Ibu Umi and the badang merah

Another transport day today, from Jember flying to Surabaya, and from Surabaya to Semarang – and then a taxi up the mountain to Salatiga, and back to Colin and Retno’s house. Which means I had to say goodbye this morning to Egypt and Meka, Umi’s two sons, and to Pak Alvian, Umi’s husband. I said goodbye to Umi too, though I will see her again in Salatiga next week. But I am sad and full of joy at the same time.

I met Umi the first time in March of 2011, when I was invited to attend the Asian English Language Teachers Creative Writing Conference. I’d heard about it the first time when one of the founders – and now one of my friends, an English professor from Malaysia – spoke about it at a conference in Salatiga.  He said that it was based on the idea that teachers of writing in English should be writers too, and that teachers are able to better create their own materials for their students than any textbook could create – especially the readings. The heart of the Conference is a three day workshop, which I did in Jember in 2011, in Birgunj, Nepal, in 2013, and now, next week, in Salatiga, where teachers come together, share and critique writing, and as a final product publish a book of the participants’ writing that they did in the workshop. Anyone who knows about my work with teachers in the Yellowstone Writing Project will understand why I was immediately struck by this, and why I quickly introduced myself to Jaya, the English professor from Malaysia – he invited me to the conference in Jember that year, which might have been the best thing that happened to me, professionally, during a very rich year for me professionally in Indonesia (and personally, even more so, of course).

Umi Safari was one of the participants in the workshop. We sat next to each other around the table on that first day, and as often happens when I open my mouth here, she was surprised and delighted when I spoke some version of Bahasa Indonesia. She is so friendly and warm, as some of the people who (might) read this blog already know from meeting her in Montana, that it is impossible not to like her immediately. She resonates a kind of joy in the world, and she embraces people full-heartedly. We spoke so much about teaching that week, during and especially outside of the workshop, over dinners, in the bus on the way to the beach (the same beach I spent an overnight at last week), between sessions. I saw her as a kindred spirit then too, especially regarding her attitude toward teaching. She understood the official government curriculum as a distraction from the real work she needed to do as a teacher, she spoke about her students with love and respect and she based her ideas about teaching in that love and respect as a starting point.

Especially, I learned so much from her. Teachers in Indonesia, at all levels and in almost all places I have been, work in even more challenging conditions than teachers I know in the United States. In particular, they just have more and bigger classes, and the government curriculum is measured by national tests that all students, across the 3,000 mile archipelago with over 700 local languages spoken on over 1,000 inhabited islands, take at the same time.  Teachers feel enormous pressure to teach to the test, and in fact the government curriculum is incredibly rigid. Our first conversations were about that: how does she teach creatively and effectively in that situation? How does she negotiate between the approaches she knows work with her students and the blanket and undiscriminating approach of the government curriculum? She was wonderful, and she was applying for a Fulbright, and she asked me if I would read her application and give her feedback.

I did read it, and I don’t remember what suggestions I offered back, though I think it had something to do with making it more personal, with being more specific about how she thought it would help her teach better when she returned to Indonesia. And she got the Fulbright, a six-month stay the following year at Kent State, and while she was there, she came and stayed with us in Bozeman. Eighteen months later, she was chosen as one of the two to return to America to teach new participants about their experiences, and she came back to the United States. My family loved her immediately, like I did. Seamus came with me when I picked her up the first time, and she rushed into the terminal and gave him a big hug and stood with her arm around him and said, “Look at me Kirk, can you believe I am in Bozeman? I am in your home!” beaming as she squeezed him tightly.

Her visits turned into a grant she submitted, that we wrote together beginning during her second visit. I knew I was going to try to come to Salatiga for this workshop, and I expected it to be during my sabbatical semester, so we decided to extend my trip and try to get funding to support a series of workshops in East Java and Jember. We got the grant (in spite of, I should note, an epic screw-up of mine that nearly derailed the whole process and which I will say no more about here), and here I am today, in the waiting room of the new Jember airport, done with this part of the work.

Umi has been simply incredible. We have had such an extraordinarily good time together. We spent so much time laughing, and we made an especially strange couple, I know, as we walked around together in the time outside the workshop, especially in Sumenep on Madura, a place with very few bules (the closest translation for that is gringos) – I saw one other in over the four days we spent there. We would wander around the city at Umi’s very leisurely pace, her holding my arm or my hand, visiting and laughing, and I know people didn’t know what to make of us. Had Umi been younger, perhaps, people might have assumed that she was my “traveling companion,” which happens sometimes in Bali, but more rarely in Java, and I think never ever in Madura. Sumenep is a fairly devout Muslim city, though, and it was funny to see the reactions – more bemused and curious than anything else, I should emphasize – of people as we strolled around.

