I'm still not quite to the point where I can fully comprehend the actions or intentions of many Indonesians, but at least I have finally gotten to a place where expecting the unexpected is second nature. I feel like I've developed a unique ability to at least recognize situations where the result will be doubtlessly unpredictable. In Medan I've already been doing much more laughing to myself (as opposed to staring in confusion) about the strange occurrences that happen here, mainly because leastwise I'm prepared for the irony. This year, rather than hitting trip mines and getting blown away, I will be watching time-bombs from a safe distance.
My second night in Medan truly began about two hours after dark with a shout from outside my bedroom window, produced by the high-pitched voice of five-foot-nothing Mr. Monang, an employee at St. Yoseph. I had met him briefly at school that day, and he had already been to my house that afternoon to help fix a slight problem in my bathroom. Especially at the time, but even right up until yesterday afternoon, I'd had a problem communicating with this man. I did deduce, however, that he wanted to enter my house, totally unprompted, after I'd already eaten, prepared for bed, and locked my doors. I'd been home alone for hours and was fully expecting to sleep soon, so his abrupt and arguably discourteous arrival puzzled me slightly. Of the few people I'd already met in Medan, and with whom I'd formed only a 24-hour relationship, I inarguably knew Mr. Monang the least. Wielding an over-night bag, he walked past me at the front door, sat on my couch, and turned on my television.
I've been in my new home for over two weeks now, and I've had countless interactions with Mr. Monang. He's taken me to the bank, motorcycle shopping, and has often given me rides home from school. Even now, I'd say I can understand maximally 20-30% of what he says to me. It's not because I have a hard time with his accent nor with his choice of words; it's mainly because I absolutely have no idea where this guy's mind is, and it doesn't help that he speaks in sharp, short bursts. I can literally speak in Indonesian with a group of people for 20 minutes straight and be totally within an Indonesian mindset, and Mr. Monang can enter the scene, and I can no longer communicate with anyone in the room. He destroys my groove like nothing else. One thing I never let slip by me, though, are his frequent queries about why I'm always laughing at him. I don't know how to explain that I pretty much never know what on earth he's talking about, so I've just resorted to laughing at the situation every time I'm around him. I feel like every once in a while we have the occasional and exciting breakthrough, but each time that happens, only 30 seconds later does he ask me a question that I simply don't have an answer to, nor can I think of anything to say that might be even slightly related. I usually just look at him with a huge smile on my face and get nothing back but a blank stare. He sees me speaking in Indonesian with countless people, so I'm sure he's also confused as to why we can't seem to get ideas across to one another. I love him, but I'm not sure that he likes me at all.
That night when he arrived at my house for an unannounced sleepover (or maybe it was; I guess I'll never know), I couldn't even understand him when he asked me simple questions like “what time is it?” His questions not only came up at seemingly random times during what I'd like to think was a conversation, but he'd use expressions that I'd never heard before (and of course using nothing but words that I actually did know, so it was all the more frustrating to not understand). He repeatedly kept saying “jam kita,” and with his unfamiliar Medanese intonation, I didn't even realize that there was an implied question mark until he reached for my cell phone to look at the clock. Jam can mean “time,” “hour,” or “clock,” and kita means “we.” I finally figured out that kita was modifying jam and, therefore, probably meant “our time.” But it was “our time” for what? I guess it's not so uncommon for someone to ask, “Yo, what's our time, bro?” But at least in English, we've got a question word floating around somewhere within the sentence.
Clearly, in his mind, there had to be no question as to why he was slipping into his pajamas and making himself comfortable on my couch. So, I was at least hoping that his thoughts were going farther than the fact that we had finally established that it was bedtime. Nevertheless, my knowing that he certainly must have some straightforward reason for being in my house, it made it extremely difficult for me to phrase the question that was turning over and over in my head; “what the hell are you doing here?!?” One thing I have gathered is that people in this country, especially if they work with you, are almost always obliged to assist you, and so rarely do they have negative intentions. I knew that I had nothing to worry about, but I certainly wasn't expecting to have a room-mate. I was admittedly in a tough spot because I really wanted to know what was going on, but if there's anything you shouldn't do in this country, it's insult or refuse someone's attempts at kindness, especially upon first meeting them (and especially in Medan, where I had heard that people are more vindictive and easily upset).
Ultimately, I willingly let this complete stranger take a shower and brush his teeth in my bathroom, and I gave him my extra pillow. The next morning, he left without a word, and I went to school alone, as I had expected to do all along. Once I got there, I decided it might be a good idea to give Sister Modesta, the school's headmistress, my account of last night. Simply ecstatic to hear that I had spent the night with Mr. Monang, she explained to me that she had “ordered” him to sleep at my house. I assumed it had to be something like this, and that's why I went to her first. Indonesian people are always genuinely concerned about whether or not others are lonely, and for them, this sort of thing is not only common, but it would be totally unacceptable to have a new guest in the ranks and not provide company for them. After all, I'm only 23 (a kid in the minds of many here), so how could I not be scared and lonely in a new house? It's a simple fact that there was no word in Indonesian for the western notion of privacy until they added pribadi, only recently, into their dictionary. Oh Indonesia.
Thursday, September 4, 2008
Sunday, August 31, 2008
Reactivating, Body Cleansing, Energy Revitalizing Trickery
Here am I at 8:00 am, sitting in my living room on a Sunday morning, laughing to myself because after one year of living in Indonesia, it's still so difficult to accept the crazy reality that, in fact, I am living every day. I was just awakened by my new team of servants, who come to my house two or three times a week. Ika is a 17-year-old girl, who's currently in trade school, studying telecommunications. Her mother, Sia, has lived in Medan her whole life. After she cleans houses in the morning, she opens a small warung (eating stall), where she sells various fried indonesian snacks. They both seem to have the typical Batak personality – loud and direct, much different from my passive and polite Javanese friends. They cut me no slack when speaking the language and leap at every opportunity to make fun of my unfamiliar, American-Indonesian dialect. They were recommended to me by my neighbors, who apparently have been hiring them for quite some time. Last week they came to my house for the first time, and we negotiated a price of Rp. 150,000 per month. Compared to Java, that seemed pretty fair to me, but when I spoke to my co-workers at school about how much I had agreed to pay them, each of my new friends' expressions changed, and they scolded me for not asking their advice first about how much to pay. I guess a whopping $16 a month for washing dishes and clothes, ironing, and mopping my floor multiple times a week is pretty unheard of in Medan.
Someone outside school, however, who has already gone to great lengths to introduce me to the culture, to befriend me, and to show me the ropes may or may not have the noble intentions that I would have hoped for. Chris drove me from the airport to my home on my first day here, and since then, I have spent a couple really long days with him, visiting his friends and family, as well as checking out some scenery in the area. I had a wonderfully genuine experience with him last week when I ate dinner with his family. Before the end of the night, I was deemed 'Uncle Ken' and was asked to say the blessing before dinner. I had multiple kids climbing all over my back for the better part of an hour, and I was receiving constant directions about how to cook the delicious food that I had been served.
Later that night, we moved from his mother's home to one of his friend's places, where many people had already gathered together. One of the crew is a local TV personality, and a couple more seemed to be pretty successful business types. They were great people, and we talked about everything from our future plans and goals to how they were going to “open my third eye” and show me a ghost who tends to hang out around their house – which hell, if they can do that, then I'm totally up for it. A couple hours passed, and throughout the course of the evening, mentions of their business popped up as non-sequiturs in our conversation. I didn't really have much interest in it because I was so tired by that time, so I never really bothered to ask what they were all into. Without a doubt, however, they were certainly selling some product.
This past friday was a good 20-hour day, which started at my school, St. Yoseph, and ended on the back of Chris's mo-ped. I was in Medan city for many hours with my friend, John, another teacher at the school, where we tried to sort out my internet situation at the infamous Telkomsel office. This year, I'm handling the complications with Telkomsel quite productively, whereas a few interactions last year ended up in tears later in the day, when I still could not begin to apply for graduate school... but that's beside the point. After John toted me around on his Suzuki for half the day, he dropped me off at Citra Gardens, where I was supposed to meet Chris for dinner. However, this place's formal atmosphere looked much more like that of an office complex than that of a food court, and in fact, it was.
I sat down with my new friend and three other people I hadn't met yet and was given expensive coffee to drink while Chris explained to me that, actually, he wanted me to see a presentation before we went to eat, and how that was actually the true reason why he wanted me to meet him there. I'm not going to say that I had been leery of him the whole time, but since our first meeting, I hadn't forgotten seeing his set of motivational tapes and secrets-to-success guides (all from the same publisher) in his car on the ride back from the airport. And sure enough, all the people I had met with him the previous weekend, who had all been introduced to me merely as friends, immediately showed up wearing suits and carrying bundles of electronic equipment.
