All the world's a stage

...And we but players in this comedy. Indonesians love to laugh. At everything, but especially foreigners. Once you get over the slight indignity (at times) its easier to appreciate how funny we actually are. Grown people stumbling through your language like children is really funny. But it's reassuring to know that we're not their only means of amusement. Indonesian humor encompases many situations, many of which I have yet to understand : ) 

Some mornings, after you've found a cockroach in your room (albeit a dead one but it was still a sizeable speciman) and you're late for school so you hurry to hang your laundry so it will be dry that evening and you hear a group of ibus, bapaks, kids and whoever else laughing at you, there's a critical moment where you either glare or start laughing with them. I found recently that doing the latter made the dark cloud hanging over me magically disappear in that moment. At first, it does seem really rude and/or awkward that they laugh when you are struggling to integrate or when you accidentally swallow a chilli and your eyes are streaming for the next half hour or when someone dies in a motorcycle accident, but 1. it's their way of dealing with everything and 2. It's reflective of their good nature. They'll laugh at you and take a thousand photos and then they'll invite you into their houses for a five course meal and their entire family will come out to meet you and make you feel really special and welcome. And at least they're not ignoring us. 

The thing about Indonesians laughing at death is something I witnessed last week when I saw that motorbike accident. I still find it strange but whatever.

May showers

The next two weeks are probably the busiest in all of Training. We had our last afternoon link session yesterday on correcting students' errors and feedback and also needs assessment. The paragraph pictured below is from a student with very high English proficiency. The lesson was on simple past tense and we practiced deciding what feedback to give (picking your battles). I thought  this was one of the most useful link sessions we've had. We've been told so much that the type of feedback you give should depends on the student's proficiency. Stigmatizing and global errors should, in most cases, be corrected. Those are errors like saying "we shit together" instead of "we sit together." Global errors transcend simple local errors, which don't impede the listener's understanding of what the speaker is saying (i.e. "We visited the gravy of Gus..." where gravy should be grave.) All useful stuff. 

In the next two weeks we have a Teachers workshop, our  Language Proficiency Interview (LPI) and a teaching practicum where we will actually teach a class with an Indonesian teacher. 

We went to pick out fabric for our swear-in batiks last weekend. Swear-in is on June 1st and each cluster (7-10 of us per cluster) is going to wear matching batiks. We get to design them differently. I tried my best to show the tiny fashion designer with whom we met what steampunk was... Our group has decided to err on the side of outlandish because, when will we get to design a batik like this again?

Our teacher brought this to class for inspiration in designing our batiks.

Sadly, this fabric exceeded the price of the amount we decided upon as a group. And no one loves cats as much as I do.

View from the rooftops of my friend's house. 

Nita (right, obviously) is my favorite teacher so far, not only because she spent hours making this game of snakes and ladders for one of our 8-hour language classes (we're up to two/week now), but that certainly put her in the above and beyond category. She approaches all of our classroom activities with this level of enthusiasm. 

Another day in paradise

I was strongly reminded of Knight bus from Harry Potter on the bus ride to Blitar; our bus driver sped around sharp turns, honking to let cars/motorists anticipate their approach (playing chicken with those who don't move out of their way on the other side of the road when passing lanes) and a ticket master literally grabs people waiting at stops and tosses them and their things through the back door as the driver slows to about 15 mph. It feels like a circus with the noise and pace of it all and vendors and musicians who rush on at the stops and yell at the sleeping passengers, shaking peanuts in their faces. At one point we went over a railroad crossing at top speed and the volunteer to my left literally ended up on my lap when we came down on the other side of the tracks.

Yes it's terrifying and we were all shocked to our senses later in the angkot when we saw a crowd of people surrounding a pile of newspaper and cardboard weighed down by stones next to a motetcycle lying on its side. We realized a few moments after passing that a person was under all that newspaper. No ambulance at the scene, although one passed us about five minutes later. 

Thoughts at Jelly's site:

Jelly and her counterpart leading camp counselor session in preparation for IGLOW (Indonesian Girls Leading Our World) camp this weekend. 

