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Women in the Arena
Women in the Arena is the celebration of everyday women living extraordinary lives in plain sight. We seek to inspire, encourage and challenge you to reach for the great heights you're made for.
Women in the Arena
From New York to Bali: Phyllis Kaplan's Unforgettable Quest for Cultural Mastery & Global Wisdom
🌍 Embark on a Global Journey with Phyllis "Phiphi" Kaplan
Join us for a captivating episode as we dive into the extraordinary life of Phyllis "Phiphi" Kaplan, an explorer at heart and a citizen of the world. Raised in the vibrant streets of New York City and the serene landscapes of Long Island, Phiphi's insatiable curiosity has led her across the globe—from the artistic enclaves of Ecuador to the breathtaking beauty of the Galapagos Islands. Through her work with Ziba Designs, Phiphi masterfully blends fine art with commercial design, all while advocating for slow travel and deep cultural immersion. 🌱✨
In this episode, we explore:
✈️ The Power of Slow Travel: How immersing yourself in local cultures can transform your global perspective.
🧵 Ziba Designs: The fusion of fine art and textiles—creating beauty with a purpose.
🌾 Bali’s Spiritual and Agricultural Heritage: The vital role of upachada ceremonies and honoring the rice goddess Dewi Sri.
🍚 Sawah Bali Project: A groundbreaking initiative promoting organic rice farming with indigenous grains to support local farmers.
🌿 Sustainable Solutions: How Bali’s traditional farmers are adapting to modern pressures from tourism.
As we journey through Bali, we reflect on the balance between progress and tradition, and why valuing process over results can lead to deeper fulfillment. Phiphi’s inspiring perspective invites us to embrace gratitude and curiosity, discovering lesser-known wonders with open hearts and minds.
🎧 Tune in for an enriching conversation that spans cultures, continents, and generations. It's a reminder to stay curious, stay engaged, and celebrate the beauty of the world around us.
https://www.sawahbali.org/
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***Last thing- This is my WISH LIST of interviews:
• Joan Jett
• Dolly Parton
• Viola Davis
• Ina Garten
Maybe you can help a girl out...***
Go check out all of our episodes on our website at: https://womeninthearena.net/
If you'd like to connect, reach out to me at audra@womeninthearena.net
***One last thing...I have an interview wish list because a girl's gotta dream
- Viola Davis
- Dolly Parton
- Ina Garten
- Joan Jett
Maybe one of you can help me out!
Thank you all for supporting this show and all Women in the Arena!
Welcome in everyone and thank you so much for joining me again this week. This week I have one of the most fascinating women I have ever met, and that is saying something because I have met so many remarkable women in the last four years that I have been doing this show. This week we are speaking to Phyllis Fifi Kaplan. You will hear me refer to her as Fifi from now on. She is a citizen of the world. She has traveled all over and has been exposed to cultures that most of us have never seen Cosm, the Omen of a Small Island Overrun by Globalization, neocolonialism and White Entitlement. An NGO Tale. She was the trustee of the Vermont chapter of the Nature Conservancy and she is the founder of the NGO Sawa Bali. She has also appeared on NPR, cnn and UNESCO, and so many more. It is my pleasure and my honor to introduce to you Fifi Kaplan. Fifi, thank you so much for being here and welcome to the show.
Phiphi:Audra, it is a pleasure to be here to speak with you, that we have the technology to speak 15,000 miles away and neither of us are in the dark.
Audra :We're not in the dark. Yes, as we speak, I am sitting here in Queen Creek, arizona, and you are in Bali. I mean that is remarkable.
Phiphi:It is remarkable.
Audra :So in my introduction I alluded that you are a citizen of the world and you've traveled all over, but that is not where you started. Tell us a little bit of where you the right place New York.
