Getting in the Christmas spirit

It's been really hard for me to believe that Christmas is fast approaching when I sweat almost every time I walk outdoors. December just doesn't seem like December without gloves and scarves and waiting for snow. But yesterday we had our school Christmas pageant. We sang "Hark the Herald Angels Sing" and "Joy to the World" and "Silent Night," and it started to feel like Christmas. I loved watching my kids up on stage--three of my goofballs playing the shepherds with comic flair, a girl who seemed shy in class as the angel Gabriel, and a kid whose incredible singing voice I never suspected playing Joseph. I was proud of them.

After the pageant, we had a reception in the cafeteria with an open stage where kids were singing "White Christmas" and "Feliz Navidad," which made me laugh since snow and people who speak Spanish are pretty much unknown to Indonesia. And then we were done for the year. I don't leave until next Saturday, so I'll do some Christmas shopping and wrapping this week. If you thought that living in the world's most populous Muslim country would protect me from the American commercialization of Christmas, you were wrong. I saw fake Christmas trees being sold at the mall in early November, lines are longer, and I hear classics like "All I Want for Christmas Is You" while shopping.

The "I'm-still-getting-used-to-being-a-teacher" moment of the day: I ran into a student at the gym. It could have been worse. I could have been sweating, out of breath, and red-faced, or it could have been an unfriendly student, but I was just getting on the treadmill when one of the sweet ones came up to say hello. I've forgotten how interesting it was to see teachers out of context. I couldn't have been much more out of context. At school, most days I wear a uniform--blue skirt, white blouse, dark shoes, makeup--but today I was wearing yoga pants, running shoes, and my high school gym class t-shirt. It shouldn't feel weird to see students outside of school, and it's happened before, but sometimes it still does.

If you're interested in knowing, I'm flying out of Jakarta on Saturday, December 20, and I'll be flying through Singapore and Hong Kong before I get to Chicago the next day. I'm meeting my family and driving from Chicago, so I'll be in Indianapolis from about the 21/22 of December to January 5.

Things I'm looking forward to when I go home: singing Christmas songs, snow (hopefully!), sweaters, Christmas lights, seeing friends, seeing family, being cold, cooking with my mother, Christmas services, my room, taking walks around my neighborhood, driving myself around, streets without traffic, drinking tap water, living with other people, using a washer and dryer instead of a bucket and a clothesline, making mincemeat pie, and having a fire in the fireplace.

God bless us, every one.

How to have a Happy Birthday in Indonesia

The Indonesian tradition for birthdays is that the birthday person treats. It's kind of like grade school, as one of my elementary education major friends pointed out. So I made chocolate chip cookies for the teachers at school today. It's a good feeling to be giving on your birthday and not just receiving. Plus, I got to enjoy some warm cookies and milk for breakfast. Another Indonesian birthday tradition is that everyone shakes your hand. Now this does seem like that big a deal, but it's warm and friendly, and I enjoyed it. I also ended up with some lovely orchids (from my parents via Karla), balloons, and far too many sweets.

The cool thing about having a birthday on this side of the world is that it seems like it last longer. My birthday started this morning for me, but I don't feel like it's really over until it's over in the U.S., which isn't until tomorrow afternoon. I even got my birthday started early here. I went out to dinner on Wednesday with a few friends from work. The Italian restaurant near my apartment was celebrating its first anniversary by having everything half off. It was good times. I didn't go out for my birthday tonight. I decided to stay in, finish the book I'm reading (That Hideous Strength by C.S. Lewis), talk to my family, finish off the cookie dough, and enjoy a quiet birthday evening.

It still feels strange to have 80 degree weather in December. In some ways, I feel like my sense of time passing is all wrapped up in seasonal weather changes, which means I'm a little discombobulated by Indonesian weather (and it sure doesn't feel like I'm been here almost five months). A good example would be rain. I'm used to Midwestern rain, which usually gives you some clues that it's coming: it gets colder or windier, or you hear thunder in the distance, or it's gets darker with that strange greenness right before a thunderstorm. Not so in Jakarta. Rain comes without any preliminaries, as if someone flicked a switch. I'm really looking forward to some weather variety when I go home for Christmas. It will be wonderful to have something besides hot hot hot, but I'm a little worried that I'll be a cold weather wimp. I think that I need to go ice-skating at the mall before I leave, just to practice.

It was really nice that I didn't have to teach today. I didn't have a lot to do except plan for next semester since I'm done grading finals for my eighth grade students. I was sad to say goodbye to them last week. They gave me headaches, but they also made me laugh. My favorite answer on the final exam was in response to a question about the target audience of a Burger King ad for the Whopper. One student wrote that the ad was directed to almost everyone--families, teenagers, adults, children, etc, "except for people who can't eat solid food." Thank goodness for students like that who add a little spice to the bland monotony of grading.

Technically, this is a long weekend because of a Muslim holiday on Monday, but tomorrow there's a Christmas service for all the IPEKA teachers, so I have to get up early for that. It's kind of a bummer, but I'm going out to see Twilight afterward. To the shame and embarrassment of my sister, I have read the book by Stephanie Meyer. It has pretty much swept the school by storm, so I thought I'd better get on board. And I'm thrilled to see kids getting excited about reading, especially in English. I borrowed a copy from an eighth grade boy, and I was reading it in the library facing these big windows where students pass on their way to the chapel. You should have heard the squeals of excitment when some of my old 11th grade students passing by saw that I was reading Twilight. They loved it, and I'm pretty sure that I'll see some of them at the movie theater tomorrow.

15 days until I leave for home!

Happy Turkey Day!

Thanksgiving is coming early to Indonesia. Karla and I wanted to do Thanksgiving dinner together for some of our colleagues, but we decided that it would be easiest to do it today. It has to be a collaboration because Karla has a beautiful home for entertaining, but she has no oven big enough for a turkey. Which means that our bird's fragrances are wafting through my apartment right now, and in a couple of hours we'll put it in the car and take in over to Joseph and Karla's.

Jakarta's grocery stores are not exactly friendly to Thanksgiving needs. We have a turkey and stuffing, but Karla and I found no pumpkin, and I went to four different grocery stores looking for Crisco for making pie crust. I couldn't find any, so I tried making the crust without it. I don't recommend it. It's probably the ugliest apple pie that I've ever made, but I'm hopeful that it'll taste good.