I find myself wondering when we'll get the real peace corps experience.. Jelly, the volunteer Zoe and I visited, was a really good match for both of us. We thought about how peace corps seemed to match us with host volunteers of similar temperments. It was a pretty nice setup: her students spoke great English and her family was well-off. Her site was fairly rural but she lived near a convenience store and lots of mom and pop shops.

Jelly lives at a site with an ibu, three amazingly adorable kids (two girls, one boy) and three girls younger than I who are live-in nannies/housekeepers. It was as nice as our houses in Batu, if not nicer.

Her school next door was big, clean and had all of the resources of most middle schools in the States. We sat in on two classes which spoke English very well (the second one less so than the first). Jelly's counter-part was also a really good teacher: she commanded the classroom well and moved through the lesson really efficiently. Jelly's main role seemed to be writing things on the board in English and leading some activities. 

On her collaboration with her counterpart, Jelly's thoughts were that she didn't see herself as a teacher so much as her kids' personal cheerleader. She said the schools are so big and students don't ever receive personal attention so giving them the opportunity to express themselves in the journals she has them turn in weekly (I really want to do that) and giving them individual feedback is really the most important thing she can do for her kids. Her main thing is her afterschool activities. She runs an IGLOW camp with some other volunteers and an English camp, both of which we got to see small glimpses of. We saw really shy girls come out of their shells at the IGLOW camp counselor session they hosted the Sunday we arrived. At the actual camp to be hosted this weekend, the volunteers and teachers arrange for speakers to come and talk about healthy relationships, women's health and sex education. In addition, the counselors lead discussions about the girls' future aspirations. This seems like such a critical organization because this is the only place a lot of these girls will be able to receive such information and be able to feel relatively comfortable discussing these issues. Most importantly, while the volunteers do a lot of the legwork of setting up the camp, it's entirely run by Indonesians in the finals stages, which Jelly said she hopes will make it more sustainable.

She mentioned that a big issue she's concerned about with the IGLOW camps is that these girls can be totally attentive to the information now but once they're married they won't see it as applicable any longer. 

We made hummus with a mortar and pestle the second night and bought ingredients for salad the third. I now look forward to my permanent site when I can arrange to cook for myself. The general concepts of what constitutes a healthy lifestyle in Indonesia is mind-blowing. Someone's host family told a volunteer, in all apparent seriousness, that the reason they were getting sick was because they weren't smoking or eating enough white rice. Vegetables and fruit are uncommon items in households. My host bapak said to me one morning (through gestures) that I would become stronger if I ate more white rice. I indicated the sources of protein on the table and he shook his head and pointed to the rice then flexed his arm and gave me the thumbs up.

A scrap of paper in the teacher's lounge, presumably a homework assignment. It's hard to go anywhere and not think about trash here. There's nowhere to put the trash so it's everywhere.

Either heaven or a hypermart. This is the first cereal I've seen in Indonesia.

This was the first time we were truly prepared for the rain (in this photo: other ID8's - my group - with their ID7 hosts)

Jelly and her host sister Naya: the sassiest deaf girl you will ever meet.

I really wanted a picture of the men returning from rice paddies at the end of the day on top of their harvest but it's difficult getting the picture from the bus, so please excuse the blurriness. 

Site visits

For those who don't know "what they want to be when they grow up" the Peace Corps is an especially good fit. I was thinking yesterday about how incredible this program is at giving people with a wide range of experience (from very little to a significant amount) the chance to start with a clean slate and see what they can do when given the same resources. I realized today that it's a relief to throw myself into a new situation, regardless of whether or not it provides some finality to the age-old question of what I will do in the work world.

These thoughts were spurred by mounting insecurities about language acquisition and being able to teach. This week I've generally felt a lot more motivated and excited about finally relaxing into this experience, which I guess accounts for the mood swings and doubts. 

Highlights have been getting this card from some local kids who hang around our school. It made me feel very teacher-y : ) 

Also visiting a traditional Indonesian drive-by wedding (the entire thing lasted 45 minutes).