While the crew began to assemble their mini-stage upstairs, Chris began to entertain the many guests who started to filter in. To my utter disappointment, he whipped out a few boxes of Liquid Chlorophyll, a product of some pyramid scheme (which is now referred to as “Multilevel Marketing,” by the way). Last year, a few teachers at Guyangan, including Imam (who is always scheming about something), came to school one day with this great new idea about how to get rich and how to sell a product that cleanses your body naturally. Liquid Chlorophyll is just some drink with a lot of iron and a lot of calcium, but a new cult of multilevel marketers has apparently started to go around (especially in developing countries, where people have a lower standard of education), in order to promote their product with a super fancy presentation, including an LCD projector, an advanced sound system, and a Powerpoint slide-show with all the bells and whistles that the program has to offer.
It's just fact that a great deal of people in developing countries are fascinated with new technology, and because they haven't been exposed to it (nor to fraudulent money making schemes, nor to many science or psychology classes), when they see a production like this, they have absolutely no reason in the world to doubt the truth of what the presenters are saying. I actually talked for over an hour about this kind of marketing and about the psychological tricks that are used in order to get people to join these scams with the group of teachers in the pesantren, who were all highly considering dropping the equivalent of $200 to join – that's two months' salary for a lot of them.
On some level, I was actually happy that I was about to see this presentation, which had excited my co-workers in Guyangan so strongly. And about half way through, I wanted my video camera so badly it was killing me. They were making claims that if you were to leave a cigarette near a closed bottle of Liquid Chlorophyll for some mentioned length of time, that the nicotine in the cigarette would be absorbed (into what, I don't know). They had so much scientific-sounding lingo for the different kinds of products, like “omega squared,” “universe induced energy,” “solar-harnessed negative ions,”and “the six elements of health.” Each time a new presenter entered or left the stage, they were given an up-beat, rock 'n' roll intro or exit track, to which they jogged off the stage, through the audience, giving high fives to the other presenters and sometimes even to excited audience members. And at one point, they had four volunteers come up onto the stage, not knowing what their assignment was to be, and they were all told to lift a man into the air using only their index fingers (a seemingly impossible task). The man was sitting in a chair, and of course the participants were confused; they were only told where they could lift him (under his arms and legs), but they didn't know exactly why they were doing this, nor how.
After they failed miserably, they were each given a glass of Liquid Chlorophyll to drink and were told that after 15 minutes, when the product had been properly metabolized (also a perfect amount of time to think about their new job and mentally prepare), they would be asked to try and lift the man again. The second time when the group of people went up in front of everyone, you could see that their attitudes had changed. They knew what they had to do, and they had all been thinking about how they would do it. Also, unlike last time when they were expected to fail, this time they had 35 pairs of eyes expecting them to succeed. The participants had smiles on their faces instead of grimaces, and they had bent knees and fully planted legs instead of precarious and apathetic postures. Of course the four of them were able to lift the man, and to their own amazement and satisfaction, an audience of genuinely impressed people began to clap. I was desperately scanning the room to see if I could make eye-contact with anyone who wasn't buying into the silly deception. Unfortunately, I was unsuccessful.
After the presentation, everyone was broken into groups, and round-table discussion ensued. Everyone was asked to stand, introduce him/herself, and give his reason for wanting to join the Liquid Chlorophyll family. If they had already joined, they were encouraged to give a testimonial about how Liquid Chlorophyll had changed their life. I'm not exaggerating about that last comment either; Indonesian people in general love drama much more than western people. For example, yesterday I was asked to video tape the speeches that some individuals made at a going away party for one of the teachers at my school who is about to move to another island. Any time someone started crying while the camera was off, John, who was sitting next to me, gave me an urgent look and pressured me to switch it on. The fact that, in a group of friends at someone's house, people were giving speeches one-by-one to honor their departing workmate should tell you enough. Anyway, I of course was not exempt from the introduction process at the Liquid Chlorophyll debriefing. If there is anything that I have learned to do during my time in Indonesia, it's been how to handle myself in completely random, awkward, and uncomfortable situations.
After the hours of craziness, I actually did have a good time with Chris and his friends at an eating stall outside the building. They were pretty genuine people, and I couldn't really be frustrated with them. Chris had been slightly deceiving, but I have truly begun to embrace all unpredictable things that happen while I'm here. I honestly just don't have a whole lot on my plate, so it's not like anything could really inconvenience me. So many things that used to frustrate me last year just make me excited now, and I when find myself in these situations, I'm always taking notes with the software on my cell phone, just so I can remember exactly how silly everything is. The only undeniably disturbing aspect of the evening was having to silently watch desperate people get taken advantage of by an American product, clearly aiming to take advantage of desperate people in other countries (there's a reason why you probably haven't heard of this drink before). But hey, that's why I can't wait to start focusing on education next year in grad school.
Someone outside school, however, who has already gone to great lengths to introduce me to the culture, to befriend me, and to show me the ropes may or may not have the noble intentions that I would have hoped for. Chris drove me from the airport to my home on my first day here, and since then, I have spent a couple really long days with him, visiting his friends and family, as well as checking out some scenery in the area. I had a wonderfully genuine experience with him last week when I ate dinner with his family. Before the end of the night, I was deemed 'Uncle Ken' and was asked to say the blessing before dinner. I had multiple kids climbing all over my back for the better part of an hour, and I was receiving constant directions about how to cook the delicious food that I had been served.
Later that night, we moved from his mother's home to one of his friend's places, where many people had already gathered together. One of the crew is a local TV personality, and a couple more seemed to be pretty successful business types. They were great people, and we talked about everything from our future plans and goals to how they were going to “open my third eye” and show me a ghost who tends to hang out around their house – which hell, if they can do that, then I'm totally up for it. A couple hours passed, and throughout the course of the evening, mentions of their business popped up as non-sequiturs in our conversation. I didn't really have much interest in it because I was so tired by that time, so I never really bothered to ask what they were all into. Without a doubt, however, they were certainly selling some product.
This past friday was a good 20-hour day, which started at my school, St. Yoseph, and ended on the back of Chris's mo-ped. I was in Medan city for many hours with my friend, John, another teacher at the school, where we tried to sort out my internet situation at the infamous Telkomsel office. This year, I'm handling the complications with Telkomsel quite productively, whereas a few interactions last year ended up in tears later in the day, when I still could not begin to apply for graduate school... but that's beside the point. After John toted me around on his Suzuki for half the day, he dropped me off at Citra Gardens, where I was supposed to meet Chris for dinner. However, this place's formal atmosphere looked much more like that of an office complex than that of a food court, and in fact, it was.
I sat down with my new friend and three other people I hadn't met yet and was given expensive coffee to drink while Chris explained to me that, actually, he wanted me to see a presentation before we went to eat, and how that was actually the true reason why he wanted me to meet him there. I'm not going to say that I had been leery of him the whole time, but since our first meeting, I hadn't forgotten seeing his set of motivational tapes and secrets-to-success guides (all from the same publisher) in his car on the ride back from the airport. And sure enough, all the people I had met with him the previous weekend, who had all been introduced to me merely as friends, immediately showed up wearing suits and carrying bundles of electronic equipment.
While the crew began to assemble their mini-stage upstairs, Chris began to entertain the many guests who started to filter in. To my utter disappointment, he whipped out a few boxes of Liquid Chlorophyll, a product of some pyramid scheme (which is now referred to as “Multilevel Marketing,” by the way). Last year, a few teachers at Guyangan, including Imam (who is always scheming about something), came to school one day with this great new idea about how to get rich and how to sell a product that cleanses your body naturally. Liquid Chlorophyll is just some drink with a lot of iron and a lot of calcium, but a new cult of multilevel marketers has apparently started to go around (especially in developing countries, where people have a lower standard of education), in order to promote their product with a super fancy presentation, including an LCD projector, an advanced sound system, and a Powerpoint slide-show with all the bells and whistles that the program has to offer.
It's just fact that a great deal of people in developing countries are fascinated with new technology, and because they haven't been exposed to it (nor to fraudulent money making schemes, nor to many science or psychology classes), when they see a production like this, they have absolutely no reason in the world to doubt the truth of what the presenters are saying. I actually talked for over an hour about this kind of marketing and about the psychological tricks that are used in order to get people to join these scams with the group of teachers in the pesantren, who were all highly considering dropping the equivalent of $200 to join – that's two months' salary for a lot of them.
On some level, I was actually happy that I was about to see this presentation, which had excited my co-workers in Guyangan so strongly. And about half way through, I wanted my video camera so badly it was killing me. They were making claims that if you were to leave a cigarette near a closed bottle of Liquid Chlorophyll for some mentioned length of time, that the nicotine in the cigarette would be absorbed (into what, I don't know). They had so much scientific-sounding lingo for the different kinds of products, like “omega squared,” “universe induced energy,” “solar-harnessed negative ions,”and “the six elements of health.” Each time a new presenter entered or left the stage, they were given an up-beat, rock 'n' roll intro or exit track, to which they jogged off the stage, through the audience, giving high fives to the other presenters and sometimes even to excited audience members. And at one point, they had four volunteers come up onto the stage, not knowing what their assignment was to be, and they were all told to lift a man into the air using only their index fingers (a seemingly impossible task). The man was sitting in a chair, and of course the participants were confused; they were only told where they could lift him (under his arms and legs), but they didn't know exactly why they were doing this, nor how.
