Oka rides again
Friday, May 2nd, 2008These past few weeks we’ve seen more of Oka out on the lane in the front of the house, slowly cranking the pedals of his blue mountain bike. Readers might remember Oka, our charming, ill-fated Navy vet who stood in as gardener when we arrived at our house last June. He always showed up on time and tried to teach me Indonesian, until I finally decided we didn’t need a gardener and handed him a pink slip.
That was November.
Today I found Oka, shirt off and wielding a hammer in a finely-crafted wooden bungalow just up the lane. The house is built on the square, pre-fab frame of a model that the Red Cross shipped out here after the tsunami. They had a bunch left over when everybody moved into concrete homes and now sell them for $800 a piece. It comes with treated Swedish pine boards and a tin roof. Some Acehnese claimed the design didn’t have enough ventilation and was too hot. But the house Oka was in had been built around this problem. Half of the little floor plan — maybe 300 square feet in all— was given over to a wooden porch. In the enclosed room in the back, they’d installed extra windows and an air conditioner. A roll-down rattan shade shielded the porch from sideways glancing afternoon sun. The house had electric sockets and a faucet from a well along the side. They’d finished it off with gutters, hip orange paint and some shuttering around the door. I wanted one.
“Who made this?” I asked, pacing the wooden floors.
“I did,” Oka said.
“This is amazing,” I said.
“I’ve been sleeping here every night,” Oka said, shooting his toothless smile.
“What does your wife think?”
“No problem.”
Oka was building the little house for his nephew, who used to live down by the harbor but lost his house in the waves.
He said he had a little carpeting to lay down on the porch and then they were done.
He looked well, if still rail thin. I was thoroughly impressed, by the house and Oka. People here make something of what they’re given.
You should make more of these, I said. I’m too old, Oka said.
I offered him some compost from our backyard for his forthcoming garden around the house. He handed me a mango from a nearby tree and said he’d be around to take a look.