Merry Christmas!

Well, Happy Holidays to all. I'm on my Christmas vacation right now, hanging out in Chiang Mai, Thailand, with my friend Mer (Grinnellian working for an NGO outside the city here). We're going to spend the holiday at the spa, getting massages and stuff, and also eating a LOT of food. There are a lot of tourists here, but otherwise Christmas isn't a big holiday here.

In Manado, however, Christmas is a very big deal, and I'm sure that it would be exciting to be there (I'm glad to have the exciting vacation, though). Manadonese people get a lot of their traditions from the Dutch, so Santa came on December 6th, not the 25th. In Dutch tradition, Santa (or Sinterklaas) lives in Spain, and travels to the Netherlands every year by boat. He sends Black Pete down the chimney (so he doesn't get dirty himself, I guess), and the good children get presents. The bad children get put in a sack and taken back to Spain, which seems pretty awesome, actually.

Now, Black Pete is black because of the soot from the chimney, but originally the character may have been a slave, or maybe he was just a Moor (from North Africa). I've heard varying reports from Dutch tourists. In any case, Sinterklaas sometimes travels around the streets, and he takes a man in blackface with him.


In Manado, they drive around in the back of a truck, blasting Christmas music. And Santa has four or five men in blackface, and a clown, too, for some reason. This has happened a number of times; you hear really loud Christmas and you start looking around for the traffic slow-up that is Santa and his posse (he's followed by decorated angkots, so traffic is definitely effected).

Anyway, I hope everyone is having a good holiday. It's a little hard to believe that it's Christmas, because it's so warm and unchanging here that time doesn't seem to work the same way. But I'm thinking of everyone back home and wishing you well!

Teaching in an SMA

I'd like to talk a bit about what school is like here. Specifically, my school.

There are about 1,000 students at the school. There are three grades, 10-12. After grade 10, the students are put into a more specialized program, so grades 11 and 12 are split into science, social studies, and language. School starts at 7am and ends at 2:15 (earlier on Friday). There are four periods, 45 minutes each, then 10-10:30 is a break (for lunch), then there are five more periods. Myself, I think 10am is a bit early for lunch, so I usually eat a late lunch when I get home.

Discipline is pretty different than in the States. First of all, the gates are closed at 7am, and any late students can't come in. "If they're late, it's better if they don't come at all," one teacher told me. Or, the late students are brought into the teachers' room and scolded for a while, then switched. As in, hit with a switch. Not a lot, but once or twice to get the point across.

If there's announcements at the beginning of the day, all the students have to gather in front of the school, and afterward the schedule is pushed back and the periods shortened. Some days there have been teacher meetings, during which the students just hung out in their classrooms, I guess. Between classes, a bell is rung, but it's not automatic, so whenever a teacher realizes it's time to switch, they ring the bell. When there's no electricity, which is not uncommon, nothing happens. Not to mention, only some of the rooms have clocks, and these all say wildly different times. So people don't seem to care too much about the schedule. The teachers are often late, or go past their time and teach into lunchtime. It's very different from the States, and it's something that can be annoying at times.

Some teachers don't show up to class at all. I'm supposed to have a teacher with me in the class at all times, but one of the teachers I work with never shows up. Last Friday, a class asked me to stay and talk with them after our class. "Don't you have another class?" I asked. "No, the teacher doesn't come," they told me.

I'm not sure about homework at the school. I believe the students are taking ten different subjects, and homework for all of them would probably be a lot. But, based on how they behave in my class, there's not a lot of accountability when it comes to classwork. Whenever I assign homework, it's just to finish something outside of class, and often some of the students already have finished it. But it's very difficult the next class to get anyone to have their homework.

One of the other trying points is that the students were raised in a very different culture. In our orientation, we learned that Americans and Indonesians are on opposite ends of the individuality spectrum. Americans are very, very individualistic, and for that reason value personal freedom and competition, whereas Indonesians are much more communal, and so hate to separate themselves from the group. The students are afraid to single themselves out in any way, and they try to help each other, so they do things like tell each other the answers.

As for English class, well, mostly the teachers teach in Indonesian. So they're learning about English more than practicing it and getting comfortable with it. That's why we're here, to get them used to speaking English. So I try to make my lessons interesting, and to encourage creativity, and get them all talking in English. It can be very difficult sometimes to get the students to participate, and I think that's the hardest part of the teaching. If the students make an effort, my activities will help them. But there's not a lot I can do for the students that just sit there. In any case, I'll keep trying lots of different things, and I hope that my students are gaining something from my being here.

