Holiday trip

We are off today to Lombok, Flores, and Komodo Island, gone until Jan. 11, in time for school. I will likely write to the blog fleetingly, and rarely check our email. My phone number is 628574306067 for those who might have reason to need to call us.

Ring Road

            There’s a new highway almost finished on the north end of Salatiga, a ring road that will enable the Semarang – Solo traffic to bypass Salatiga on a four lane highway. This should be a great thing for Salatiga traffic, because the road through town now is hilariously busy often with lines of buses and trucks at top speeds, something you notice when your main method of moving about is on foot, bicycle, or motorcycle. Those buses are big, and they’re all about the destination, not the journey.

            It passes fairly close to our house, and it’s been a great place to go for a bike ride. I went there with Graham on Sunday afternoon so he could so some extended skating on the new roller skates he got for his birthday, and I followed him around on my bicycle while he wore himself out.  The closer the road has gotten to completion, the more it has become a sort of city park, so that when you go there, you see all sorts of people, picnicking on the side of highway, young men lining up their motorcycles for spirited races on the straightaways, couples meandering along the fresh white stripes going down the road. All of this happens in spite of the busy road work going on, the buckets of burning tar, the men painting the curbs, the steamrollers and the back-hoes – you just go around them, whatever form of transport you use. It’s already smooth enough for local drivers to use it as a convenient bypass – it’s a city park with a lot of fast moving hazards transversing it, in other words.

By any standards, it’s a nice road, smooth, wide, free of obstacles and cross traffic, for the most part (though it will, I suspect, be a bear to cross when it opens), which means that by Javanese standards it’s something of a miracle. Travel in this country is amazing. We’re 37 kilometers from Semarang, but if you can get there in an hour you’re lucky. If you happen to travel there or back at any of the times when the shifts are out in the fabric factories (read: sweatshops) in Undangan, there’s not much to do but just watch as the young women crowd onto bus after bus, or stand waiting on the corner in large groups. Looking at the traffic from a bus, or as a new arrival, it’s easy to feel like there’s no logic to it, just a mass of undisciplined traffic, but now that I’ve spent some time on a motorcycle in this traffic (which still doesn’t count as fun, for the most part, except that it kind of is [unless I am riding with Laura on the back, who actively comments on the relentless hazards in utterances that usually take the form of various vowel sounds] – where was I? Oh…), now that I’ve spent some time on a motorcycle I get the logic of the roads, the horns typically a polite (sometimes very loud polite) signal that there is car or a motorcycle in a space you look like you might want to occupy but should not. There are motorcycles weaving everywhere, darting between buses and cars and trucks and other motorcycles. It’s mostly a two lane highway between here and Semarang, but with anywhere from 4-6 lanes of traffic.

So the ring road feels like something of a luxury, an extravagance, an enormously appealing place to go where you can move at top speed on whatever vehicle you are riding (lovely, for example, on the ride down a very long steep hill on a bicycle) because you never really move that fast in traffic here. It’s strange to bond with the community on the brand new ring road, but for the weeks that remain before it gets hit by actual traffic, it’s a gathering place, and an oddly pleasant way to spend an afternoon, with traffic that is all about the journey for the moment, back and forth, with no place to go.

Spelling reform

        In 1968, the Indonesian government spearheaded a reform of the spelling system, ostensibly to put it more in line with Malay. It made all sorts of orthographic sense - roemakoe (my house) became rumahku, the pronunciation remaining the same (roo - ma - koo); Djakarta became Jakarta. But, according to Benedict Anderson in his obituary of Suharto (Soeharto) in 2008, the spelling reform had a more sinister purpose: it meant that it would be immediately obvious to identify when something was written, and whether it was officially sanctioned or not. It was an aspect of the general policy of the Suharto government to control the interpretation and dissemination of historical knowledge, especially with the point of justifying his takeover from Sukarno in 1965, the central part of which involved the wholesale slaughter of anywhere from 1/2 million to 1 million people throughout Indonesia. Those people, supposedly, were connected to the PKI, the Indonesian Communist Party, who were blamed for murdering six senior generals in attempted coup; to this day, the degree to which the Communist Party was involved in the murders remains unclear, though what is not unclear is that this was simply a pretext, and that the mass murder was the way in which Suharto created the conditions of fear and raw power that sustained his regime for 37 years until 1998.
         Every year, Suharto memorialized the dead generals with a giant ceremony at their giant statue and reminded everyone of the history, in which the bloodthirsty Communists, who the military under his command valiantly defeated but who were always ready to rise up again unless there was sustained vigilance, ended their threat to the sacred Indonesian nation. The Communists, until 1965 a major political power, were never a force again, but Suharto strictly controlled historical writing and did things like make school children watch a four hour movie every year on the anniversary of the killing of the generals, about the evils of the Communists (and their women, who supposedly castrated the dead bodies - that part apparently not in the movie - and then danced on the bodies - in the movie).
         The moral of the story: bad spellers are Communists, which I have allways suspicted inyway.

My self evaluation, Semester one

Is was surprised this semester when my students didn’t fill out evaluations for my teaching, when there was no platform for them to say anything about the class. I asked them about this, and I collected my own, informal evaluations, but it still puzzles me. And then, after the semester was over, I got evaluation forms as an email attachment, forms I was supposed to fill out, evaluating my classes and my performance. I’m reproducing them verbatim, in the order I wrote them. I’m putting them here because I feel compelled to put in a blog entry, and I am tired (it’s been a long week) and because I think these evaluations offer a pretty good sense of my teaching this semester. And I will say, I like the idea of having to submit a written self-evaluation at the end of every semester, though I suspect it a reform that would die a quick and irritated death if I suggested it to my colleagues in the United States:

 For Public Speaking:

1.     What went well in your class?

In general, the best activities were the ones designed to get students to speak more fully in class. The thing that went the best was to see students developing a sense of confidence about speaking, and to see them developing a sense of how to be a better audience. I was also impressed that they began to think more fully about how to appeal to their classmates, rather than simply thinking of their teacher as their only audience. For me, that was perhaps the most important aspect.

2.     What did not go well in your class?

It felt very rushed to me, with many speeches crowded on top of each other. I had a difficult time keeping up with the material we were supposed to cover, and on the speech days, sixteen straight speeches seemed to me too many in a row. I also found it difficult to know quite how to assess the speeches, and I don’t think that I did that fairly.

3.     What are possible factors which influence the lack of success of your class?

I have never taught public speaking before, and it has been 20 years since I have taught a curriculum that I didn’t write myself. I didn’t do a very good job keeping on schedule. I also thought that perhaps the students didn’t need to be learning so many different kinds of speeches, For example, I still cannot see quite the difference between a persuasive speech and an argumentative speech, and sometimes I found the formulas for the speeches slightly distracting as well, difficult to follow and teach. Mostly, I attribute the lack of success in my class (because I don’t think I taught this class very well) to my lack of experience teaching public speaking as a course, and teaching a group of students whose first language was not English. I loved my students, however, and I was pleased to see them speak more by the end of the semester.

4.     What do you think the possible strategies to improve the teaching and learning process in the future?

If I taught this course again, I would focus less on the types of speeches and more simply on getting students to speak about something. The speeches seemed pulled from a rhetorical tradition – my rhetorical tradition, I should add – that students were not wholly familiar with. I really wish I knew more about varieties of Indonesian rhetoric. What are the occasions that demand speaking and rhetorical activity in Indonesia? On Java? What are the cultural expectations surrounding things like argument and self-presentation? I didn’t understand that, and I think I’d start by exploring some of those issues with students. I think I’d get them out more observing and analyzing speeches. In all my classes, I struggled with what I was supposed to be teaching – is it the English language, or the topic? I always leaned toward the topic, but some of my students seemed to expect more direct language teaching.