Phiphi:And therefore, and being a female at that time and having the set of parents I had just had, opportunity written each day, I was privileged enough to obviously being white, all of those things and educated the world really was my oyster. And it was a smaller world then also. But I was lucky enough to be brought up in the big world of the Big Apple and both Long Island and New York, so I had all the cultural attributes that New York City could provide. I had lessons at the Metropolitan Museum as well as the Brooklyn Museum, art lessons, and we just spent a lot of time in New York. But I was brought up also in Long Island, which at that time was very verdant and not as developed as it is now. So next door house was a big woods and you know, I also felt very, very much at ease and lost in a world. When I was in nature, and my friends were like that also, we did as much as we can walking in the woods, walking to the beach, bicycling, all those things. That pretty nice childhood.
Audra :You'd also mentioned to me, when we first met, that your father was an adventurer, that he believed that education wasn't just in four walls or in books and that if there was an opportunity, that he didn't hesitate, but to pull you out of school and go on a trip, on a global trip, and take you somewhere, to educate you to another, another country, another culture and learn something new it's very, very true.
Phiphi:My father, uh, probably you had these aspirations of not only being an adventurer, but since he had an engineering background, he would have loved to like be there building the Panama Canal or doing a bridge, you know all of these things. He was a very curious person. That's the other thing. I was very lucky. Both my parents were incredibly curious about the world around them. So, yes, at the age of 13, he took me and my mother to Ecuador and, of course, we went to the Galapagos Islands. But the more astounding part that I remember, of course, but the more astounding part that I remember, of course, is going through the Amazon jungle with our, you know, we just had our private guide. That's how you did it back then.
Phiphi:This was, as I said, 69, 70. And we found a village, a very small village, found a village, a very small village, but what this village had was a princess, a young woman who was. I'm not quite sure what her role was, except that she really was kind of idolized and probably had the capacity to guide her people. And so, when I was shown into her grass hut, my father, mother and I they had never seen any white people before. And this is Ecuador. Before oil had been, there was oil exploration. Therefore, you're really talking about the tribes that were very isolated, and South America is known for that. Many, many different kinds of indigenous tribes and people. Therefore, we had experiences that are not impossible to have nowadays.
Phiphi:But you know, the world is flat now. The world is flat now. It's not that difficult to travel. But if you take the time and go beyond and go below the tourist trail, you can find some pretty wonderful, unique things, and in Bali, here also. But you really need to go off the beaten trail and you need to do slow travel. That's the other thing I hear about. You know, I have friends that are from New York who go to Europe for a weekend. I'm like for Paris for the weekend. I'm like what you know to me. You don't have a chance to really be here now.
Audra :So I really believe in slow travel. That definitely gave you a bigger exposure to the world at large, that it was much bigger than New York City, but your career was in textiles. So tell us a little bit about your career and then how that launched you into your passion.
Phiphi:Okay, so I went to school in Vermont. I went to Bennington College and I was an artist. That school is very, very well known for arts and literature. It's a very small school and I came back to New York afterward and immediately started a company named Ziba Designs. And it took off and why it took off. It was a textile and wall covering company wallpaper. It started that way I was doing designs. That was a marriage of fine art and textile art and commercial art and it had never been done and that's why I believe it was so successful. My first line was a line of hand-painted fabrics on silks, raw silks, cottons, linens, all kinds of materials and it was very exclusive because it was only sold through architects and interior designers. In New York City and all throughout the country there are these showrooms that only an architect or an interior designer can bring their clientele and it was a very, very successful business.
Phiphi:By 22, I was living a very, very high life in New York in the late 70s and all the 80s and it was wonderful. But at some period I was living there during the AIDS crisis and I was taking care of a lot of friends and watching them die a very ignoble death. I really felt that my inner priorities, that I was meant, that the life that I had lived was deeper, had to be deeper than just having this very successful business making a lot of money and really only selling to the 1% or 2% of the world. And that really came in focus, obviously, when I moved. I had a home in Vermont, because Vermont, of course, is not a wealthy state. There's a lot of poverty there, especially when I was there, as I said, in the 70s and 80s, and that you know, the first thing I did was go work for Meals on Wheels and really got to understand, not just, you know, going to Bennington College, but to understand the community. And these were very impoverished people and often what was great is that I was the only person they might see for every week, because Vermont's a very it doesn't have a large population and people live very isolated. But what happened in Vermont? It coalesced for me about a sense of place, and a sense of place was something very deep. You know what makes a sense of place, as we all are aware of now in America, we're all living on borrowed land and where I was living in Vermont was part of a lot of Cree Indian land. But I started to get very, very heavily involved in what a sense of place is and at that time, you know, people in New York wanted second homes and at that point they were all going out to the Hamptons and Montauk etc. And you know the traffic was legendary. So people started to look for Vermont, because Vermont was only four or five hours away and therefore people started to look at the huge tracts of land and at that point also, farmers were having a very difficult time being able to keep their land because of the high taxes and they were still growing. Basically, vermont is a dairy state.
