Saung Kiky. Part 1

The rain had just stopped outside my window. The pedestrian sidewalk was no longer visible. A waterway, the street in front of me had became. Slowly the flow of water was moving to the north towards the sea. And as if nature had just calmed itself, these serene sounds of the breaking waves buoyed my mind as well. The sun started to regain its strength. Inhaling my cigarette, my memory wandered off to a place that I just visited not too long ago, in fact it was just only yesterday: Saung Kiky.

I was just wondering of how far did we need to ascend on this rather steep and narrow path upon Gadog, Puncak area. And then about ten minutes later, my companion directed me to the right, prior to descending from the car and opening the gates. It was just an unmarked green gate of a simple house. There was this path leading down from the point we parked, there we would find this sparse open-air hangar type of construction. Two embak-embak, female employees, were chatting while sorting and packaging freshly bloomed chrysanthemums. One man was rearranging Christmas bloom pots. We looked rather confused before another man came down from a green house.

“Can I help you with anything?”

“We have an appointment with Pak Kiky”

And then this humble gentleman named, Pak Kiky, the proprietor, greeted us from another green house and asked us to join him up there.

We were awestruck at the beginning. In front of us laid thousands of ready to harvest chrysanthemums in white, yellow, pink and red according to their beds. We said our how do you do-s and then he walked us through his green houses. There was a nursery in which you would grow your seeds into a ready to plant stage. There were this empty cultivated beds, half grown chrysanthemum beds, ready to bloom beds, and finally the ready to harvest beds. Each bed of earth rows are clearly labeled, marked and dated.

“We harvest everyday in here,” he said.

“To keep us busy, we need to create the entire lifecycle here in the plantation. As you see, we start from there, and then the next day we will tend the next bed, in order for us to be able to harvest everyday”.

He talked about a certain dealer that wished to buy 300 bundles of chrysanthemums per-day but he was only able to supply 50 of them. The market are out there, he said.

“Your friend here,” he pointed to his friend, my companion driving up there.

“Is the guy who has the keys to the markets, but he doesn’t have any land to work on. So if you guys are interested, please go ahead. Big cities need more than what we can provide daily” he said referring to Bogor and Jakarta.

It was of course a very interesting proposal. While the walk only needed about 10 minutes around the 4,000 meter-square area, the talk in-which-I-am-most-humbled-about took two hour and a half.

He was describing, or lecturing if you will, of a very simple but deep farmer’s philosophy: give back to nature whatever you take from nature.

“You see that little barn down there? That’s were we keep our lambs. We use the manure from the lambs to give nutrients to the land and to the flowers. And then we use the money from the flower to buy that paddy-fields down there, to grow our own organic rice.”

“Organic? You mean no pesticides?”

“That and dirt-cheap organics I mean”

(To be continued in Part. 2 below)