I'll have more to write about next week because we're doing site visits (not our actual permanent sites, to which we have yet to be assigned) for the next four days. I'm going 4 hours away to a place called Blitar with some other people from my group. We will be put up in a volunteer's house (I think she stays in a boarding house owned by her host family) and get to shadow them for a few days, eating what they eat, helping teach their classes and getting a tour of their side projects. I'm excited we're finally going to see what our job will be like. I say finally but it's taken me this long to feel comfortable having simple conversations with people so it's probably good we weren't put in front of a classroom before now.

More beach pics

Ad encouraging voters. I took this coz at the last election, to show that they voted, they dipped the tip of their pinkies in ink.

First mosque I've seen that wasn't decked out. Mosques literally everywhere (even on the beach) so surely not all of them can be really fancy.

Coconut!

Swimming

View from a neat cave with religious something

Sunset at another beach

Cool tree

Bakso! (Meatball soup - also famous because Obama apparently likes it)

Myazaki moment

One might assume that the life of a Peace Corps volunteer is always crazy and they would be 80% safe in that assumption. Mostly though, I feel like Bennedict Cumberbatch in the role of Sherlock: when I'm going, it's at full speed and when there's free time I don't know what to do with myself. 

Here are some anecdotes since my last post. Relating to the topic of free time, on Saturday I spent much of our afternoon off at a middle school talking with a student in Indo-lish while eating snacks a teacher provided us. To be clear, I was there to get wifi, but even in a tech-savy country where all the young people are on facebook or gaming all of the time, being social tops hiding behind your cellphone. 

It started to rain at some point after Hudan and I went behind our screens and the maternal teacher who fed us snacks had been outside in the courtyard for a while scraping out weeds from between the stones. I'm still surprised every time I see the school dynamic here. The principal, students and teachers all stick around after school  (at least at this middle school) and do various chores together like painting a door, sweeping and weeding the courtyard. The whole time I was there we listened to a radio station that played Madonna, Lincoln Park and Jay-Z. 

I finally took a picture of the sign over my village. I live about 5 houses up the street directly through the sign.

In trying to describe the cultural differences I've witnessed in the schools so far I refered to this sheet that PC gave us. It's a clean-cut overview of differences in cultural values. 

Makan pagi (breakfast): fried corn thing, nasi putih and stewed veggies. This is one of my favorite meals my ibu makes.

Minggu (Sunday):

At 8 Sarah's family picked me up to go to the beach, which I was told was two hours away. We stopped for smoke breaks, visits to friend's houses for watermellon and more smoke breaks and  I think, in general, we took the scenic route, which was fine by Sarah and I. A some point I stopped caring about time, which is my first success story of adapting to "rubber time" that I have to report. Among our stops was a fish market, where we picked up our raw lunch. 

Sarah and I didn't feel like we needed to know how we would work raw fish into our beach picnic. Several miles of bumpy road and terrifyingly steep hills later (I won't describe the seatbelt situation here) we emerged in Avalon, tropical paradise-style. The pictures don't do it justice. 

Goacina Sendang Biru in Malang, East Java (on their google map it showed up as Pantai Bajul Mati) 

We stopped at several more friends' houses on the way back, another beach at sunset and a bakso restaurant for dinner. The moral of the story is: our host families are awesome! 

Still working on uploading the rest pf the pics!

Innocents Abroad

This was the title of my last post that I deleted later in the day because I wasn't feeling the same way at that point. Yesterday was a general election day so we - and everyone in Indonesia - got the day off. Our reason for a free day was not to vote however, but to stay away from the poll stations. This was pretty difficult seeing as they were everywhere (I wouldn't be surprised if they set up polls in people's houses) but I at least avoided them as much as I could. Around mid-morning, after a skype date broke off because I ran out of minutes, I walked down a large hill to get my notebook that I left in the building where we have our afternoon sessions. In that 20 minute jalan-jalan (walk; also works as an explanation of where you're going) I passed by 10 or so polling stations. Since the previous night my neighborhood was filled with bollywood-type music (I think it was actually Indo pop but it sounded like a bollywood soundtrack) coming from loudspeakers in the house next door. I didn't associate it with the election until the following day when I saw that outside each polling station there were 10 or so amps blasting Indonesian and also American pop. It was a weird juxstaposition seeing all the Ibu's sitting around nonchalantly with Adele playing at concert-level volume right above them but I'm getting used to it. My host family doesn't listen to music but my friend Sarah's Bapak is obsessed with Beyonce, Alicia Keys and actually pretty much any American pop star. While driving us around (he's technically related to my family so he invites me on outings) he plays music videos on a little tv screen. Last night we went out for some karaoke and he knew all the words to the pop songs we picked to sing.