Difficulties aside, it's really nice to have some way to celebrate my favorite holiday. It's a different Thanksgiving for sure (like I've never had a Thanksgiving where I don't have to wear a jacket), and I'm missing cooking and spending time with my family, but it's also fun to share Thanksgiving with people from around the world.

I will miss the pumpkin pie, though. So I've already made my mother promise I can have one at Christmas.

A little international news

Happy Election Day! I won't write much on the election because I know that most of you have been ten times more saturated with election news than I am and are consequently ten times more exhausted, but I thought you might be interested in an international perspective. Briefly, almost everyone wants Obama, some for political reasons, some because of Obama's connection to Indonesia, some (students) because McCain looks too old. When my boss Joseph put up on his door a "Who should I vote for?" survey for passers-by, Obama was the overwhelming winner. I voted a week and a half ago by email. I had no idea that the state of Indiana was so progressive, but after completing a couple of forms (including one that waived my right to voter privacy), I printed my ballot, filled it out, scanned it, and sent it back. One piece of interesting election-related news that you might not have heard is that Obama's former home in Jakarta has gotten a lot more attention recently. One Dutch man is offering to buy it and set up an Obama cafe. My favorite part is that it would feature "Obama blend" coffee made with beans from Kenya and Java.

I read about that in the Jakarta Post, and I've been trying to get my hands on a copy of it more often so that I can be better informed about current events in Indonesia. My favorite part is the letters to the editor section, where you can see a wide range of opinions on news and Indonesian issues. What I've noticed recently in some of the articles and comments is the struggle in Indonesia to maintain local culture and to create a unique national identity out of the incredible diversity that comes from being a nation of islands. Language plays a really interesting role as local languages are threatened by Bahasa Indonesia and Bahasa Indonesia is threatened by English.

In other international news, the financial crisis in the United States has actually been really good news for me, since I get paid in dollars. The Indonesian rupiah (with other Asian currencies) has dropped significantly against the dollar over the last month. When I first got here, one dollar was about 9200 or 9300 rupiah, but yesterday one of my co-workers got more than 10,000 Rp to the dollar at the bank.

Bandung was interesting this weekend. I went on Sunday with Yuli, one of my co-workers, whom I didn't know very well before, so it was a great time to get to know her better. We went to drop off a student for a computer design training camp, but we stayed just to have fun. It rained a lot in Bandung (streets-flooded rain), so we didn't get to go to see a volcano like we had hoped, but we did some shopping and ate some good food, so it was a good trip. Bandung is at a higher elevation than Jakarta, so it was blessedly cooler. The bad part was the rain made traffic nasty on the way back, so it took about an hour longer to get home. But Yuli and I talked about our college experiences, and it turns out that college students in the United States and in Indonesia do some of the same kinds of crazy, spontaneous things. Good times.

TGIF

It's Friday!
Today was a particularly long Friday because beside teaching 8 periods of eighth graders, I had professional development for two of my free periods, I planned with my co-teacher Douglas for Monday's lesson during my lunch period, and I stayed after school until 6:00 to talk to parents at the report card distribution for my old year 11 students.

Funny/frustrating moment at IPEKA today. I haven't talked too much about how IPEKA's administration can be difficult to deal with at times, but today is a good example. We got a notice on the school message board at 2:23pm which announced that we will be having a school service/gathering on Monday to plant trees as a follow-up to the "I go green!" seminar some teachers and administrators attended today. Between some unclear communication and the short notice, there were some irritated teachers. In general, expatriate teachers are better at complaining than the Indonesian teachers, so sarcastic comments popped up on the message board almost immediately. We all want this school to be a better learning environment for students, and it's frustrating when that doesn't happen.

We're getting into rainy season now (it rains every other day or so), and while I've heard that it can get kind of miserable later on in January and February, right now I like it. It's much cooler (I don't start sweating immediately when I go outside), and the rain clears up some of the smog. I've seen seen the mountains to the south of Jakarta twice in the last two weeks, and I didn't even know that there were mountains to look for!

I'm going to Bandung this weekend. A teacher who's accompanying a student to a competition invited me to keep her company. I'll let you know how it goes.

I realized recently that in the last three months I have taught 119 tenth graders, 120 eighth graders, 108 eleventh graders, and about 40 seventh graders, which comes to a total of approximately 387 students. And 387 names that I should have learned. Actually, I count it a mark of progress that I thought I was on the wrong floor today because I saw students whose names I know.

Finally! A long juicy post to catch you up

So this will be a long entry with lots of pictures to make up for almost a month of non-entries. The last time I wrote, I was in the middle of our Ramadhan break. I stayed at home for most of it, but stayed busy. Things I did during break:

1. Watched the national finals for Australian rules football (which is different from soccer and rugby and American football, but looks a little like all of them). Imagine a lot of men on the field kicking and throwing the ball around and tackling each other.

2. Baked brownies with two 15 year old girls, both daughters of coworkers. Baked is actually the wrong term since the brownies were cooked in a steamer. Weird, huh? They tasted delicious, but we had to wait until the next day to eat them because they took forever to steam, and we had already pigged out on chocolate fondue by the time they were done. It was a perfect girls night, something that I've been missing in Jakarta.

3. Went to Taman Safari with Tim and Karla. It's this place up in the hills outside of Jakarta (my first time outside of the city) where you drive through different animal exhibits of bears and lions and tigers and zebras and cows and elephants and deer and hippos and monkeys and apes and you feed them carrots and then you can park and walk through other exhibits (like the Komodo dragon) or see some animal shows. You can also hold some baby animals. It's the kind of place that is a bit of a guilty pleasure because you know that this probably isn't the best way to take care of animals, but it's definitely a unique experience.


When you drive through the lion and tiger territory, they tell you to roll up your windows for safety.
Here's Tim feeding the elephants.

Yes, we were that close to the hippos. Yes, it made me a bit nervous. Yes, he liked the carrots we tossed in his mouth.

This beast is massive. Ok, maybe not quite as big as the hippos, but they can inflict some serious damage. I learned that Komodo dragons have some nasty bacteria in their mouths that will kill their prey if those jaws don't.

Me, Karla, and Tim with our tiger friend.

This little guy made me laugh because he was ticklish. And he had a cute potbelly.