For Critical Reading:

1.     What went well in your class?

I don’t know, to be honest. I hope that I helped students recognize strategies for becoming more engaged and active readers. I spent a lot of time trying to get them to step back from the mania around correctness and to develop a higher comfort level with uncertainly and mistakes, both in language and in comprehension.  For the students who were engaged and interested, I think this was useful.

2.     What did not go well in your class? What are possible factors which influence the lack of success of your class? (I’ve combined 2 and 3 because I kept answering them both.)

First, I found it difficult to teach using the material we were given to use. It may because I have not taught critical reading to a group of students who speak English as another language; in that combination there were many aspects that I found difficult.  But I found many of the materials, and the way they were presented, to be distracting from the work of critical reading I wanted my students to do. The test at the midterm did not go well, and I think demonstrates the difficulty of administering a common test for several separate classes. All of us have slightly different approaches and styles, which should be encouraged, I think, and I wish I had been able to plan my own curriculum, because I found myself doing this anyway, and I think my students suffered because of it (not, I should add, because my curriculum wasn’t a good one, but because it did not follow the sanctioned curriculum). I also talk too fast, even though I tried not to, and I had a difficult time getting students to speak in class, no matter what I did. I did, however, get better at that as the semester went on.

3.     What do you think the possible strategies to improve the teaching and learning process in the future?

I am a newcomer here, and I hesitate to sound like I am critical; I don’t know enough about how things work here to be comfortable offering suggestions for changes. I will say that as an experienced teacher with several years in basic literacy and teaching, I have a very different approach to teaching critical reading than the textbook uses. It could be that I am not experienced enough teaching this sort of group of students, and so less aware of what they need; to some degree this is certainly true. As a teacher, I wanted my students to read and engage, directly, with as many kinds of texts as I could find – I wanted them to raise questions, get confused, make guesses, struggle, find personal and emotional connections, and reflect upon all that. I have a very difficult time teaching reading as a set of separate activities – this week, drawing inferences; next week, drawing conclusions; and so forth. Instead, I want to get students engaged in the process of being active readers who are bringing their own ideas and backgrounds to bear on the reading of a text. I tried to do this, but it didn’t work very well, because I felt too much conflict with the other material, which I also didn’t teach very well. To be honest, I found this experience to be extremely interesting and provocative, for me, but I don’t think it was very helpful for most of the students, and I regret that a little. I really think that there should be other methods of evaluation besides a common test; I don’t see how that can be a productive way to assess more than 200 students at once.

For Academic writing:

1.     What went well in your class?

I think that several of my students surprised themselves with the process they experience and the writing that they did. I also think that several of my students actually enjoyed the process of discovery they went through when they wrote their papers. For me, what went the best was watching students draft and revise and rethink their paper. I enjoyed that a great deal, and I think my students learned, at least at times, that to be successful writers they had to begin with something that interested them first.

2.     What did not go well in your class? What are possible factors which influence the lack of success of your class?

I hate sounding like a broken record - this is the third evaluation I have written – but I just cannot teach with a curriculum someone else has prepared for me, especially in a topic that I have been teaching for 20 years, and that has been at the center of my pedagogical and scholarly work. I should not have followed the text, or the rhythm of the class as it was pre-ordained, at all, and if I had it over to do again I would not. More than anything else, my students needed an occasion to engage as writers, to discover a topic and a idea that excited them, and to use writing as a way of doing that. Some of them did this, but a good number of them came up with topics that were bland from the beginning, and that they were clearly not interested in at all. (I am still confused at how many students chose to write about methods of teaching English vocabulary – most of whom expressed no interest in becoming teachers.)  I also was surprised at the expectation students had that I would correct every error in their papers, which I did not. In some ways, more than any other class, I wish I had this one to teach over again, because I think that I could have had a lot more fun, and that my students would have gotten a lot more out of it.  There are a several ideas about teaching writing in the academic writing textbook that I simply disagree with – outlining, structuring the writing before you know enough about what you want to say, worrying too early about the structure of paragraphs and the right ways to organize. If students want to write well in English, they have to approach the task as writers, not as grammarians or template fillers. I think the over-focus on organization and correctness from the beginning of the course is a great detriment. Also, my students had absolutely no idea about how to use the databases available through Satya Wacana, and they are too late into their academic career to not know how to use those.

                  Also, I discovered on the first day that the classroom where I was supposed to teach, the bright sunny one with the modern computers, was occupied with another academic writing course, and I was moved to a dark and noisy classroom with classrooms that were impossibly slow and that made the computer classroom a nuisance instead of a benefit. I could not hear my students unless I turned off the air-conditioning, which made it unbearably hot. I could not teach in that classroom, so after about five weeks I had to request a new classroom, even though access to fast and reliable computers would have been very useful throughout the semester. 

3.     What do you think the possible strategies to improve the teaching and learning process in the future?

First, their needs to be some direct and open-ended instruction on using the databases for research. Students need time to play around and explore in them and to learn how to use them, and they need this early on in their life as students – I would recommend it in their very first year, in some structured and not too challenging way. Without such instruction, students will do what students all over the world (in my sudden global experience) do, which is “google it” for research. My students, in this course, treated Google as the fount of all knowledge, the tree of life, the peak of wisdom (I’ll stop mixing my metaphors). They couldn’t Google enough; and I was surprised to learn that there is no one at the library who will take the time to sit down with them and teach them how to do use the databases. I should have done what Ibu Heny did, and brought in the librarian she recommended. But this is an issue, I think, that should be addressed well in advance of their time in academic writing.

                  As before, I think the pre-ordained curriculum might be useful, and necessary, for a new teacher, but for teachers with experience and creativity, such curricula are a distraction.  If I had to do everything over again, I would have ignored it all together, right from the beginning, and structured the course according to the ways I have structured my writing courses for years. I am not saying that the curriculum used at UKSW is a poor one; it is simply not the way I teach writing. I will say that some of the ideas in the textbook, from the point of view of someone trained in writing pedagogy in the United States, seem considerably out of date and in some cases counter-productive to helping students learn how to write. But I understand that I am in different context here, and that there is more here that I don’t understand than I do.

                 

Today in the Jakarta Post

            On the first five pages of the English language daily Jakarta Post for Friday, December 10, there are 10 stories about corruption of one sort or another, not including the picture of protesters in front of the Headquarters of the Corruption Eradication Commission. (In the photograph, one protestor is wearing a wig mocking Gayus Tambunan, a tax official on trial for graft who was caught on camera, wearing the same wig, at a professional tennis tournament in Bali – he had been bribing the warden of the prison, and the guard, to get out of prison every weekend, bribing them with the remnants of the money he had skimmed off as a tax official. The judge who acquitted Gayus in his first trial, after Gayus bribed him with $40,000, is the subject of the story on page 2: Corrupt judge gets light 2-year sentence.) Everyone is on the take in this country, and every day in the Post is like this, story after story: Crowd demand mayor to resign (in Medan, said mayor having been named by the prosecutor in North Sumatra for embezzling $165,000); Court sentences for officials to a year for skimming money off the top of the family planning program in Central Sumatra); Anticorruption rally ends in chaos, where students in Makassar, in South Sulawesi, threw Molotov cocktails at the police as part of countrywide protests against corruption, and clashed in other parts of Indonesia. Corruption is endemic here, at any level, from the slight $5 bribe you add on to your driver’s license fee to avoid having to take the test, to the exorbitant, such as Gayus’s bribes using embezzled money. It’s how things are done in Indonesia, and it’s excruciating to see how damaging it is to a fledging democracy.

            There are two stories about Indonesia and the Nobel Peace Prize. It was, apparently, extremely important that the Indonesian Ambassador to Norway be recalled to Indonesia so that he could attend the Bali Democracy Forum meeting held at the same time as the ceremony in Oslo (an irony not lost on the attendees at the Bali Democracy Forum, who noted how odd it was for the Indonesian government to flee from a ceremony honoring a persecuted Chinese democratic activist to go to a forum on democracy). Indonesia joins a panoply of other countries apparently strong-armed by China into not attending. They are not strangers to this sort of thing, as one of the articles points out, having organized a boycott by Southeast Asian countries of the 1996 Nobel ceremony, honoring peace activists in Indonesia’s bloody conquest of East Timor (one of whom is now president of the now independent Timor Leste).

