Jakarta's Wasteland

Squandered. Misused. Unproductive. Worthless. These are all synonyms of waste. While in America we're having our fashionable conundrums about our discarded containers of capitalism, elsewhere in the world, trash is considered by some to be a status symbol.

 
Last semester, my TEFL counterpart and I taught a week’s worth of lessons on waste and sustainability. We had our students collect samples from trash bins around the school and line up according to their predicted timelines for their item’s decomposition rate. After revealing how close or far off their predictions were, we presented a PowerPoint on the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, an enormous vortex of marine debris floating in the North Pacific Ocean that covers an area somewhere between the size of Texas and a whole 8% of the Pacific Ocean. I included in this PowerPoint a graph that showed Indonesia as being the second largest contributor of ocean plastics in the world, right behind China.

Granted, the study is from 2010 (led by a scientist from my alma mater - UGA!) but Indonesia is still often quoted as being in the top five countries who contribute the most ocean plastic.

I was concerned before class that in giving this depressing presentation on waste mismanagement I would come off as the hypocritical foreigner barging in with reprimands, telling them that their country has a trash problem when the United States is among the top five producers of waste in the world, behind China, Brazil, Japan and Germany. However, I quickly discovered that my concerns were misplaced. When my counterpart and I translated the graph into Indonesian, our students surprised us by…. applauding. I looked to my counterpart, Miss Euis, to make sure there wasn't a mistranslation. She laughed along with them and said facetiously, "hooray, we are the winners!" Responding to the look of utter bewilderment on my face, she explained that our students were probably just excited to hear that Indonesia is known for something. In part, it may have been ironic applause from high schoolers who have grown cynical about the state of the world that the preceding generation has left them, but something that one of my students said that day in class has stuck with me ever since. He said, "It means we're rich."

It is telling of the eco-conscious American middle-class culture I grew up in that I had never before considered that the amount of trash one leaves at the curb (or in their yards to be burned, as was the case in Indonesia) could be interpreted as a symbol of wealth. In other words, that having more trash is thought of as desirable, something to show off to your neighbors. I thought of America, where even gas and petroleum industries attempt to greenwash their products in order to cultivate a positive social image in the public eye. Here, there was none of that.

While my home state of Georgia may not be a paragon of progress when it comes to waste diversion and reduction programs, I still learned at an early age the virtues of recycling and bringing reusable bags to the grocery store. In my socio-economic group, these practices corresponded directly with one’s social capital.

In Indonesia, a mismanagement of landfills and the absence of formal waste diversion programs has led the country to the brink of a state of national emergency, according to the Director of Solid Waste Management in the Republic of Indonesia, Ir. R. Sudirman. The people who recycle are individuals who do so out of necessity, like independent trash pickers who roam the streets with large baskets or sacks on their backs, gathering plastics and aluminum to sell. They are the unsung heroes of waste management in Indonesia.

My school's trash dump and one of the men (not contracted) who comes by semiweekly to pick out sellable recycling.

More unsettling than the lack of a formal waste management program is the reverence of western culture that I have observed, especially when it comes to accumulating stuff. When people in the town I live in talk about wanting to see more development in their city, development is synonymous with supply of goods and the ability to consume higher quality products. America gets the most time in world news and has the biggest economy. When Indonesians watch America's consumer-driven media it’s easy to conclude that in order for Indonesia to be more developed, its citizens need to consume more stuff. Like America does.

Take cars for example. Cars are every bit the status symbol in Indonesia that they are in America. Even if the notoriously fuel-inefficient SUVs have started drawing judgmental stares from sane members of the population in America, it's as if they were at the peak of their popularity here. My male counterpart, Pak Yayat, who drives an SUV, was the one to retrieve me from a hotel in Bandung when my group first arrived in West Java. Whenever there's a need for a car, he always drives. As we were driving to his sister's wedding, he pointed out his house as we passed it. He commented that he chose to have a big car rather than a big house. I said offhandedly, but you can't sleep in a car, to which he replied, sure you can! He added, having a big car is better because everyone will know that you have money.

But while Americans talk about saving energy and biking to work, these habits are ridiculed in the smaller towns in Indonesia because that's already the norm. With power outages quite frequently blacking out the city both inside and outside of the rainy season, sitting in the dark is definitely not a way to impress your neighbors. And only those too poor to buy a motorcycle or the very random guy decked out in a cyclist uniform (or me, that stray American volunteer) ride a bicycle around town. Even my students who live right down the street hop on their motorcycles to travel the few hundred yards to school. 