I've talked a lot about the difficulties of teaching, but there are good things, too. The students can be very excited, especially about playing games, because they can't do that in other classes. My students also LOVE to sing. All Indonesians love to sing, but especially the Manadonese. My first week, I had to sing in every class, and the classes would sing to me, too (usually "I'm Yours" by Jason Mraz). Many of my students are eager to learn, and there are class periods where I just have to stop and laugh because the students are having so much fun with their English. Some of them really like to imitate my inflections (I think English is one of the more tonally expressive languages), so whenever I say something like "OH-k" they all have to repeat it. They also love to say things like "Barack Obama--he is my father."

This past week, I've been teaching them about Thanksgiving, and I made a crossword puzzle out of the vocabulary. But I didn't realize how many words are the same length...

"The first Thanksgiving was celebrated by Native Americans and the ______" "Potatoes"
"People of all ____, young and old, enjoy Thanksgiving." "Eggs"
"Thanksgiving is a time for families to come __________" "Potatoes"

Twilight--uncanny

I kid you not.

My house

Here (finally) are some pictures of my house.




Here is my bedroom. It's very clean in this picture because my friends were coming to visit. I have a large bed, a wardrobe, a desk. Oh, and an air conditioner, which is a big help.

Here is my bathroom.


You see I have a Western toilet, which is nice. I don't have a sink, but I have a mandi, which is like a big tub to hold water. To wash my hands, then, I get some water from the mandi with a bucket, and wash over the drain in the floor. The shower is on the other side of the room, out of this picture. It's just a shower head in the corner, so after I shower I have to sweep all the water to the drain so the floor will dry.

On the other side of the bathroom is another bedroom.


Last year there were two English Teaching Assistants living here. This room is bigger, but it doesn't have air conditioning, so I went with the other room. Besides, I think the cockroaches were coming from this room. Not that I have seen any live roaches for a while--the anti-bug chalk works really well.





These are some pictures of my kitchen. There are two room, one of which is more like a balcony, but there's no door between them, so I consider them to be the same room, even if only one has a real ceiling. I have a sink, a table, a stove with two burners, a fridge, and a little shelving unit for storage. Oh, and a rice cooker and a waffle maker, now. There's a gecko that lives in my kitchen, though he runs away when I come in. If I leave the room for a while, he'll stick his head up over the windowsill and make a sort of clicking, chirping noise to see if I'm still there.

It turns out that there is also a cat who likes climbing the first floor roof to come into my kitchen and poop in the corner. I find this very odd, because it doesn't eat any of my food, it just comes in and poops regularly in the corner. Very strange.

Cooking is interesting, because the stove is super hot. A lot of what I cook turns out either burnt or undercooked, or a mixture of both. My most common meals are French toast and hash browns, or vegetables and rice. I found a jar of spaghetti sauce at the store, but it turned out to be really gross (very thick and sweet), so the other day I ate buttered noodles with onions and garlic instead. Last night I cooked tofu with kecap manis (sweet ketchup?), and it was very good. For some reason it was the perfect temperature for the tofu to cook, though carrots and broccoli are sort of hopeless. That is, they will never be cooked quite right, but I don't mind slightly undercooked vegetables.

I also eat out pretty regularly, either gado-gado (vegetables with peanut sauce) across the street or ikan bakar (fish cooked over a fire) down by the ocean. I never was very interested in eating fish at home, much less a whole fish, but now I like it a lot. The meal consists of the fish, whole, with rice and vegetables (usually a spinachy stalk kind of thing), plus dabu-dabu (chili sauce), for a couple of bucks.

Now that I've been talking about food so much, I am very hungry, so I'm going to go home and eat lunch now. Oh, but I almost forgot the other room in my house.

It's basically a parlor. But I don't hang out there too much because it can be too hot.

Bunaken

This weekend, some friends came into town to celebrate my birthday with me. We watched a movie, ate waffles, and yesterday, went to Bunaken, which is the name both for an island near Manado and the marine park next to it. There's a public ferry, but it doesn't go very often, so the four of us rented a boat to take us there and back. The picture above is the view from the boat. The island that looks just like a mountain is Manado Tua, or Old Manado. For some reason.



We didn't go straight to the dock on Bunaken Island, but instead they put down these glass window sort of things on the bottom of the boat and went over the coral reef so we could see it. All of us were amazed; this reef is huge, and only about three feet deep into the water. None of us had ever seen anything like it before, and the men on the boat thought it was really funny how shocked and amazed we were. But it's really very beautiful, and easy to see even from above the water.



