The Best of Indonesia, Part 2

I'm riding home from Manado in the front seat of a bus, and it is the most fraught drive of what will surely be my foreshortened life. (That is saying something when you consider the fact that I've been driven by a) a one-eyed man, during a storm, up a mountain, in a car that stalled, and b) me, who once spun 360 degrees on a slick West Virginia interstate.)

The utterly incompetent driver chatters, smokes and texts as we hurtle down the road, taking every mountside zig and zag as if he believes the bus to be a descendant of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang that will sail cheerfully off the cliff to safety. Passing a truck, we come within inches of a head-on collision; I clutch my seat, gasping "Jesus Christ," and he chuckles. Just when I think I'm so wound up I could slap him, he offers me a cigarette.

The road levels out and my body unclenches and then, as if God is chuckling at me too, a rainbow appears above the mountains. "Colors in the sky!" I shout, being too incompetent an Indonesian speaker to know the word for rainbow.

****

I meet an Indonesian college student who's majoring in forestry and, when I tell her I majored in English, says that she loves reading English novels. I am skeptical--North Sulawesi bookstores have a breadth of selection similar to Walgreen's. I ask her which novels and she responds "Oh, Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, Little Women, but my favorite is Anne of Green Gables because Anne has such a big imagination."

My voice gets shrieky with excitement: "No way. Anne of Green Gables has been my favorite book since I was a kid." She tells me she never got to finish the Anne series because its unavailable in Indonesia; getting even shriekier, I say "I can help you with that!" That evening, as I email her the Anne e-books from my Nook, I laugh thinking of Anne's favorite phrase: "kindred spirits."

****

Ester and I are staring at the third draft of my student's speech on unity. Like the first two, this one is clearly plagiarized.

She is giving the speech at a national competition in Jakarta in one week. A sinus infection makes my ears buzz and my head heavy, and all I can think of is the plane ticket Fulbright has already bought for my cheating student, and how much I'd like to be asleep right now. We have already had two grave meetings with her, explaining in English and Indonesian that her speech must be original work. "Go home and write another essay in your words," I had admonished her, "Miss Ester and I will translate it." But the concept of cheating here is fuzzy: "She is scared," Ester says, "She is only a tenth grader," these being legitimate excuses, which I've heard many times, for plagiarizing. I am baffled.

"Okay," I say, tearing up the pages of too-perfect sentences, "Instead of writing a speech, how about the three of us just sit here and talk about why unity is important for Indonesia." In a plodding, triangular conversation between my student's Indonesian and Ester's Indoglsih and my English, we discover that she has a fully developed, unique argument in her head. But since she had never been asked to write an essay before--let alone one for a national competition--she had assumed her ideas weren't good enough to be written down.

I am ashamed: Why didn't I think of this before? But Ester is laughing "See? Before, she worked alone and then I fixed her work and then you corrected it, and it was imperfect. But together, we work perfectly."