So that was election day - schools closed and everyone socialized at the polls all day (even though I think they closed at noon?) except for us Peace Corps volunteers who went hiking or over to each others' houses to watch Iron Man while studying. July 9th is the presidential election and I assume we will have a lot more restrictions, although from what few articles I've read it sounds like they're not expecting as high a turn-out as the last presidential election five years ago so maybe Peace Corps won't put us on total lock-down.

Some things have clicked for me in the past week and while I'm starting to really miss people back home I feel pretty good at a month in. I'm reading the Great Gatsby not because I want to think about American affluence right now but because it's either that, the Game of Thrones series or the Hunger Games series, which are all on this guy's kindle that I borrowed who got it as a hand-me-down from his dad. So if you were thinking that you reeeeeally wanted to send me something but were concerned about porn making it through the postal service then pdfs of books/any reading is a great idea! : ) 

Pics taken this week:

Outside of the school where I get wifi.

Me and Mr. Soria, the tenant staying with my host family. He's awesome and even practices his English with me and breaks down some of the communication barriers I'm having with my host family.

Outside the wifi school.

Near our afternoon class building.

Sarah and the kids who flock us in droves when we go to their school for link sessions in the afternoon.

Tomato patch/rice paddy across from a soccer field that I pass on the way to school.

The Posh Corps

As I mentioned before, Batu is a really nice town and does not match up with my image of how life in the Peace Corps should look. We're provided with jugs of approved water AND I take hot showers every morning AND there are hardly any insects.  Our water purification workshop last week is more in line with what I had in mind when I signed up for the Peace Corps:

We were told that if we're lucky we'll get water that looks like that in the bucket on the right.

Boil and filter or boil and soak with iodine or chlorine for 15 minutes.

Having had a week and a half of diarrhea right off the bat Im not to keen to test the waters, so to speak, with rice paddy run-off (top pic, left) or well water (top pic, middle). You can't really see it but the bucket on the right has dead bugs and other small particulates in it, so as not to be left out. 

We talked with some PCV's who are a year into service and they said Dr. Leonard scared them with this same workshop, but assured as that in their experience they didn't have water like that in any of the buckets. Some of them don't even have to use their filtration buckets because their tap water is potable. As I've seen here, the unofficial mantra of the PC, "it all depends", applies more oft than not. 

And then there's money. Dealing with money here is difficult for me because it doesn't do much good to compare Rupiah to US dollars for context. For example, I went to buy a pack of pens the other day and the cashier said it would cost 20,000 Rp (less than $2) for about 10 pens. I would pay that in the States without thinking and I actually did end up paying that amount without trying to haggle her down from the buleh price but when I told other people what I paid they said I had been seriously ripped off. So part of not acting like a buleh (sp?) is not comparing Indonesian and US prices of things. 

Saturday meant a half day of language class and a trip into Malang with some of the crew. We got lost for two hours trying to find a specific pizza shop that some people in my group wanted to go to to meet other volunteers, and got caught in a rain storm (2nd time with electronics and books in my backpack and no rain cover. I think this time I learned.) I enjoyed looking at the city. It's definitely different with more traffic noise from motor bikes than cars, huge palm trees and bamboo growing all over the dirty rivers with trash hanging from the trees from where the river rose last rainfall and, of course, the looks we get from everyone everywhere we go. Amazingly, even in the big city, Indonesian people are still so smiley and welcoming. 

Also, shouts out to Tamar for suggesting that I wear crocs here. They're perfect for everything and all the women here wear them.