Sometimes starting fresh can be a drag. You have to force yourself to be an extrovert if you want a social life. There are a few people, thank God, who make that part easier – my counterpart, Bu Euis, comes to mind. We walked down the road during our break today to go check out a batik store. As we were walking single-file with motorists whizzing past she said to me, "I’ve only recently started to like walking." I asked her since when? She said, "since meeting you." We stopped first at the Indomaret five minutes down the road (my third home, after my real home and school) so that I could withdraw some cash from the atm and she could buy cereal paraphernalia (a two-bowl box of cornflakes and a small box of indo-milk). She said this was another one of my bule influences rubbing off on her. I can only hope that she will rub off on me. She is independent, enthusiastic, passionate, very interested in others and the person I would say I am closest with here so far. Her English is also pretty spot-on and, while that doesn't really help me with my bahasa Indonesia, it is nice being able to express myself somewhat fully to somebody.
My other friends, or the people I see every day and am starting to have less what-are-the-differences-between-our-two-cultures conversations with, are the 5-10-year olds on my street, one 22-year old mother to four of those kids and some of the teachers at my school. We’re beginning to know things about each other: I know that this teacher is very blunt and is seen by the others as having a quick temper and that that teacher loves cooking and is a mother hen. I found out yesterday that Bu Euis is one of the youngest teachers at MAN Karawang and that most of the staff were her teachers not even a decade ago. As for me, they know that I really don’t like taking photos with people before even being introduced and that I think touching mothers’ bellies so that their babies might have lighter skin is wrong and pretty f’ed up (not on the part of the mothers, of course, just culturally-speaking.) Oh, and that I like cereal and gado-gado (mixed veggies with peanut sauce) and DEFINITELY NOT EVER spicy food please and thank you.
In addition to an English club for students I have started one for teachers on Tuesdays and Wednesdays (because they are all so busy they can choose which time suits them best) and that has opened some conversational doors. We reviewed expressions of food this week and now all of my recruitees will come up to me between classes with their notebooks and ask (while laughing), "Do you…no no no…Have you eaten yet?" Food is and always will be a fail-safe conversation with people of any culture, I’m convinced. And besides, the enthusiasm and good but undisruptive humor the teachers have is a welcome reprieve from the craziness of the classroom.
The bule effect has started to wane at my school, which is both a blessing and a curse for me. It is a curse in that I actually have to command a class’s attention with more than my differentness now. Sternness is about as foreign to me as Sundanese so this usually ends up as an uneven silent match where I purse my lips and will them to be silent and the class clowns finally cave into the pressure of a few "good students" several minutes later….not very effective but such is my learning curve.
Reverting to the basics in just about all aspects of communication – how to command attention, how to discuss food, directions, objects, activities – is stressful, if necessary. Mostly stressful in just how routine and elementary it feels. Those days are what Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Philip Dick are for – a slice of the strange and beautiful that I’m used to; an immediate connection. That is what I miss when routine gets the better of me; I miss having strange/beautiful discussions and experiences with others. But I feel refreshed once I retreat to that place of nostalgia; refreshed and ready for a paradigm shift. As difficult as it is sometimes to dive below the surface when you are the outsider looking in at this immense reflection of the whole, things eventually become familiar and only once you have established the familiar can you deviate.
Teaching reflections aside, my cultural assimilation woes are not to say that there isn’t plenty of strange in the world around me. Strange and beautiful are the two words I hear most often in the context of describing Indonesia. The persistent heat, the endless rice fields with coils of mist hanging about at dawn and dusk, the people defecating in those fields unashamedly, the calls to prayer echoing eerily over loudspeakers everywhere you go, the different mentality of waste disposal here (littering is not a word in their lexicon, trash burning is the only means of waste management I’ve yet seen) and the unconditional respect kids show to adults. There is definitely a lot of exotic in the world around me, but as of late, when I’ve been busy immersing myself in the world of teaching, it has not been present in my internal environment. Not consistently at least.