Phiphi:My work with the Vermont Nature Conservancy as well as the Vermont Land Trust was really focused on the fact that farmers in Vermont could not make any money just through milk. It was a price-controlled commodity. Therefore, there were two things that happened at that time. We had to have economic development. The first thing they had to do for economic development was they had to go organic. Organic, as you know, requires or, at the market, gets a much higher price. Okay, it's in a different category than trying to compete with all the other milks, etc.
Phiphi:The other thing was diversification. Well, we all know milk makes a lot of things. Everybody knows Ben and Jerry's ice cream, but you know yogurts. And then they started getting into the cheeses, which you know commands a huge. We all know that cheese is like gold. We all we want the prices we pay.
Phiphi:And the Vermonters started to diversify and specialize in Vermont cheeses, which were and still are extraordinary, and this created such a huge market, first of all, being only four or five hours away from New York City. They started out at the big farmer's market in Union Square in the center of New York actually downtown New York, actually downtown New York and then, obviously, distribution got broader and wider, and this is what made Vermont what it is. It already had cachet. Everyone knows certain. When you think of Vermont, you think of clean and wide open spaces and beautiful mountains and fresh air, etc. And that's all very true.
Phiphi:So this gave an incentive for the farmers not to have to sell their land to a New Yorker who wanted to put a McMansion on it. This is a very, very important, important aspect, and what happened at that point was that they started to conserve their land. What would happen is the Vermont Land Trust, for example, would purchase their development rights so that the farmer would get an influx of a lot of money to be able to start up the business a value-added product and then also their taxes got lowered and this is what stopped those McMansions. Of course, through zoning. This all goes through zoning, disallowing there to be development on this prime agricultural land. What's very important about this is that once you joined this program, your land was conserved forever. That doesn't mean that a farmer couldn't sell the land, it just always had to be in some kind of agriculture. It could never go into any other land usage.
Phiphi:And this is basically the same program that I used when I came to Bali. The same program that I used when I came to Bali and after a number of years, after the UNESCO designation, was about rice paddies and its water delivery system, which is called Subak. So it's Sawa and Subak, and these are not just land, these are not just literal things, they're also in the realm of cultural and religious. Both Sawa land rice paddies and Subac, which is the water delivery system, also has a religious component to it.
Audra :So I'm going to stop you for there just a moment, because I think that's really important what you just said. I'm going to explain it too. This work that you did in Vermont with the conservation of the land for the Vermont farmers sparked something in you. It ignited this passion that if I can do this here, I can do it everywhere. I can do this wherever. So I think it's so fascinating, which is why I think that you are such a fascinating human being that you took this passion and you chose Bali, this amazing, remarkable, magical land. The way that you describe it to me it sounds like a place that I have never been to, that I now I have this desire to go to because of the way that you describe it. Like I said it just it sounds magical, like it's like there's no other place like this on Earth.
Phiphi:Well, that is true, that is very true, and there, really isn't.
Audra :So I'd like you to tell that story, because I just think it's such an amazing. I think it's an amazing journey that Vermont made this spark to Bali, which I'm sure it wasn't a direct line, but it got you there. So that's where I want you to take us. Next is the story of Bali and its people and its art, because at the heart of it, you are an artist.
