Week Five: Top Five

Over the past month I’ve been to one wedding, two funerals, four birthday parties, two traditional markets, six malls, one scout camp, one beach barbecue and more dinners at friends’ houses—and by friends, I mostly mean strangers who want to become friends with the bule—than I can count. I’ve tried bat (never again) and I’ve raced on the back of an off-duty policeman’s motorcycle at midnight. I’ve listened to hundreds of students say their names, ages and hobbies and I’ve taught at least half of them that “fifteen” isn’t pronounced like “five-teen.” It’s been a busy month. Since this is my fifth week in Amurang and I’m still playing catch-up in this blog, I’ve decided to bring you up to date with a few Top Five lists.    

Top Five I’m-So-Not-In-Kansas-Anymore Experiences

5. I’ve eaten at Kentucky Fried Chicken twice, which is twice as many times in five weeks as the number of times I went there in my four years in Kentucky. Indonesians take me there to give me a taste of home, and I don’t object. But KFC in Indonesia isn’t much like home: before they eat, everyone washes their hands in a long, metal trough by the back door; every entrée comes with a moist mound of rice wrapped in tissue paper; the soft drinks come in one size, which is about as big as a Dixie cup; ads with cute teenage girls in jilbabs eating fried chicken play continually on TV screens.

4. If I’m not walking to school, I’m taking an ojek (taxi-motorcycle) or bendi (taxi-buggy). Both take you anywhere in town for the equivalent of 20 American cents. The teachers prefer I take a bendi because it’s slow, safe and traditional; I prefer the ojek because it makes me feel badass to zoom to school sidesaddle in my ladylike teacher’s skirts.

One of Amurang's many bendis.

3. The whole school took a field trip to the North Sulawesi State Fair. While I was half-walking, half-being pushed through the crowd, a man on stage started yelling into his mic, “Amerika, Amerika!” He was the MC of an English speech competition for students that had just begun; within two minutes, the headmaster of my school had decided I should serve as a judge and had pulled me onto a balcony above the stage. For an hour, I listened to adorable kids give nearly incomprehensible speeches with titles like “Go Green, Sulawesi!” and “Just Say No to Drugs and Free Sex!” When I announced the winner at the end of the competition, the crowd stared at me blankly. It turned out no one knew the word “winner” in English.

2. Ely, my teaching counterpart, told me September 24 was National Sports Day. He said, “We will all go jogging together in the morning to celebrate.”
I said, “Cool. So it’ll be like the students and the PE teachers?”
He said, “No, no; all the teachers and all the students from every school in Amurang will jog with all the town’s government officials and policemen.”
I said, “Um. Cool.”
And he was half-right: thousands of students and hundreds of adults met at 5:30 am outside the regency headquarters and a stretch of road was shut down for us, but no one jogged. We walked.

Students, teachers and bureaucrats marching along a coastal road.

1. I have a newfound hatred for the inventor of the camera phone: my photo is taken constantly, by everyone around me. The teachers take my photo while I check my email; the students take my photo while I eat lunch. Those two funerals I attended? People took my photo while the preacher spoke. People who have never met me thrust their squirming children into my arms and take my photo. To keep my sense of humor (and sanity) about the whole thing, I’ve made some rules: you have to introduce yourself before you can take my photo, no photos in class, if I want to stick out my tongue or cross my eyes in the photo, you have to let me.

This is what it's like to stand in a crowd of camera-happy Indonesians.

Top Five Reasons I Like Teaching at an Indonesian High School

5. If I forget my laminated map of the US, I have to draw a map on the whiteboard to show Boston and Kentucky—and the students usually don’t know how bad it is.

I tried and failed to learn my ETA friend Thomas' impressive map-drawing skills.

4. I get black marks on my face from the whiteboard eraser on a daily basis. It happened on my first day, in my first class. But Indonesian students don’t sit tactfully silent and let you go around looking like an idiot; if you have something on your face, they say so. Marker on my face is now a running joke in my classes.

3. There’s no AC in school and fans in only three classrooms, so everyone sweats a lot. This makes everyone chain-drink bottles of water. So the combination of North Sulawesian heat and North Sulawesian generosity means that bottles of water appear in my hand almost magically. Sometimes students or teachers just show up at my desk or in the classroom to give me a bottle.

2. In the middle of school one day, I played a spontaneous, five-minute game of basketball with four students while 800 others cheered me on. I made three baskets, the crowd went wild every time and I think I can confidently say that it was the peak of my athletic career.

1. I ask all of my oldest students, “What do you want to do after you graduate?” Their answers are inspiring—“I want to be a pilot and travel around the world” and “I want to be a career woman and make my parents proud” and “I want to be a public prosecutor.” Sometimes when they answer me, I say, “You know what’s important for becoming a pilot/career woman/president/international lawyer?” The whole class shouts, “LEARNING ENGLISH!” and then giggles like crazy. 

Top Five Things I Miss Most About America

5. Coffee.
4. Fall weather.
3. Food that isn’t eaten with rice.
2. Coffee.
1. Coffee.

Top Five Surprises

5. I got electrocuted by my stove. My left hand was numb for an hour.

4. A group of friends (most of whom I had met at least once before) showed up at my door at midnight on my birthday with cake, confetti and party hats. It was so thoughtful, it nearly made me cry.

My wonderful Indonesian friends and a newly 22-year old me.

3. I was given a puppy, who I named Louisa May. She was brought to my house as an early birthday present. Way, way too early in fact—the puppy was less than four weeks old and could barely open her eyes. After one night of her peeing in my bed and sleeping on my neck, I demanded that she be returned to her mother until she was eight weeks old. It was my first near-fight with an Indonesian: the teacher who had found the dog told me it was cultural—four-week old puppies are commonly adopted in Indonesia!—and I told her, carefully, that it was biological—four-week old puppies can die without the nutrition from their mother’s milk. Luckily, Ely, who raises dogs, weighed in and agreed that four weeks was too young. The puppy was returned.

2. I was given a second puppy, who I also named Louisa May. She was plopped into my arms when I arrived at school on my birthday (four days after I’d returned the first Louisa). She is, thank God, a healthy eight-weeks old and pees exclusively on newspaper or outside. Raising a puppy is proving to be more difficult than I had imagined; as one teacher put it when I complained about being tired, “Being a mommy is hard.” But it’s also fun: Today we went for a walk around the neighborhood with a gang of kids who scooped Louisa up whenever a motorcycle or unfriendly dog appeared. I would call “C’mon, babygirl” to the puppy when she lagged behind; the kids would laugh and laugh and shout “C’mon, babygirl!” The whole town is getting a kick out of watching the white girl walk down the street with her little white dog trailing after.

Louisa May celebrating my birthday/her adoption day in style.

After Louisa's first bath.

1. I really, really like it here (almost all the time).