After they failed miserably, they were each given a glass of Liquid Chlorophyll to drink and were told that after 15 minutes, when the product had been properly metabolized (also a perfect amount of time to think about their new job and mentally prepare), they would be asked to try and lift the man again. The second time when the group of people went up in front of everyone, you could see that their attitudes had changed. They knew what they had to do, and they had all been thinking about how they would do it. Also, unlike last time when they were expected to fail, this time they had 35 pairs of eyes expecting them to succeed. The participants had smiles on their faces instead of grimaces, and they had bent knees and fully planted legs instead of precarious and apathetic postures. Of course the four of them were able to lift the man, and to their own amazement and satisfaction, an audience of genuinely impressed people began to clap. I was desperately scanning the room to see if I could make eye-contact with anyone who wasn't buying into the silly deception. Unfortunately, I was unsuccessful.
After the presentation, everyone was broken into groups, and round-table discussion ensued. Everyone was asked to stand, introduce him/herself, and give his reason for wanting to join the Liquid Chlorophyll family. If they had already joined, they were encouraged to give a testimonial about how Liquid Chlorophyll had changed their life. I'm not exaggerating about that last comment either; Indonesian people in general love drama much more than western people. For example, yesterday I was asked to video tape the speeches that some individuals made at a going away party for one of the teachers at my school who is about to move to another island. Any time someone started crying while the camera was off, John, who was sitting next to me, gave me an urgent look and pressured me to switch it on. The fact that, in a group of friends at someone's house, people were giving speeches one-by-one to honor their departing workmate should tell you enough. Anyway, I of course was not exempt from the introduction process at the Liquid Chlorophyll debriefing. If there is anything that I have learned to do during my time in Indonesia, it's been how to handle myself in completely random, awkward, and uncomfortable situations.
After the hours of craziness, I actually did have a good time with Chris and his friends at an eating stall outside the building. They were pretty genuine people, and I couldn't really be frustrated with them. Chris had been slightly deceiving, but I have truly begun to embrace all unpredictable things that happen while I'm here. I honestly just don't have a whole lot on my plate, so it's not like anything could really inconvenience me. So many things that used to frustrate me last year just make me excited now, and I when find myself in these situations, I'm always taking notes with the software on my cell phone, just so I can remember exactly how silly everything is. The only undeniably disturbing aspect of the evening was having to silently watch desperate people get taken advantage of by an American product, clearly aiming to take advantage of desperate people in other countries (there's a reason why you probably haven't heard of this drink before). But hey, that's why I can't wait to start focusing on education next year in grad school.
Friday, August 22, 2008
Another First Day
One year ago, I walked outside of the Semarang airport to immediately meet my gleaming counterpart, my enthusiastic headmaster, and my shy but ever-smiley driver. Imam, Mr. Humam, and Mr. Muslikhan were all fully outfitted in their monochrome, army-style school uniforms, ready to escort me all the way back to the pesantren from Central Java's capital, a route that I would frequently take for the next 10 months. After a surreal, nighttime drive through Indonesia's most crowded island, we stopped to pray at a mosque in Pati city, about 30 minutes away from Guyangan. I was asked to wait in the car where I sat for 15 minutes, listening to the sound of azan – a loud, captivating and, at the time, almost unsettling recitation of the Koran. All three of my new workmates re-entered the car together; they offered a humble apology for taking up my time, and I avidly reassured them that I was comfortable and content. At about 10pm, I stepped out of the car in Guyangan for the first time, and I was bombarded by a crowd of adults and students who were so enthusiastic to shake my hand, that my back was soon pressed against the door of the vehicle. Mr. Humam promptly broke up the mass and allowed me to enter the school's library. I was urged to sit at the front of the room, and Mr. Humam began to say a few words in Indonesian. He spoke unintelligibly for maybe five minutes, invoking constant laughter from a crowd of people whose eyes never left me. He then handed me the microphone. Even before my luggage had been unloaded from the car, I was being urged by Imam and Mr. Humam to give “my speech” in front of the most captivated audience I'd ever seen.
So here I am with another first day behind me. The parallels to last year have been undeniable, and the differences have been sobering and invigorating. Again, a group of three accompanied me from the airport. But this year at the arrival gate, I met my kooky counter part, my intrigued head mistress, and my stern but gradually friendly driver. Ibu Berna, Sister Modesta, and Chris sported their own personal styles – Chris with totally western pants and a button-up shirt, Ibu Berna with a more Indonesian blouse, and Sister Modesta with covered hair and a full nun get-up. Also like last year, the first stop was to obtain sustenance, but instead of a buffet-style feast, eaten humbly with our hands in the eyes of Allah, I used chopsticks to shovel in an explosively tasty dish of rice, veggies, and (praise Jesus) pork!
The crowd waiting for me at my residence this year was much smaller and considerably less star-struck. I entered my off campus home to meet a group of loquacious and cheery women sitting, watching TV, preparing tea, and sewing my brand new pillowcases. They were all employees of the school in some capacity, most of them teachers. This fact, however, still did not keep me from initially feeling astounded that, in Indonesia, there were members of the opposite sex, not only standing in the general proximity, but within the walls of my house, under my roof. We joked around as if everything were normal, but my eyes couldn't keep themselves from wandering toward the windows in my front room, making sure that neighbors weren't peering in, actively judging my character.
I look forward to all the relationships I will make with people this year. In only 24 hours, the screaming differences between Batak culture (the largest ethnic group in Medan) and Javanese culture have already begun to emerge. People don't give you a smile unless you earn it, which I suppose is similar to the US, but so far, all earning it seems to entail here is smiling first. That might not seem so monumental, but I assure you it is. It's also taken longer for people to warm up to me in general. Going from complete strangers to best friends was an instant transition on Java; therefore, no matter how long or quickly it takes people here, this difference is quite substantial. After taking me shopping and around Medan on his motorcycle I've already encountered an employee at my school who thought twice and then apologized for asking me for my phone number so quickly within our acquaintance. On Java, I've had strangers look over my shoulder on public transit, steal my phone number, call me later, and then introduce themselves as “your friend from the bus.”
One thing sure hasn't changed though – people's generally non-linear, completely inaccurate judgments of distance. I've had people tell me that my house is everywhere from 500 meters to 5 kilometers away from my new school. Turns out, it's about a mile.
So here I am with another first day behind me. The parallels to last year have been undeniable, and the differences have been sobering and invigorating. Again, a group of three accompanied me from the airport. But this year at the arrival gate, I met my kooky counter part, my intrigued head mistress, and my stern but gradually friendly driver. Ibu Berna, Sister Modesta, and Chris sported their own personal styles – Chris with totally western pants and a button-up shirt, Ibu Berna with a more Indonesian blouse, and Sister Modesta with covered hair and a full nun get-up. Also like last year, the first stop was to obtain sustenance, but instead of a buffet-style feast, eaten humbly with our hands in the eyes of Allah, I used chopsticks to shovel in an explosively tasty dish of rice, veggies, and (praise Jesus) pork!
The crowd waiting for me at my residence this year was much smaller and considerably less star-struck. I entered my off campus home to meet a group of loquacious and cheery women sitting, watching TV, preparing tea, and sewing my brand new pillowcases. They were all employees of the school in some capacity, most of them teachers. This fact, however, still did not keep me from initially feeling astounded that, in Indonesia, there were members of the opposite sex, not only standing in the general proximity, but within the walls of my house, under my roof. We joked around as if everything were normal, but my eyes couldn't keep themselves from wandering toward the windows in my front room, making sure that neighbors weren't peering in, actively judging my character.
I look forward to all the relationships I will make with people this year. In only 24 hours, the screaming differences between Batak culture (the largest ethnic group in Medan) and Javanese culture have already begun to emerge. People don't give you a smile unless you earn it, which I suppose is similar to the US, but so far, all earning it seems to entail here is smiling first. That might not seem so monumental, but I assure you it is. It's also taken longer for people to warm up to me in general. Going from complete strangers to best friends was an instant transition on Java; therefore, no matter how long or quickly it takes people here, this difference is quite substantial. After taking me shopping and around Medan on his motorcycle I've already encountered an employee at my school who thought twice and then apologized for asking me for my phone number so quickly within our acquaintance. On Java, I've had strangers look over my shoulder on public transit, steal my phone number, call me later, and then introduce themselves as “your friend from the bus.”
One thing sure hasn't changed though – people's generally non-linear, completely inaccurate judgments of distance. I've had people tell me that my house is everywhere from 500 meters to 5 kilometers away from my new school. Turns out, it's about a mile.