Phiphi:Yeah, and I'm a great appreciator here. May I just talk a little bit more about the farming aspect of it? Absolutely Okay. What I wanted to say about the extraordinary confluence of Vermont and Bali is that there are so many overlaps. It's astounding. First of all, vermont only has small landowners. We don't have big agribusiness, except for even the milk is not even that. And the same in Bali, everyone is small landholders, the farmers. So there were many overlaps. Also, the fact that both Bali and Vermont have this cachet in the New York City farmers market in Union Square, which was tremendous for their value added products and tourism, brings a lot of people here wanting organic food, organic rice, all kinds of elevated products, and they're also willing to pay premium prices for these things.
Phiphi:As a Balinese, people spend very, very, very, very little money on their food. What they do spend money on is their upachada, which is, as I began to say, began to talk about, the farmers in Bali. Upachada are ceremonies. Bali is the only island that has Balinese Hinduism in this huge archipelago of Indonesia, which is a sea of Islam, and one of the things about Balinese Hinduism is it also contains animism, which means it gives life to everything inert. Everything becomes sacred or certainly animated these farmers not only. As I was saying, the water delivery system called Subac also has this extraordinary religious component to it. There are upachata ceremonies at every aspect.
Phiphi:As the rice, when you plant rice, it's like one's own life, when the fertility of it and that's, by the way, the goddess of fertility for rice is called Dewi Sri. That's our rice goddess. And the important thing to remember is that, even though Java produces a lot of rice, they don't have soup back and Bali has one of the most highest productions of rice. They can only assume, because of these upacara, these ceremonies I know it's rice is growing a different ceremony that this makes it more productive. That's all I'm going to tell you. You can think what you want. But getting back to Salabali, our pilot project was called Seeing is Believing and all I can tell you is, if you come here and you see the productivity of the rice, maybe you will, maybe you will accept it.
Audra :Tell me a little bit more about that. Tell me what does the ceremony look like? Can you tell us about the ceremony, Sure?
Phiphi:sure. Well, as I said, there's animism also, so there are effigies made out of bamboo and colored paper and all kinds of things banana leaves, all kinds of things that make an effigy of Dewi Sri, kinds of things that make an effigy of Dewi Sri and Dewi Sri is placed on this. It's called a bedugul, which is a shrine. Every farmer where the Subak water enters their plot of land as a bedugul, it denotes their ownership. Therefore, at the top of where the bedugul is, this is where many of the upachada for rice happens at different stages of the rice growing. For example, at the end stage, when you are collecting the rice, you only collect the best rice and that is always immediately where the water is coming in from the Subac water and the fattest kernels, all the you know, the heaviest kernels, and you make an offering to Dewi Sri in that bed of gold. Every farmer does it a farmer's wife, by the way. The farmer's wives are integral in rice farming and every kind of farming. They do everything together and it's hard work.
Phiphi:I've done it many, many times. You're talking about going into wet paddy and falling down. You're not falling. Well, I fell down a lot, but that has to do with the tall berms. I've fallen off the berms, you're sunk down into almost to your knees and there are eels and everything else slithering around you Eels, eels and all kinds of things you know. And you are then bending over and putting these five little sheaves called gaba the rice, bright, bright green and planting them in a grid, a very specific grid. And it's hard work. The hot sun is, you know, is on you and it's, you know, it's always hot in Bali and it's very, very hard work.
Phiphi:But I did it many times. I did it many times with the Sawa Bali team. We would also have businesses come out and have a group day of bonding with the organization, all kinds of things. It's bloody hard work. So is harvesting. After you harvest, you never again think about when that grain of rice you're making rice at home and now a couple of grains fall down on the floor. You never allow that happen. You pick those grains up. It's very hard work. How we change the farmers, we did the same model we used in Vermont changed the farmers.
Audra :We did the same model we used in Vermont. So this is all indigenous to Bali. So these are natural grains of rice to Bali. There is no chemicals, there's no pesticides, there's none of that. Well, all of that is there.
Phiphi:That that's the thing. Sawabali had our pilot project. We had our pilot project go. As I said, first we had to uh, we had to make sure we had to filter the water coming down from the subac because it all had chemicals in it. Then we had to make sure the patty itself had not had biomass added. So a lot of cow manure okay, got it. And then they grew an indigenous rice called mankop, which is a brown rice, much, much more healthy cognitively, everything else, and you only needed a small portion, which is a very important aspect. You know, 25, 30 years ago everyone walked and everyone did labor. Now it's not like they're taxi drivers, they're sitting. If you're going to eat that white rice, diabetes is really so.