            There is a story about the brother of the Sultan of Yogyakarta, the cultural center of Java, who resigned from the democratic party. The Sultan of Yogyakarta is appointed to the governorship of the province, the only appointed governorship in Indonesia, as a reward for the Sultan having allied with revolutionary soldiers during the Indonesian Revolution (1945-1950). The President of Indonesia wants to revoke that status now, because it is undemocratic, to the great consternation of, it would seem, most of Yogyakarta, and of course to the Sultan’s brother. (The Sultan himself has suggested that he will bow to the will of the people.)

            In financial news, the price of rubber is at an all-time high and Islamic bonds are a good investment (I have no idea what this means, but you can buy “Sharia-compliant notes” – I hope somebody in Oklahoma is making sure to ban these investments).

            That’s today in the Jakarta Post. 

Update: Indonesia, bless their fledging democratic souls, decided to send an envoy to the Nobel Peace Prize Ceremony. I suspect it was the embarrassment of my publicizing the slight to the 32 followers of our blog that tipped the balance. Pak Kirk, Global Democracy Crusader.

Reflections on the Ordinary

Now that the shock of living in Indonesia has subsided somewhat, the kids have gotten used to their school, and we refer to rumah besar (the big house) as home, life in Salatiga is not really all that different from life in the United States. We get the kids to school, make a second cup of coffee, throw in a load of laundry, run out of milk, catch up on correspondence, volunteer in the classroom, visit with friends, look for lost soccer gear, fight over homework, get dinner on the table, and maybe try to sneak in a run before the day's out. That said, life is, for all practical purposes, absolutely nothing like life in the Unite States.

For starters, Ibu Kasum shows up every morning at 8:00 sharp. From then until about 2:00 pm, she cleans the house, hangs out the laundry, mops the floors, cooks and delivers the kids lunch to school, and makes dinner for the family. For this I pay her the grand sum of $50 per month. Oddly, this does not leave me with infinite time on my hands. Before we left, Brent, a returning Fulbright who had just spent a year in Bali advised, "Whatever it is you want to accomplish in a day, cut it in half." He wasn't far off.

Take the laundry for instance. The semi-automatic washer we purchased requires that you drain the clothes after washing them on one side, and put them into another tub for rinsing and spinning. Only that tub is about a quarter the size of the first, so you have to do it four times, although it still beats the alternative which is washing everything by hand. Then the laundry is put out on the line, either by myself or by Ibu Kasum, for as long as the rain hold out. When the rain starts, you go flying like mad to collect it all, hope that at least some of it is dry, and drape the rest over every available chair and railing in the house until the next day when you do it all over again.

Or shopping. Ibu Kasum does most of the shopping but I still need to pick up odds and ends that the kids go through quickly or that she doesn't come across. Indonesian food stores come in three varieties: the tiny warungs, the toko, and the American style supermarket. The latter can be found only in the big cities and while they boast bright lights, huge inventories, and roller-skating sales clerks, offer only more versions of the same heavily processed, sugar and msg laden prepared foods that the small and medium stores in Salatiga offer -- mostly processed milk products, dried noodles, and rows upon rows of cookies and sweets. The Javanese have a serious sweet tooth. Seamus is in heaven.

The only place to buy 'real' food is in the pasar, the traditional market of which there are two in Salatiga. I am still honing my shopping chops as very little English is spoken outside of the ex-pat and university communities. While it is fun to wander the stalls and admire the incredibly array of goods, it is super time consuming. One very funny, and still somewhat confusing aspect of the Indonesian markets is that all the same type of goods are sold in one area. There will be a full row of fresh flower ladies, then a row of fruit sellers, then a row of people selling dried fish. They all sell exactly the same merchandise, displayed in exactly the same manner. Then of course there are the banana sellers who are a block up, I still have not figured out why they aren't with the fruit ladies. The vegetables are found on the second floor, stairs are around the corner past the row of quail's egg ladies, and across from the tofu/tempe stands. Its all very charming but it means you can put some serious miles on before you have purchased what you need for a single meal. And then lug it home on the bus.

Many of the ex-pats who we have met have been here for long periods of time so they are more invested in re-creating western foods that we 'short-timers'. The upside of this is there is a good network of people who know where to buy bacon, cheese, hamburger buns, canned tomatoes, oatmeal, and other goods that make a homesick 10 year old feel a little less, well, homesick. But it does require more running around.

I do seem to be getting the hang of it though. The other day I got my hair cut, bought fruit, veges, and bread all in the same day. I no longer panic when the fruit lady shouts out a number at me. I don't always know what she is saying, and depending on my mood, will not always barter with her, but at least I don't panic. I find it a little unsettling to argue over whether a kilo of the lovely, sweet, fresh mangoes that would cost me $5 in the States should cost me 90 cents or 75. But I am generally able to pay without causing a scene and audible laughter no longer follows me wherever I go. It is odd the things you take for granted. I don't miss my American routines necessarily, and I am enjoying the experience of the other, but there will be a quiet joy in that first visit to my familiar grocery store, and maybe a tiny sigh of relief.

Substitute teachers

 The day we visited the Merapi area, we delivered supplies to two school that had pupils from refugee families, delivering the bags to the appropriate children. At the second school we visited, all the faculty came out, and they brought us tea (this is not remarkable – tea simply appears) and made us comfortable and brought the kids out in small groups. We gave them the packages one by one in a sort of awkward procession (for me) – they would shake our hands and thank us and take the supplies. “Terima Kasih” “Sama-sama” again and again. We sort of dispersed after a while, Laura inside talking to someone while the kids were who knows where and I was in the parking lot, squatting so I could look kids in the face, shaking hands, saying “sama-sama” again and again. Only after I it had been happening for a few minutes did I register the howls of laughter coming from a classroom just behind me.

As soon as I finished passing out bags I darted into the school, because I have learned that most of the time the loud peals coming when I am around have something to do with my kids. Sure enough, in front of the noisy classroom were Seamus and Graham giving an impromptu English class to a group of 7^th graders while their teachers were at first distracted and then delighted. Graham would write things on the board like “Saya suka ayam goreng” and then when a girl (all girls in this class) would say “I like fried chicken” he marched to the back of the class and gave her the whiteboard marker and insisted that they come forward to write their sentence on the board. This occasioned great squeals and much embarrassment, and it was truly hilarious.

I’ve included a full text of Seamus’s English lesson below. 

(Bule is the Indonesian gringo.)
Saya suka bule ini.
I like this bule.
Bule ini keron sekali.
This bule is really cool.
(Kesukaan) saya bule adalah Seamus.
My favorite bule is Seamus.

 

Learning New Vocabularies

December 3, 2010

Several of my students use a phrasing in their papers that I marked, at least in my own head, as an error when I read it. When they write about methods of teaching vocabulary, which for some reason that I cannot yet explain is a very popular topic for my students to write about in the academic writing course, they often write “learning new vocabularies” by which they mean “learning new vocabulary words.” I explained this to one of my students one day in a conference, helpfully pointing out the distinction. Not a major issue, to be sure, but something worth mentioning in the pedagogical small talk of a teacher-student conversation.

So I was a little surprised last week, when I attended an English language conference at my university, to see the word “vocabularies” used in a presentation abstract, to mean “vocabulary words.” I suddenly wondered if there could be a way that “vocabularies” was actually proper, in Indonesian English, the way not having an article in front of “hospital” is proper in British English, and whether there could be something called Indonesian English which has its own rules (the linguist in me says of course there can).