Thursday, August 7, 2008
Why this Language and Culture are so Darn Cute
Comment on Culture
The differences and variations in cultures around the world are terribly fascinating, but until one truly begins to recognize the individual perspectives of the people in those cultures, as well as to genuinely become aware of his/her own, he can never fully appreciate the distinctions. Of course, Indonesia was totally captivating from the moment I stepped foot on it's soil (or swam in one of its many seas); the vegetation here is different, the land is different, the animals are different, and the people are different. However, it has taken a great deal of time for me to understand what exactly has been quite so personally absorbing. Before I ever boarded my initial flight to this country, vast differences were to be completely expected. But the importance does not lie in what is different; importance lies in how and why. The way you see a culture will depend gigantically on your own background and very little on the electrical signals being sent to your brain via your eyes, nose, ears, etc. At my pesantren, when I managed to have an intelligible conversation with one of the Arabic teachers after class, I sometimes wondered if he had truly just stepped out of the same classroom into which I was about to enter. Mr. Syaid's views and comments concerning the santri (pesantren students), and of Guyangan as a whole, were so completely different from my own that I'd found myself contemplating which one of us was the blind one? Now I realize, though, that neither of us was completely blind; it's just that he had sand in his eyes, and I had exhaust fumes from SUVs in mine.
The Cute Factor
Your perspectives and degrees of openness will define your experience abroad, as well as how you interpret all aspects of a particular culture. What's nice though is that, chances are, if you're reading this blog, you're probably from the US, and that means that we have very much in common. Republican, Democrat, cityboy, redneck, black, white – we all grew up with the same movies, the same music, the same TV shows, McDonalds, Wal-Mart, and free public education. Consequently, at least to some degree, by the end of this entry, I'm sure we will all be able to come to some sort of consensus that Indonesian culture is... well...
...just plain cute.
Part 1: The Language, Bahasa Indonesia
Indonesians have described their language to me as being hemat, or economical. There are no articles, no linking verbs, no verb tenses, pronouns are often left out, and verbs in general are commonly omitted if the meaning of the sentence is still clear. So for us, “economical” might just seem like a sloppy euphemism for bona fide baby-talk. For example, the English statement, “I am hungry,” would be stated as “I hungry” in Indonesian. “Do you want some Doritos?” would become “Want Doritos?.” If you needed to ask, “May we please go to the bathroom,” the Indonesian syntax would be “May we to bathroom?” And if you then wanted to express, “I am as hungry as a pig,” in Indonesian your sentence would read “I same hungry with pig” (although, few would ever think of using such an expression). Examples like this are endless, but you cannot judge the legitimacy of the language! All the essential information is there, is it not?
Excessive abbreviation doesn't just stop with syntax and diction either. It works its way right into the spelling of words. In fact, it's so common to shorten words when writing, it would be nearly impossible to use an Indonesian-English dictionary effectively without knowing the meanings of the abbreviations for the following common prepositions, conjunctions, etc. (and there are countless more):
bhw
blm
dgn
dpt
kpd/pd
sdh
spt
utk
yg
I realize that, for conciseness, many translating dictionaries will use concise spelling in their example sentences, as not to necessitate a 5-volume series. However, if I had included all the shortened forms, the above list would extend considerably further – as it fills two full pages with two columns each at the beginning of my particular dictionary.
I understand why the editors chose to organize their dictionary in such a manner; that is, leaving you with no other choice but to memorize a hundred vocab words and their truncations before you can really even begin to use their product. This is nothing more than their fair warning to those who truly want to be serious about using the language in everyday life. Indonesians send about as many text messages in a day as there are hours in a week. So, combined with the culture's already established tendency to truncate sentences, phrases, and individual words, we also have the fact that you must pay for text messages per every 100th character, and Indonesians are always trying to squeeze as much as they can out of every penny. Consequently, deciphering an indonesian text message can be a day's task in itself because of the cryptic SMS language they tend to use, called bahasa singkat. If a 60-year-old indonesian man, who knew the language fluently, had just purchased his first mobile phone, and his granddaughter sent him an SMS, I guarantee he would likely not be able to identify whether or not the message had been sent to him in his own mother toungue.
With no information being lost in translation (and I swear to this), the sentence, “Even though it's late at night, I'm still not able to sleep,” would likely appear as the following in an indonesian text:
“udh mlm2 tp q gk bs tdr”
And no, that “2” was not a typo.
My favorite example of this came from an unforgivably flirty and clingy, unmarried teacher at my friend Jon's former school. This lady simply loved tall, handsome, Western men, and she ceaselessly sent Jon love notes, stole his pictures, invited him to her classroom, barged in on his, and above all, bombarded him with text messages. About six months into our grant period this past year, both Jon and I had already established ourselves as being quite enthusiastic toward using Indonesian in our daily lives. So, our indonesian friends, most of whom never having had a relationship with a foreigner before, began to send us text messages as if we were fluent and were totally up on modern use of the language. More indonesian people than you could ever imagine have never actually spoken to a person of a different nationality. As a result, only those who are particularly self aware would alter or slow down their speech, in order to oblige a foreigner who is beginning to learn their language. This is simply because the only people they've ever spoken to in their entire lives are those in their communities who already know the language fluently and who would never need special treatment for comprehension. Jon's not-so-secret admirer was no exception.
Workplace and classroom culture, as one might expect, are also slightly different in Indonesia. What we would deem to be text-book sexual harassment runs rampant. Relationships among co-workers are also incredibly common, and even dating among students and teachers is considered normal in many places. Other than simply not being interested in this woman, Jon was also still accustomed to workplace culture in the U.S., where employee relationships must be handled with extreme care. Her blatant attempts to court him were making him uncomfortable on at least two different levels. Consequently, it was one particular text message, with a small English phrase plopped right in the middle, that left him at a total loss, as far as how to continue handling this situation given his current knowledge of indonesian social dynamics. Jon forwarded the message to me, so that I might be able to make something of it and then possibly give a suggestion as to how he could proceed. With my limited Indonesian, I could unravel no more than the following:
Ktg$baJ D^&a;d .. yudt2
hgh1 UY +lk2 ty #* dd2
kjkjkjkjkaaaaaajkjkjkjkjk
ty&you make me cry%2
ytd kd2 &()kY sl2 dd!!!!
I had no substantial advice.
Another aspect of this language that I've noticed, which only adds to its relative cuteness, is the fact that it contains an inconceivably large number of two syllable words that end in “i.” I'm not sure why these words tend to invoke such warm feelings, but I guess it comes from the connotations we're already used to. Just consider the following English words: doggy, kitty, baby, lilly, silly, tiny, shiny, smily. That being said, I dare you to read the following list of terribly basic and commonly used words aloud without at least cracking a smile!
pagi, tapi, laki, kopi, kami, cari, nasi, bayi, jati, pipi, rapi, janji, jadi, jeli, lagi, jari, tadi, putih, sapi, diri, sami, hati, nanti, masih, candi, sini, dewi, cumi, bumi, kursi, mili, seni, senti, ini, kiri
The following Indonesian sentence could, in fact, easily be mentioned in passing by two native speakers on any given day (actually, I would assume that this sentence has been uttered literally thousands of times)
Tadi pagi kami cari nasi putih lagi. Which translates to:
Earlier this morning, we looked for white rice yet again.
I've mentioned it before, but the economy of the Indonesian language is to be truly marveled at. A new concept, the doubling of many words, separated by a hyphen, allows for new but totally related ideas to be conveyed. Consider the following words: macam, pagi, siku, cium, bapak. They mean: type, morning, elbow, kiss, and father, respectively. However, let's see what happens to their meanings when we say each one, twice in a row:
macam-macam – a wide variety
pagi-pagi – very early in the morning
siku-siku – right angle
cium-cium – kisses
bapak-bapak – a way to describe a club or bar whose patrons tend to be older men looking for prostitutes half their age.
Meanings aside, the fact that I get to say pagi-pagi on a fairly regular basis gives me a feeling of genuine delight.
Coming soon...
Part 2: The Culture in General
The differences and variations in cultures around the world are terribly fascinating, but until one truly begins to recognize the individual perspectives of the people in those cultures, as well as to genuinely become aware of his/her own, he can never fully appreciate the distinctions. Of course, Indonesia was totally captivating from the moment I stepped foot on it's soil (or swam in one of its many seas); the vegetation here is different, the land is different, the animals are different, and the people are different. However, it has taken a great deal of time for me to understand what exactly has been quite so personally absorbing. Before I ever boarded my initial flight to this country, vast differences were to be completely expected. But the importance does not lie in what is different; importance lies in how and why. The way you see a culture will depend gigantically on your own background and very little on the electrical signals being sent to your brain via your eyes, nose, ears, etc. At my pesantren, when I managed to have an intelligible conversation with one of the Arabic teachers after class, I sometimes wondered if he had truly just stepped out of the same classroom into which I was about to enter. Mr. Syaid's views and comments concerning the santri (pesantren students), and of Guyangan as a whole, were so completely different from my own that I'd found myself contemplating which one of us was the blind one? Now I realize, though, that neither of us was completely blind; it's just that he had sand in his eyes, and I had exhaust fumes from SUVs in mine.
