What I Learned from Falling into a Shit Canal in Indonesia
You really don’t fully comprehend the essence of life until you fall into a channel of shit and bacteria in a developing country outside a blaring rock concert thrown by entrepreneurs and corporate investors.
[edit: A good friend suggested to me that I should clarify that I wasn’t looking at my mobile phone and I also was not drunk. I had only had one drink and it wasn’t a very strong one. So, no, I was not distracted. It’s just really hard to see your way around a dark Bali road at midnight.]
It’s the indignity of breathing in human waste at such close range while thousands of dollars of electric equipment dazzle the night sky with lasers, and men who help invest hundreds of millions in funding to startups each year sip vodka drinks that makes it all real.
Three days ago, after leaving a party of startup founders, corporate investors and jet-setting conference organizers, I fell eight or nine feet into a pitch black sewer.
I should start this reflection with a piece of advice. Do not walk down dark roads at night in the developing world without a friend, or without some kind of lighting equipment.
Countries like Indonesia, and its neighbors in Southeast Asia, are laced with open sewer canals that line the roads, which are often unlit. It is not likely that you will fall in if you are paying attention and using a flashlight, but if you do..
If you do…
If you should so happen to be walking along in your white dress shirt and black dress pants and you should fall eight or nine feet into a pitch black drainage canal, you really should try to remember to do the following.
Relax. Take it all in. There’s a reason for it.
So, How Did This Happen?
The party had gotten a little stale. Everyone was sitting in groups and I swear, as you passed by them, someone would raise his voice and say something like, “and so we started with two million in funding…” and then it would fade into murmuring, swallowed up by techno music or the hired local band singing Adele.
So, I decided to go home.
First, I was walking down a steep drive, following a man in a white shirt up the road ahead, and bright flashing strobes from a concert flickering over head.
And then, I was falling through pitch black darkness almost head first my arms spreading out before me as I began to comprehend what had happened.
I thought: “Oh, what the… I’m falling. How…” BOOM!
There I lay, arms crumpled under me, on several uncomfortable rocks, smelling nothing but the shit and waste that was filling every pore of my body and getting in my mouth.
Here’s what I learned about the experience.
Save yourself, because nobody else will
It took me 1/300 of a second to figure out that I was not in the ideal position to be rescued. It was completely dark outside. I was at the bottom of a drainage ditch. No streetlights. No traffic.
I didn’t have a lot of time to think about how it happened, but I did wonder, why now? Why here?
I also could not breathe. All of the air had been thrown from my lungs, and I suddenly noticed I was groaning, trying to grab whatever oxygen molecules I could at the bottom of the fetid methane-filled canal.
Adrenaline took over. In about two seconds I felt my body swell with power.
I pushed myself up, wincing, and crossed the ditch. And then for some reason I was able to grab onto the concrete barrier separating the ditch from the road and hurl myself onto the road.
That’s when I saw the flashlights.
A benevolent energy takes over in a crisis
The flashlights were the only movable things I could see. I walked towards them.
Three or four men approached me, running. They slowed as they neared. I could see them looking at me, confused.
“Do you have any water?” I asked. “Clean water?”
One man took my arm and led me to the side of the road where, astonishingly, a green garden hose lay wrapped around itself, connected to a spigot.
Had this happened before?
He started washing me down. Everyone was talking in Bahasa. I asked if they had any thing to treat the wounds. A woman emerged from behind a wall, she was carrying iodine and bandages.
It all felt surreal. She began to inspect my wounds, and clear away the debris in them. She dotted iodine into each one. It stung like a mother fucker.
But I knew that at least the risk of infection had diminished.
I began to feel very lucky to have fallen where I did.
Walking into the unknown may harm you, but your emergence from the other side is the experience of grace.
I chose to walk home under my own power.
Drenched from head to toe, my sneakers squishing and squeaking under me, I walked along the main road to my villa, about ten minutes away.
I walked around dogs, and I walked along a tributary that took dirty water to the same fetid swamp channel I had emerged from. I felt nauseous and scared.
How the hell had that happened? I had been to the venue all day, visited it twice. I knew that it was surrounded by a drainage ditch. Why on earth had I fallen in?
I spent most of that night really worried that I would get encephalitis or hepatitis, maybe even tetanus.
I panic-messaged friends at home and they all said the same thing.
“Dude, go see a doctor first thing.”
“Do you think I am going to die,” I asked one.
“No, but don’t take chances,” she said. “I believe if you keep worrying about it you may even invite the very thing you fear!”
Heavy shit.
I tried to sleep. In between sleeping and waking, I really thought a lot about what happened just a few hours before. It was a startling experience. Sore and unable to really get comfortable, I concluded that I really could have died. And I began to think of all of the ways I could have died, and of the causes.
Despite my friend’s admonishment, I couldn’t stop thinking that I maybe swallowed some typoid virus, or was slowly incubating a deadly brain bacteria that would start with a sore throat and end with me hooked up to life support back in Singapore or Hong Kong.
By five a.m., half awake, I experienced this vibrating sense of clarity. My body felt tranquilized. I lay there looking up at the mosquito net and feeling peaceful.