4. Went to Taman Mini. Taman Mini is kind of like a world's fair just for Indonesia. You can go there and see architecture and dance and artifacts from different parts of Indonesia. Unfortunately, when Karla and I went, it was extremely hot and kind of crowded and people were staring at us, which made the experience less than pleasant. We left without seeing a lot, but we did take a gondola ride over the lake which has a model of Indonesia's islands (which are upside-down in my picture). I'm pretty sure the big one is Kalimantan/Borneo, but I'm not positive. They're hard to see in my picture, but there are some little white dots that are miniature volcanoes on the islands.

5. Got ready for my parents and Megan to come. Remember my locked bedroom? Because my apartment has two bedrooms and the school only pays for me to have a studio, one of my bedrooms is locked, but they let me open it so that Megan could stay there. I got to see a whole new part of my apartment.

6. Welcomed my parents and Megan at the airport! It was so good to see some familiar faces.

7. Went to Yogyajakarta and Solo in Central Java with them. We had such a good time. We visited a couple of incredible ancient temples (Prambanan and Borobudur), a batik factory and a silver-making factory, and two interesting palaces of the local monarchs. And after living on an island for three months, I finally saw the ocean. We waded in the Indian Ocean on the south side of Java. Awesome waves! We also drove through a lot of countryside, which is very different from American countryside.

At the batik factory: this is a woman putting the wax by hand on the fabric before it's dyed. Batik-making a very complicated and time-consuming process. In the background you can see a little more of the kind of thing she's working on here.

The Buddhist temple/pilgrimage site: Borobudur.

Taken from the top of Borobudur.

This is the Hindu temple Prambanan. The scaffolding and the stones that you see in the foreground are part of the reconstruction efforts, which have been complicated by extensive damage from an earthquake in 2006. Imagine it as the world's largest puzzle. It ties my brain in a knot just to think about it.

The Indian Ocean and Indonesian beach-goers.

8. Got back to Jakarta.

Megan and my parents spent about a week in Jakarta with me after we got back from central Java. My apartment was a lot busier with four people living in it, and it was really nice to have some one to come home to. They kept busy with finding their way to the mall and swimming in the pool at my apartment complex. Over the weekend, we went to a wedding of one of my coworkers (the groom is Australian and the bride is Chinese-Indonesian). I learned that it's not impolite in Indonesia to skip the ceremony and just come to the reception. We were among about 30 people at the ceremony, while more like 350-400 appeared for the reception.

Keep this a secret, but I played hooky from school on Tuesday (when I don't teach any classes anyway), so that I could spend their last day with them. We went to the Dutch district of Jakarta, which wasn't quite as interesting as I hope it would be, partly because it hasn't been very well maintained and partly because it was really, really hot while we were walking around. We managed to find a very nice restaurant for lunch, though, and we finished the afternoon at Monas, Indonesia's national monument. Up at the top, it was clear enough for us to get a great view of the city.
Mom and Dad and Megan left the next day (two weeks ago), and I've been missing them a lot. I really enjoyed introducing them to the people and places that I'm growing to love here. If anyone else wants to come visit, feel free. It makes me very happy.

Since then, I've been getting used to teaching eighth grade. They are so funny! They give me a little more of a headache than the 10th and 11th graders do, but they have so much energy and creativity. I got some great results when I had them write a fractured fairy tale, and I saw some interesting Powerpoint presentations yesterday on war posters. Two of my favorite quotes from eighth grade:
One male student to a group of giggly female students: "Stop acting like a bunch of howler monkeys!"
One student to another: "You're speaking unproper English!"

My tutoring student also cracks me up. When he doesn't want to do something I've asked him to do, he simple says, "No need. No need." How can you argue with that?

On Saturday, we had an all school social gathering at hotel restaurant. It was an all-you-can-eat buffet with Indonesian, Chinese, Indian, Japanese and Western food. It felt like Thanksgiving. My favorite part was the cheeseboard right around the corner from the breadbasket. I haven't had such good bread and cheese since I came here. It was a communal gorging on delicious food, so a good time was had by all.

I'm approaching my four month anniversary in Jakarta. It seems a little strange that I've been here that long because I still feel so new here and I still have moments where I think with disbelief: I'm in INDONESIA. But I'm learning a lot. God is good. All the time.

Thoughts on Ramadan and other recent news

So I promised that this post would be about Ramadan (which started October 2 and ends today, I think), but as I’ve been thinking about it, the fact that it’s Ramadan isn’t that apparent, at least not to my untrained eye. There are a few things that stick out. People get up early to eat so I sometimes heard an air rifle being shot off at about 5:15am and I saw a few fireworks at night as the fast was being broken. Right now, some one’s setting off a lot of fireworks in the neighborhood, and they’re getting just high enough that I can see them bursting over the rooftops out my living room window. When I was tutoring late at my private student’s house, I would have to wait a few minutes until the family’s driver had broken the fast so that he could take me home.

I have been learning more about Ramadan, though. I’ve learned that it’s a time of purification, generosity, and forgiveness for Muslims. At the end of Ramadan, Muslims celebrate Idul Filtri (known as Lebaran in Indonesia). Giving money is an important part of the celebrating. The wealthy give to the poor. Employers (though not mine) give to their employees. Parents give to their children. What’s interesting to me is the culture conflict that happens in that arena. Many of us gladly contributed to funds for the security guards at my apartment and for the cleaning and security staff at school, but I overheard an Australian coworker complaining about how his paper boy came begging for a Lebaran donation. Walking the line between generosity and handouts is difficult here.

In some ways, the Indonesian celebration of Lebaran resembles the Christmas season in the United States with the emphasis on generosity and family (and increased consumer spending). There’s a mass exodus out of Jakarta for Lebaran as people go home to their towns and villages to celebrate with family. Even though IPEKA is a Christian school, we get a week and a half off for Lebaran, so I’m enjoying easy transit around the city and sleeping past five o’clock until....

My parents and my roommate Megan get here on Sunday! I’m beyond excited. We’re going to Yogyakarta for a couple of days and then they’ll spend a week with me in Jakarta. I’ve been delightfully busy with figuring out details like groceries and linens and who’ll sleep where. Which means that I haven’t been doing as much grading as I should be. I got slammed with 11^th grade papers and then 10^th grade tests and then 11^th grade finals, and I’m still not done. The hard part about giving out an assignment is that I know I’ll have to grade more than a hundred of them. But with my family coming, I’m really motivated to get it all done.