The Cute Factor
Your perspectives and degrees of openness will define your experience abroad, as well as how you interpret all aspects of a particular culture. What's nice though is that, chances are, if you're reading this blog, you're probably from the US, and that means that we have very much in common. Republican, Democrat, cityboy, redneck, black, white – we all grew up with the same movies, the same music, the same TV shows, McDonalds, Wal-Mart, and free public education. Consequently, at least to some degree, by the end of this entry, I'm sure we will all be able to come to some sort of consensus that Indonesian culture is... well...
...just plain cute.
Part 1: The Language, Bahasa Indonesia
Indonesians have described their language to me as being hemat, or economical. There are no articles, no linking verbs, no verb tenses, pronouns are often left out, and verbs in general are commonly omitted if the meaning of the sentence is still clear. So for us, “economical” might just seem like a sloppy euphemism for bona fide baby-talk. For example, the English statement, “I am hungry,” would be stated as “I hungry” in Indonesian. “Do you want some Doritos?” would become “Want Doritos?.” If you needed to ask, “May we please go to the bathroom,” the Indonesian syntax would be “May we to bathroom?” And if you then wanted to express, “I am as hungry as a pig,” in Indonesian your sentence would read “I same hungry with pig” (although, few would ever think of using such an expression). Examples like this are endless, but you cannot judge the legitimacy of the language! All the essential information is there, is it not?
Excessive abbreviation doesn't just stop with syntax and diction either. It works its way right into the spelling of words. In fact, it's so common to shorten words when writing, it would be nearly impossible to use an Indonesian-English dictionary effectively without knowing the meanings of the abbreviations for the following common prepositions, conjunctions, etc. (and there are countless more):
bhw
blm
dgn
dpt
kpd/pd
sdh
spt
utk
yg
I realize that, for conciseness, many translating dictionaries will use concise spelling in their example sentences, as not to necessitate a 5-volume series. However, if I had included all the shortened forms, the above list would extend considerably further – as it fills two full pages with two columns each at the beginning of my particular dictionary.
I understand why the editors chose to organize their dictionary in such a manner; that is, leaving you with no other choice but to memorize a hundred vocab words and their truncations before you can really even begin to use their product. This is nothing more than their fair warning to those who truly want to be serious about using the language in everyday life. Indonesians send about as many text messages in a day as there are hours in a week. So, combined with the culture's already established tendency to truncate sentences, phrases, and individual words, we also have the fact that you must pay for text messages per every 100th character, and Indonesians are always trying to squeeze as much as they can out of every penny. Consequently, deciphering an indonesian text message can be a day's task in itself because of the cryptic SMS language they tend to use, called bahasa singkat. If a 60-year-old indonesian man, who knew the language fluently, had just purchased his first mobile phone, and his granddaughter sent him an SMS, I guarantee he would likely not be able to identify whether or not the message had been sent to him in his own mother toungue.
With no information being lost in translation (and I swear to this), the sentence, “Even though it's late at night, I'm still not able to sleep,” would likely appear as the following in an indonesian text:
“udh mlm2 tp q gk bs tdr”
And no, that “2” was not a typo.
My favorite example of this came from an unforgivably flirty and clingy, unmarried teacher at my friend Jon's former school. This lady simply loved tall, handsome, Western men, and she ceaselessly sent Jon love notes, stole his pictures, invited him to her classroom, barged in on his, and above all, bombarded him with text messages. About six months into our grant period this past year, both Jon and I had already established ourselves as being quite enthusiastic toward using Indonesian in our daily lives. So, our indonesian friends, most of whom never having had a relationship with a foreigner before, began to send us text messages as if we were fluent and were totally up on modern use of the language. More indonesian people than you could ever imagine have never actually spoken to a person of a different nationality. As a result, only those who are particularly self aware would alter or slow down their speech, in order to oblige a foreigner who is beginning to learn their language. This is simply because the only people they've ever spoken to in their entire lives are those in their communities who already know the language fluently and who would never need special treatment for comprehension. Jon's not-so-secret admirer was no exception.
Workplace and classroom culture, as one might expect, are also slightly different in Indonesia. What we would deem to be text-book sexual harassment runs rampant. Relationships among co-workers are also incredibly common, and even dating among students and teachers is considered normal in many places. Other than simply not being interested in this woman, Jon was also still accustomed to workplace culture in the U.S., where employee relationships must be handled with extreme care. Her blatant attempts to court him were making him uncomfortable on at least two different levels. Consequently, it was one particular text message, with a small English phrase plopped right in the middle, that left him at a total loss, as far as how to continue handling this situation given his current knowledge of indonesian social dynamics. Jon forwarded the message to me, so that I might be able to make something of it and then possibly give a suggestion as to how he could proceed. With my limited Indonesian, I could unravel no more than the following:
Ktg$baJ D^&a;d .. yudt2
hgh1 UY +lk2 ty #* dd2
kjkjkjkjkaaaaaajkjkjkjkjk
ty&you make me cry%2
ytd kd2 &()kY sl2 dd!!!!
I had no substantial advice.
Another aspect of this language that I've noticed, which only adds to its relative cuteness, is the fact that it contains an inconceivably large number of two syllable words that end in “i.” I'm not sure why these words tend to invoke such warm feelings, but I guess it comes from the connotations we're already used to. Just consider the following English words: doggy, kitty, baby, lilly, silly, tiny, shiny, smily. That being said, I dare you to read the following list of terribly basic and commonly used words aloud without at least cracking a smile!
pagi, tapi, laki, kopi, kami, cari, nasi, bayi, jati, pipi, rapi, janji, jadi, jeli, lagi, jari, tadi, putih, sapi, diri, sami, hati, nanti, masih, candi, sini, dewi, cumi, bumi, kursi, mili, seni, senti, ini, kiri
The following Indonesian sentence could, in fact, easily be mentioned in passing by two native speakers on any given day (actually, I would assume that this sentence has been uttered literally thousands of times)
Tadi pagi kami cari nasi putih lagi. Which translates to:
Earlier this morning, we looked for white rice yet again.
I've mentioned it before, but the economy of the Indonesian language is to be truly marveled at. A new concept, the doubling of many words, separated by a hyphen, allows for new but totally related ideas to be conveyed. Consider the following words: macam, pagi, siku, cium, bapak. They mean: type, morning, elbow, kiss, and father, respectively. However, let's see what happens to their meanings when we say each one, twice in a row:
macam-macam – a wide variety
pagi-pagi – very early in the morning
siku-siku – right angle
cium-cium – kisses
bapak-bapak – a way to describe a club or bar whose patrons tend to be older men looking for prostitutes half their age.
Meanings aside, the fact that I get to say pagi-pagi on a fairly regular basis gives me a feeling of genuine delight.
Coming soon...
Part 2: The Culture in General
Monday, July 28, 2008
Back at it!
I've always confidently and shockingly informed everyone back home that the jaunt to Indonesia lasts a grueling 30 hours. That seemed pretty realistic. Of course, it's difficult to estimate the true time when the entire trip is a half-conscious, heavy-eyed haze. Studying one's flight itinerary is not much help either. With no way to reasonably expect fewer than three layovers on three drastically different parts of the planet, one would need a time-zone map, a protractor, and a slide rule to get accurate information from a North West Airlines internet printout. So, I decided that on the morning of July 23rd, I would simply strap on a good old fashion analogue wrist watch to keep track of my travel time before arriving in Jakarta on the afternoon of the 25th. Granted, I got the cheapest flight I could, which included a 14 hour layover in Singapore, so I knew the actual time in between leaving my house and getting to a hotel on Jaksa Street would comprise of more than than just air time. However, I truly believed that crossing the mystical International Dateline would significantly make up for the artificial two-and-a-half day gap in between my port of embarkation in the US and the Soekarno-Hatta Airport just outside of Jakarta. Consequently, when glancing at the time, nearing the end of my odyssey, I gasped (well, likely yawned) in a sleepy stupor when realizing just how many times the hour hand had circumnavigated the face of my indonesian, counterfeit Fossil Watch. Well into my 50th hour of travel, I found my self, still standing, finally on the last leg of the journey, talking to a loquacious german fellow, in a familiar, over-crowed un-air-conditioned airport bus, headed toward the city center.
My exhaustion, however, was immediately counteracted by marveling, once again, at the wildly weaving traffic on the spaghetti streets of Jakarta, skyscrapers towering over makeshift huts constructed out of bamboo and scrap sheet-metal, ever-smiling indonesian faces, the statue of Monas, and a hole-in-the-wall, all inclusive convenience store, a little gem that a couple friends and I accidentally stumbled upon during our first visit to this dynamic city. I could not help but get choked up at the flooding memories of this place, which defined fun for me during all my travels in the previous year. Jakarta is a city of character. It's loud, it smells awful, it's impossible to navigate, it's dirty, it's dangerous, but at the same time, it offers so much solitude and allows one to unwind in the most unlikely of environments, in a country where a 5am call to prayer awakens the majority of it's residents every day of every week.