I recently asked some of my students what they thought was the biggest issue facing Karawang and they said, "a lack of facilities." When asked to elaborate on what kind of facilities, they told me that they were concerned about a lack of management from the local government for things like trash pick-up or road up-keep. In my two years living on the rural outskirts of an industrial city, the only "management" of waste I've seen apart from burning trash piles and, of course, non-contracted trash pickers, was a "clean the city" day last May where a throng of students and community groups gathered downtown and went on a big march through the main (cleanest) streets of central Karawang, playing trash picker for a day and delivering frequent updates to Instagram and Twitter.

I'm still not used to seeing kids throw their trash right out of public transportation, maybe even at some pedestrian's feet. It doesn't matter if a trash can is within arm’s reach and you're in someone else's house; trash is discarded wherever you happen to be standing and this behavior is reinforced from birth. I still cringe when I throw my biweekly garbage right in my host family's front yard to be burned, but the fact remains that there is no other place to put it. (And if breathing the acrid smoke from your burning pads and tampons isn't a good enough motivator to invest in reusable menstrual products, I don't know what is). I am mesmerized by the river of trash flowing by my school: muddy, wide and blooming with bright tropical plastic colors. At first, I associated all these behaviors and sights with an ignorance of the big environmental picture but that is not the real problem. 

Big-picture organizations in the larger cities are trying to get laws passed so that the government will regulate waste more effectively. Greeneration Indonesia is a group that launched a highly successful campaign in 2010 to require local retailers to simply ask customers if they wanted a plastic bag or not, instead of automatically giving them one. Diet Kantong Plastik (Plastic Bag Diet) is an international campaign that was launched last month in seven cities across Indonesia requiring retailers to charge a 200-rupiah (about 1 cent) tax per plastic bag. It was originally supposed to be 23 cities who would pilot the bag tax program on February 21st, National Waste Awareness Day, but other cities ended up postponing or withdrawing for unmentioned reasons. In fact, even in those seven cities, it doesn't sound like many retailers enforced the tax. Bureaucracy and unwillingness on the part of the retailers to make faithful customers pay a measly 200 rupiah for their plastic bag continues to clog the system of change, much like plastic bags clog all the sewers.

This is the sign that sits in local convenience stores informing customers about the plastic bag tax and encouraging them to bring reusable bags.

Packaging is something that my dad, a national expert on product policy, was especially keen to learn about while visiting me last July during Ramadan. In an eco-lodge in Southern Kalimantan where we stayed on the eve of our four-day tour of Tanjung Puting National Park, we spoke with an activist who said that it has only been in the last 10 years that people have switched from using banana leaves to plastic for food packaging. Plastic is being sold to us (all of us, the world over) as modern, convenient and, ironically, more hygienic, despite all the dangerous chemicals that seep into our food through plastic. There was an article in the Seattle Times recently that explained that the success of selling Tupperware in Indonesia to middle-class housewives is due to exploiting the Indonesian tradition of social gatherings.

It doesn't matter that banana leaves have many superior qualities to plastic - besides being biodegradable, they're aromatic, antioxidant, anti-bacterial and it means you don't have to wash your dishes! - plastic manufacturers prey on the desires of lower-income countries for modernity and have established their place in Indonesia and in all our minds as the superior packaging method.  

I didn't have my own picture on hand but this is a common enough sight still in many places, although it is already being replaced by Styrofoam, plastic bags and waxed paper wrapping.

So what is the big problem with trash in Indonesia anyway? Why all the fuss if people are used to it and have their own systems in place for dealing with it (i.e. burning it or leaving it out for the trash pickers who earn Rp. 500,000/month, ~$38 per month or about $1 per day, to sort through). Last Sunday I had the opportunity to answer this question.

The problem starts here, with this and other trash cans like it (so seldomly seen anywhere except for in big cities like Jakarta) that advertise a sorting process for trash. Before we even leave this trash can, I'd like to say that the contents of these two receptacles and others like them are identical. This so-called sorting is a farce.

Once sanitation workers take the contents of these receptacles to a temporary trash disposal site (TPS), the waste is then picked up by one of many licensed contractors in orange trucks, who take it hour away to another town called Bekasi, home of the largest landfill in Southeast Asia and Jakarta's controversial dumping grounds.