This is a simple observation, but it raises profound questions about the ownership of a language, about the meaning of “error,” and about who gets to claim the right to enforce correctness in a language. It suggests that the process of linguistic colonization underway with English is, like the process of colonization itself, not wholly under the control of the colonizers.  It challenges English language instructors to focus on languages as on-going acts of human creation rather than languages as artifacts to be preserved by people like me, Pak Kirk, Global English Archivist. At some point, and I think that point might already be here, I don’t get to tell the students learning “my” language that, to borrow a phrasing from another student paper, the way they speaking it wrong.

Teaching the English Language is a Useless Activity

December 1, 2010

            Our Saturday trip to the refugee camps began with a visit to a middle school near Merapi, where several children from refugee camps were attending classes. Ibu Maria had arranged two workshops with teachers from the area, one for math teachers and one for English teachers. I’d gladly agreed to do it – though I think I had been confirmed before I found out about it – because I have been wanting to meet and talk about teaching in Indonesia with some practicing teachers, and Ibu Maria wanted to know if I had handouts or a Power Point presentation for my teachers (I am convinced that Power Point has colonized global ways of knowledge, but that’s for a different posting). I told her I wasn’t going to prepare anything, because I didn’t know anything about teaching in Indonesia and I had to meet the teachers first before I knew what I would say to them. I’m never sure if this is actually just laziness on my part, or some sort of wise behavior, but I do know that if I had prepared some sort of activity – Language Games! – I would have blown my learning opportunity.

            We met first in a large room, where there was a small ceremony. “ It’s culture,” Ibu Maria said. (Ibu Maria says “it’s culture” about everything, usually involving some nice thing that she or her husband are doing for our family and which we are unable to stop them from doing even with our extensive protestations.) “It’s culture” to have a little ritual before we start the workshop, and all the dignitaries in the room had to say a little something. I didn’t understand everything, but Ibu Maria warned me (though only just as the ceremony was beginning) that I would have to speak too, and that she would translate for me.  I said a few things, including what I reported on in the last entry, and about how excited I was to meet teachers, etc. etc. I must have been a little flustered, though, because when I was finished one of the people asked me what my name was.

            After the ceremony, I went with the five middle school English teachers, joined later by a sixth, to a classroom in the middle school. We arranged the desks in a small circle, and I told them candidly that I had nothing prepared, that I didn’t know enough about them to know what to say, and that I hoped they didn’t mind if we just had a conversation. They didn’t say that they did, but I suspect a little that they did mind, in fact, because I think they were expecting some kind of wisdom about teaching from me.

            They introduced themselves one by one.

            C, the first teacher, had been teaching for five years, and one of the first things he said was: “I think sometimes that teaching the English language is a useless activity.” His problem, it turned out, was not that teaching was a waste of time, but that the government of Indonesia required all teachers, in all schools, to teach the same material at the same level as a way of preparing students to take the same test at the end of the year. If they failed that test, they had a second chance, and if they failed that second test, they had to repeat the class. It was, I quickly learned, a multiple choice test. (Note my earlier complaint in an earlier entry that I had to teach a common examination with five other classes in my department, and that I found – find – it stifling to my ability to teach the students in my class.) Failure on that test by the students is, of course, failure by the teachers. This is a global narrative for teachers, told in a particularly stark way here.

            Bear in mind that Indonesia has 17,000 islands, though only 922 of them are permanently occupied. There are more than 700 languages actually spoken on the archipelago, Indonesian being the official language of the country but the second language of almost all Indonesians. There is a staggering and very visible class divide here, the gap between wealthy and poor something difficult to describe, even from an American perspective. The 2000 census of Indonesia lists 206 million people. And every single Indonesian eighth-grader on all of these islands speaking all of these languages from all of these backgrounds learns the same curriculum in preparation for the same test. It makes the deep concerns I have about official standards for teachers in the United States appear paltry, by comparison.

            The second teacher, his partner, has been teaching for six months. I asked her what surprised her the most about her job since she started teaching. “It’s really hard,” she said. “I didn’t realize how hard it was to work with so many students.” Another teacher, an older man who had been teaching for 24 years, said that he though he had to teach things that students weren’t learning from.  A young man who had been teaching for three years fretted about the motivation of his students. “I thought they would like to play games,” he said, “but they do not.” And all of them expressed clear frustrations with the government curriculum.

            I have not yet seen the curriculum, though I have one on its way from Ibu Maria. It includes, as it was described to me by these teachers, narrative, descriptive, and procedural texts. It emphasizes reading, writing, listening, and speaking (but the test that measures all this is multiple choice and scored anonymously). The teachers described similar problems as they went around the room: students don’t care about the readings, students aren’t excited by the language, teachers have to teach materials they don’t think help students actually learn the language, they have to teach so that students will pass a multiple test even though the curriculum states other priorities. And they all had 40-47 students per class.

            I wanted to know, as we spoke, how they handled this, focusing on things they did, that worked, even though they weren’t in the curriculum, and then goals that were in the curriculum which they could agree with. About the first, the most common response was finding new texts. “My students don’t want to read Javanese legends,” one person told me. “They’re bored by them.” So he finds fairy tales, which they like better, unfamiliar stories. They go outside; they have a dance with songs in English; and so forth.

            About the goals in the curriculum that they could agree with, I got an immediate and angry response from C. “You shouldn’t ask us to agree with anything the government wants us to do.  They have done nothing for the people in Merapi. They are doing nothing. We will not find anything they ask us to do worth doing.”

            It was an amazing 90 minutes with those teachers. I have no idea if I offered them anything, though I can say that they taught me a great deal, and I am hoping they will follow through on the invitations they promised me to visit their classes; I want to speak to them again. We talked about what they did as teachers to subvert the curriculum, and how to think about teaching with that in mind. I told them that I had a version of this conversation with teachers I worked with in the United States, who face similar pressures from official standard setters who seem to target most of all the professional knowledge that teachers bring to the classroom.  After that we took pictures for several minutes, part of the after-ceremony, I think, in situations like this.

            Because of my academic field, I have been aware for some time of the research and scholarship that deal with English as global language, but my interest has been, I must say, rather secondary – I have kept vaguely up with the writing out of a kind of professional responsibility. But now I am a teacher of English to groups of Indonesians and living in a country and part of the world where English instruction is omnipresent; signs hang outside houses all over Salatiga, offering English classes.  I am part of the project of global English, in a direct way, and to be in that position is to force countless questions about the politics of the project, ones I know I will write more about because they are becoming one of the primary issues I am thinking about. Talking to these teachers put the issue squarely inside the rural classrooms of Central Java, where the global force of English as a world language is felt by resistant and already multilingual students and their frustrated teachers.  Who drives this learning? Who decides to what ends it is used? Who decides what are the “best” methods (the phrase I hate the most to describe teaching: “best practices”)? And what place do teachers have in any of this?  It’s mind-spinning and in the vortex of national aspirations and global economics and the ambitions of people everywhere to speak so they will be heard, in some way.  Pak Kirk: Global English Teacher. A life of adventure and antonyms. 

Hari dalam bahasa Indonesia

     Wisata bencana is an Indonesian phrase for an Indonesian phenomenon: distaster tourism.

             Any description of our day on Saturday should by rights begin with an act of unwarranted voyeurism, with me standing on the steps to stranger’s kitchen, looking in at a stove and some dishes, presumably drying, me standing there for how long I do not know, staring in, transfixed by a vision of the mundane turned extraordinary.

            I knew it was a kitchen because there was a stove there, and those dishes, but aside from that there was little to distinguish it from the wasteland I stood in. Covered in ash, everything blasted or turned or leaning to the south from the force of pyroclastic flows carrying a heat cloud of 1100-1500 degrees Fahrenheit, moving at a speed of  around 150 miles per hour, the kitchen was part of a landscape in which familiar objects were monuments, a garage, or a siphon, or a clothesline, or the charred ruins of a mosque transformed into memorials of a lost normalcy.

