except to take a deliberate step back.
2. People: It is a month for community and family and sharing. In the UK, we would get together with family as often as possible to break our fast together in the evenings, with lots of amazing food and sweet treats (which is one of the reasons why Muslims rarely lose weight during the month as we have that daily battle with our shrinking bellies vs food that we end up not being able to refuse!). Also, we often cook and give food to family and neighbours, and receive the same in kind too.
3. Sharing: After a while there is an exhilaration or euphoria that kicks in. We are living the life we want to live. Notwithstanding the religious aspect of feeling closer to your Creator, it is also about the living the modest and centred life that is surely the way humans should be living.
4. Celebration: For children especially, the celebration day after Ramadan finishes (Eid Ul-Fitr) is glorious, a day they look forward to all year, like Christmas Day. Lots of presents, and of course as much food and treats as you can consume. It usually takes me a couple of weeks after the end of Ramadan before I even realise each day that I can eat and drink what I want to. Within 14 days I am back to normal again (eating and drinking until I cannot move, breathe or see out) so the challenge each year, of course, is to extend that period of taking the benefits of Ramadan into the real world. 

One highlight of this Ramadan was that Anisa did 28 of the 30 fasts. I was anticipating she might be able to just do weekends, so to fast whilst at school – and in Balinese heat and humidity – was an immense achievement.

The most amazing aspect for me was how the community came together and celebrated. Our neighbour Ozge was dreading her first Balinese Ramadan as it is always a hugely sociable month in Turkey. But thanks to her cooking a mountain of food every single day – and she and Mahnaz making sure we all went to each others’ houses and inviting other Muslims and non-Muslims – it turned into a riotous timetable of social activity. We met an amazing American Muslim lady, Audrey Shabbas, an eminent and now-retired professor in Islamic and Middle Eastern studies, who has met presidents and poets, and she commented that they had very few Ramadan celebrations in Sibang in the decade and a half she has been in Bali. This year was very different.

The Green School had never held any Ramadan celebrations, either, possibly because there had been so few Muslim students and families in previous years, but this year we had a couple of events at the school too. And Siobhan, our wonderful Australian neighbour, organised an Iftar dinner featuring possibly the best food of the entire month (sorry, Mahnaz and Ozge …).

The most magical experience for me was going to a vegetarian Middle Eastern restaurant in Ubud called La Portal to Shamballah for a buffet dinner. And not just because buffet is the best word in the English language! Before dinner we entered a room along with 12-15 others to listen to live music in the Sufi (mystical Islamic) tradition. It was played by the Egyptian and Russian married couple who own the restaurant, along with dhikr (mantra-like phrases of remembrance) from a Turkish poet and musician. Some of the music was so beautiful it moved us to tears, and then we were all invited to whirl if we would like to. And indeed, some people were able to move and whirl on the spot for half an hour and more in total rapture and ecstasy. Utterly enchanting. Ozge invited the Turkish musician to perform at her house for an especially memorable Iftar evening under the stars. Ozge also happens to be an amazing story-teller, relating traditional Turkish and Arabic folk tales in an almost dazzlingly cinematic fashion.

As Ramadan drew to a close, it coincided with the approaching Balinese New Year. This is celebrated in a riot of noise and colour with the Balinese locals (and Green School students) holding up their respective Ogoh-Ogoh monsters and parading it through their neighbourhoods (see Mahnaz’s blog above). Directly afterwards, we then had Nyepi, which I have mentioned in a previous blog, a day of complete seclusion and silence.

The complication for us was that Nyepi fell on a Saturday and the following week was a school holiday. So, if we were going to make the most of my limited annual leave, we would have to miss Nyepi and travel a couple of days beforehand, partly as the roads and airports are chaotic in the run-up to the day of seclusion.

So, we opted to travel (details in the next blog though I think Mahnaz may have given the game away), therefore we can’t tell you what Nyepi was actually like to experience, although the Balinese that we spoke to mentioned that it was beautiful, very quiet, and a time for family to reset and reflect. And yes, monitors really were roaming the streets making sure no-one was sneaking to each other’s houses and no lights were being turned on!

Minor quirky tale of the month: One evening, we were playing the excellent card game ‘Herd Mentality’ which we had taken to Bali (thanks to Liz and Colin who introduced us to it). You have a set of cards with questions like: “What is the best superpower?” and you all have to write down answers, and you get points if you anticipate what others have written (i.e. points for following the herd mentality). It’s nice when there are more than the three of us taking part, so we played it recently with Ozge, her husband Ahmed, and their two children, although I didn’t ask some of the questions that were a little Anglocentric.

Once card asked: “Name something you take into the bath with you.” Of course, the three Brits wrote down answers like ‘book’, ‘phone’, ‘rubber duck’, etc. Our Turkish friends, though, had to clarify and say that they don’t generally have baths in their houses, but showers. Though, of course they do go to hammams to have a proper bath. So, their answers were “shampoo” and all the toiletries you would take with you to the Turkish baths. Well, I found it quite interesting.

Mind you, when a later card asked: “What is something that scares a dog?” some answered: “water” or “fire” or ” a stick”. Ahmed and I both wrote “a bigger dog”. So maybe cultural differences are a little overstated, and dads are the same all over the world!

Date : 12/04/2025

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