In other teaching news, I’ve been easing into eighth grade, where we’ve started a unit on war. My first class with them kind of devolved into shouting matches of their opinions on war, which was fun, even though it was a little chaotic. They’re definitely different from my 10^th and 11^th grade students, and they have lots of energy. Here’s one thing that’s been cracking me up. One of the problems that we have as English teachers at IPEKA is that students don’t always speak English in class. IPEKA is supposed to be a 100% English school, but it certainly doesn’t work out that way. So, we English teachers try to discourage Bahasa Indonesia in our classes as much as we can. About a month ago, I was thinking about how my high school French teacher made us sing a song in class if we made a certain verb mistake in past tense. Inspired by Mrs. Lattimer, I wrote the following lyrics for Indonesian-speaking infractions.

(Sung to the tune of Alouette)
This is English class where we speak English,
We speak English no matter what the task:
In our groups and to our friendsies
Mondays, Tuesdays, Thursdays, Wednesdays
Fridays, too, yes that’s true. Ohhh.
This is English class where we speak English,
We speak English no matter what the task.

Since it was a little late to start it with my 10^th or 11^th graders, I decided that my ditty would have to wait until January, but then eighth grade fell into my lap, and I thought I’d see how it worked. Well, I taught it to them on my first day with them (Monday), and when I saw them again on Friday, I heard little choruses of “This is English class” erupting as I walked down the halls. It made me laugh. I hope it works.

I did something really exciting today, but I want to tell the story with the pictures I took.

Flotsam and jetsam news

The last couple of weeks have been pretty busy, so I apologize to those of you who’ve been waiting with bated breath for my latest report.

The end of my time with my year 11 students kind of snuck up on me. It’s probably because I’ve never ended a school year in September. I had my last regular class with them yesterday, and it didn’t really hit me that I’m done teaching them until one of my classes handed me a little poster with a class picture and their signatures. I laughed a little because more of their comments complimented my looks than my teaching (Nicole Kidman and Annie of “Tomorrow” fame” have joined Barbie on the list of women students have compared me to), but I suppose I’ll appreciate it when years of teaching have made me grumpy and sour. I’ll miss my 11s.

The school calendar is really complicated, and I won’t explain it completely, but basically the year 11 students begin year 12 next month, while the year 10 students won’t move up until January. This means that my schedule for the next few months has a big hole, which will soon be filled by teaching grade 8. And with this newest reshuffling of the schedule, I'll only be teaching 3 days a week, and I’ve been relieved of my grade 7 responsibilities. I’m starting to think that they want me to learn the name of every student in all of junior and senior high.

Sushi and bookstores have been a fun feature of the last couple of weeks. My coworker Tim (he’s a fellow Midwesterner) and I started exploring good sushi places a couple of weeks ago. Some of our Indonesian co-workers know of an all-you-can-eat sushi buffet, so a group of us are going next weekend. I’m pretty excited, even though wasabi and I have a complicated relationship. As a small side note, I’m getting much more proficient with chopsticks. On the subject of bookstores, Tim and I also found an excellent one in a western suburb of Jakarta (Lippo Karawaci) where you can read in egg shaped wicker chairs that hang from the ceiling while looking out the window and sipping “Refreshing Tea” or “Relaxing Tea” from the bookstore’s café. Good bookstores are rare enough in Jakarta, partly because this culture is not much of a reading culture, and the ones I’ve found don’t make leisurely browsing easy. The same area also has a lot of restaurants that look like they’re worth trying. We had some tasty Indian food at one and enjoyed dessert and live music at another.

Last Monday we had a blackout at school. Apparently, random power outages are fairly common in Jakarta. The school is equipped with a generator to deal with it and the light came back on a couple minutes later. It doesn't really surprise me that this city has power problems. Infrastructure is not exactly Jakarta's strength, and a city of 10 million takes up a lot of energy.

Also along environmental lines: yes, this city suffers from air pollution and trash everywhere, but they do have some good ideas. At the grocery store, you buy many liquids and gels in pouches not bottles. For example, I bought hand soap in a bottle the first week I was here, but now that I'm running out, I can just buy a pouch of hand soap, and it cuts down on waste. The same goes for cooking oil and laundry detergent and dishwashing liquid. Packaging in general seems less wasteful here. (Unfortunately, there’s no recycling, and I still cringe a little when I throw away plastic bottles or paper.) Another thing is that there’s no central air conditioning. IPEKA cools classrooms and offices with wall units, but the hallways and the lunchroom don't have AC. Besides cutting down on climate costs, this also means that we can control the temperature of individual classrooms, unlike most American classrooms.

I miss fall. I’ve never had a September without autumn, and it’s hard to believe it’s September without changing leaves and crisp, cool sweater weather.

Last week I found a Walter in my refrigerator. “Holy cow!” I said. He crawled out more slowly than usual and posed for several photos on the side of the fridge while he was warming up.

Topic for next time: Ramadhan

Grocery Shopping

Grocery shopping has never been my favorite thing to do. I always get overwhelmed by possibilities and take way longer than I should. And grocery shopping here is part of that “everything is more complicated and takes longer than it should” feature of living in Jakarta. But here are some interesting features of my grocery shopping.

I shop mostly at two big supermarkets, Carrefour and Hypermart. They sell other stuff beside food, so they’re kind of like a Walmart or a Target but only kind of. When I arrived at Carrefour the other day, there was a promotional tent outside where this was happening. Yes, those are children in oversized plastic balls rolling around like hamsters in an inflatable pool filled with water. I couldn’t stop laughing, and I really needed to share it with someone.

Carrefour has a garage on the first floor so you have to take this moving ramp up to the second floor. They magnetize the cart wheels so that they don’t slide down. At first glance, Carrefour looks pretty much like a grocery store in the U.S.

There are some differences, though. For one thing, there are a lot more store employees. Labor is very cheap in Indonesia, so at times there are more employees than customers in an aisle. Sometimes they thrust products at me or try to get me to sample something. There’s always someone mopping the floor. Actually, that’s true almost everywhere I go—school, mall, grocery shopping. Floors and windows really do need to be cleaned often (pollution brings in a lot of grime), but sometimes I think employees just need something to do. Other grocery store differences: eggs aren’t refrigerated, there’s a whole aisle of powdered milk, bread pretty much only comes in white, and when there’s a problem at the register (at least at Carrefour), they wave a flag until someone come to help.