Jumping right back into the swing of things and speaking Indonesian even more fluently than a month ago when I left here, Jakarta has already filled me with an unparalleled excitement and anticipation for the upcoming year. I've already made a great friend from germany, who I will see again next month when he visits Medan (where I'll be living this time around); I've begun rekindling the relationships that I temporarily left behind during the month of July, and I've already got a shiny new, hot pink indo-phone, which will provide me with scarce internet time during the inevitable stretches of prolonged waiting I'm going to be doing over the next many months in the midst of this laid-back culture.
Mixed with these euphoric feelings, though, are ones of slight confusion and of blinding nostalgia. Firstly, I can't help but already miss my friend Jon, another Fulbrighter who, over the course of the year, became pretty much my exclusive travel companion and one of the best friends I've ever had. It will certainly be different this year, not being able to easily talk with someone who I can relate to so well and who is on the exact same level of understanding this culture. I'll have to wait quite a few months for all the new grantees to find their respective grooves before I can genuinely start making the jokes I want to make and before I'll be able to unwind and talk with someone who fully understands what I'm going through. This is much different for me than last year because each grantee was in the same boat, all dumped into a foreign country, having fun figuring things out together. Even though I'll have a year of previous experience, in many ways I'll have to be much more independent than before. Secondly, I have very freshly on my mind all the things I miss about home. I fully appreciated spending time with my family more than I ever had before, and seeing my best friends again was refreshing, productive, and just terribly fun. There are a great deal of people with whom I want to share this unique time in my life, but with whom I'll just have to settle for infrequent phone conversations and with limited e-mail.
Nevertheless, I cannot help but feel that Indonesia, which I chose to live in virtually by throwing a dart at a map, has become the place where I truly belong at this point in my life. I doubt if I'll always feel like that, but the circumstances under which I am staying here are so incredibly ideal, it's impossible for me to imagine any other alternative that would have even closely stacked up. This place has allowed me to set a bar for happiness that I may not have otherwise known, and I will not settle for much less in the future. This certainly doesn't mean I'll always live here, but I know so much more about myself and what motivates me (no matter where I'll end up), and I could have never fully known these things if had I not made the fleeting decision to go to this mystifying part of the world. I owe a great deal to the Fulbright program, and I'm gleaming at taking advantage of what it has given me... again.
Let's just keep our fingers crossed that this year E. Coli bacteria won't find itself living in the completely WRONG part of my body... again, as well.
My exhaustion, however, was immediately counteracted by marveling, once again, at the wildly weaving traffic on the spaghetti streets of Jakarta, skyscrapers towering over makeshift huts constructed out of bamboo and scrap sheet-metal, ever-smiling indonesian faces, the statue of Monas, and a hole-in-the-wall, all inclusive convenience store, a little gem that a couple friends and I accidentally stumbled upon during our first visit to this dynamic city. I could not help but get choked up at the flooding memories of this place, which defined fun for me during all my travels in the previous year. Jakarta is a city of character. It's loud, it smells awful, it's impossible to navigate, it's dirty, it's dangerous, but at the same time, it offers so much solitude and allows one to unwind in the most unlikely of environments, in a country where a 5am call to prayer awakens the majority of it's residents every day of every week.
Jumping right back into the swing of things and speaking Indonesian even more fluently than a month ago when I left here, Jakarta has already filled me with an unparalleled excitement and anticipation for the upcoming year. I've already made a great friend from germany, who I will see again next month when he visits Medan (where I'll be living this time around); I've begun rekindling the relationships that I temporarily left behind during the month of July, and I've already got a shiny new, hot pink indo-phone, which will provide me with scarce internet time during the inevitable stretches of prolonged waiting I'm going to be doing over the next many months in the midst of this laid-back culture.
Mixed with these euphoric feelings, though, are ones of slight confusion and of blinding nostalgia. Firstly, I can't help but already miss my friend Jon, another Fulbrighter who, over the course of the year, became pretty much my exclusive travel companion and one of the best friends I've ever had. It will certainly be different this year, not being able to easily talk with someone who I can relate to so well and who is on the exact same level of understanding this culture. I'll have to wait quite a few months for all the new grantees to find their respective grooves before I can genuinely start making the jokes I want to make and before I'll be able to unwind and talk with someone who fully understands what I'm going through. This is much different for me than last year because each grantee was in the same boat, all dumped into a foreign country, having fun figuring things out together. Even though I'll have a year of previous experience, in many ways I'll have to be much more independent than before. Secondly, I have very freshly on my mind all the things I miss about home. I fully appreciated spending time with my family more than I ever had before, and seeing my best friends again was refreshing, productive, and just terribly fun. There are a great deal of people with whom I want to share this unique time in my life, but with whom I'll just have to settle for infrequent phone conversations and with limited e-mail.
Nevertheless, I cannot help but feel that Indonesia, which I chose to live in virtually by throwing a dart at a map, has become the place where I truly belong at this point in my life. I doubt if I'll always feel like that, but the circumstances under which I am staying here are so incredibly ideal, it's impossible for me to imagine any other alternative that would have even closely stacked up. This place has allowed me to set a bar for happiness that I may not have otherwise known, and I will not settle for much less in the future. This certainly doesn't mean I'll always live here, but I know so much more about myself and what motivates me (no matter where I'll end up), and I could have never fully known these things if had I not made the fleeting decision to go to this mystifying part of the world. I owe a great deal to the Fulbright program, and I'm gleaming at taking advantage of what it has given me... again.
Let's just keep our fingers crossed that this year E. Coli bacteria won't find itself living in the completely WRONG part of my body... again, as well.
Thursday, March 27, 2008
On The Run!
The fear being instilled into these poor pesantren children on a daily basis can, in no way, be productive. There are basically three punishments that I know of at this school. The first and least severe is having to stand out in the sun in front of the office until the headmaster has decided that the offending party has had enough time to think about what they have done. The second is losing one's privileges to see his or her parents on Friday (the Muslim “sabbath”). Friday is the only day when students are allowed to both leave the school grounds and to have visitors. And lastly, the headmaster sometimes decides to just kick people out of the school, condemning them to fend for themselves, find another school, and unavoidably repeat a year of their education.
What's really interesting, though, is the fact that the harshness of his punishments is not a function of the severity of the offense. I have seen students loitering outside the teacher's office for a couple hours as a result of their getting into a fight, and I have seen students virtually banished from the community for having been late to class. Yesterday, a notoriously bad student blatantly cheated on his midterm and was asked to leave the classroom, only to be able to retake the test later; however, at the beginning of this semester, my class 10-C dwindled from 40 students to 25 students because 15 of them were caught playing basketball on a Wednesday.
---
At the end of February, directly after the headmaster began his spring cleaning in my 10th grade class, three male students were sitting with me on my living room floor, forcing laughter to try and hold back the tears in their eyes. As a result of this sporadic dealing out of punishments, students are afraid of their own shadows here (as if the intense cultural belief in reality-altering ghosts weren't enough). They had just tried to leave my house after spending some time with me, but they immediately rushed back inside my door after finding that the gates to my complex had already been locked and that they could not exit. I knew the magnitude of this problem and was trying to help find some solution for them.
They were boarding house students and had innocently lost track of time while they were practicing English with me after class. Now, you might think (as I would have thought eight months ago) that it would be no problem for me to casually walk over to the assistant headmaster's home, only 25 feet from my front porch, and explain the situation to him. You might think that, since I am a teacher at the school, since the gates had actually closed five minutes earlier than normal, and since these students had taken the personal initiative to spend their scarce free time developing their English skills, an explanation to the powers that be would not even be necessary. However, what I have failed to mention, and what you might remember from past descriptions of my home, is that the female housing area borders literally the only outside wall of my home. These kids were in a strictly prohibited area after hours. If I truly felt the urge and wanted to break a window or two, I could feasibly climb the wall of my laundry room and be right inside Guyangan's forbidden paradise. These students were ultimately trapped inside the only corridor that leads directly to the mysterious place, which would ensure them all a one-way-ticket to hell, should they decide to walk north instead of south. My house was their only refuge, right next to a chained cast-iron gate, a “DO NOT ENTER” sign, an authority who could ruin their future, and the house of the most senior conservative teacher at the school.
Every creak of my house, every faint outside voice, and every muffled footstep made these kids shudder in fear that Mr. Najib had seen them and that he was about to knock on my door and send them all home to inconceivably disappointed parents. So, when there actually was a knock on my door, three petrified boys scrambled into my kitchen, out of sight, and left me to deal with whatever wrath Mr. Najib was about to lay down, hoping that I would just lie about their presence. I braced myself, knowing that I couldn't lie to my boss, but I was also feeling a lot of compassion for these poor kids. I opened the door, and thankfully, I was relieved to be welcoming nothing but a smile and a Jurassic Park DVD being held in the hands of one of my favorite students, Salim, the headmaster's grandson and frequenter of my home. The three fugitives dashed back into my living room immediately upon hearing his voice. Salim, who doesn't live on campus, might have actually been the only person who could have helped us get out of this pickle, and man, did he deliver!