Last Sunday I had the opportunity to visit Jakarta's landfill, Bantar Gebang, with an Australian-Indonesian group that teaches once a week at a primary school situated inside the landfill. The group was started earlier this year by an Australian working for the UN who comes around to hostels to recruit native speakers to join the English lessons and take a tour of the landfill (suggested donation, including a home-cooked lunch and transportation is 150k rupiah; the extra money goes to the school).

One girl from Holland and two guys from California came on the Sunday tour with me. The children all live at the landfill.

Lady of the Flies.

Flies swarm around students as they copy notes.

I sweat a lot in Indonesia but rarely have I sweat like I did during my visit to Bantar Gebang. Due to the mountains of steaming garbage looming over everything, the air was both putrid and about 15-20 degrees hotter than the relatively cool 90 Fahrenheit in the city. Even my rainy season cold, which has dulled the smell of notoriously smelly fruits such as jackfruit and durian, could not entirely block out the smell of this dump site. 

Me and my two hand-holders posing in front of the trash mountain opposite the school.

An example of the incredible biodiversity in the landfill.

Giant blue caterpillar that scared the kids off.

The catch-22 is that since many people's livelihoods depend on collecting sellable trash, there is even less incentive to implement recycling programs in the cities to divert some of the landfill trash, which has long since surpassed its capacity and is dangerous to residents and the environment. 

My left hand-holder holding out a seed for me to look at.

A girl from our English class who escorted us foreigners on the tour looking out at the orange trucks that sometimes wait in line for up to 8 hours to dump their trash.

My left hand-holder told me (in bahasa Indonesia) that an elderly lady was killed last week in a trash avalanche on this slope while she was picking through the trash. You can barely see the red, white and green shirts of the trash sorters in the middle and at the top. They carry a basket on their back and wear thick wellies while hiking this mountain.

Our escorts stopped to crowd around a run-over kitten.

Trucks leaving. The bubbles in the groundwater, black like oil, is methane.

The row of houses to the left is where several of our escorts told me they live.

Man selling snacks.

Two friendly parents sorting through trash who were surprised when I asked in Indonesian to take their picture.

Teenagers painting drums.



After finishing his porridge, this boy flung his Styrofoam bowl and plastic spoon into the ditch of trash.