She was a fabulous collaborator in the workshops, too. Participants attended to what I am saying, it seems to me (if I remember of course to speak slowly and clearly), but I am an English professor from the United States, and know nothing about teaching in Indonesia. I know that a reaction to some of my ideas about teaching writing is a fully justified, “That’s nice, but he doesn’t know anything about what it’s like to teach here,” but Umi could always handle that, always entered the conversation to say, well, this is how I translate these ideas into my own classroom, this is how I think about them in the series of over-crowded rooms – over-crowded with students and curricular expectations. She made what we spoke about with teachers plausible, imaginable, in ways I would have had a harder time doing on my own. Of course in the process she taught me a lot.

In the ten days, we developed all sorts of inside jokes. We go hunting native speakers, I tell her I don’t want to pass away, she tells me I must have spilled water on my shirt. She is a woman who loves to laugh, and her open heart and generous wisdom sometimes is easy to pass off as something simple, but it isn’t. At her school, I think she scares the men who run the show there (I know this never happens in the United States, so some of the women reading this blog might be interested to learn of this unusual phenomenon). She is smart. She has had a Fulbright, and travelled to the United States twice on the dime of the U.S. government. Her students love love love her – the rooms and faces light up when she walks by – and she loves them. (At least about her, and I imagine her students, I don’t mean that euphemistically: she loves them.) She teaches with unorthodox methods, and mostly ignores the mandates of the government curriculum, and her students do well on the annual tests anyway, well enough that her principal doesn’t bother her about her teaching style anymore.

But after I had landed in Jakarta, her principal cancelled the workshop she’d spent three months planning, and that I’d travelled around the world to do. He narrowed in into a one day workshop with three different meetings. There was a three hour workshop with the English teachers from the school. “He’s the one who looks at porno in the office,” she told me about one of them later. “And he’s the other one.” One of the teachers said there are two kinds of students, the serious ones and the lazy, stupid ones. I told him I would never use those words to describe students because it would mean I couldn’t teach them anything. None of her colleagues showed up for the lunch she scheduled. She began crying in the teacher room, wondering why no one respected her. But it wasn’t true: she had scheduled a one hour meeting with the seniors from the school, a huge group who asked me questions about learning English, about motivation. I knew they had authoritarian teachers, in Banyuwangi I’d heard older teachers say about young women students – 21 or 22 -  that now was the time good Muslim girls needed to think about getting married and having children (to rolling eyes, I am happy to report). I told them when I closed that I hoped they remembered the simple but important truth that when real change in societies around the world occurred, it did so because young people stood up and said no. In Indonesia in 1998, young people stood up and said no more. In the United States too. In Hong Kong. And I made Umi translate for me. The students who asked the best questions, in the most interesting and complex English, were the girls from her class the previous year.

Her husband Alvian is an English teacher too, and an Imam at the mosque around the corner from their house. He and I talked at length about Islam, about fundamentalism. He has been preaching about Islam as a religion of tolerance and love, pushing against currents like ISIS, currents that exist in Indonesia too. Her children, especially the two I got to know, Meka and Egypt (he goes by Gipsy – the “g” in Indonesian is hard), are wonderful. Meka, ten, wouldn’t let me speak English, kept teaching me new Indonesian words and phrases. My four nights in their house in a Javanese neighborhood were one of the best Indonesian experiences I have had, and my capacity to speak Indonesian sky-rocketed. She has organized a school for students who drop out of high-school (where I spoke to students too) and an organization that does out-reach to young people to encourage them to read. “Not just book reading,” she explained in our radio interview yesterday. “We want them to learn to read situations, read the world around them.” She has never, by the way, read Paulo Freire. This is her, thinking about teaching, because she learned how do it by listening to her students, who she listens to because she loves them.

I left my iPhone in the place where we stayed in Banyuwangi – and only realized it after the four hour drive back to Jember. One of the volunteers in her organization drove on his motorbike, on the same day, to retrieve it. I paid for his gas and food, but Umi warned me not to offer him extra money. “If you give him money for it,” she said, “he’ll think you believe he did it for the money. He will be offended.” So I gave him a bunch of gifts instead and bought him lunch. She said that in Indonesia they call it the badang merah, the red thread, which the whole point of is never to cut. If I give him money, I am cutting the red thread. If I don’t, it continues to unravel, connecting more and more people through acts of generosity and kindness. Umi has red threads coming out of her from every direction. She unspooling miles and miles of the stuff. I can’t express enough my admiration and love for her.