When Salim realized that Reza, Afif, and Bam were all in my house, he immediately knew the gravity of the situation and instinctively greeted them all with raised eyebrows and wide eyes. Jeff Goldblum and the velociraptors were going to have to wait. Figuring out a plan of action would require some serious devotion. Salim, who was more familiar with the layout the complex than anyone else in the room, knew what had to be done. However, it was going to require three cell phones. We had mine and Salim's, but boarding house students aren't allowed to carry them, so the first course of action was to quickly locate an active phone. Luckily, this wasn't difficult. Salim left my house and came back after about five minutes with his friend's Nokia. Now we just needed to wait until dark, when the open area of the complex would be deserted, and the female students would be finished with their evening prayer session.
There are actually two sets of chained gates that these students were going to have to by-pass. But, exiting my complex without being noticed was clearly first priority and, without a doubt, the most important and challenging. Once outside, Salim would have to help them get by the second gate, into the male dorms. He was key; he was going to be the innocent and inconspicuous lookout the whole way through. With free range of any part of campus, excluding the girls' dorms, he was unique, and because it was no secret that he often drops by my house, no one would question his walking around after dark. My role was also going to be integral. Mr. Najib loves it when I spend time at his house, so that night, I was certainly going to be paying him a visit.
When Salim went to borrow his friend's phone, he also had another important task. Mr. Najib's blinds are unpredictably open or closed on any given night, and Salim had to let us know the status of his windows. Had the blinds been closed, I would have been unnecessary in the escape plan because Mr. Najib virtually never leaves his house after dark, but as it turned out, I would need to be a decoy.
Salim would take his first post, just inside the servants' entrance to Mr. Jalil's home (the senior teacher at the school). This entrance opens into a washroom and a pretty long hallway that leads right into the kitchen at the back of the house, bypassing all the bedrooms and the living room. Once through the kitchen, there is another hallway and then a door to the outside of the complex. Salim would have to make sure that this path was clear. But, before any of that could happen, I had to distract Mr. Najib. Although the chance was minimal, we couldn't risk him seeing the students running from my house to Mr. Jalil's.
I was first to leave the house, and Salim was pretty close behind me. I knocked on Mr. Najib's door as Salim took his position. Of course, he received me with utter delight and excitement, and I was encouraged to take a seat - the first obstacle. This was going to be a little awkward. Clearly, the most obvious seat to take would be the one that was closest to me, the one right in front of the window. I didn't initially think about the layout of Mr. Najib's living room, but having him talk to me with a view of the student's path in the background would totally undermine the entire purpose of my going to his home. So, not skipping a beat, I walked right passed him at the door and took a seat at the opposite side of his living room. His only option then was to sit with his back to the window.
I talked to him for about 30 seconds before receiving a text message from Salim, telling me that the coast was clear. I excused myself from conversation for just a moment, in order to immediately send a message to the boys in my home (who had Salim's friend's phone) that they could run for it. Trying desperately to not burst into laughter and to keep my eye-contact with Mr. Najib, I saw three frightened kids out of the corner of my eye, running like hell across the small courtyard.
Salim obviously did a good job from that point on because I still see Reza and Bam on a regular basis. I know they'd never been trapped inside my part of campus before, but after they got passed that hurtle, I take it that getting back into the male dorms after hours isn't too difficult if you know what you're doing. I was pretty amused by the entire scheme, but those boys were certainly not having fun that night, and I actually had to be pretty serious too. While I'm pretty much immune to anything that goes down at this school as far as punishments go, I'm sure that if Mr. Najib had seen those boys running in front of his house, from the direction of mine, with sitting me in his living room, he probably would have been pretty angry. I was definitely facing a loss of trust, but Salim made us all feel confident that it would work, and now everyone has a pretty wonderful story!
What's really interesting, though, is the fact that the harshness of his punishments is not a function of the severity of the offense. I have seen students loitering outside the teacher's office for a couple hours as a result of their getting into a fight, and I have seen students virtually banished from the community for having been late to class. Yesterday, a notoriously bad student blatantly cheated on his midterm and was asked to leave the classroom, only to be able to retake the test later; however, at the beginning of this semester, my class 10-C dwindled from 40 students to 25 students because 15 of them were caught playing basketball on a Wednesday.
---
At the end of February, directly after the headmaster began his spring cleaning in my 10th grade class, three male students were sitting with me on my living room floor, forcing laughter to try and hold back the tears in their eyes. As a result of this sporadic dealing out of punishments, students are afraid of their own shadows here (as if the intense cultural belief in reality-altering ghosts weren't enough). They had just tried to leave my house after spending some time with me, but they immediately rushed back inside my door after finding that the gates to my complex had already been locked and that they could not exit. I knew the magnitude of this problem and was trying to help find some solution for them.
They were boarding house students and had innocently lost track of time while they were practicing English with me after class. Now, you might think (as I would have thought eight months ago) that it would be no problem for me to casually walk over to the assistant headmaster's home, only 25 feet from my front porch, and explain the situation to him. You might think that, since I am a teacher at the school, since the gates had actually closed five minutes earlier than normal, and since these students had taken the personal initiative to spend their scarce free time developing their English skills, an explanation to the powers that be would not even be necessary. However, what I have failed to mention, and what you might remember from past descriptions of my home, is that the female housing area borders literally the only outside wall of my home. These kids were in a strictly prohibited area after hours. If I truly felt the urge and wanted to break a window or two, I could feasibly climb the wall of my laundry room and be right inside Guyangan's forbidden paradise. These students were ultimately trapped inside the only corridor that leads directly to the mysterious place, which would ensure them all a one-way-ticket to hell, should they decide to walk north instead of south. My house was their only refuge, right next to a chained cast-iron gate, a “DO NOT ENTER” sign, an authority who could ruin their future, and the house of the most senior conservative teacher at the school.
Every creak of my house, every faint outside voice, and every muffled footstep made these kids shudder in fear that Mr. Najib had seen them and that he was about to knock on my door and send them all home to inconceivably disappointed parents. So, when there actually was a knock on my door, three petrified boys scrambled into my kitchen, out of sight, and left me to deal with whatever wrath Mr. Najib was about to lay down, hoping that I would just lie about their presence. I braced myself, knowing that I couldn't lie to my boss, but I was also feeling a lot of compassion for these poor kids. I opened the door, and thankfully, I was relieved to be welcoming nothing but a smile and a Jurassic Park DVD being held in the hands of one of my favorite students, Salim, the headmaster's grandson and frequenter of my home. The three fugitives dashed back into my living room immediately upon hearing his voice. Salim, who doesn't live on campus, might have actually been the only person who could have helped us get out of this pickle, and man, did he deliver!
When Salim realized that Reza, Afif, and Bam were all in my house, he immediately knew the gravity of the situation and instinctively greeted them all with raised eyebrows and wide eyes. Jeff Goldblum and the velociraptors were going to have to wait. Figuring out a plan of action would require some serious devotion. Salim, who was more familiar with the layout the complex than anyone else in the room, knew what had to be done. However, it was going to require three cell phones. We had mine and Salim's, but boarding house students aren't allowed to carry them, so the first course of action was to quickly locate an active phone. Luckily, this wasn't difficult. Salim left my house and came back after about five minutes with his friend's Nokia. Now we just needed to wait until dark, when the open area of the complex would be deserted, and the female students would be finished with their evening prayer session.
There are actually two sets of chained gates that these students were going to have to by-pass. But, exiting my complex without being noticed was clearly first priority and, without a doubt, the most important and challenging. Once outside, Salim would have to help them get by the second gate, into the male dorms. He was key; he was going to be the innocent and inconspicuous lookout the whole way through. With free range of any part of campus, excluding the girls' dorms, he was unique, and because it was no secret that he often drops by my house, no one would question his walking around after dark. My role was also going to be integral. Mr. Najib loves it when I spend time at his house, so that night, I was certainly going to be paying him a visit.
When Salim went to borrow his friend's phone, he also had another important task. Mr. Najib's blinds are unpredictably open or closed on any given night, and Salim had to let us know the status of his windows. Had the blinds been closed, I would have been unnecessary in the escape plan because Mr. Najib virtually never leaves his house after dark, but as it turned out, I would need to be a decoy.
Salim would take his first post, just inside the servants' entrance to Mr. Jalil's home (the senior teacher at the school). This entrance opens into a washroom and a pretty long hallway that leads right into the kitchen at the back of the house, bypassing all the bedrooms and the living room. Once through the kitchen, there is another hallway and then a door to the outside of the complex. Salim would have to make sure that this path was clear. But, before any of that could happen, I had to distract Mr. Najib. Although the chance was minimal, we couldn't risk him seeing the students running from my house to Mr. Jalil's.
I was first to leave the house, and Salim was pretty close behind me. I knocked on Mr. Najib's door as Salim took his position. Of course, he received me with utter delight and excitement, and I was encouraged to take a seat - the first obstacle. This was going to be a little awkward. Clearly, the most obvious seat to take would be the one that was closest to me, the one right in front of the window. I didn't initially think about the layout of Mr. Najib's living room, but having him talk to me with a view of the student's path in the background would totally undermine the entire purpose of my going to his home. So, not skipping a beat, I walked right passed him at the door and took a seat at the opposite side of his living room. His only option then was to sit with his back to the window.