My favorite product that I've seen recently was in a Indian grocery store which I visited with my Indian neighbor from across the hall (he and his wife are also IPEKA teachers). Sorry for the blur, but it says "World's No. 1 Fairness Cream for Men." For a white person who cannot tan to save her life, this looks very funny.

The story of this week is me starting to fall in love with fruit here. I started with familiar fruits, bananas and apples and oranges and grapes, but I’ve been branching out. I discovered pink guava juice a few weeks ago, and I’m pretty much addicted to it now. My exciting discovery this week was that guava naturally prevents or cures dengue fever (a nasty virus transmitted by mosquitoes). I love it when I’m smarter than I think I am. I also tried fresh guava, pink and white, for the first time. If you haven’t tried it, it’s a green fruit about the size of a small apple or orange, and you wash it and cut off the top and bottom and bite it and it’s juicy and fleshy and it can have some small seeds, but overall delicious. I also found some excellent mangoes this week, some at a fruit stall near my apartment (thankfully, I had an Indonesian friend to translate), and some at Hypermart. Mangga is Indonesian for mango, and they’re fabulous here. I'm also learning to cut up a mango successfully, but give me a little more time to practice.

I have one more piece of grocery news, though it’s not really my grocery news. On the way to church last week, we saw this motorbike. Those chickens are alive (or were). I hope they enjoyed the ride.

Lessons learned this morning

1. If I don't get my 8 hours of rest, I am at risk of oversleeping.
2. Oversleeping becomes much more likely when I hit "off" and not "snooze."
3. Waking up at 6:05 (five minutes before the shuttle leaves) is enough to induce heart pounding panic.
4. Wearing a uniform really reduces that paralyzing "what will I wear?" feeling when there are thirty seconds to get dressed.
5. Morning non-essentials include face-washing, teeth-brushing, breakfast, jewelry, make-up (though I did manage a couple sweeps of mascara), and a packed lunch.
6. I can go from bed to door in about three minutes if I really need to.
7. I'm not doing that again.

Skype

I am a new and passionate fan of Skype. If you have a computer with a microphone, please download Skype and call me (I'm easy to find). When I talked to my dad this weekend, I was blown away by the quality of the sound. Downloading the application and computer to computer calling are both free. What could be better?

Good news: I am less that an hour away from the weekend!


Bad news: My computer has at least a hard drive problem and perhaps other problems, too. Which means that I need to find a friend who speaks Bahasa Indonesia to help me buy a new laptop, since I'm tired of fixing a four-year-old computer. I'm not really that upset about it (all my files are safe, thank goodness); it's just the hassle that I mind. Everything here takes about 5 times more effort and 10 times more time.


Busy news: With the resignation of one of our English teachers, some teaching responsibilities have been redistributed to cover the holes. Right now it looks like I'll be helping 7th graders in "individualized instruction," which means another 100+ names to learn, bringing my total to more than 350 students in three grades. I'm kind of looking forward to it because seventh graders have an energy that gets lost by the time they get to high school.


I just realized that I may not have described my teaching responsibilites very well. If this will bore you, feel free to skip this paragraph. Most of my responsibilities are in eleventh grade, where I work with Karla. We're almost done with a unit on power in which we've been reading Animal Farm and Marked. Once a week, I and two other teachers work with tenth graders for individualized instruction, which is more of a support class for their English skills and classwork. Now I may be adding 7th grade individualized instruction, where I'll be in their classrooms once a week with another 7th grade teacher.


More busy news: I saw my tutoring student (I'll call him Daniel) for the first time yesterday. I'll be tutoring him three times a week. Teaching him will be something of a challenge, but it's nice to work with a student individually for a change.

Disciplinary news: I handed out my first "note of concern" today. A note of concern sends a student to "Special Afternoon Meeting" or SAM, which is basically detention during lunch. Actually, I wrote 16 notes of concern for students in the same class who were all five minutes late to my class after their morning break. Lateness is kind of a part of Indonesian culture, but it is frustrating to Indonesian and expatriate teachers alike at IPEKA. So I also made the students write down and turn in ideas to solve their lateness problem. My first note of concern should have come long before this since I've let things slide before, and I know discipline is one of my weaknesses as a teacher. With 16 under my belt, I think I'm over that hump. I hope SAM was a party today.

Tasty news: I made a really good curried tomato, bean and potato soup the other night, and I've been enjoying the leftovers all week. I would post the recipe, but I pretty much made it up, and I don't actually know what kind of beans I'm using since I don't recognize them and can't read the label.

More tasty news: I'm going to my favorite Korean restaurant tonight where you get to grill your food at a little grill built in the table. I always overeat there.

More good news: I successfully bought a pair of shoes last weekend. It wasn't as bad as I thought it would be.

The much promised and long delayed first photos

Finally, Internet installed at my apartment and a brief respite from my computer woes let me give you a visual taste of my life in Jakarta.


Two views from my balcony. This was a not-so-smoggy day where there was actual sunshine instead of cloudy glare. When I'm standing on my balcony and I turn around, I see...

My kitchen is at the back to the left. My utility room is straight back through the door you can see, and my bedroom and bathroom are to the left.

My bedroom with its ginormous bed and ugly art. Sorry, no pictures of my pink bathroom and its sickly yellow toilet seat. You'll just have to come visit.

My kitchen. One of its little oddities is that each of my four burners is a different size. Don't ask me why.

Three basic vehicles on the road. Cars, vendors, and motorbikes. What you can't see, and don't want to see, is the open gutter-canal that runs through the median. I sometimes imagine what I would do if I fell in. The answer involves tears and a lot of disinfectant.

I walk down this street to catch an ongkos to the mall. You can see a few vendors' stalls along the right side of the road. I exchange smiles with a beautiful old woman at one of them when I pass.

I'm anticipating more good photo opportunities Tuesday when we celebrate Indonesian Independence Day and the students enjoy "traditional games" for the rest of the day. I've heard that there's chicken chasing involved, so it should be good. And finally, the best shot so far of one of my Walters.

So cute!

Happy Birthday, Indonesia!