            When we first drove onto the slopes of Mount Merapi, talking our way through one roadblock and bribing our way through another (my family and I were not involved in this talking or bribing, by the way, and none of the money donated by our friends and family was spent on said bribe), we passed through abandoned but otherwise normal seeming terrain, houses, small warungs (shops), farms, schools, in lush forests muted that day by a light fog. There were people around, allowed up for the day, in limited numbers, to attend to their property, though they would return to the refugees camps before it got dark. The emptiness, itself remarkable in this densely populated place, and the layer of ash along the road (washed off by the rain everywhere else) visible clues to the destruction wrought by the eruptions. Indeed, moving closer and closer on the 2 ½ hour drive, we saw a series of strange sights: the leaves of palm trees, broken and inverted by the weight of the ash; rivers torn by the flows of ash and mud carried by subsequent torrential rains; communities newly reoccupied, struggling to bring life back to the farms destroyed by the fallout. It was one of those drives that occasions increasing silence.

            Even so, nothing prepared any of us for the sudden and complete transformation, for what seemed like a crude and arbitrary line drawn, separating the dense green foliage and the colorful houses and the signs of daily upkeep from an apocalyptic landscape unlike anything I have ever imagined. There was a house, surrounded by bamboo, and trees, boarded up but otherwise apparently perfectly intact, and then twenty yards from it, the twisted and grey remains of trees and buildings stretching for miles, hills with the outline of roads winding through neighborhoods where no one will live again for years. There was a new graveyard for some of the first victims, and the smell of decay, and flies everywhere, in huge cloying swarms, that besieged us in the car as soon as we opened the windows to see better the surreal sight unfolding before us.

Graham, standing near a stand with a siphon on it, like stands everywhere in Indonesia that sell fuel in small glass bottles. "I could just imagine myself driving up on a motorcycle," he told me later, "buying some bensin, opening my gas tank and using that siphon to fill it up."

            I thought, after we stopped and I walked slowly through the debris, some still smoking, of power and of death, of the incredible force unleashed by that volcano that could turn this place into what we saw, a ripped skeleton of the earth, trees stripped and blackened, one wrapped in a piece of metal, and rows and rows of charred bamboo, lying on its side, all pointing the same direction, of the vast, and of the immediate, of the family whose broken dishes lied still neatly placed against each other.

            I don’t have the descriptive vocabulary to take this further. I need Cormac McCarthy or Dante to step in perhaps, to find the right Biblical syntax, or Shelley, maybe, to offer up the sublime with its terror and transcendence. I will never forget it, I cannot stop running the scene through my head. I just offer it, because it matters, it matters to the people who reached out over the distance of thousands of miles to offer a small but welcome helping hand. This is where the people you helped lived, until a month ago, until they moved to the cramped quarters of the schools and churches and mosques and dormitories and warehouses and whatever else that could be commandeered to take in the hundreds of thousands lucky enough to flee alive.

            Laura spent all of Friday in Semarang with Ibu Maria, shopping for the 300 individual bags we assembled (with ten people, total) on the ground floor of our house late into Friday night. Each bag had five packages of dried noodles, a can of sardines in tomatoes, a can of chocolate sweetened condensed milk, a bag of dried shredded beef, a container of kacip manis (sweet soy sauce, the Indonesian go-to condiment), three eggs boiled in a traditional Indonesian way, five small notepads, three pencils, and a package of feminine sanitary napkins. We also had several bags of diapers for families with babies. We passed these out in three locations – at two schools, where the teachers brought in students who were living in refugee camps and we gave a bag to each one, and at a refugee camp on the outskirts of Yogyakarta, in a school and a police station, with the army set up in a bivouac along the side and some aid workers in another canvas tent. There were 500 people in this refugee camp, some of them people whose homes were in the area we had visited earlier that afternoon, and the children and mothers (almost none of the fathers) lined up and took one bag at a time, along with three boxes of vitamins.

            It felt both very small, and very important – small because they are still where they are, and still without a sense of what the future will be, still, as one of the refugees I talked to put it, faced with “banyak kerja dan bukan uang” (“lots of work and no money”), with leveled houses and decimated farms. It was not a happy place, but the people were quietly grateful, and I was even more grateful, grateful that I could live in this place, at least, with a sense that I was a member of my community in a time of need, grateful even more for the community I was even more aware of from my home, who made our outreach possible, who supplied 300 families with goods and food to augment the rice most camps have in abundance.

            I was grateful, too, for my children, who took in the sight of the ruined landscape with silence and awe, who arrived at the camp with enthusiasm and compassion. Seamus ran across the street and bought bunches  of candy and two soccer balls, and went around to each person he could find, offering them candy, and passing off the balls to groups of eager children. Graham reached into some place deep, played a role he hasn’t played so much, that of the playful older kid, who swung small children in circles, threw kids over his back and ran around with hordes chasing him, put a box on his head and chased groups of laughing screaming kids.  And we spent a hour there, delivering the goods, playing with the children, greeting the soldiers, all of whom were from Salatiga (and who insisted, to my great embarrassment and reluctance, that I eat some rice and vegetables – I took as meager a portion as I politely could), talking to the refugees and the volunteers.

            Earlier that day, when I was addressing a group of teachers who had been displaced by the eruption (another amazing experience that I will write about next), I told them how glad I was to be there, what an honor it was to meet them. And I told them something like this: “I want you to know that my friends and my family in America know what happened, they are aware of your suffering, and they send their love, prayers, and money for you.  They know you are here, and they want you to know that.” After Ibu Maria finished translating that for me, the teachers applauded. They were applauding for all of you who reached out when we asked you, for all of you whose gift was not only the supplies a (large and grateful) handful of families got to help them through a part of their trials, but also to know that they have not been forgotten, ignored, passed over. Such is the looming plight of an on-going refugee crisis, and you lifted that, even if briefly, gently and with compassion that stretched from the other side of world, to a community of people whose world has been flattened, whose most intimate spaces are recognizable only by the destroyed detritus of their previous lives. I know they are grateful, and we are grateful too, and honored that we could be emissaries of a such a wonderful group. I thank you again and again.

Graham, playing games with the kids at the camp, who chased him and called him "Mas Graham" and who treated him, to his great delight and with his complete encouragement, as a human jungle gym.

An Indonesian Thanksgiving

   Last night, at our Indonesian neighbor Ibu Lala's house, with her family Pak Eko, Larissa, and Ezel, we had Thanksgiving dinner, with her sister's family and a Korean family who live down the block. We had written off Thanksgiving, with little grief, but when we got the invitation, we were of course delighted, and my pleasure at actually having a Thanksgiving reminded me of why I like this holiday so much. And it was a great Thanksgiving, a delicious dinner, and great company - Pak Eko is a television producer who develops Indonesian reality TV shows - he got written up recently in the New York Times for his reality TV productions - and he talked me through several of them: the hidden camera that sees if people volunteer to help strangers in pretend need on the street, the 12 hour version of Extreme Home Makeover, the I-almost-died true story reenactments. Though his house is 10 feet from my house, we had not yet met ("That is the American way," he said loudly - he lived in Tulsa for 6 years when we went to Oral Roberts, "but not the Indonesian way!" And he laughed, a big and very happy laugh).  He decided last night that he wants me to be the host of his new documentary feature, Garbage Nation, which deals with the unbelievable problem of trash in Asia. In any case, we'll go down to Semarang sometime soon, the four of us, to watch them filming and producing one of the several reality TV shows he develops. It was the first time I wished I had a TV here, since some of the shows sound very funny, and reality TV shows are actually programs you can understand with limited language skills.

    Turkey, stuffing (delicious from the wok), string bean casserole, mashed potatoes, salad, cranberries, all served elegantly from a table set up in the car port - we ate in the front hallway, since there was no table large enough for us all. Pak Eko's brother-in-law, a pastor, prayed in Indonesian, and then Pak Eko gave a wonderful prayer as well - that I might transform my students at the University, that our family will bring great things to Indonesia, that the Koreans will find a way out of their present conflict peacefully - and we ate, and talked, and ate some more, and talked. No wine (alas) and no pumpkin pie, but apart from that, it felt just like Thanksgiving, and we were so pleased for the invitation and the dinner and the new friends. It was one of those banner days.

