It’s my “don’t complain about what you don’t have, work with what you’ve got” story.

The back story, as I was told it by Indonesian friends who took me to the village where the elephant was made, is that the Indonesian Government had sponsored a famous artist, the late Sapto Hudoyo , to help the village use its traditional clay object handicraft skills to create products which would be more commercially viable. As I understood, they made traditional, utilitarian household objects such as bowls and pitchers, many of which I could see baking in the sun when we entered the village. 

When I visited it was clearly a very, very poor village, even by developing country standards.  And the objects, like my elephant, were very fragile for having been simply sun-baked, unlike the kiln-fired pottery I was used to in Australia. I remember carrying my little elephant, wrapped in multiple layers to protect it from fracturing shock, around Indonesia and then in my carry-on luggage, back to Australia.

This was the simple combination: a specific skillset, clay, sun, their modest homes from which they worked.

They made an industry of it, eventually exporting to the world.

And, like the people of that village, businesses they could develop from their own homes.

Name of the village? It’s times like this I wish I’d kept travel diaries more assiduously, but from some searching today on the web I’m at least 95% sure it was Kasongan.

A tourism site I found via Google included a whole piece on Kasongan which sounded very much like the place I visited (emphases added by me):

Kasongan village is the dwelling place of kundis, which means earthenware jugs and later refers to people who make any earthenware jug-like as kitchen tools and ornaments. 

and

At the beginning, these ceramics did not have style at all. The legend of the dead horse, however, inspired the craftsmen to create horse motifs on many products, especially the horses carrying earthenware goods or roof-tiles complete with bamboo basket placed on the horseback, in addition to frog, rooster and elephant motifs.

The entering modern influence and culture from outside through various media and the first introduction of Kasongan to public by Sapto Hudoyo around 1971-1972 with artistic and commercial touch and commercially sold in major scale by Sahid Keramik around 1980s enables tourists to see various ceramic motifs.

From what I’ve read today, the village of Kasongan went from strength to strength, not only selling to people who visited there but shipping quantities of goods internationally and became its regency’s main source of foreign currency. Then the Bali bombings in 2002 affected trade badly and then the village and its business were devastated by the major earthquake in 2006.

An article in the NZ Herald at the time, “Quake survivors forced to start from zero”, painted a grim picture of the devastation caused and the anxiety among the survivors.

But judging by this video (warning: turn the volume down as there is some serious static part way through), apparently taken from a motorbike driving through Kasognan recently, the village and its industry seem to be thriving again. It’s certainly a bigger and more bustling place than I recall from those days long ago when I visited.

I couldn’t see any little clay elephants in the video. I like to think they are still being made.

Because my elephant reminds me of how those very poor people took that one skill they had as a community, making earthenware vessels and then drying them in the sun, getting help from someone more creative to add value to their work and thus created livelihoods for themselves and their families.

I see it as a story to encourage and inspire many of those people around the world who have in recent months been put out of work or had their savings destroyed in the great economic meltdown. I’m sure many of those people, who may understandably be grieving for the loss of their jobs and/or savings, have skills which they can translate into viable businesses.

My hope is that someone who reads this story of the resilient people of Kasongan, who made my little clay elephant and turned their dirt poor village into an exporter to the world, and then picked themselves up after a 6.3 earthquake to do it all again, might be moved to share the story with someone they know who is feeling pessimistic about their economic situation and who might just be inspired by it to re-evaluate their own skills and how those skills could be successfully employed and marketed. 

If the story helps just one person get back on their feet and create a successful business I will feel I have done something useful to honour the people of that village.

I seriously doubt I’m the only blogger who has ever experienced this particular manifestation of blogger’s block. But it is ironic, or even reprehensible (if I wanted to give myself a really hard time, which I don’t) to reflect that my backsliding has been occasioned by my flying around the world to tell people about blogging and other aspects of social media.

And it’s not that I have nothing to post about. On the contrary, after a couple of weeks in China, including presenting and participating at ad:tech Beijing, and a couple more weeks in the USA, including being part of BlogWorld Expo, I have so many experiences to recount and ideas buzzing around that I think I could post for a couple of months just about all of that.

And that’s where the inaction of the past week, since we got back, comes in. Because part of the challenge was that I was thinking I should get my notes out and do a couple of series of posts, one starting with experiences in China, back in October, and another starting at the beginning of our trip to the USA, starting in Las Vegas for BlogWorld Expo and moving on to Connecticut and New York.

But the more I think about doing that, the more I felt weighed down by the idea. Just thinking about it made me tired. And I don’t enjoy posting when it seems like a chore. Nor do I recommend it.

So that’s the fessin’ up out of the way.

Now, having made a new start, and looking ahead, I’ve drawn on my reflections to come up with five rules for planning future travel, especially where attending a conference is part of the program.

They are my rules. May not work for you.

