Family Bungalow

Part of Fulbright’s requirements for English Teaching Assistants is that we be involved in our schools’ extracurriculars, so all 44 ETAs in Indonesia run some type of club, covering anything from debate to theater to sports. In the English Club I run on Monday and Tuesday afternoons, the students and I talk about some aspect of American culture for 10 minutes and then play games until we’re too sweaty to stand it. My favorite club meeting centered on weddings: I showed them pictures from my older brother’s wedding, explained the something-old-something-new tradition and then taught the reception dance floor favorite, the Cha Cha Slide. (This proved to be an inexplicable hit with the 11th grade boys, with their acne and wispy mustache-sprinkled faces, who have downloaded the song to their cell phones and sing along “Now cha cha, y’all!”)

Last week, the club’s topic was Thanksgiving. We went over Pilgrims, turkey and football, and then I asked the students what they were thankful for. Most of them said their family and their health; one brave boy thanked God for his girlfriend, which naturally made his friends whoop. Then Yafed, a shy 16-year old boy, said “I am thankful for Miss Polly, because she is my only American teacher, so I want to have relations with her. Good relations.” I spluttered for a few seconds, confusing everyone, and then suggested what he really meant was “a good relationship.”

In that brief, spluttering moment, all I wanted was someone in the room to make eye contact with and giggle. I wanted to share the joke without having to explain its punch line or look up words in my dictionary. Like a tree falling in the forest, a joke isn’t really a joke unless someone else is there to hear it.

All of this goes to say that for the Thanksgiving weekend I had the unrivaled joy of hanging out with eight of my best ETA friends, and more or less laughing for four days straight. They came from their placements around Indonesia—Sumatra, Java, South Sulawesi and Maluku—to Bunaken, a small island two hours from my town, famous for its coral reefs. We were the only guests at a lovely dive resort run by a gray-haired Australian man who said things like “We’ll have a quick bickie for brekie before headin’ out in the boat.” (And when he said that kind of impossibly Aussie thing, I always had a friend nearby whose grin matched mine.) Our rooms, joined by a porch, were called the Family Bungalow, and that’s what it was: a family Thanksgiving.

Loving life on the ferry ride to Bunaken.

Seabreeze Resort, our home for four days.

We cooked a Thanksgiving dinner, including sweet potatoes, green beans, apple crisp and absolutely no rice. We went on a dolphin tour, jumped off a pier for hours with a gang of local kids, and snorkeled through schools of fish that looked like bright confetti flickering in the water. We jumped off our boat when we were laughing so hard we risked peeing on deck (or maybe that was just me). We took naps together, had sing-a-longs with the Indonesian dive guides and chatted through our rooms’ paper-thin walls. We even posed for a family portrait.

Left to right, back row: JT, Brandon, Talya, me, Nicole, Kelsey, Eric. Front: Thomas, Paige.

When I got back to school this morning, a dozen elementary school students stood outside my classroom for ten minutes, staring at me and calling “What’s your name, Mister?” I asked Ely why they weren’t at their school and he explained that it was Teacher’s Day, a national holiday where the government conducts ceremonies honoring teachers. But, he said matter-of-factly, the local government hadn’t told the schools the holiday’s exact date or when the ceremonies would be, so half the town’s teachers had decided not to show up today and even more would not show up tomorrow.

“So the local government is appreciating teachers?” I asked.
“Oh yes,” he agreed.
“But it failed to tell the teachers when or how they would be appreciated?”
“Right,” he nodded.

I spluttered out a half-laugh and wished with all my heart that an ETA was there to enjoy the moment with me.





*Thanks to my beautiful friend Kelsey for the photos, as I was both too lazy and having too much fun to take my own.