    That was yesterday - it's still Thanksgiving in the US as I write this, and we'll skype home to my parents in a few minutes, and then I have to teach (I presented yesterday at a conference - how could they hold a conference on Thanksgiving Day?) while Laura and the kids will go to Semerang. Seamus and Graham will go a movie, and Laura and our friend Ibu Maria will put together the supplies for the refugees we will visit tomorrow, outside of Yogyakarta.

     They will purchase these supplies with the $2,300 that our friends, family, and fellowship contributed for the Merapi refugees, from a request we put out last week. Laura has been working to process all the money, get it in cash one way or another (credit cards, with limited exception, are largely useless here) and working through all the details. We'll report on the visit next week, in detail, and we'll keep track of every rupiah we spend, in scanned documents, so that you can track them money you donated. But I want to tell you, here, how enormously moved we were by the incredible outpouring of support. With several villages incinerated, over 300 people now dead as a result of the eruptions, and communities that have barely begun to consider the process of rebuilding (or not rebuilding), and as the event falls from the attention of the media here, I promise you that this will be money well spent, and we have never felt so close to home, so far away, since we arrived here. Thank you thank you thank. That's my biggest Thanksgiving message - on Thanksgiving weekend we will deliver the gifts you so amazingly provided.

(I was sorry that the pass-through with Mountainview didn't work out, because it had the makings of a great joke set-up: "Did you hear the one about the lesbians, the Unitarians, and the Jew who gave money to the Fundamentalist Christian School?" I'll keep working on that one.)

Love, Gratitude, and Stuffing in a Wok

By the time we finish our turkey, family and friends back home will just be waking up, making coffee, trying to unstick the pages of Joy of Cooking and muttering, ‘is it 15 minutes per pound at 350 or 10 at 400 wait no 300?‘ Wonderful holiday tradition! Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday. I get to cook with my favorite people, the meal is all my favorite foods, and there is nothing overtly religious that I have to feel bad about. Every Thanksgiving, I re-live American football on the shores of Lake Washington, oysters at Pete & Jen’s, Bill Christmas’ cranberries, turkey on the picnic table, and Graham‘s first lost tooth. Devon’s dinner rolls, Cathy’s green beans, and my mom’s mashed potatoes. Oh! My mom makes good mashed potatoes. So today, just another day in Salatiga, I joyfully hopped on the number 9 and bought almonds at the pasar to go into the stuffing for the meal we will share at the home of our neighbor Ibu La La. And I remember all of those things for which I am so very thankful this year.

Note: If you are reading this and are not from the US, my apologies for the absurdly sentimental outpouring that is about to follow. It is tradition.

I am grateful for my family. For my kids who are being so game throughout this whole crazy adventure. My husband who is not afraid of anything, even when he should be. My mom holding down the fort and my dad who worries even though he has enough to worry about. My nephew Scotty whose enthusiasm for our trip knows no bounds, the list goes on. We are a fortunate lot.

My girlfriends, oh, my girlfriends! I would be nowhere with out them. They send me jokes, tell me the weather, share neighborhood gossip, and basically remind me that the world is really not that big a place and that everything is just fine. Kirk is grateful for them too but for different reasons.

Inextricably linked to this, I am grateful for the internet. For Skype and for Facebook and Yahoo. This would be a very different experience without it.

I am grateful for the deeply imbedded sense of hospitality that we have experienced throughout Indonesia. The offers of rides, of food, of furniture! The infinite patience I experience every time some poor Indonesian is subjected to my Bahasa. The sense of inclusion that we experience everywhere we go. A woman paid my bus fare the other day, just to be hospitable! We chose Indonesia, in part because we read the Indonesians were friendly, because they embraced foreigners and welcomed them. Really, we had no idea.

I’m grateful for so much this year. Mostly, I’m grateful for the crazy set of circumstances that brought us here and that I live in a time when I can crouch over my little two-burner, stirring my wok-full of Indonesian bread crumbs, Egyptian almonds, and California dates, in French butter with my coconut shell spoon (ok, truth be told, there were better implements for stirring but I loved the symbolism of it), laptop resting on my knees and celebrate with those thousands of miles away.

Love and gratitude, my friends. Happy Thanksgiving!

Hari dalam bahasa Indonesia

Diminutive, in Bahasa Indonesia, is mengkatapengantarkan pengecil.

Special Request

Several people have asked how they might help support the relief effort for those affected by the recent eruption of Mt. Merapi here in Central Java. For a time, we were as confused as everyone else! The relief effort was hampered by wild media coverage, news of conflicting (and competing) NGO’s, and lack of government direction and oversight, even our local friends were confused. Meanwhile, over 200 people have died and thousands remain homeless. The eruptions have died down considerably. From where we sit, Mt. Merapi looks once again like the picture postcard volcano with charming but harmless little puffs of smoke rising from the crater but frankly no one, local or otherwise, can say if the current crisis is over. And, the people in the camps, who were living pretty hand-to-mouth to begin with, have nothing to return to -- no houses, no schools, no livestock, no crops, no mosques, no churches. Everything has been incinerated.

Graham’s Indonesian teacher, Ibu Maria Teguh, who has become a good friend, is organizing a delivery of supplies to one of the refugee camps in which she has a colleague. The Indonesian government has, from all reports, flooded the camps with rice and pop mie (instant noodles of marginal nutritional value) but little else. Our hope to provide some badly needed supplies to one of the camps outside of Yogyacarta. These supplies -- protein in the form of salted eggs, dried beef and tinned fish, diapers and powdered milk, vitamins and school supplies -- will be purchased in Salatiga and driven over to the camps on Sunday, November 26, by Ibu Maria, a couple of other teachers, and ourselves.

To be frank, American dollars go a long way in this part of the world. Ibu Maria gave me a list of the supplies they wanted included in each family packet: a weeks worth of eggs, milk, diapers and supplies came to about 65,000 Rupea. At 9,000 Rupea to the dollar, that’s a little over seven bucks. It’s not enough to live on, but it will make a HUGE difference!

Please consider helping us with this effort. I know that there are many important causes competing for your attention at home, but for the time being, this is our home, and we feel obliged to do what we can to help the neighbors and friends who have made us so welcome in it.

If you're still interested in helping with Merapi relief, please make your check payable to:

Laura Prindiville
Account: 10043487
In the memo line, please write "Merapi Relief".


Then mail it to:

First Security Bank
208 E. Main Street
Bozeman, MT 59715


As the timeline on this is pretty tight, please do email me at prindylou@yahoo.com and let me know how much you are sending. That way, Kirk and I can cover any gifts that don't clear before the weekend. I promise to keep all donations confidential.

Laura, Kirk, Seamus and Graham Patrick

The Teacher is the Ruling Class

November 18, 2010

            A student who helped usher us through the hullaballoo and confusion of arrival smiled politely at me, before the semester started, when I told her I was determined to have a discussion-based class, and told me I would have a difficult time doing it in Indonesia. “Students don’t want to talk in Indonesia. They are very reluctant to participate.” It is not as if my students are competing for the floor in my classes in the United States, so I didn’t let her prediction concern me too much. I told her it didn’t really matter, that I wasn’t really able to teach in another way, and that my students were out of luck if they hoped for me to just pop in and lecture. “I didn’t travel to Indonesia to hear myself talk,” which might not be true given that I have also started writing a blog.

            So I was slightly prepared in my first week of classes when my students really didn’t want to speak at all. It made quite a bit of sense to me actually. I’m not a small person, and I am very white, and very American, and I speak loudly, and I learned later very quickly, and I was sweating profusely, the way someone who lives in Montana sweats when he moves to the tropics and then is a little amped up on coffee and nervous energy and has ridden his bicycle in busy traffic to a stuffy room on a sunny day. I think I might have looked somewhat alarming, and perhaps they thought I would pass out, and hurt one of them in the process.  So their silence, in that first day in my critical reading class, was not terribly hard to understand.