Phiphi:So a big part of Indonesia and India and rice nations, rice growing nations that have modernity. Modernity means you're not in that rice paddy all day, you're doing another job, and for Balinese it is in the tourism business, which a lot translates sitting in a car and driving people around. We grew a different rice around. We grew a different rice, had it milled, so we keep all of its nutrition and because it was a value-added product and it was organic, it was 300% markup from what the farmers could usually sell their seed, their rice that came out of a laboratory and had all these inputs of chemicals, etc. So this is the project we did.
Phiphi:The problem is that the mono-economy of tourism needs the exact same finite resources that farming does. It needs land and it needs water. Guess which one is winning out, since Bali has only one economy, no diversification, and this is the problem. People are selling all their land, but they're not only selling their land. As one, my very dear friend Pakangir, who is a very close farmer I collaborated with him for years and is a friend he said to me years and years ago selling your land is like selling your mother.
Audra :Oh, what happens if they win? What happens if the farmers sell out that they win and the only thing that's left is tourism? What?
Phiphi:happens to it? Well, there is only tourism. What's left is tourism. What happens to it? Well, there is only tourism. But the point is is that, with, bali has lost a lot of its magic, and I'll tell you why. First of all, the traffic here you can wait almost an hour just to go a mile it's. And then there has been investors who either have laundered money from, like Jakarta dirty money, corrupt money or just investors, and they just there is a lot of corruption in Indonesia and they pay off and they get to do whatever they want.
Phiphi:The buildings are all supposed to be Balinese style. Well, they're not. You know, that's the thing about Bali. The arts are so strong here and everything has a reason. It's not as if it's just the Balinese style. What is built has to do with who is building it, the scale of the person. By the way, every building has a shrine for praying and needs to have the chinong, the offerings. It doesn't matter if it's a hotel or it's a gas station. There's always a place to pray there, and that happens every day.
Phiphi:The Balinese practice their religion by making things. So every day, a chenang, an offering, and this is just not a willy-nilly offering. My family, each color has to go in a very specific you know, you do. You know one color first. Another color In the middle is this called pandan leaf, which I love, and this is the offerings that are made. And, as you can see, this is made out of bamboo and this is what is done every single day, not only here in this offering in my house, because I am part of the family temple here, but I also have a yoga shala down there that is also blessed, and this happens every day. And when there's big holidays, which there were, the offerings are far more ornate, festooned with all kinds of fruit, flowers, etc.
Phiphi:Bali does have a lot of magic, and the way I find my magic is by living with a family. I live in a family compound with probably about 20 people, but my very close family is Dedik and his wife, who was here doing their offerings, and Dedique was not only a dear friend, but he was a member of Sawabali and also he's a very, very well-known conductor. He is a conductor of the gamelan, which is the Balinese orchestra. So what makes it so wonderful is I get to hear Gamelan practice of the various orchestras that he does every day, except for Wednesday. I feel very, very lucky because I love the Balinese music which, by the way, is on a pentamic scale, five notes, as opposed to ours which has seven. So the sound itself is very, very different. Besides, the instruments are totally different.
Audra :Yes, we need to preserve all of this, so we need to preserve this culture so it doesn't get lost. So it doesn't get lost because, as I said in the beginning, the way that you describe this, when you and I first met, when I said tell me about you and I know I keep using this word is that it just had this magic quality to it and I thought, well, I need to book a ticket to Bali because I and I never, ever, had this, this desire or inkling to go. But the way that you had described it was so special that I thought I need to go and see this before it disappears.
Phiphi:Well, thank you for that. And it's all very, very true what you say. I have been transformed coming here. Not only are the people the most welcoming people, they have so much humor and they are very as a society, they are a collective society. They are rice-growing. They have welcomed me and you know, I live in a traditional village outside of Ubud.