So, instead of swimming at the beach, we stopped in to rent some snorkeling equipment (except me, I used my nice mask and snorkel from scuba training) and took the boat back out to an edge of the coral reef. I'd never really been snorkeling before, and I was a bit skeptical about it, and especially about doing it in the ocean and dealing with the salt water in your mouth, but it was just as simple and easy as could be. We basically drifted along the edge of the reef and looked at the coral and the fish and had a great time. The reef drops off, so there's sort of a vertical ledge, and it's very easy to swim along next to it.



We spotted some scuba divers beneath us, and now I'm very excited to go back soon and dive, because it looks like the easiest dive you could imagine, and it was very beautiful in the water. At the end of the day, my friends left for their overnight drive back to Gorontalo. I was very tired afterward, and sunburned on the backs of my legs and in a nice line where my two-piece separated, but my burns are pretty mild and so I'm fine today. All in all, I had a great time going to Bunaken and now I can't wait to go back! But it will have to wait, because I've got plans to travel for the next couple weekends!

(Sorry there aren't more pictures, but I was too busy snorkeling!)

Sometimes you feel like a nut...

Well, life has been going on here more or less the same. It's still very hot, and it hasn't rained for a while, though I'm told there's a rainy season SOMETIME. I'm on my second week of teaching now. Mostly we sing simple songs (this week it's a song I learned at camp about pizza), play games using language, and do some activities. This week, in anticipation of Halloween, I'm telling my students the story of the ghost of Bloody Mary (who appears in the mirror if you call her name three times (in the dark)), and then they write their own ghost stories. I've learned a lot about Manadonese ghosts, some of which are pretty scary.

This Monday I got sick. I don't know if it was something I ate (the rolls I got across the street are the prime suspect; the rambutan seemed fine) or what, but I was pretty sick! And Tuesday I woke up with a fever, but it was an improvement from the night before, anyway. So I stayed home, and the Oma I live with came up to check on me and try to help me about FIFTY times, mostly because she's very forgetful. She told me that eating would make me healthier, and I wanted to say, "I don't think you understand the nature of my illness," but since she doesn't speak English I just ate a little rice. Later, some teachers from school came by and decided that I had gotten sick because I was so tired from doing my own laundry.

Anyway, I feel just fine now, better than fine, even, because my friends from Gorontalo are coming to visit me tonight! Alexa and Sarah, who live together in Limboto, actually, outside of Gorontalo, are driving up here for the weekend to celebrate my birthday, which is very exciting. Hopefully we'll go to Bunaken, and at the very least we're going to have waffles and hang out and have a grand old time.

I have quite a few pictures, but unfortunately I'm having some technical difficulties on that end, since I'm using a computer at school. So, next week, at least, I will sort it out and put up some pictures of my current life. Until then, here are a couple pictures I stole from other people. This is us at Tangkuban Prahu, one of the volcanoes around Bandung!

Manado

Sorry it's been a while since my last update. I'm in my house, but I don't have internet, although I've been trying for the last two weeks to get it. It'll probably be a while, so I'm stuck at internet cafes, where my time is limited. So I'll try to give some information about my life right now, but a bigger update will have to wait.

I live on the second floor of a house, renting from an old woman who doesn't speak any English, which isn't a problem. My house is very close to my school, so I can easily walk back and forth, though sometimes I get escorted home by teachers or students.

Things I do not have:
the internet
a stove (yet)
hot water
a bathroom sink (I brush my teeth in the kitchen)

Things I do have:
air conditioning
a flushing toilet
a refrigerator
a gecko living in the kitchen
a couple cockroaches, some ants, and some tiny moths
rolling blackouts

Manado is very hot, but during the last week it started to rain every day, which helps. During the dry season the power goes off regionally every day, so every afternoon I've been without air conditioning or running water (because I live on top of a hill, it takes an electric pump to bring me water). But this should be ending now with the rain, which is nice.

The city is pretty easy to get around, so I've been downtown a lot, where there are restaurants and shops and things. So far I've had a lot of time on my hands because I was just observing in the class, but tomorrow I start teaching, so that should keep me busier.

Everyone here is very friendly and helpful, and I've been feeling fine. I've invested in some pest-control, and everything seems to be working all right. Hopefully I'll get internet at home next week, and then I can post come pictures!