I talked to him for about 30 seconds before receiving a text message from Salim, telling me that the coast was clear. I excused myself from conversation for just a moment, in order to immediately send a message to the boys in my home (who had Salim's friend's phone) that they could run for it. Trying desperately to not burst into laughter and to keep my eye-contact with Mr. Najib, I saw three frightened kids out of the corner of my eye, running like hell across the small courtyard.
Salim obviously did a good job from that point on because I still see Reza and Bam on a regular basis. I know they'd never been trapped inside my part of campus before, but after they got passed that hurtle, I take it that getting back into the male dorms after hours isn't too difficult if you know what you're doing. I was pretty amused by the entire scheme, but those boys were certainly not having fun that night, and I actually had to be pretty serious too. While I'm pretty much immune to anything that goes down at this school as far as punishments go, I'm sure that if Mr. Najib had seen those boys running in front of his house, from the direction of mine, with sitting me in his living room, he probably would have been pretty angry. I was definitely facing a loss of trust, but Salim made us all feel confident that it would work, and now everyone has a pretty wonderful story!
Wednesday, March 26, 2008
Goodbye Telkomsel... Hopefully Forever
I first want to apologize for the sparse (lack of) updates recently. It has been a perfect storm of mundane misfortunes that has kept me from not only using the internet but also writing in general. The biggest deterrents have been increases in my responsibilities at the school, as well as having to keep up appearances in neighboring villages. I haven't really written much about the flooding here, but as catastrophic as it has been, I still would have been tied down in Guyangan flood or not.
The last half of February and the first half of March went by without my having ventured outside Pati at all. Spending extended amounts of time in my village with no breaks has been incredibly rewarding, but I can certainly understand why most of the Fulbrighters don't do it. Your daily activities, friendships, tasks, and expectations that others put on you start to snowball exponentially, out of control, until no semblance of your life in the States remains.
After eight months of living in an exotic alien environment, I've only now come to fully understand my daily needs and recognize what is essential to ensure my happiness. Everything really comes down to people and relationships when I take into account what keeps me smiling on a day-to-day basis. If you know me pretty well, you know that I'm a social person, and this might not come as too much of a shock. However, the extent to which it is true has surprised even me. Any time I leave Pati, the only thing I really ever buy is ice cream at the mall in Semarang. And if I do shop, I inevitably end up with two bags full of imported candy that I use as rewards for my students. My vices and my splurges are so minimal here. The sacrifices I've made to live in Guyangan have ended up being so inconsequential. That's why I've been able to afford a video camera and a new computer from nothing other than my Fulbright stipend; there's really nothing to spend money on here. I guarantee that I use no more money on a daily basis than most teachers at my school, other than when I travel of course (which is a big expense). Friendships have always been my number one priority here, and while they've sometimes been confusing and occasionally frustrating, they have been my most worth while investments.
That being said, I can't leave these introspective thoughts without telling the whole story – if I didn't have a lock on my door, I would probably go insane. I'm positive that people know (to the minute) when I'm in my house, when I'm at school, and when I'm in Jakarta. So, when someone comes to my door, I'm sure that he (not “or she...” that would be disastrous) knows quite well that I'm in my living room. But, do I always respond to their obsessive knocking? God no. Being no less than 100% extroverted when I'm outside my home has lead to my becoming virtually 100% introverted while I'm inside my home. I'm in the center of a fairly large complex of buildings, I have no outside windows, and I can't even hear the call to prayer. It has been terribly satisfying to spend an entire day, from time to time, ignoring every Indonesian phone call I receive, laughing at different cadences of knocks on my door (trying to guess who will certainly not be entering my house today), and not even seeing the light of day from sun up to sun down. That might sound depressing, but it doesn't happen like that very often. Waking up to random people watching my television, using my computer, or reading my books didn't bother me at first (kinda), but I felt that it was necessary to have at least some sense of privacy. When you set boundaries here, ya gotta set 'em high!
Oh, and one more thing. Internet. I either want a reliable source of internet or no internet at all (preferably the former). My cell phone being stolen was a real blow, but I can confidently say that my blood pressure has gone down since it happened. One evening, upon being blindingly furious about the 7th failed attempt in row to connect to Telkomsel's remote server (a pretty common occurrence), I calmed down and decided that I would get to the bottom of why exactly I was so irate. This had to be done. I remember very few times in my life, if any, of being angered to the point of wanting to inflict physical harm to virtually anything I looked at, and I didn't want this to be a new personality trait. My soul searching some how lead me to the school's library, where I looked up the word “technology” in an English dictionary. Its entry was this: “Technology – The application of scientific knowledge for practical purposes and for simplifying our daily lives.” I want to stress “simplifying our daily lives.” Simplifying. By it's very definition, this advanced piece of equipment sitting next to my computer was contradicting its only purpose for even being in existence. I take that very personally. So, I'm not even angry with the guy who stole my phone, which is much more than I can say for my friend Imam. He was so appalled and embarrassed to hear that something like that had happened to me in his country that he promptly wished an eternal stomach ache on the thief. I doubt though that his curse was even necessary, because if that pickpocket hasn't already keeled over from a heart attack of frustration, then he deserves to have a Nokia N70.
The last half of February and the first half of March went by without my having ventured outside Pati at all. Spending extended amounts of time in my village with no breaks has been incredibly rewarding, but I can certainly understand why most of the Fulbrighters don't do it. Your daily activities, friendships, tasks, and expectations that others put on you start to snowball exponentially, out of control, until no semblance of your life in the States remains.
After eight months of living in an exotic alien environment, I've only now come to fully understand my daily needs and recognize what is essential to ensure my happiness. Everything really comes down to people and relationships when I take into account what keeps me smiling on a day-to-day basis. If you know me pretty well, you know that I'm a social person, and this might not come as too much of a shock. However, the extent to which it is true has surprised even me. Any time I leave Pati, the only thing I really ever buy is ice cream at the mall in Semarang. And if I do shop, I inevitably end up with two bags full of imported candy that I use as rewards for my students. My vices and my splurges are so minimal here. The sacrifices I've made to live in Guyangan have ended up being so inconsequential. That's why I've been able to afford a video camera and a new computer from nothing other than my Fulbright stipend; there's really nothing to spend money on here. I guarantee that I use no more money on a daily basis than most teachers at my school, other than when I travel of course (which is a big expense). Friendships have always been my number one priority here, and while they've sometimes been confusing and occasionally frustrating, they have been my most worth while investments.
That being said, I can't leave these introspective thoughts without telling the whole story – if I didn't have a lock on my door, I would probably go insane. I'm positive that people know (to the minute) when I'm in my house, when I'm at school, and when I'm in Jakarta. So, when someone comes to my door, I'm sure that he (not “or she...” that would be disastrous) knows quite well that I'm in my living room. But, do I always respond to their obsessive knocking? God no. Being no less than 100% extroverted when I'm outside my home has lead to my becoming virtually 100% introverted while I'm inside my home. I'm in the center of a fairly large complex of buildings, I have no outside windows, and I can't even hear the call to prayer. It has been terribly satisfying to spend an entire day, from time to time, ignoring every Indonesian phone call I receive, laughing at different cadences of knocks on my door (trying to guess who will certainly not be entering my house today), and not even seeing the light of day from sun up to sun down. That might sound depressing, but it doesn't happen like that very often. Waking up to random people watching my television, using my computer, or reading my books didn't bother me at first (kinda), but I felt that it was necessary to have at least some sense of privacy. When you set boundaries here, ya gotta set 'em high!
Oh, and one more thing. Internet. I either want a reliable source of internet or no internet at all (preferably the former). My cell phone being stolen was a real blow, but I can confidently say that my blood pressure has gone down since it happened. One evening, upon being blindingly furious about the 7th failed attempt in row to connect to Telkomsel's remote server (a pretty common occurrence), I calmed down and decided that I would get to the bottom of why exactly I was so irate. This had to be done. I remember very few times in my life, if any, of being angered to the point of wanting to inflict physical harm to virtually anything I looked at, and I didn't want this to be a new personality trait. My soul searching some how lead me to the school's library, where I looked up the word “technology” in an English dictionary. Its entry was this: “Technology – The application of scientific knowledge for practical purposes and for simplifying our daily lives.” I want to stress “simplifying our daily lives.” Simplifying. By it's very definition, this advanced piece of equipment sitting next to my computer was contradicting its only purpose for even being in existence. I take that very personally. So, I'm not even angry with the guy who stole my phone, which is much more than I can say for my friend Imam. He was so appalled and embarrassed to hear that something like that had happened to me in his country that he promptly wished an eternal stomach ache on the thief. I doubt though that his curse was even necessary, because if that pickpocket hasn't already keeled over from a heart attack of frustration, then he deserves to have a Nokia N70.
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