Team Griffith at Kebun Marga Windu

Chapter 1. Kebun Marga Windu in Pictures (by Peggy Garber)

In May of 2004, Steve and I went to visit Bob & Eti, who together make up Team Griffith, at their farm, Kebun Marga Windu, in the mountains of West Java in Indonesia. We had been hearing from our friends via email for a couple of years all about the adventures of creating this very unique farm and we were anxious to see the real thing in person. To get there, we flew from Hong Kong to Jakarta, drove ½ hour by taxi to the Jakarta train station, took a 3 hour train trip to Bandung, and finally rode by private car another 2 hours through Sumedang and then Citengah. Just beyond the small village of Citengah, the road rounds a ridge following a small river and there it is.

(1) The house and farm buildings sit in the middle of the mountain slope on the north side of the river valley. Above and behind the house, Bob and Eti grow nilam, pepper, vanilla, ginger and tea. The rice paddies immediately across the road in front of the house belong to others. Bob and Eti’s newest farmland, on the far side of the river from the house, is in the process of transforming from rice production to a similar set of crops as their other farmland. Further up the valley, the jungle and mountains loom.

(2) From the farmland across the river, we look back at Bob & Eti’s new house and several outbuildings. To the left of the house there is a cattle shed and a fertilizer store. Attached to the right end of the new house is the original one story, one room bungalow in which they have lived for the first 2 years. To the far right of the house is the relatively new nilam oil distillery.

While it’s hard to distinguish, the land just above the bungalow and distillery is mostly growing pepper. The land higher up, just below the tree line, is tea. The village of Citengah lies just over the ridge to the right of the farm.

(3) Bob and Steve stand on a new road that Bob engineered and the villagers built. It goes from the main road below the house up the ridge toward the village. After a hairpin turn, the road ends at a tea station above Bob & Eti’s where their truck can pick up the tea harvested from all the higher slopes of the hill. Behind Bob and Steve is the front porch of the bungalow with the new house attached at its back.

(4) In the kitchen of the old bungalow, food preparation takes place on the floor, as per usual in Indonesia. There is a sink with cold running water, a small counter with storage below, and a double hotplate for cooking.

(5) Bob enjoys participating in the cooking process, but Eti also has a hired helper in the kitchen and around the house.

(6) The Bungalow is basically a one room structure with a tile floor and a fairly high ceiling. The kitchen is a long narrow corridor walled off from the rest of the living area opposite the one entry door. The new house now attaches to the back wall of the bungalow’s kitchen with no inside passage between the 2 dwellings. This one room bungalow with kitchen was Bob & Eti’s home for 2 years as they got the farm started. They would tilt their sleeping mattress up against the wall on the left to create more living space during the day.

(7) The new house sits above the road which comes from Citengah village and continues up into the mountains. This is a standard Indonesian country road: two narrow lanes, no center stripe, no shoulders, and a moderately potholed asphalt surface. The driveway up to the house is quite steep and sits at a sharp angle to the road from the village. Bob & Eti’s white pickup is parked in front of their fertilizer store to the left of the house. While fertilizer use is not unique in this area, Team Griffith has provided a reliable source at a fair price, with credit and delivery available. Local farmers use it to boost tea and ginger production.

We enter the first floor through a veranda, which is as wide as the new house, comfortably deep, and serves as an informal sitting area for all sorts of visitors when meeting outdoors is much more comfortable and less formal than meeting indoors. A similar but slightly smaller veranda on the second floor provides a private cool outdoor area off the master bedroom.

(8) The new pickup is what we would think of as a standard Japanese size vehicle. It holds three Americans snugly, although the person in the middle has a more intimate relationship with the gear shift than most would prefer. Hinges on both sides of the truck bed and the tail gate make loading and unloading possible in a variety of tight settings.

The fertilizer store behind the truck is the size of a snug double garage. The sign reads: Kebun Sal, Citengah, which means Farm Store in Citengah.