Phiphi:So, going to Upachara which, by the way, is tomorrow, or is it today? Oh, it's today at 4 o'clock. Excuse me, I just realized it's today at 4 o'clock which will be in a temple, one of the temples, the large, gorgeous temples, festooned with artistry, the carving of the wood, the carving of the statues, every placement of the deities and the shrines. I always notice something new. And then, of course, every woman brings their offerings, which is a huge basket of things fruits and cakes and flowers and everything. They walk with it on their head. I can't do it like that. I need to use at least one hand. When I go to temple. It, just as soon as I enter the Chandi doors, it reminds me why I'm here.
Audra :And how long have you been in Bali?
Phiphi:Well, I first came in 2009, 9, 10. And so I did come back for a few years during the pandemic to America. I had a gorgeous place on Lake Champlain in Burlington, but I think of myself as being here for 15 years because all the time that I was in Burlington for a few years and I came back during the pandemic, I was in touch with all of my friends here who were suffering terribly because their mono-economy. They did not have any income.
Audra :No, there was no. If all there is is tourism, there was no one there.
Phiphi:And once again, when there was an opportunity to diversify, as soon as tourism opened up again, they just went right back to it. And the extraordinary aspect of this is that tourism is almost 100 years old. It was decided not by the Baladins, but by the Dutch government in Jakarta, then known. The Dutch were the colonizers of Indonesia for many, four or five hundred years okay, starting with the spice trade and they decided, because everyone went to Bali because of the culture, it was all about the culture, the music, the dance, the puppet, the wayankulit, which is the shadow puppets. It was all about the artistry. It was decided that Bali should just become this island for tourism. I mean, this is what was happening for tourism. I mean, this is what was happening After World War.
Phiphi:I, you know the world, people were searching for paradise and back then, in a lot of ways, that's how the moniker was created Valley is a Paradise and you can find it. But you've got to look real hard now Between the traffic, the pollution, the noise of construction every place on the island and there's no political will. And this is the reason why Sawabale and the work we tried to do was. We are in a stage called late-stage capitalism, where everyone is trying to squeeze out as much money as possible and therefore it was very difficult for us to sell our product, even though everyone was interested in it, because they loved the stories of this rice that hadn't been found in hundreds of years and it was refound. It was very difficult for us to sell the rice, not like it was easy to sell the value-added products in New York, etc. This is a cutthroat island in that way.
Audra :For those of us listening, can we support? I mean, believe me, there's a lot of us that really like rice. Can we access this? It's?
Phiphi:interesting you say this. I had markets that wanted it in Singapore, which, of course, is very, very, very close. You're not allowed to export rice. Trying to get our brown, organic rice, indigenous rice, and the bureaucracy, the organization that went through Bulog, it never, it never. They just classic Indonesian way. They just put it at the bottom of the pile and we never got authorization. But there is no funding and right now, because we have disbanded, I don't even have an operational team, we don't have operations, it's impossible to write grants, etc. I have moved on. I'm just way too old to do this now.
Phiphi:If but we have often talked about this if there were funding available and we're not talking about big money, we're talking about, you know, a couple hundred $200,000. To go to a SUBAC and give all the workshops sustained technical assistance. That's what we did differently. We did sustained technical assistance, which is what you need to do, to do change management. You can't just do workshops once and expect people to change their systems. So right now it's not happening.
Phiphi:I mean, farmers will grow for their own homes and their families, because it's healthier, but I have to say we'll have to see how many young people go into farming unless they take their technology with them and they can do it if it were to be done correctly. There's still a lot of kids going to a university to learn about agriculture. It's the outliers who do it. A lot of kids going to a university to learn about agriculture it's the outliers who do it, but it's not a wholesale. There are some farmers that do it here, but it's not wholesale. That's the sad part. But I think, something I really would like to emphasize. I think something I really would like to emphasize Sawa Bali on paper or for its ability to scale up we eventually had 20 farmers is a failure, is a failure, but I think that failing I hope everyone understands that failure is part of life and the takeaways that you get from failure are not just humbling but really important lessons, but really important lessons, really important lessons.
