Indonesians

The Timorese are not Indonesians.

Indonesians were Islamized by Arab merchants.

Thousands of Indonesians are unable to return to their flooded or water-logged homes.

Budi Artawan was a hotel worker in Holiday Inn Resort Balihai in Bali, Indonesia. He became a friend, who showed me around the town of Kuta. I noticed then that Indonesians often had a scientific mind, as he pointed out the cholesterol count in my avocado shake.

Over three million Indonesians have become new tax payers in the last year, according to the Directorate General of Taxation.

In the beginning of the twentieth century, the Philippine elite started switching from Spanish to English as the archipelagic elitist language, especially in written form, as a consequence of the Spanish-American War in 1898. Meanwhile, indigenous languages have continued to be the aural-oral mainstay, with Spanish loanwords being quite common. In 1937, administration chose Tagalog as the basis of the national language. As time passed, code-switching between English and indigenous languages became more prevalent. As a result, the Philippines is a linguistic hodgepodge. English is like an effervescent pink drink, and Tagalog is a grey shark in the seas. Spanish still rings nostalgically of bygone majestic good ol' days for many Filipinos. Tagalog is still not as fully "intellectualized" as its cousin Indonesian, which Indonesians use in university-level education and has extensive literature.

Denny Christian, a 28-year-old from Jakarta studying accountancy in Australia, worries that the Papuan affair could make life difficult for Indonesians in the country.

Indonesia is an archipelago made up of thousands of islands which are disaster-prone. Rampangilei noted that 150 million Indonesians live in danger of earthquakes, 60 million from floods, and four million at risk from tsunamis.