            After my first week, teaching my two other classes that were likewise perspiry and quiet, I of course asked my students what was going on. I intentionally had them do a very simple free-write in my critical reading course,  something along the lines of “what was a word that you saw in the reading last week, and why did you see it?” My plan was then to ask for someone to tell me the one thing that they wrote down, in the knowledge that everyone in the room would have that one thing written down and they would certainly read it for me off their paper. When they did not, no matter how politely I phrased the question, I said, “Listen, you need to tell me why no one is speaking,” a question which, somewhat more predictably, got no response.

            I am a patient person in the classroom, however, and determined, and I waited, until Severine nervously raised her hand and said, “you do speak a little fast, sir.” (There appears to be nothing I can do to not be addressed as ‘sir’ several times a day.) This was a breakthrough moment, because of course while it might occur to most thoughtful people to speak slowly to a group of non-native speakers in a classroom where learning to read in English is a central focus, I had not considered the possibility.

            Now

            I

            speak

            more

              like

               this.

            (Really. I picture my words leaving my mouth in a sort of vertical descent, rather than horizontally, at least when I am concentrating on speaking slowly enough and with the right sort of not-patronizing-but-not-obfuscatory English language.)

            After that, the students started speaking, no torrent, certainly, but a small spring of discourse that cheered me no end. I learned all sorts of interesting things that first week, when variations of this discussion occurred in all of my classes. I learned, for example, that Indonesian students are conditioned to extreme deference toward the teacher, and that this included a rather deep anxiety, magnified by my being an American teacher who couldn’t speak any Indonesian at that point, of making mistakes in English pronunciation and grammar. In my writing class, I learned that this regularly translates into a paper that is full of marks of grammatical errors, and that one of the points of many of their English classes appears to be learning that they are not native speakers of the language and thus make errors in pronunciation every time they speak and in grammar every time they write. (I comforted them by showing them some research done on multi-national speakers of other languages who communicate in English for business and other transactions, situations in which, quite literally, error does not exist, because no one is marking it, everyone is focused on making sense, and the goal is understanding one another. There’s a lot of miscommunication, and a lot of round-about face-saving discussion to help discover the actual gist of the conversation, but no error, because error only exists in language, I told them, when someone is looking for it. I’m not much of an error-seeker, but their other teachers are, and my lack of attention to error worries them a little.) Essentially, they learn quite a bit about how poorly they speak and write the English language, at least as they told about their classes. They have a sympathetic ear in me, to be sure, because the thing I know better than I have known anything else in my life, and the lesson that is reaffirmed to me anytime I am within earshot of Indonesian language, is that I speak and listen to Indonesian very poorly.

            I was instructed by students in my public speaking class to do something that I have never liked to do as a teacher, which is to ask a question and then call randomly on students to answer it. I’ve always found this to be a failing strategy in my classrooms in the United States. It kind of irritates my students there, like I am somehow over-stepping my bounds. But in my classrooms here it actually relieves the mounting pressure. All teachers are familiar with the ways silence in the classroom creates tension, and one of the secrets, of course, of getting students to speak is to let them become more nervous by the silence than it makes you (a very hard thing to do, as any new teacher will tell you). But in Indonesia, it’s comically extended, and my students here are actually capable of out-waiting me, of not responding to the most basic questions so resolutely that I give up. (I now preface my solicitations from students with the phrase “I know I am not supposed to ask questions like this, but does anyone have any comment about….?”) Almost always, though, when I call on them randomly (“Agam, what do you think?”),  my students have an answer ready, usually a pretty good one, and they seem perfectly happy to tell it, and even sort of glad sometimes when I asked.

            I was doing this in my writing course during the second week of the semester, making my students read things they had written during their freewrite (another violation of my teaching code, but if I didn’t do this I tell you nothing would happen, and then I would have to listen to myself talk, which I am perhaps protesting too much about not enjoying). “Does this bother you, to just ask you like this?” I asked one of them, as I was going around. “Oh no,” she replied.
“We are used to it. In Indonesia, the teacher is the ruling class.”

            In a place like Indonesia, a carnival of post-colonialism, that comment continues to resonate with me. There are ruling classes everywhere, of course (tax cuts for the top 2% anyone?), but for most of Indonesia’s history, the entire point of everything that happened was (at least from the Dutch and then Japanese perspective) justifying and increasing the visibility of the ruling class. Two rather long-lived and slightly unhinged president/dictators powerfully and often quite brutally dominated their “independence” up until the end of the 20^th century. Indonesia is no slouch at colonial power itself, having fought a long and failed war in East Timor and struggling still in places like Papua and northern Sumatra with pesky freedom fighters/unpatriotic insurgents. To mention, in such a delightfully offhand way, that “the teacher is the ruling class,” well, there is something almost resistant about its comfortable transparency. The teacher is not the ruling class here in the way that if you assign something, the students will go and do it – not even close, actually, sometimes to my great frustration. Here, the teacher is the ruling class in the sense that no one wants to tell the teacher that what he is saying doesn’t make sense, or that he might be talking too fast, or that they don’t like the assignment, or that they don’t know why you’re asking them to do this assignment in the first place, or that they didn’t think the test was fair. The teacher is the ruling class in the sense that the teacher’s presence engenders not cooperation, but complicity and silence. I’m still learning how to cope with this, and I am certainly going to write more about it, but I am finding it one of the most fascinating aspects of learning to teach in this new place.

Our neighborhood

November 13, 2010

            We live down a smaller road off the main street that runs by our kids’ school. They have a very short walk every day, just up the block and to the left, perhaps a 200 yards total from the gated entrance to the school, with 2-3 guards who check your bag every time and run one of those mirrors-on-a-stick under cars heading in. Our house is the tallest and biggest one in the neighborhood, three stories, the top largely unused except for a tiny deck where I sit, sometimes, and read, looking out over the houses and the palm and banana trees that grow everywhere here. We have a big gate that is usually open but that Pak Devri, our guard, locks every night. He stays in the small guardhouse alongside the driveway, or in a small room behind the back garden. 

There is another house on the property, smaller but still grand, where an Indonesian family whose children attend the school lives, very generous and friendly, but with a beagle named Gibson (I call him Fritsom, because that’s what our first guard, Pak Roni, used to call him) who barks all the time on their back porch when they aren’t home. Sometimes Fritsom is out there all weekend while they go to Semarang, fed and watered by one of their team of workers but otherwise neglected and very annoying. 

Across the street from us is a lot with palm trees and banana trees, occasionally harvested. On a clear day, from three of the four balconies, we have a wonderful view of Mount Telomoyo and Mount Merbabu, neither of which explodes.  All around us the green of the foliage mixes with the red roof tiles of the houses (the first thing I thought when saw these roofs was: “No hail here.”)

Just up the street on the main road are two shops that we use for our basic needs, Toko Lancar, where we buy snacks and drinks and gum and sometimes some eggs, and Toko Yani, where we get our water and propane. Ibu Yani runs that store, and it’s got more of a neighborhood feel – Toko Lancar is more like 7-11. We head up to Toko Yani’s pretty regularly to order more bottles of water, and less often for propane for our stove. Ibu Yani always patiently talks me through whatever requests I mangle when I head there – today I wanted to buy some milk, but I told her I wanted to buy some difficult (susu or susa). We buy eggs by the kilo from her (which is why the first time, when she asked how many I wanted and I said about 10, she was rather surprised). Around the corner, about a five minute walk from our house, is a glorious snack shop packed full with all sorts of fried things – cassava chips, peas, string potatoes, cow lung – and crunchy sweet things. There are a couple of stands for eating on the block, one with a delicious bowl of chicken noodle soup that costs about fifty cents but which I have stopped visiting ever since the demon who lived in my intestinal tract inhabited me. (Said demon now seemingly well cast-out.) There’s also a coffee shop around the corner, run by bules and open only on Fridays, solely visited by other bules, most from the school, who order very expensive coffees that take an extraordinarily long time to come. On Fridays after school it’s quite the scene, with bunches of students and families waiting for their fancy coffee drinks. I don’t go there very often, in part because it’s very very slow and in part because these aren’t my people.