Tomorrow is Indonesian Independence Day. On August 17, 1945, two days after the Japanese surrender of World War II, Sukarno declared independence from the Dutch, and the Indonesian flag was adopted. I had secretly found the Indonesian flag a little boring until a visit to Wikipedia cured me. The red represents courage, physical life, and the color of palm sugar, and the white signifies purity, the spiritual life, and rice. Together they represent a whole human being and good Indonesian cooking.

Actually, so far I'm not in love with Indonesian food. Most of my experience is limited to catered meals provided by the school the first week I was here, but the food tended to be either very spicy or very deep-fried. Once they put little tiny fried minnows no longer than my thumbnail in a little plastic bag. I think I was supposed to sprinkle them on my rice, but I couldn't eat them once I figured out what they were. That's not to say that I haven't had some good food. A co-worker and his wife introduced me to an excellent little Korean restaurant near our apartments and I've had good Chinese and Japanese food. I can find plenty of American restaurants in the shopping centers, but you'll never guess what the most popular fast food joint is: KFC. I also cook at home, but sometimes it just seems like such a bother to spend time cooking just for me.

So the nice thing about Indonesian Independence Day is that I get a three day weekend out of it, but I'm not exactly sure what I'll do with it besides wondering why the three countries (United States, France, and Indonesia) I've spent the most time in all have their independence days in the summer. Actually, I think I'll go shoe shopping. I've been meaning to buy a pair of more comfortable shoes to wear to school, but my wide feet make shoe shopping hard even in the U.S., and I'm not keen on adding a new sizing system and a language I don't understand to the mix. However, I've gotten the kick in the pants I needed from my sister who told me, "Laura, suck it up, and go buy some shoes." Thank you, Erica.

Present participle post

So I've been neglecting my blog-writing responsibilities recently, but not for lack of things to share. Here's what I've been up to recently:

Mourning what looks like a fatal end to my faithful computer of four years. Just as soon as my Internet was installed in my apartment on Saturday, my computer came down with the Ebola of computer ailments. I can get it to turn on about once in every ten times I push the power button, and then I'm lucky to get five minutes of operation before the screen starts to quiver like an analog TV not quite getting the signal, and then everything freezes. I haven't exactly decided on a course of action yet, but it doesn't take a prophet to predict that there's a new computer somewhere in my future.

Ice skating. A co-worker and her daughter took me to a little ice rink in one of the malls here. (I don't know why I didn't think to bring my ice skates to Indonesia.) I wanted to go not just because I enjoy skating but also to see if I've turned into a weather wimp with all this heat. I haven't. The cold was delightful, and I'm looking forward to Christmas.

Buying my ticket home for Christmas. This was far more complicated than I expected, but the end result is that I'm arriving in Indianapolis on the 21st of December and leaving January 5. I'll be so ready for snow and cold and sweaters and seeing family and dear friends.

Receiving a delightful package of books and goodies from my mother. The way to make Laura smile is to send her books.

Researching interesting places to visit when my parents and roommate come to visit in October. My excitement goes way beyond exclamation points.

Getting a tutoring job. I'm about 90% sure that I'm going to start tutoring a very artistically talented 7th grader boy in English.

Celebrating one whole month of being here. My "anniversary" was 08/08/08, which is almost celebration enough by itself (one of the few dates where it doesn't matter if I write the date American style or rest-of-the-world style), but it was also Friday, and I was invited out to dinner at a Japanese restaurant by the family whose son I'll tutor. Then I got to watch the last half of the opening ceremonies of the Olympics. It hardly seems like I've been here a month, but it's been a good one and I'm looking forward to more good months.

Teaching a graphic novel. We're reading Marked by Steve Ross in my 11th grade classes, an adaptation of the gospel of Mark. I am not very familiar with the graphic novel world and I'm not totally comfortable with the portrayal of Christ, but I love the way Marked avoids traditional iconography and refashions situations and characters to remind us how strange and crazy and challenging the gospel story is. I won't say anything more, but I definitely recommend it as a book to get you thinking.

Creeping into my kitchen every morning with a camera to capture that perfect shot of Walter.

Watching the Olympics. I've been an Olympics junkie since I was a little girl. Erica and I have sung along with the NBC Olympics theme song many times (I can hear those timpani and trumpets now), but it's a little harder to get my Olympic fix in Indonesia. For one thing, the Olympics aren't very popular here, largely because of Indonesia's limited medal prospects. Badminton is their best hope this year. In fact, there was hardly any competition for the TV rights to cover the Olympics in Indonesia. The coverage I've seen is sometimes laughable in its badness. The transition between events usually involves cutting one event off in the middle and sometimes going to an Indonesian anchor before cutting into another event in the middle. Maybe it would help if I understood more than a few numbers in the Indonesian transitions, but I don't think so. My favorite was when the visual showed a women's basketball game while the audio followed the men's bicycling road race. Perhaps Indonesia has discovered an efficient way to cover two sports at once. All in all, even though I'm closer than most of you to the Olympics, I'm feeling further away, and I've been re-examining my enjoyment of the Olympics: do I just like them because I get to watch the U.S. win? And what is it that makes a country good at the Olympics?

Living alone. This isn't anything new, but I've been thinking about how living alone has been one of the hardest things to get used to here. While living alone it has its benefits (I don't bother anyone and no one bothers me), I've decided that I vastly prefer living with other people. To all the people I've lived with, no matter how short or long the time, I miss you.

Growing, stretching, and learning.

On prices and passports

One U.S. dollar equals about 9100 Indonesian rupiah. This means that you only need $110 to be a millionaire here, but the first time I saw my 6-digit grocery bill, I think my heart skipped a beat. Unfortunately, this means that knowing how to count to ten (let me show off just a little: satu, dua, tiga, empat, lima, enam, tujuh, delapan, sembilan, sepuluh) in Bahasa Indonesian doesn't really help me.

As far as prices, some things are very cheap here, but some are surprisingly expensive. At the grocery store, produce and most basic commodities are less expensive than you would find in the United States, but imported goods cost a lot more. Cereals can be $6-7 a box. One the other hand, I usually get to the grocery store by ongkos, which costs 2500 rupiah/less than $0.30. Most of the time, I "splurge" and take a taxi home, which puts me back around 12,000 rupiah/$1.30. When my taxi driver didn't know where he was going, and the ride cost close twice what it should have, I had to remind myself that I was still getting a ride home for less than three dollars. Today when I sent my mother's birthday present--wish her a happy birthday on August 30th--, a woman in a little shop next to the post office sold me a box, packed the present, and wrapped the box for 5000 rupiah.