Phiphi:I knew what we were facing when I began Sawabali and I was just really out of my mind to do this, to go up against the tourism industry. There was no way, and I can also say there were probably things. I mean, I know In my book I go into this there are reckonings of things that I did not do well, that I did not do well and people who could have become allies, I ended up alienated. So I think it's important when you look at things like this and it takes a lot of time and it takes a lot of time and it takes a lot of will to really look inside, understand your own failures, curiosity Don't let it dampen your curiosity and don't let it dampen your ardency or your advocacy or whatever activism that you're passionate about. Don't let that stop you.
Audra :You know, I think that's one of the things that I admired the most about you is that you knew what you were up against. You absolutely were well aware what you were up against and you did it anyway. You did it because you knew that it needed to be done. You knew that it wouldn't accomplish everything that you wanted it to, but you knew that you had to try and it was better than doing nothing.
Audra :Well, thank you for acknowledging that, yeah, it's just, sometimes we get caught up in the end result than the actual the doing. A very good friend of mine, as a matter of fact, when I started this and I said to her you're a nut, because I am a type A personality and I am trained trained to focus on the goal and the end result and, quite frankly, so was she, and quite frankly so was she. So, Tina, I have shouted out to you before on this very statement and I'm shouting out to you again because she said this and she's so smart, and she said the goal is not the point, the journey is. And I didn't understand what she said at that point, but I've been doing this for four years now and now I understand.
Phiphi:Well, you're getting to be more process-oriented, and process is huge. My entire life is about process. Process always takes a lot, lot longer, but I enjoy the process. I enjoy the process. The other thing I want to talk about is that the reason I did this was something to do with having a moral economy. This isn't a perfect society. It really is not society. It really is not. But the reason I live here is not only when things are going wrong or not going well. Laughter is a huge part here. I'm not taking things too serious. The other thing is that the Balinese carry their religion inside of them. Their countenance and just being with them is light and loving and open and endearing, and it's really a very humane society, really a very humane society. And they have I'll leave this one saying for your listeners to ponder A very big credo here in Bali and actually very much, very, very much prevalent here, and that's what humanity is. I mean, that's the humaneness that I love here. Thank you for being interested and curious.
Audra :Thank you for being interested and curious. I've been so fascinated, and I have a feeling that a lot of my audience will be too. If they wanted to learn more, where would you direct them?
Phiphi:That's a really good question. First of all, they can go on our website sawabaliorg S-A-W-A-H-B-A-L-I dot org. Is that what it is? No, just dot org, sorry. They can go there. They can look at our Facebook page, but I would say the website has really got a lot of pictorial interest. I mean, it's right there showing you how the water is used. I thank you for your interest. Look at our website. If you're interested to coming to Bali, please do your homework before coming here and don't just look at the touristy things to do and consider. Consider, because where you will learn the most and have the most fun is living simply with a family. Yes, you will have your own bedroom. You may have a lot of places now have their own bathroom for tamu, for foreigners, and when you do that, they will include you in everything and you will have a lot of fun and you will probably enjoy the food. The food is just fantastic here. If you like it spicy, even better, enjoy the food. The food is just fantastic here.
Audra :If you like it spicy, even better. I always like it spicy. Spicy is where it's at.
Phiphi:Well, you have an open invite when you're ready. I have a whole guest suite I will take you up on that.
Audra :Why not? Why not? It has been a delight to get to know you. I have so enjoyed getting to know Bali. Why not, why not? No idea about that makes me intrigued and want me to go read more into. So getting to know you, getting to know about more information, and it's made me, it's made me curious about things that I need to research. So it's really it inspired me to do further research on things that I thought I knew, that I probably don't we always learn each day?
Phiphi:Be open to that.
Audra :Fifi, thank you so much for being here, thank you for your openness, thank you for your education and, most importantly, thank you for sharing your time with us. I so appreciate you very much.
Phiphi:Ditto, thank you for being a very professional interviewer as well as a warm one, and, as I said, you have an invite here. When you come here, I will take you up on that All right.
Audra :Thank you so much, and I want to thank all of you for listening and we'll see you again next time.