Driving out, we got a two-second look at trucks entering the recycling center, where recycling is then sold.

~~~

We tend to perceive nature as this fragile thing that we selfish humans are corrupting, but I think it’s more realistic, not to mention more helpful from a Darwinian standpoint, to think of ourselves as the fragile organisms. Other species, like the golden bug pictured above, are resilient and can thrive even in a wasteland like the one I visited on Sunday. Human life, on the other hand, is much more easily snuffed out. If nothing else affects our behaviors, then, at the very least, a sense of self-preservation should. At our IGLOW gender equity and youth development camp next month I am most looking forward to our sessions on the environment so that we can hear from local activists about what we can personally do. We all have to start somewhere. The most important thing is that we start.

5 minutes in Karawang, the city on the rice fields

Welcome to Karawang, capital of Karawang Regency in West Java, Indonesia! This city is quite different from anywhere I've ever lived or visited (the closest being maybe Heredia, Costa Rica - mostly climate-wise). With over 2.2 million people in the regency, Karawang may not be quite what you imagine when someone tells you they're going off to a developing country to teach English. For one, I live in a rapidly developing area in East Karawang that is quite crowded and very near the city center. KFC, Verizon, Honda and even a Holiday Inn overshadow the local marketplaces and many small mom and pop stores selling the same thing right next door to each other. Civilization encroaches on the rice paddies that dominated the area not five years ago. With Jakarta only 32 miles away and jobs available in the blossoming factories, Karawang is growing very rapidly.

As a self-proclaimed Buddhist (even though I am not, many volunteers claim one of Indonesia's six official religions out of respect for national ideology) I have been informed of several Buddhist temples around town and also introduced to Buddhist friends of friends (many of whom have been Chinese-Indonesian). Even though Islam is the majority religion, people just care that you believe in something.

I teach at an Islamic high school, as you will see in my video below, where Islamic studies are included in the curriculum, female students must wear a hijab and male students must wear their nicer clothes for Friday prayer. I live with a large Muslim family (a mom, dad, three biological children - two who don't live at home - and three adopted children and also the uncle), who run an Islamic elementary school next door. My host dad works for the Ministry of Religious Affairs, which, among other religious matters, oversees madrasa schools like the one I work in. Islam on Java incorporates many local cultural traditions, my area having a dominate Sundanese culture. So you will see in weddings, for instance, the food, dress and marriage customs are all a mix of Islamic and Sundanese traditions.

This is what HOME looks like to me these days.

 Or, check out my movie here.

Of light, water and wonder

When I'm traveling my emotions are often amplified. When traveling during holidays I run the emotional gamut from insanely happy to deeply pensive and sometimes lonely. And if I'm traveling to observe another holiday being celebrated during one of my regularly-scheduled holidays, then there's an added level of surrealism.

Such was the case this Thanksgiving. In my first year in Indonesia I spent Thanksgiving with my teacher family making mango salad, Indonesian empanadas and singing karaoke at the mall (none of the aforementioned activities were done in an effort to replace my traditional Thanksgiving activities, they were just what I happened to be doing at the time). This year, I went to Thailand with a group of volunteers to observe a Thai/Buddhist festival called Loy Krathong.

While I got off to a rocky start by bringing the wrong passport to the airport and then missing a second flight on my layover in Singapore (I didn't realize that you had to re-check in/go through immigration for a transfer flight), I was in the mood to be grateful by the time I reached Thailand. Part of the reason for my feelings of gratitude was because on the night I was stranded in the Jakarta airport after missing my first flight, I called one of my teacher friends at around 8:30 pm and she immediately said "c'mon over", even though her whole family is currently struggling to deal with the trauma of her younger brother's brain tumor. He has recently undergone surgery no. 1 to remove some of the tumor (which has already taken his sight) and it is naturally a high-risk operation with severe side effects. It's really scary to hear about but her family remains positive, upbeat and focused on caring for him and making him feel the best that he can. Despite this trial, they gave me shelter, good company and helped me get to Thailand.

So I arrived in Thailand two days late but on an adventure high and feeling grateful for all the people who helped me to get there (you especially padres) and for all the people and experiences which are currently coloring my life.

Catching a snooze at the Singapore airport.

I was originally supposed to be in Phuket on Sunday morning, but I ended up arriving on Tuesday afternoon, roughly 32 hours before the Loy Krathong festival. After meeting my friends, we did some sight-seeing. The day of the full moon, a Wednesday, we went around Phuket to see the Big Buddha and Chalong temple. The Big Buddha is a ginormous white statue of the Buddha sitting atop a mountain. The view of Phuket from above was also pretty nice.

No shawl, no pants, no Buddha.

A bodhisattva in the fur

We also saw a baby elephant taking a nap on our way down from the summit. Zoe, if you're reading this, we did not ride them.



Next we went to a beautiful set of temples, one of which held a relatively recently-acquired artifact: a splinter of Lord Buddha's bone. As we were walking through the peaceful temple grounds, milling with all the tourists and worshippers in the tranquil sunlight, a sudden explosion of firecrackers ripped through the settled calm. A small old man with a wiry broom emerged from the smoke surrounding a brick chimney and nonchalantly began sweeping away the ashes and small bits of firecracker within. I know we weren't the only foreigners who suffered a mild heart attack from that unexpected disturbance of energy. I still have no idea what the fireworks in the middle of the afternoon were for.