As soon as I finished writing this, however, my siblings invited me to launch their kite that they just received from my mom stateside. And so we spent a gorgeous afternoon in the Indonesian sunshine flying a kite in the squallish breezes. Oh, simple pleasures. And I realize we are indeed all just "strangers in a play in this strangest of theatres.." Sometimes you share a laugh with someone over a stupid joke and that person is no longer a stranger.
My other friends, or the people I see every day and am starting to have less what-are-the-differences-between-our-two-cultures conversations with, are the 5-10-year olds on my street, one 22-year old mother to four of those kids and some of the teachers at my school. We’re beginning to know things about each other: I know that this teacher is very blunt and is seen by the others as having a quick temper and that that teacher loves cooking and is a mother hen. I found out yesterday that Bu Euis is one of the youngest teachers at MAN Karawang and that most of the staff were her teachers not even a decade ago. As for me, they know that I really don’t like taking photos with people before even being introduced and that I think touching mothers’ bellies so that their babies might have lighter skin is wrong and pretty f’ed up (not on the part of the mothers, of course, just culturally-speaking.) Oh, and that I like cereal and gado-gado (mixed veggies with peanut sauce) and DEFINITELY NOT EVER spicy food please and thank you.
In addition to an English club for students I have started one for teachers on Tuesdays and Wednesdays (because they are all so busy they can choose which time suits them best) and that has opened some conversational doors. We reviewed expressions of food this week and now all of my recruitees will come up to me between classes with their notebooks and ask (while laughing), "Do you…no no no…Have you eaten yet?" Food is and always will be a fail-safe conversation with people of any culture, I’m convinced. And besides, the enthusiasm and good but undisruptive humor the teachers have is a welcome reprieve from the craziness of the classroom.
The bule effect has started to wane at my school, which is both a blessing and a curse for me. It is a curse in that I actually have to command a class’s attention with more than my differentness now. Sternness is about as foreign to me as Sundanese so this usually ends up as an uneven silent match where I purse my lips and will them to be silent and the class clowns finally cave into the pressure of a few "good students" several minutes later….not very effective but such is my learning curve.
Reverting to the basics in just about all aspects of communication – how to command attention, how to discuss food, directions, objects, activities – is stressful, if necessary. Mostly stressful in just how routine and elementary it feels. Those days are what Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Philip Dick are for – a slice of the strange and beautiful that I’m used to; an immediate connection. That is what I miss when routine gets the better of me; I miss having strange/beautiful discussions and experiences with others. But I feel refreshed once I retreat to that place of nostalgia; refreshed and ready for a paradigm shift. As difficult as it is sometimes to dive below the surface when you are the outsider looking in at this immense reflection of the whole, things eventually become familiar and only once you have established the familiar can you deviate.
Teaching reflections aside, my cultural assimilation woes are not to say that there isn’t plenty of strange in the world around me. Strange and beautiful are the two words I hear most often in the context of describing Indonesia. The persistent heat, the endless rice fields with coils of mist hanging about at dawn and dusk, the people defecating in those fields unashamedly, the calls to prayer echoing eerily over loudspeakers everywhere you go, the different mentality of waste disposal here (littering is not a word in their lexicon, trash burning is the only means of waste management I’ve yet seen) and the unconditional respect kids show to adults. There is definitely a lot of exotic in the world around me, but as of late, when I’ve been busy immersing myself in the world of teaching, it has not been present in my internal environment. Not consistently at least.
As soon as I finished writing this, however, my siblings invited me to launch their kite that they just received from my mom stateside. And so we spent a gorgeous afternoon in the Indonesian sunshine flying a kite in the squallish breezes. Oh, simple pleasures. And I realize we are indeed all just "strangers in a play in this strangest of theatres.." Sometimes you share a laugh with someone over a stupid joke and that person is no longer a stranger.
Putting the kite together.
Up, up and...
down.
maybe if we run
closer
Selfie time!
No wait -- she's up! The word for kite in BI is layang-layang. I think this is much more fitting.
Ok, we don't care about kites anymore.
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