However, most of the places where I feel comfortable shopping are pricey by Indonesian standards, and sometimes even by American standards. When I go shopping at the mall nearest my home, I'm not getting any steals. I've been looking for a watch for the last couple of weeks, and I can't find anything (besides large pink plastic ones) under 400,000 rupiah. Last weekend, I visited a very upscale mall called Senayan Plaza, which featured marble floors and designer outlets like Prada, Burberry, and Coach. In a country where people assume that I have money to burn because I'm white, it was interesting to find a place where I can't afford to shop.

My students certainly can. They come from extremely wealthy families with cooks and maids and drivers. Their jaws dropped a little when I told them that I clean my own apartment and ride the ongkos.

By the way, I have my passport back! I've been reluctant to tell this story until I was sure that everything was ok. When I first arrived, Suli, the head of administration at IPEKA, told me that I needed to give her my passport to get my kitas. I'm still not exactly sure what a kitas is. It's not my work visa, but it's still issued through the immigration office. IPEKA sponsors me and pays for it. When I forgot to bring my passport the next day, Suli called me that afternoon and told me that a man from the apartment complex would be coming by to pick up my passport and take it to the immigration office. With some trepidation, I handed off my passport to a man I had never seen before (to his credit, he did give me a business card and a receipt) and hoped for the best. I caught a glimpse of my passport when I went to the immigration office a couple of weeks ago to sign in half a dozen places and to be photographed and fingerprinted. However, I was not exactly comforted about my passport's safety when a co-worker reported that the kitas process is very expensive because of corruption. But as of Thursday, the school has my kitas, and I have my passport, which means one less thing to keep me awake at night.

There was another sighting of (newly christened, thanks to Megan Ranney) Walter the lizard this morning on my kitchen counter. Unfortunately, he's still a little camera-shy, but I promise that pictures from other parts of my life in Jakarta are coming soon.

Success of the week: I made it to and from (by taxi) one of the big computer warehouse centers in Jakarta where I bought a new power cord. Granted, a student told me today that I should have bargained with the seller for it, but I just get inordinately proud of myself for every little victory towards being an independent person in Jakarta. My next challenge is learning more Bahasa Indonesian.

I did learn one magic word this week. My problem was that I could get on the little public transportation red vans (ongkos--I can pronounce it, but I'm not sure how it's spelled) because all you have to do is stand on the side of the road and wait for one to come by, but I couldn't get off because I didn't know how to tell the driver to stop where I wanted to be let off. This meant that I would either get off with someone else close to where I was going and walk the rest of the way, or wait until traffic slowed enough for me to jump out at an intersection. A few days ago, I figured out that you can say "ini," which means "here." I'm still amazed at how well it works.

A couple of you have asked about leaving comments. I think that all you have to do is click at the bottom of the post where it says (right now) "0 comments." A new window should pop up where you can comment to your heart's delight.

How to cross the busy street north of my apartment complex:

1. Pray.
2. Don’t bother going to an intersection; crossing in the middle of the block works.
3. If you’re American, look right first. They drive on the left side of the road here.
4. Wait for a break in the traffic, but remember that motorbikes usually go faster than cars.
5. When there’s a gap, proceed into the street. Hold your hand out, palm to the traffic and fingers up. This is Indonesian for “Please don’t hit me.”
6. In the middle of the road, cross the median by:
1. Finding an intersection with a break in the median. Watch for extra vehicles doing U-turns here.
2. Finding a little metal bridge that crosses the open gutter in the middle of the median.
7. Look left.
8. Repeat step 5.
9. Get to the other side of the road.
10. Thank God.

A word on Islam

When I came to Indonesia, I knew that it was a predominantly Muslim country, but I had heard that its Islam was "gentle." Here's what I've noticed in that vein so far:

Most women do not wear head coverings, and I haven't seen a single one wearing the full burqa.

You can find all the trashy T.V. here that you want. I haven't noticed any censorship of objectionable material, at least not on the cable channels that I receive.

There is a mosque within hearing distance of my apartment, and I occasionally hear the prayers over the loud speakers, though to date, I haven't seen anyone stop what they're doing to pray. Maybe I just need to be looking harder.

Women do go out unaccompanied. I didn't even think about this aspect of Islam until my mother asked me about it (in the context of me going out by myself). Women go out, ride motorbikes, and have jobs. I'm told that some more traditional families might require a male escort for their female members, but unaccompanied women are not unusual. I stick out for other reasons.

In other news, I found Nutella at the grocery store and an English bookstore big enough to satisfy me. I'm a happy girl.

This past Sunday, Joseph and Karla (my boss and his wife, who's my co-teacher in year 11) took me to church in the downtown part of Jakarta, which is south and east of where I live and work. It's taken me a long time to recover any of my sense of direction here, and I still get really mixed up because the streets run like a pile of spaghetti, complicated by one-way streets and streets that are blocked off.

Anyway, in Jakarta's downtown, we visited a department store which had two floors dedicated to traditional Indonesian wares. On one floor, there were paintings, wood carvings, jewelry, knick-knacks, incredible (huge!) Indonesian beetles in framed boxes, exquisite pieces of silver-smithing, and other handicrafts. The floor below it was nothing but batiks: traditional clothing for women and men and pieces of fabric with gorgeous colors, textures, and patterns. Though I've seen little flashes of beauty here, like blossoming bushes, kids playing soccer, lovely faces, and colorful pushcarts, I've mostly noticed Jakarta's dirt, poverty, and pollution. I've taken it on faith that this is a beautiful country. It was so refreshing to see the richness that Indonesia has to offer, and I'm looking forward to some more exploring.

To be fair, we also had lunch at Chili's, not exactly culturally enriching, but it tasted really good.

Patience

The word of the week, maybe the word of the year, is patience. I'm finding that I often have to set aside my American expectations for smooth, efficient speed and accept that things don't always work that way here. The traffic is a perfect example. On the way back from grocery shopping this week, my taxi driver got lost. (I was very proud of the fact that I knew where I was going when he didn't.) With a traffic jam, it took probably four times the normal time to get home. If only patience weren't so difficult to learn.