The other way from our house takes us into the neighborhood of Dukuh, where we live. Down the street is mosque small in stature but impressive in loudspeaker-amplified call to prayer, though it has help from the other mosque just around the corner and the five or six other ones almost as close, all with blocks of loudspeakers that helpfully remind us when it’s time to pray. Amazingly, though I thought it would never happen, I now sleep through the 4:45 AM call to prayer, and I have come to enjoy the sonic blasts from them that come several times a day. There are also small houses, and smaller little streets cutting off, and some tiny stores run out of the front of houses, and it’s a very pleasant outing to wander through small quiet brick and asphalt streets, mostly shaded by large trees. Most houses have at least one bird cage hanging on the front porch – in some places, there are entire aviaries, but that’s in other slightly more prosperous neighborhoods. There’s a small Muslim cemetery near us too, and a fancier one near the school (which is one of the reasons, the Indonesian language teacher from here who has become our friend told us, that the school is haunted – this country has a lot of ghosts).

Across the street from us are Colin and Retno, who own an export company that ships mostly furniture to England. Colin is British, and Retno is his Indonesian wife. They have an eight-year-old daughter, and they have become good friends already. We have dinner with them about once a week, and Colin pours me a gin and tonic, which one can get here only in the nicer hotels, and only for about five dollars a piece. Colin has a stash of liquor from his regular visits to duty-free shops. Colin and Retno have helped us with so much since we moved here, always willing to come to our aid when we can’t figure something out, which is several times a week, and we’re super grateful to have them close at hand.

Everywhere in the neighborhood – and all over the city – are heavy canvas campaign posters. “Friend to the small people” – “Closer to the community” – “He offers proof, not just promises” (my personal favorite).  These are colorful, usually centered with a picture of the candidate looking regal and rational. The election – for Salatiga mayor - is in January, though at this point I have no idea what any of the issues are about, though I too am a friend to the small people, as anyone who knows me knows.  There are also all sorts of planted fields around our house – everything, in fact, that is not a house is a planted field, even when it looks like a forest. It’s a palm forest, a jackfruit forest, a snakefruit forests, a banana tree forest, and there are tight well-trodden paths weaving through all of these, paths that seem to tread on no one’s private property – or maybe it’s more the point that when I tread on those paths and come across the people who live around and cultivate the land, they don’t try to shoot me or kick me off their land.

I am less self-conscious about the house we live in, its spectacular ostentatiousness and size, than I was when we first arrived. I’m less self-conscious about everything, really. It’s odd, from the perspective of only a couple months in, to consider the stifling feeling of paralysis I experienced when we first arrived, the inability to negotiate even the teeniest situation coupled with a gnawing trepidation to even try.  One of the pleasures of this experience, in fact, is to become ensconced in a neighborhood, no matter how much we aren’t of it – to be familiar, and greeted, and known, and spoken to. Everyone assumes we’re phenomenally wealthy – correctly, in this context – simply because we are white and living in Indonesia, and they would assume it whether we lived in Rumah Besar or not. To be abroad, in the most unfamiliar place I have ever lived, and feel like daily life is, in the end, sort of mundane – in some ways, that’s one of the coolest parts about living in, instead of traveling through, a place.

Obama, heroes, and goats

November 9, 2010

"Of course, democracy is messy. Not everyone likes the results of every election. You go through ups and downs."   President Obama, in remarks at the University of Indonesia today

          Obama left Jakarta this afternoon after a highly anticipated whirlwind visit to his former home of four years. Much to the chagrin of Indonesians, he had cancelled two previous visits, the first to focus on getting the health care bill passed, and the second because there was suddenly an extraordinarily large uncontrolled oil leak filling up the Gulf of Mexico. These seem, from an American perspective, perhaps legitimate reasons for cancelling, but Indonesians were nonetheless offended (health care? As my grandmother used to say, “Oh, plap.”)  There was some discussion that Indonesia’s President Susilo Bambang Yuhoyono, known here as SBY (fondly, I should add, unlike those who use BHO in America) didn’t attend the ASEAN summit in New York last month because he was offended by the dual slight. So by the time Obama showed up here, enthusiasm was slightly decreased, and they were disappointed the visit was so brief. (And one, of course, a very conservative Muslim, disappointed that in shaking hands with Michelle Obama he made physical contact with a woman not related to him.)

            The Jakarta Post, a very strange English language newspaper here, has been packed with Obama stories for the last two weeks. Will this improve relations? (Maybe.) Will he visit his old school? (No.) Does he like India better than Indonesia? (Consensus: yes, because India can do more to contain China.) Will he remember how to speak Indonesian? (Sedikit, a little, at least the food he ate at the banquet last night – but he was wearing a headset, presumably for translation. One can forgive this, given that he was 10 when he left and probably not fluent in diplomatic vocabulary.) Why isn’t he bringing his daughters? (I don’t know.) Will he be chastened after his electoral setback? (Who knows?) Will he come back soon? (Probably not.) Will he say nice things about Muslims? (Yes.) Will the American right wing go into deep apoplexis because he visited the largest mosque in Indonesia. (I’ll let you field that one.)   Here less than 24 hours, Obama did seem, in his remarks today at the University of Indonesia, to be pensive and nostalgic about his time here.

            He spent some time in the speech recounting Indonesia’s truly extraordinary history over the last several decades since he left, a period that has seen Indonesia come out of a brutal and tight-fisted dictatorship into a clumsy democracy, that has seen it recovering from a terrible economic crisis in the 90s. He nicely left out the part about how amazingly corrupt the government remains – stories of the bribes, and murders, and favor-currying of politicians are 2-3 pages of the Jakarta Post every day.

            Today is “Heroes Day” in Indonesia, not celebrated with time off from school or anything like that, but acknowledged anyway. (Maybe it’s not a national holiday because there is another one, next week, feast of the sacrifice, celebrating the wonderful loyalty in Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice his son as commanded by god. We can expect, apparently, a lot of dead goats.) It commemorates a battle in the East Java city of Surabaya, in 1945, against the British (who found themselves, after World War II was over, for 13 unfortunate months trying to “help” Indonesia transition out of 3 ½ years of misery under the Japanese and back into 350 years of misery under the Dutch.) This was the first fight against foreign occupiers after the August 17, 1945 Declaration of Indonesian Independence. Obama praised Indonesia’s history, comparing the staggering ethnic and religious diversity here to that in the United States, commenting on the similarity of e pluribus unum to Indonesia’s national slogan, bhinneka tunggal ika, unity through diversity. It’s the thing Indonesians seem most proud of, and most troubled by too – in that we share another commonality.

            I wasn’t invited to any of the events, though I waited expectantly for the gilded invitation. I did get invited to a special Thanksgiving Day dinner at the American Consulate in Surabaya for all the Senior Scholars, but then found out that only I, and none of my family, was invited, in the true spirit of Thanksgiving. I was ready to go just for a glass of wine, which is extremely hard to come by here, and then absurdly expensive and not very good when you do come by it. Ah well.  I’ll just stay home and sacrifice a goat next week instead, in lieu of putting one of my kids on chopping block. Happy Heroes’ Day.

            Obama’s gone now, flying onto wherever. There was no terrorist attack against the “Great Infidel,” as called for during his visit by the Imam in prison for the Bali bombings, and everyone seemed to have dug the speech, at least as reported so far. Perhaps under Obama Indonesia will become more than a blip on America’s radar, all it was for me until a few months ago.