In the highest room in the tallest tower was a crystal ball sitting atop a lotus flower surrounded by golden Buddha statues looking after what I THINK was the splinter of Lord Buddha's bone, one of the famous Buddhist relics residing in Thailand.

Wat Chalong, the temple of a billion quadrillion steps (and just as many Buddha statues.)

When I started planning this trip back in June I originally wanted to go to Chiang Mai, a city in northern Thailand where you see all the Google images of skies filled with floating lanterns and lakes dancing with hundreds of candle flames "like a fairy ballroom", as one site promised. However, plane ticket prices went up before I got my act together and by then a group of volunteers was already going to Phuket, which, although perhaps more expensive on the ground, was the cheaper flight.

That being said, I'm happy with what we saw of the festival and Phuket is not so shabby of a place to be either. Really, nothing could disappoint me at that point, which I think is a good mental place to be in when you're showing gratitude to a water goddess and casting off your negative energy to float away with the old year, as are some of the purposes of the Loy Krathong festival. There weren't hundreds of people adorning the night with lights on the less tourist-filled beach we ended up at but there were locals celebrating and we managed to escape the commercial vibe.

After dinner we went down to the fish scale waters and walked to the end of a dock leading into the path of moonlight blazing through the inky inlet. Rawai beach, about 45 minutes from my hostel, was where we ended our afternoon tour of Buddhist relics and temples around Phuket. There was no sand, only a long wooden dock. I read that start time for casting off lanterns and krathong was sundown but locals told us people usually went down to the water after 8.






A krathong is a floating basket usually made from banana tree trunk and leaves pinned decoratively around the edge with flowers, incense and a candle in the middle. I saw some people put locks of hair and nail clippings in their basket as well (symbols of the old energy you are casting off).







Loy Krathong is said to be a romantic festival. If you and your beloved cast off your krathong together and your baskets bob off into the night, two lights burning beside each other until they're out of sight, then that is a sign of everlasting love. The main threat to everlasting love was, of course, the waves, which doused almost everyone's krathong after a few seconds. But I'm sure the water goddess took the intentions of those lovers into consideration when dolling out blessings.

 

DAY 3: KOH PHI PHI (aka FI FI) ISLANDS
The next day we visited the pearl of paradise.



After passing a Viking cave...



And some beautiful rock patterns:



We saw before us the beach where they filmed The Beach (this area is called Maya Bay).



Our guide had an excellent response when asked where the star, Leonardo DeCappuccino, was now. Without a beat she responded, "he's still asleep in my bed." I guess even Leo needs a break from battling sharks bare-handed and causing the fall of paradise.









As we gathered around the red-checkered cloth of a bar table on Thursday evening, having had our fill of pad thai, sweet mango sticky rice and green curry, the other nine volunteers and I plus our hostel friend Chiu from China took a moment to observe a tradition that would be celebrated in a matter of hours on the other side of the world among all our family and friends but that we had to import and join with other local traditions in the land we were in. We each recognized what we were thankful for and then joined the throng of ladyboys, locals and tourists mingling on the street.

How hot is hot?

Lately it's been pretty hot. More so than usual (or so it feels). You may have heard of the raging wildfires in Kalimantan and how the resulting haze has caused many people to suffer from respiratory illnesses. Maybe what caught the attention of international media was the fact that the intentional burning of palm oil plantations this year, in the worst drought year since 1997, has made Indonesia's CO2 emissions surpass those of the entire US economy and, as well, the UK.

Well, all I know is that it's dry, it's hot, the rice paddies look like cracked craters and many people don't even have running water (although I can still take my two baths per day. Alhamdulillah). It was so hot the other day at school that when I was walking from the sink in the main office to the teacher's room not 20 feet away, my hands were already bone-dry without wiping them on my pants or shaking the water off. Only walking, which I guess is something.

This observation, mixed with a little restlessness in the teacher's lounge, prompted me to suggest to my two main partners in crime - Bu Euis, my English counterpart, and Bu Dila, a biology teacher and my other best friend - that we document this phenomenon and record it for posterity or, at the very least, our amusement. Ergo, Bu Dila filmed the below experiment and Bu Euis timed us. Then we explained our findings. Hope you enjoy!

I wrote that the first time I timed the water evaporation by myself the time was 34 seconds. This may have been slightly faulty information because I was counting in my head.

Here's the link in case the video doesn't play:
https://youtu.be/9oMq6XPhS4U

Photo journal

A photo diary of a day in my life in Karawang - or actually two days.

 

Morning bath, during a morning power outage (this happens about once every two weeks, and only for half an hour usually, so not a big thing).

 

 

I came to one of my 11th grade classes early and got to watch them practicing a Sundanese dance. This was Sundanese class.


Playing a vocabulary memory game later with that class. I love documenting the successful games.

Watching sparrows building a nest in the teacher's lounge. I spend almost all of my time out of class in this room. Many teachers spend their free time and class time here too, so it's a cozy environment and there are frequently snacks.

 

Writing in my food diary with Bu Euis. We started this week; she to count her calories because she wants to cut back and me to see if I'm getting enough nutrition....yes vegetables and more fruit are sorely needed.

 

Playing a board game at English club with Bu Euis. Board games courtesy of the Regional English Language Office in Jakarta <3 <3

 

