It’s a twofold statement when I say I can’t believe it’s been nearly 11 weeks in Indonesia! On one hand this 11 weeks has gone by really fast! It barely feels like it’s been that long. Yet on the other hand, I thought I was at the 2.5 month mark about 3 weeks ago so it’s been a longer than usual couple of weeks in that context! And I can imagine the next couple of months are going to fly by firstly because of a visit from the Careforce team in October!! Woohoo!! Secondly because I will have to spend a week in Singapore in order to renew my visa and that is in mid-November. Then it’s only 3 weeks until I come back home for a holiday for Christmas and New Years!!!
Living here is really easy. You wake up, go to devotions, work and come home. A typical day for me consists of waking up at 5:40am (don’t worry – I don’t actually get up until 6:00am!! There are usually 2, sometimes 3 snooze times in there!) I then brace myself for a morning wash in cold water – eww… Still can’t enjoy that! Then it’s off to breakfast at the communal eating area. It’s mostly something different every day, but the same foods come around again. Sometimes it’s rice porridge (a very bland food as you can imagine!), this lentil type bean soup (the flavours in this make me sick, it’s like a pea soup with sugar and some cinnamon in it, I tried, but when I realised my upset stomach was due to that I stopped eating it!) Sometimes we have fried rice (but not with meat and veggies in it like we’re used to), a couple of times we’ve had boiled potatoes, a few times we’ve had deep fried cassava which would be really nice like chips but they cut the pieces up really big, a couple of times we’ve had donuts and my favourite breakfast is deep fried bread, which sounds a lot more gross than it really is! However what I end up eating most is cold rice and if I’m lucky, a hardboiled egg… When the breakfast isn’t ready on time – this is what I eat. Somewhat plain and boring but it has to do if I am to eat breakfast!!
At 7.00am is devotion at the main meeting area called Asrama (or dormitory in English) where we sing some songs, listen to testimonies and someone speaks a mini message. I usually leave at 7.30am because I want to get to school to prepare for an 8:00am start. Then I teach until 2:40pm and then the kids go home. Before I came I wondered if there would be much down time considering many of the kids live here on site, but they are usually playing somewhere in the grounds and just run up and say hi from time to time – they’re really quite content running rampant on their own, and most of them understand if you say you don’t have time to play right now…
My gorgeous kids lining up at the start of the day!
Some of the kids singing in the morning before sport. On Fridays they wear their sports uniform to school.
(L-R) Wendi, Cristi, Ester in their school dresses for Mondays and Tuesdays
Some of the boys playing card games when they've finished their work. This is their Monday and Tuesday Uniform.
The evenings vary for me. On Mondays we don’t have morning devotion but we have an evening one instead. Fridays are movie nights, which I thought would be a bit boring and lots of old or Indonesian movies, but then I realised that Bali is the movie capital and that we have access here to some of the latest movies out. I really hang out for movie Fridays now, ha! The rest of the weekdays I sometimes play soccer in the afternoons from5.30-6.30 and then it’s dinner time. Other than that it’s playing cards, or ping pong, or talking with people or, lately, doing some school work to try to get ahead a bit.
On the weekends I usually play around on the internet for a bit because the internet is a lot faster then. It’s also washing day on Sunday, and on Saturdays the men’s soccer team have games in the afternoon and people pile into the truck to go and support them. All in all the life here is pretty cruisy. The work is emotionally draining at times, but that’s just the life of anyone who works with children, but it’s not physically hard. I love the heat! It gets a bit much in the classroom at the end of the school day, but then I can go back home and shower off and feel a whole heap better!
Last week another team of people came and went, among them was Eleanor, a teacher in training who was able to help out around the school a bit, and most importantly, able to understand my ‘teacher speak’ and identify with the barriers I have been facing!! It was great to have her here, and we were lucky enough to go and visit a local school for the morning. The only bad thing was that we had to wake up (and this means get up) at 5.15am to catch the bus at 6am!! At first I felt fine, but half way through the morning I started to realize how much sleep I’d lost (like, an entire 45 mins!) and felt terrible, ha ha! The school buildings were interesting – bare concrete floors and not very visually appealing. Wooden desks and chairs and in the 1st grade there were 30 pupils!! And the teacher made sure she told me 3 times that she has a goal to get all her children reading and writing in 3 months! Geez! I have one of her ex pupils in my class now – he’s 6 years old and is definitely fluent. He also has a good go at reading English at times too! The kids were funny – everywhere we went there were kids following and staring! If we were in a classroom, there were kids in the doorways of the classroom! When we went out at playtime we almost got mobbed just with kids wanting to see us!! I think I can identify with Justin Bieber on one level…
Visiting a school in Tobelo - Eleanor and I are in the Principal's office (check out the couch!! The main reason for this photo, ha ha!)
Some of the kids in the Tobelo school in their sports uniform. (Mmmm, pink...)
One of the first grade classes.
We got swamped in the yard!! I think nearly all 350 kids at the school were trying to get in this shot, ha!
Gotta get a shot with the kids! (How young do I look!?!? I'm not sure how that happens... Maybe I've discovered the fountain of youth...)
After that we went in to Tobelo and I showed Eleanor the market which is a rabbit warren of stalls selling such a variety of things you wonder where they obtained them!! There’s a part with a fish market, the veggie market, stalls with clothes, shoes anything you may happen to want! Following that we both got home and crashed into bed and had an afternoon nap! I’m not entirely sure why we were so tired, but it really took it out of us!
So there is a synopsis of my day to day life here! Right now I’m about to take some of the school girls to the hospital to visit one of the patients – a 13 year old girl who is paralysed from waist down with limited movement in her hands. The poor thing gets so bored all day with nothing to do – we don’t have TV’s in the rooms here… And the rain has just started so I’d better get my washing in!!
In part of the fish market.
Mmmm... Seaweed pringles. My favourite. (Actually, no, sorry, that's a lie)
These butterflies are everywhere! Josh befriended this one.
I'm a sucker for anything baby!! This little one had just hatched and so wasn't so scared as a human hand was its first experience, :)
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