(9) A structure behind and above the fertilizer store (the center foreground roof in this picture taken from the master bedroom veranda) currently houses 3 feeder steers. There is space for more cattle, but Bob & Eti have found little market for good meat. Behind and above the cow shed is the beginning of Team Griffith’s mixed crop terraces, then above that tea, then jungle beyond.

(10) This panorama view shows the houses and buildings beside a large tank which is about 3 feet deep. The small covered patio where Bob and Steve are standing is the entrance to the original bungalow. The 2 roofs of the new house stand tall just behind the 2 roofs of the bungalow. There is a small paved open area between the new house and a large covered work area and storage shed at the far end of the tank. Uphill behind the covered shed is an elevated water tank. The tank is purely esthetic, and a high status symbol. It has no function. Currently, house water is pumped into the water tower from a well which Team Griffith had dug. Just up the hill from the water tower are three little Quonset style green houses filled with small plants waiting to be put out into the fields. Behind those is the livestock shed. Some of the rock retaining walls and paths can be seen just above the tank on the right.

(11) This view looks from the new house across the tank into a sea of green growing things. There are small fish in the tank, fingerlings which poke their noses to the surface when the fountain stops. Bob redesigned the fountain to increase its spurt, and spurt it does. To the eye and the ear, the fountain is a pleasant amenity to rural life in West Java.

(12) There is a brick paved path hidden in the greenery around the tank opposite the house. This picture is taken from the path looking back at the bungalow on the left with the new house attached. You can see the difference in quality of roof tiles between the older unglazed bungalow and new glazed tiles of the house. Roof tile of this general sort and color is standard in this part of the world. That white disk at the right end of the highest roof is a satellite dish. CNN? HBO? Yes, and much more.

13) Bob, Eti and Steve relax in the sun filled master bedroom sitting area, which faces southwesterly toward the road, the river, and on down the valley. The master bedroom extends the full width of the house and contains familiar furniture from their Seattle condo, as well as new items purchased specifically for the room. The door behind Eti leads to the private second floor veranda with comfortable outdoor seating.

(14) The view out any of the windows looking down the valley, as well as from both verandas, is superb. The river meanders down the valley directly in front of the house through lush green, terraced rice paddies. Jungle covers the hillsides. Farther down the valley on the left, a few houses on the edge of Chitengah village are barely visible.

Bob & Eti’s wood framed windows are tall, wide and almost always open. The detailing in the eaves is extensive and very pleasing. Bob and Eti also have arranged a nice variety of indoor plants growing in some lovely pots and stands. The combination of windows, eaves, plants & view is just simply gorgeous.

(15) The new kitchen was coming together as we arrived. Our first meal was in the bungalow, but the very next day, the new stove and refrigerator were installed. This marked Bob & Eti’s real move into their new house, even though they had started sleeping in it several days earlier. This new kitchen would be upscale anywhere in the world and is especially atypical for Indonesian. Eti is training her kitchen helpers to do food preparation on the new granite counter tops instead of the floor, as they are accustomed.

(16) Eti’s family came to say hello. We had met them all in 1997 on our first trip to Indonesia with Bob & Eti. I had transferred some pictures of our family and from our China trip onto Eti’s laptop computer, so the family gathered round to see. The older seated man is Aki, Eti’s grandfather. Just behind him in brown and gold tones is Eti’s mother.

Eti’s family thinks this huge house is a crazy. They call it a hotel. It is big for 2 people. The rooms are arranged with very few square corners, which leads to very interesting spaces. All the floors are beautifully and individually tiled and the main rooms each have different wood and straw mat ceiling details. The bathrooms are fitted with western style toilets, cabinets, counters, sinks, and stall showers, including hot water from a rooftop solar water heater. The hot water shower is in stark contrast to the typical Indonesian cold water tank for bucket baths while standing in the middle of a bathroom. However, there is only hot water to the showers. None goes to the kitchen or the bathroom sinks. It was just too difficult to get the Indonesian workmen to run the extra water pipes, because no typical Indonesian kitchen has hot running water.

(17) Bob sits in a chair on a rug with a coffee table that all come from Seattle, but the floor tile is Indonesian. The pattern in the main living area combines large green square tiles edged with teak strips and intersected with smaller yellow tiles at the corners. It is lovely.

