Write Everyday At Blogger

Writing is difficult. Nobody disagrees with that-especially in English because English isn't my mother tongue and because writing is not my habit either.

So here i am , 4 o'clock in the afternoon, in front of a computer inside a cubicle in a warnet-stands for warung intrenet (literaly means Internet kiosk)-on Margonda Street, Depok, Indonesia, desperately trying to produce a piece of writing-in English!

Imagine that i have to express myself in a language that is foreign in my country, with all the rules of grammar and tenses that are pulling me backwards, hindering my fingers to move and making the words come out so slow that could bore a clown.

But, then again, i have to be able to get rid all of those obstacles and see them as challenges. Absorb every energy the pulls produce and use it to make the brain produce more words and more words.

So, that's all for the first page of my blog. Hopefuly this one page will generate thousands more pages. Just like confucius said-a thousand mile journey starts with one step.

If you mention Sumanto here in Indonesia, then, almost everybody will associate that name with the notorious Sumanto that shocked Indonesia with his weird deed-eating a human corpse!


A few years ago Sumanto, a native of Purbalingga, a small town in Central Java, dug out a fresh-burried body of an old lady and ate it. He said that he did it because he wanted to get supernatural powers.

After that he was sentenced to jail by the local court.

During his times in jail, Sumanto was behaving like any other normal man, infact he has had a good behaviour so that the government decided to release him this year. "He was behaving nicely and infact he was quite active", Said the Warden. "He was good in catching pest around here such as rats, cockroaches and cicak ( small lizards that crawl on the walls). But we made sure that he didn't eat them. We told him that if he do that he will get punishment".

He was also giving good responses when answering questions from a reporter about his realese. But, when the reporter ask him wheather his going to eat corpses again when he's free, he looked tense, upset and started to clinch his teeth-the reporter ask him no more question.

But the future doesn't look so bright for him. He said that he would rather spent the rest of his life inside prison rather than to live out here. He had friends and free meals. His family rejected him if he should go back to his village.

He was confuse of what he would do when he is released. He had no job and nobody. But some people really had an interesting idea. They offered him a job to work as a debt collector.

It's fasting month in Saudi Arabia, India, America, and in my beloved country Indonesia. This year, and last year, I'm fasting in Depok-a small town on the ouskirt of Jakarta where to many people moving in while the city infrastructures are not ready yet.


here's a trend in Depok-perhaps in other cities throughout Indonesia as well- that during Ramadhan a few hours before the time to break the fast (around 6 pm) some people are becoming instant entrepreneurs by selling ready-to-eat food on a "Ramadhan Bazaar", in a market even on the rode side. They sell any kinds of food that usually show up only on Ramadhan, such as kolak (a thick sweat delicacies containing palm fruit, banana, sweat potato), es kelapa (a sweet drink made from the water of a young coconut fruit, along with its meat, a little liquid brown sugar and some ice cubes), dates, and timun suri (a kind of white-flesh pumpkin-because of its tasteless nature, people usually have it with syrup) and other indonesian cuisine.

Speaking of food and drinks, it's 5 pm now. So its around one more hour before i can have them. To wait for the maghrib-here we call it ngabuburit- people do it in many ways. Some are staying at a mosque reading the Koran, the youngster are usually hanging out at malls or riding thier motorcycles around the city and some... well posting their blog-just like me.

Posting a blog while fasting is quite enjoyable. Surprisingly with an empty stomach my mind becomes more cooperative so i can produce this writing. And by writing i didn't even notice that the time to break the fast is near. I mean instead of doing other things that are, maybe, useless and might breaking the essence of fasting itself, writing is an act of an angel.