1. Unless you are a very good multi-tasking, multi-tracking person,with excellent touch typing skills, don’t kid yourself that you are going to be able to live blog conference sessions effectively. (I now have much greater respect for those who can pull that off).
2. If you want to share highlights of the event with your readers and friends, practice using Twitter and punch in a few snippets from a session. In a subsequent post I will give an example of where I did this at BlogWorld Expo.
3. Be realistic about the likely availability and speed of Internet access where you are staying or at nearby coffee shops. Just because they say you have wireless, free or paid, doesn’t mean it’s going to download anything important in your lifetime.
4. Accept that if you are going to go to conference sessions and take in the related expo and network with contacts/friends old and new and party afterwards, then finding time to blog, with a clear head, while you are at the conference might be a challenge you don’t succeed in meeting.
5. Build a bank of posts before you go and either set them to publish on specific days and at specific times while you are travelling, or just publish them as you go. It’s not a new rule – I’ve seen others recommend this: now I know why. Being really creative in an organised and efficient way while on the road may be your thing but it’s not mine.

Other suggestions welcome.

Finding the restaurant was a stroke of luck. We’d actually had a recommendation to go to the Schoolhouse restaurant, which is in itself quite delightful, but had a predominantly Western menu: when we said we’d been hoping for Chinese food, Christine the owner said we should try out her new restaurant down the road a piece, namely the Roadhouse. It’s actually so new that we were told we were the first “walk-in” customers other than friends and family.

The Roadhouse is a business that supports local growers, which in our own neck of the woods we like to do. And that meant special flavor and freshness, as it does here.

Attended by smiling Daisy, we experienced friendly, country-style service and excellent dishes. While we were waiting for our cooked dishes, we were served a complimentary and generous plate of amazingly fresh and crunchy local vegetables – cucumber, baby tomatoes, cos lettuce and some kind of sprouts, with a pot of very yummy “peasant sauce” for dipping.

We then tucked into two main dishes, one with chicken, one with eggplant:

• the Jiang Bao Chicken was a dish of chicken pieces stir-fried in sweet bean sauce with fresh local walnuts and cucumber
• the eggplant (aubergine) was local and fried till golden-brown crispy, sauteed with ginger, leeks, dark soy sauce, sugar, salt, tomato-based sauce and green pepper.

And to accompany all this, regularly replenished mugs of beautiful Longjing tea.

Chef Jeremy Taisey hails from Seattle, Washington and is obviously – and justifiably – very proud of his delightful establishment.

The view from the dining area, through a large picture window, is of a whole section of the Great Wall. In the picture below, if you look closely on the top left hand side of the picture, above and left of waiter Daisy’s head, you may be able to discern the features of the sleeping Buddha, also marking the end of that section of the Great Wall.

Good local produce, beautifully prepared, in a friendly, sparkling clean restaurant, with outstanding views.

Deceptively simple, of course. The layout, the furnishings, the stationery, the positioning of the restaurant to enable patrons to look at the Great Wall, staff efficiency and friendly service (even coming out to the parking lot to help translate for us with our driver), the attention to detail and the elegant website all spoke of sophisticated marketing and a high level of attention to detail.

A memorable experience. Thank you Daisy and Jeremy. And Christine for pointing us there. And yes, we have told our Beijing friends!

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I spoke about this with an Australian expat friend, someone who has lived in China for several years. I wondered whether the concept of professionals working from home made any sense in the current China context. Her observation, as best as I can recall, was to the effect that with the economy booming and likely to do so for some time, there is an unrelenting demand for managers and other professionals to work in enterprises. In other words, in the office or the factory.

That made sense, even though the experience of being stuck in peak hour traffic in Beijing and again in Shanghai made me as a visitor wonder why there did not seem to be any level of interest in the concept of working from home. Lack of technology is hardly the problem – I read somewhere that China’s internet speed is much faster than is experienced in the USA. Cell phones are ubiquitous.

It’s not, as far as I could tell, that the basic concept of ‘work from home’ or ‘work at home’ is not understood (as we came through the Beijing airport terminal there was a battery of signs promoting Amway). More that there seemed to be no engagement with the concept of working from home being something which would be embraced by professionals (interpreting that term as broadly or as narrowly as you like).

There are a lot of factors that have facilitated the West’s takeup of the home office phenomenon, including massive layoffs at the managerial level, disillusionment with the constraints and stresses of corporate life, the desire of many parents to spend more time with their children while still being productive and earning. And of course the availability of technology which makes it fairly irrelevant – in productivity terms – as to where a working person in certain industries is physically located. Maybe these factors haven’t been in play in China, or not in the same way.

Maybe in the West we just don’t easily comprehend the social and career implications of the sort of growth China is experiencing. The day before we left China, the Shanghai Daily’s front page headline was Double digit growth forecast for the economy: the accompanying story reported an 11.9 percent growth in the second quarter, the fastest growth in 12 years, and a potential growth of 11 percent in the year ahead. Do professionals see working in the office or the factory as the only practical way to be effective and successful in this sort of environment?

If any reader has some more insight on this, I would love to know.

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On the Mutianyu section of the Great Wall, northeast of Beijing, on a very windy but thankfully sunny day.