On knowing nothing

In less than three weeks our renters move into our house, their home from August until the end of next June.  Over the last two months, we’ve painted, weeded, mulched, packed, repaired, scrubbed, washed. We’ve found a home for our dog. We’ve enrolled our children in an international school. We’ve gotten shots and taken pills. We’ve haggled over insurance and negotiated about what city we’ll live in. We’ve shopped for better shoes and waterproof clothes for a warmer climate. We’ve convinced our two children that this will be a good experience for them, and I still maintain that position publicly, though when I am excited about leaving, it is always modified by the panic that has become my primary emotional condition.

I would, I daresay, be anxious enough if everything were clear and ready. But beyond the date our renters move in, things are only clear on a global level. We will live in Salatiga, in Central Java, population 150,000 (the third city we have been assigned to), and I will teach at the Satya Wacana Christian University, a school of about 6,000 students. As the level of detail increases though, I still have no focus: I don’t know when I will get my work permit, which determines when we can get our visas, which determines when we can buy our plane tickets. This is all the more urgent because the grant will pay only for my flight and Laura’s, and I am already dreading the no-choice-but-to-pay-it-goddammit price tag for S and G’s tickets. We don’t know where we will be living in Salatiga. I don’t know what I am teaching when I get there.  I can count to ten, haltingly, in Indonesian, and say good morning, skills that will come in handy if my flight to Jakarta arrives before noon and I am greeted by someone asking me to please rate the quality of my travel experience on a scale of satu to sepuluh.

            I have always believed myself one who embraces uncertainty, and then I tried to write about how gracefully I do so and I could discover few examples.  In less than the time that it takes to draft a paragraph, a certain notion about myself has collapsed, is in fact collapsing during the very act of writing this sentence. I am not a person who handles uncertainty well, and even funnier, it appears that my wife and two children are. “Look at the big picture,” Laura tells me. I have no idea what that means - zoom away to a big enough picture and I am dead – but she finds comfort in the big picture, and I confess I do find comfort in that comfort at least.

            I have considered myself better prepared than S and G for the experience of going abroad because I am more accustomed to the total disorientation of culture shock, but as the trip comes closer, I believe the opposite is true, and will likely remain true after we arrive.  They seem slightly worried about some of the goodbyes they will say, but have no particular expectations about the journey or the arrival; I wake up early in the morning, feeling anxious even before I remember why. And then my mind clicks in and I am racing through a host of details that I have no control over: what is the delay in Jakarta for the work permit? How can I prepare for classes when I don’t know what they are? How much will plane tickets cost when we are able to buy them? How come I always get empat and empalan confused when I am counting to ten?

            So I get up and immediately check my email, looking for a message from Tina, my connection in Jakarta. Tina is short for Augustina, though both names are made up for the purposes of this blog. Tina is organizing my year abroad and has been the link for information, bureaucracy, and any negotiating I had to do. I had to negotiate, for example, when my initial contract, which I had been told would be written for the cultural and artistic capital of the island of Java, Yogyakarta, specified instead Makassar, an industrial port city on southern tip of Sulawesi, population 2 million people, its only tourist attraction an old Dutch fort and a village 2 hours to the north, more religiously conservative, though with a thriving red light district. (When I initially complained about it, Tina forwarded me an email from the head of the office in Jakarta, who assured me that it was a wonderful city, as evidenced, he wrote, by the fact that the former Vice-President of Indonesia is a successful businessman there.) Laura balked, and I am nearly sure that, if we hadn’t been moved to a more acceptable city, she would have ended the whole adventure. Tina reminds me about paperwork I need to get in and tries to help me think through the timeline, though I understand nothing about the timeline, except that there are two critical criteria – work permit and visa – that have to be met before the ticket, and getting these pieces of paperwork is, at least until I get the work permit, out of my hands. She tries to help me understand how I should prepare for my teaching, though I have no idea how to prepare for classes when I don’t know what I will be teaching, whom I will be teaching (except college age students), and what sorts of expectations they have for teachers.  
          Tina is wonderful, which I say because she is my only lifeline to this process and if I don’t believe she is wonderful I will go even crazier. I know she is working to make this as easy as possible and as good an experience for me as I can have. But the 13 hour time difference between Bozeman and Jakarta means that when we’re lucky we can trade only one email per day. She also doesn’t respond that quickly to my emails and she never quite answers all the questions I have, or any of them completely. She seems wholly undaunted about the relocation of my family to a completely foreign environment with no knowledge of the language, culture, dress code, eating habits, etc. My emails to her vacillate between the fawning – “I am so appreciative and grateful for all the work you are doing” – and terse and anxious - this morning’s email, quoted verbatim, was:

Dear Tina,

Please respond to my emails!

Yours,

Kirk

which emails, I should add, have requested a phone conversation to address the cascading anxieties my neurotic heart of a brain sends pulsing through my body like little red blood cells of stress.
              Tonight, perhaps, the email and phone conversation that will allay all this uncertainty will appear. Until then, I will try to hyperventilate in small doses, so that I don't pass out, at least in public.