There was nothing I could do. It had happened. I had fallen into a shit-filled sewer river.
I told myself, “You will have to be okay with this.”
The Buddhist believe life is an illusion and our attachment to it and desire is what makes life horrible
One minute you can be at a party dressed in a nice starched white shirt, looking out at the beach, relaxing with a mojito, while a Spanish woman chats next to you with your friends.
The next, you could be up to your neck in human waste.
We carry around our own portable Floridas in our head.
My mom is from Florida. I remember having to go to church every Sunday to pray about my grandmother’s lung cancer and leukemia.
I was told to pray, and ease her pain. I did what I could. I learned from that childhood that you keep all of your prayers inside your head, and your heart, and you let them go every night and on Sunday.
You give them up to The Lord. Who answers them. Or doesn’t.
It was my grandmother’s death when I was eight, then my aunt’s death when I was ten that really cemented my connection to reality.
The death of a loved one really drives home the misery of being alive.
I learned, through pattern recognition and grief, to cling to the hopelessness of life and to not let go. And to pursue worldly things to ease the pain.
Like coming to Bali, to party and hang out in the sun at this conference.
That morning, as I thought about what a big mistake that thinking was, it began to occur to me that I had really been smacked with reality.
Those things I was pursuing were not all that great. They were temporary.
The reality was staring me in the face. We lived in a really precious and precarious world.
Smile. And counter any fear or doubt with generosity and kindness. It heals you faster on the inside than anything else.
The next morning, one of the men came to the villa and served breakfast.
He offered to take me to the doctor, and I said that was a good idea.
On the way there, I began to have serious doubts about whether the health care would be any good. I had never been to a doctor in an emerging market country. I had even heard a guy the same day joking about how he hoped he would not get bitten by any dogs on his scooter.
“I do not think you want to get a rabies shot in Indonesia,” he said. A couple of the tech bros around him nodded.
The doctor was great.
About 28 years old, she explained everything she was doing as she examined my cuts and my body for any damage. She explained her recommendations for shots.
“Badunga area and Seminyak have a lot of horses, so if you have not had a tetanus vaccine in the last five years, we can give you one.”
I had, but I said, just to be safe, shouldn’t we do something?
She pulled out a ampule of tetanus immunoglobin and gave me what sounded like a pitch perfect medical school definition of what it did, while the nurse prepared the syringe.
The syringe on a tetanus shot is huge. I thought she was spearfishing!
As the nurse rolled up my sleeve, the doctor looked away, wincing awkwardly.
“Is this going to be bad?” I asked.
She nodded. “I hate those things!”
Thanks, doc!
We laughed as the needle traveled into my upper arm.
“Holy shit!” I said.
“Yes!” she said.
Some people experience severe bouts of anxiety or fear and it passes. Others are not so lucky. They constantly live with the threat of disease, infection and bodily harm.
The United Nations estimates that over a billion people’s lives are threatened by dirty water in developing countries.
These billions of people do not have the luxury of a doctor with a sense of humor, or the cash and credit cards to pay for emergency treatment.
These billions of people have sometimes no potable water for days at a time.
These billions live in a world of filth.
Some privileged people will take for granted that they live in a world of filth
I almost left this part of the story out, but it makes a good point.
A woman, who will remain nameless, emerged from the throbbing drumming and electric guitars and lasers of the party and found me surrounded by the Balinese people washing me off and cleaning my wounds.
She asked me what happened. I showed her my cut arm and hands and my dirty shirt.
“I fell into the sewer channel,” I explained.
“Oh, wow. What? Are you okay?” she asked.
I explained I was going to be fine, and that I needed to go home. She then began to try to convince me to go back into the party, since the next villa party was not starting yet, and there was still an hour to go at the current party.
I said, “Are you kidding? Look at me. I just fell in shit and god knows what else.”
“You are a pussy. Get into the party!”
I ignored her.
She kept going: “You know what? I played rugby. I am tougher than you. You are a pussy.”
She then began to tell the startled Balinese people around me that I was a pussy and a girl.
“He…NO…sorry. She is afraid to go into the party. He is a pussy.”
I looked down at my sopping wet clothes and then looked at her, and I thanked everyone who helped me and began to walk home.
In other words, I let it go. Not worth my time.
Realizations
I suppose that if you ever find yourself submerged in shit and bacteria and you live to tell the tale, be grateful. You are at least aware, awake and able to understand your situation.
Stay calm. Do your best to get out of the situation you are in. Relax while you do it.
And then find others to help you. Be grateful for the help and don’t pay attention to the negative aspects of your situation.
Understand that all of this chaos and disorder is a kind of illusion, and your preoccupation with the illusion around you may separate you from understanding true nature. You may get so wrapped up in things that you lose your ability to do good.
Life is incredibly shitty, but you don’t have to be.
Just thought of something. Consider donating to Charity: water, an organization dedicated to bring clean drinking water to people in developing countries. I am not affiliated with them in any way, but I will donate, because I understand the risk dirty water poses to humanity.