Went really far into the country with my male counterpart to spend an hour at his sister's wedding. I'm kind of wedding-ed-out at this end of my service but he tempted me with the free lunch buffet. Ended up chatting with his uncle, a former everything teacher (including English). He was one of those people who makes you happy you live in a small village where people generally never meet or get to practice their English with a native speaker. Very charming fellow and I liked connecting more with my other counterpart's family, who are all very nice. On the way back we passed a parade in honor of some kid's circumcision.

 

If I end class before 2 pm, as I did on Friday, I sometimes take a bus across the city to my host sister's office where they have really good wifi. It takes about 45 minutes if the driver doesn't decide to stop for a lengthy lunch/smoke break. I didn't take a picture of my sister's office but here's one of the road outside the angkot (that yellow mini-van pictured above) on the ride home.

 

Still on the way home, stopping at a gas station. 

 

Should I stay or should I go?

I'm opting for shorter posts because long posts are exhausting to write (and I'm sure to read as well) and I miss so many details by writing so infrequently. We'll see if I can keep up my blogging stamina.

Yesterday two little things happened that changed my perspective in little but important ways. Lately, that's been happening more frequently - little things changing my perspective. Both happened within several meters and minutes of each other on my walk home after a late lunch with two teachers. As I was walking the short distance back to school from the nasi padang restaurant, an enthusiastic familiar voice called to me from across the street. I looked up and saw this girl, 15, who runs a clothing store near my school. 

She has always been super enthusiastic when talking with me in our sporadic encounters but not in a bule fanaticism sort of way, more so just because that's her character. She positively radiates excitement. I sat down to chat with with her, a younger boy who was just chilling and a couple who runs a pop mie stand next to the girl's open-air clothing store and, even though it was the end of the day and I was tired, I actually wanted to stay for many hours just talking with these relative strangers. They're really enjoyable company. It took a while for the younger boy to warm up to me, maybe because I was dressed in my nice slacks and batik and there were some older men around so he had to be cool, but after I asked them what their favorite films/tv programs were they both really opened up. He loved horror films and knew about Finding Nemo, Dora Emon and she liked Twilight and the terribly cheesy and just all around terrible soaps that they call cinetrons here. But it was something about this girl's attitude, excited and genuine when trying to remember a word in English and talking about all her favorite subjects in school (biology, history and english) that made me really want to try to give her something useful in return. She reminded me of my favorite students at school whose sheer enthusiasm about seemingly EVERYTHING makes me want to transfer some useful knowledge or skills to them, like English practice, scholarship information...etc. Just being an adult figure who actually encourages them to be enthusiastic about school is not enough. I feel so inspired by people like that 15 year old. In fact, meeting people like her make me want to stay in the teaching field longer....

That was small event 1 yesterday. Event no. 2 happened moments later after I took my leave of this exceptional 15-year old girl working at a clothing store, and arrived at my school to retrieve my bicycle. By our school gates I saw a girl standing by herself waiting for public transportation to take her home. I've stopped before and chatted with the students who wait 1, 2, sometimes 3 hours for transportation home, but all too infrequently. It made me feel especially critical about all the teachers who skip out on class or just give their students an assignment from their workbooks, and also bad about every time I have not gone to class for whatever reason. Teacher attendance is a very serious problem in Indonesia and I could write a whole other blog post about it. While it's not cool for teachers to treat their job with such laziness in the first place, it's even worse when you consider that some students' families save a lot of money and the students spend many hours in transit just to go to our rather well-renowned Islamic high school (there are other high demand high schools in Karawang, but our school is respected as one of the best Islamic high schools (Madrasas are regulated by a different ministry, the Ministry of Religious Affairs, than normal high schools because of it's religious curriculum).

Another big problem, which is very much related to teacher absence, is cheating. Really, it's actually entertaining watching the kids try to hide their efforts to cheat from me, as I'm staring them down. I usually wave at them or sit next to the students and that deters them for at least as long as I'm looming over them. Before the test begins they play a form of rock, paper, scissors with their desk mate (two to a desk) to decide which half of the class will leave for the first half of the lesson. This is a method to deter cheating - sitting only one to a desk. The boys are especially funny about cheating. As group 1 was leaving I literally chased several boys who were frantically trying to copy other student's answers before turning their tests in. It was very absurd chasing them down the aisle but my counterpart (the good one!) seemed to take a lassez-faire approach, which was not effective in the least. I thought I saw looks of appreciation from the students who are always badgered for answers at least :/

The big question on my mind these days is.....should I stay or should I go? The deadline to extend for another year is the beginning of January. If I decide to stay with Peace Corps Indonesia for another year I have many other decisions to make. Do I stay here in Karawang and continue my projects or do I take part in the exciting opportunity to be part of the first group of volunteers to go off the island of Java (the other places that have expressed interest in having volunteer English teachers are North Sulawesi, East Nusa Tengara and ). Or, do I leave Indonesia entirely and go....back to America? On to another country to teach English or work on some other skill? Today I am leaning towards staying in Indonesia and moving to another island but tomorrow I will most certainly be of a different mindset and opinion. I suppose only time and the amount of research I do will tell!

Semangat! (Which my students always translate as "keep spirit!")