Other notable items of the week:

I found a lizard in my apartment one morning this week. I tried unsuccessfully to catch him and photograph him, but he was very speedy and very good at hiding behind my couch. My co-workers have assured me that this is fairly normal. I have to admire any lizard willing to climb three flights of stairs up to my apartment.

Stairs are kind of the story of my life right now. My apartment is on the fourth floor, and I teach mostly on the fifth floor at IPEKA. I'm pretty sure that my legs are going to be in the best shape of my life by Christmas.

In other fitness news, I attended my first ever yoga class this morning at the gym by my apartment where I have a membership. I didn't understand anything the instructor said, but by the end, I had learned a little yoga, and I think I had worked out the Bahasa words for "inhale" and "exhale."

Even when I'm feeling impatient, I can't ignore the wonderful kindness shown to me from all directions: my co-workers at IPEKA and my friends, family, and church families. I gave some devotional thoughts at a teacher fellowship meeting this week, and it was a great opportunity to reflect on how God has been good to me here. I am very grateful. Blessings on all of you.

This is the week when I've started to notice all the little things that I have to get used to. Things like:

1. My hair will always be a little on the frizzy side here.

2. The sun always goes down at 6 o'clock.

3. Cars drive on the left side of the road, so I need to make sure I'm looking the right way when I cross the street.

4. Shopping will always more difficult than I think it will be.



Actually, a lot of things turn out to be more difficult than I think they will be. Like going to the bank this week. Fortunately the woman who opened my account spoke fairly good English, but I had a terrible time trying to deposit my US dollars into the account because 1) I had fifty dollar bills instead of hundred dollar bills, and when I had exchanged them for hundred dollar bills at the money exchanger next door, 2) my hundred dollar bills didn't have the right serial number. Not all cash is equal here.



Yesterday, I had my first day of classes, so I met all of my students. I have around 115 students in grade 11, and I don't think I'm going to learn all of their names before Christmas. Fortunately, their names are mostly Western-sounding names, so pronunciation shouldn't be a problem. They call me Miss Laura (all teachers are addressed by first name here), and they seemed interested in me--I fielded a number of questions about my romantic status--, so I'm excited to jump into teaching. The first book we're reading is Animal Farm, so it should be interesting, particularly in a country where the government is often corrupt.



Favorite student comment of the day: "Miss, you look like a Barbie." Which made me laugh.



Fun fact to know and tell about Indonesia: Like many Indonesians, some of my students have only one name, and it's not always a particularly unique one (like Ryan or Kevin). This makes it really difficult to tell them apart when their only name is the same as someone else's. I am newly grateful for my three names: Laura Elizabeth Mail does not get mixed up with anyone.

I'm here!

Please congratulate me. I have successfully navigated by foot the city of Jakarta to arrive safely at the mall and its free Internet, and I did it all by myself. It helps that someone showed me how to do it two days ago, but I’m still proud of myself.

The last week has been something of a whirlwind. We got back from Michigan; I packed, slept, went to church, and left for the airport on Sunday afternoon. My travel was mercifully smooth, despite a delay in Los Angeles (thank you for your prayers). I even made a friend in Hong Kong who was also on the way to Jakarta, and I realized that traveling alone makes you hungry for conversation, so I was very grateful for company.

Since I arrived on Tuesday, I’ve been busy with preparing for the new school year. I’m teaching mostly 11^th grade and a few classes of 10^th grade. The school schedule is possibly the most complicated thing I’ve ever seen. Some days I teaching two periods out of 11 and some days I teach 8. Preparations have included PowerPoint presentations, a 5 hour worship/welcome-to-the-new-semester service, meetings with the English department, getting to know my colleagues (Joseph, Karla, Tim, Laura, Glenn, Tricia, and others), and the like. If you’re interested, you can see a picture of my school at its website: www.iics.ipeka.org. It’s just as spectacular as it looks. The facility is only a year old, and it’s gorgeous, much nicer than the school where I student taught.

One thing I love is my apartment. It’s huge! Or maybe it just feels huge after four years of college living. I have a large room that includes a kitchen, dining table, and living room, a bedroom, bathroom, balcony, utility room, and oddly enough, a maid’s bedroom and bathroom, each more like a closet than a room. I also have a phone and a phone number, so let me know if you want it. I live on the fourth floor, right across from an Indian couple who both teach physics at IPEKA, and I have a great view of...well, mostly of haze. That’s something I’m still getting used to: not seeing a blue sky.

Other interesting things I’ve seen so far: avocado drinks with chocolate, on-carts (little red vans that are the only public transportation I know of), a family of five on a motorbike, and more familiar stores and products that I expected to see (Pizza Hut and Ace Hardware among others).

I’m not entirely comfortable here yet, particularly because I don’t speak any Indonesian (I don’t even know how to say “I don’t speak Indonesian” so I’m pretty much helpless when it comes to communication), but I’m feeling like this is a place where I can be happy.

Thank you for your love and prayers.

Laura

The hopefully-not-too-boring first entry

Welcome to my blog! I'm hoping that this is a good way to keep it touch with all of you while I'm making my way in Jakarta, Indonesia as an 11th grade English teacher. Here's the scoop:

Departure date: July 6

What I'm doing until then: freaking out and going to Michigan for a family vacation

Hours I'll be in Indianapolis between vacation and getting on a plane: hopefully 24

Time it will take me to get from Indianapolis to Jakarta: about 30 hours with stops in Dallas, Los Angeles, and Hong Kong.

Things I wish I were taking: my cute sweaters (too hot there) and more books (not enough room)

What I've been doing this week: saying goodbye (to Indianapolis, to clean tap water, to weather below 70 degrees, and to people I love), driving to the Indonesian consulate in Chicago twice, worrying about my visa, getting my visa, hanging out with my parents, getting new luggage, and not putting stuff in that luggage (yet).

Best way to reach me: email--lauralizmail@yahoo.com--since I don't know what my phone service will look like until I get there. I can also receive snail mail at my school.

Laura Mail
c/o IPEKA International Christian School
Kompleks Taman Meruya Ilir Blok K
Jakarta 11620

What would make me really happy: to hear from you during my Indonesian adventure and to have your thoughts and prayers with me.