Magical Paddy from the Land of Lembor
A farmer in the subdistrict of Lembor in Manggarai, Flores, accidentally came across the wojalaka rice that had almost become extinct. It has now spread out to many parts of Indonesia.

Yohana Anita Tanis took a handful of purple-blackish rice and placed it in a bowl of white rice. She washed the mixture and cooked it. The result was a serving of blackish rice. "I mixed the white with the black so the texture would be soft enough for my child to eat," the 34-year-old woman told Tempo three weeks ago.

The rice is called wojalaka, a variety indigenous to West Manggarai regency, East Nusa Tenggara, on the island of Flores. It has a fine and rubbery texture and tastes good, especially when mixed with white rice. It is generally too soft on its own.

Robert Eli Sipayo showed Tempo a timeworn paper which he had written some time before. The customary figure from Kalumpang-a customary region of Mamuju regency, West Sulawesi-opened the stash of folded sheets. On the unlined paper were a flurry of handwritten notes and sketches. There was a drawing of the construction of a customary house jumbled up with doodles on looms and techniques for traditional healing. "This work is still incomplete. I want to add some more material to it," said the 73-year-old in his conversation with Tempo last month.

Green Grunge from Bali
Rock band Navicula sings about the environment. They have toured with Greeenpeace and sell organic soap as merchandise.

Sumatra skies colored in red
Guns to fangs fury takes today
People cheer as angels cry
By this bullet I have learned to fly

Trash-based Village

Gamolan Promoter from Unila
Hasyimkan managed to revive the popularity of gamolanan xylophone instrument made from bambooin Lampung. He forged new teachers, made corrections to the history of gamolan and created the instruments.

As the Nusantara Bamboo Festival in Pringsewu, West Lampung regency, became imminent last month, Hasyimkan came up against an emergency: 200 players of gamolan, a traditional musical instrument, from Lampung University (Unila) could not perform in the finale performance. These were students from Unila's department of dance and elementary school teacher training, where Hasyimkan is a lecturer. "In our plan, there would be 400 people performing in the gamolan festival," he said. "It turned out that 700 elementary school pupils also wanted to participate. Therefore I had to cancel out some of my own students." The event, said Hasyimkan, 43, proved that "people have become more enthusiastic about the gamolan."

Organic garden in lawallu