(18) Why are we mostly on the floor? Partly because it is so inviting, but mostly because that is where Indonesians are most comfortable. Steve brought a picture book of Seattle, and shared it with Eti’s family. Translation from English to Sundanese was, of course, courtesy of Eti. The wonderful tile work really shows in this group picture. Greeting visitors just inside the front door is a large tile floor medalian.

(19) Bob & Eti have taken these two village boys under their wing. The boys live in the house and perform a variety of household tasks in exchange for room and board, some help with school and some individual attention from Bob & Eti.

(20) Not only is Bob now a farmer, but he is also a builder. Here he poses with some of the rock and cement work he has constructed on the farm. This sturdy stairway replaces a slippery slide down a slick hillside on wet clay as a more effective route to get to the new farm land across the river.

(21) Another recent building project is the distillery at right. The plan includes ginger, nilam and perhaps other crops from which oil can be extracted. The boxes are treasures from Seattle which, by the time we had returned home, have been unpacked and moved into the new house. Bob declares via recent email that the distillery area is now ready to go into production.

(22) Bob inspects one of the greenhouses, which are more suited to Indonesian rather than American average height. The greenhouses are rudimentary, but they serve as temporary housing for thousands of new plants of many varieties that Team Griffith will soon transplant into their farm fields.

(23) After walking a short way up the road in front of the house, we look down at the river and Team Griffith’s new farmland on its far bank. Bob has built a bridge across the river and there is also a small shed, standard on Indonesian farms, providing protection from sun and rain as well as storage for supplies. This shed also houses a few chickens.

(24) Steve and Bob descend the same steps shown in picture 20 above, making their way from the road to a raised path leading to the river. Bob had to buy a one meter wide strip of land from his neighbor on which to build this elevated concrete and rock path, which helps him remain upright while walking between rice paddies on his way to new farmland on the other side of the river.

(25) Steve and Bob pose on the bridge which crosses the river to the new farmland. The water rises and falls with rain and with the seasons. The river is not terribly deep, but it is a considerable stream with a fair amount of fall, so it provides a sound rather like an ocean, constant but very pleasant.

(26) The river bends more than once as it passes the Griffith land, and since rivers tend to eat into their banks at such points, Bob designed these baskets of rocks to stop the erosion. After one heavy rain, Steve and I watched the river, which drains thousands of acres in the hills above, rise half way to the tops of these baskets.

(27) This view looks down the valley toward Citengah village from the edge of the new farmland across the river from the house. These terraced rice paddies are not part of Kebun Marga Windu, but they add immeasurably to the bucolic setting of the farm as a whole.

(28) One of the most unique for Indonesia aspects of Team Griffith’s Kebun Marga Windu is the variety of the crops they are growing. Tea, ginger, pepper, vanilla, and nilam are among the commercial crops. Here a vanilla plant is growing on the trunk of a cebrung tree. The cebrung tree is used to form a trellis that several different kinds of plants can grow on. The tree is mostly topped, but the trunk is still alive. Here, the vanilla is trained to grow up and down, then up then down again on the living post.

(29) In addition to the commercial crops, Team Griffith grows pineapple, banana, and papaya, among other things, for their personal use. Several of these plants grow along the path from the house around the tank. The path itself is paved with bricks made on site. The decorative raised letters KMW on each brick stand for Kebun Marga Windu (the Marga Windu Farm) and provide good traction for walkers on this often wet and sometimes steep path. This picture shows pineapple growing alongside the path.

(30) After showing us around the farm, Bob took us in his little white pickup truck on a day trip into the mountains behind Kebun Marga Windu. The same little narrow, potholed road wound up and around the hills, passed many manicured groves of tea bushes surrounded by dense jungle. Here a volunteer poinsettia tree grows in the midst of a hillside of bright green tea, contrasted by the dark green of the jungle beyond.

(31) As we returned down the mountains at sunset after an afternoon rain shower, wisps of clouds began to creep down the valleys below us. The entire trip was stunningly picturesque.