Selamat Datang ke Rumahmu Meester Jon!

Welcome to your house Mr. Jon! Wowza! Living and working at a Pesantren (Islamic boarding school) is near to the most extreme type of culture shock I can possibly imagine. Pictured above is the mosque in the center of campus. I live alone in my own house, yet simultaneously I am a member of the Pesantren community, consisting of 900 outstandingly enthusiastic male students (grades 7 through 12) and a slew of teachers and faculty who are equally if not more eager to interact with a big, tall, white American.

Everyone here has a different expectation of me, some contorted and exaggerated schema they developed in anticipation of my arrival, most frequently incorrect or impossible to fulfill. The director of the Pesantren expects me to teach from 5 AM to 10 PM, the English teachers treat me as a living textbook, hoping I will immediately transfer my fluency to their untrained tongues, and the students’ respect for me creates a general atmosphere of extreme shyness punctuated by outbursts and celebrations when I perform sports feats during recreation time. The latter is not too difficult on the basketball court given my height advantage, yet the superhuman expectations inevitably result in disappointment. When 100 high school boys lined up to watch me dunk on the basketball hoop, and I never quite performed the one-handed hanging massive air time dunk they expected from someone who comes from the same country as Kobe Bryant, the look of jaded dismay across their faces made it seem as if their grandma had just died. Similarly, I received a glance of alarmed consternation when I responded to one of the teachers laughingly stating that no, indeed I did not pack an LCD power point projector from America in my suitcase.

Case in point. August 17^th: Indonesian Independence Day. Who better to say a few words on the day dedicated to the independence of their country than the American guy? This ceremony was followed by a series of nonstop sporting events, of which I was the constant center of attention. The first event was a sport that I have since deemed dance interlude soccer. It took a while to explain the rules, but eventually I figured out that I was unanimously voted by the teachers to play striker (the most difficult and glorified position) but the twist was anytime somebody played this crazy traditional Indonesian music the game was put on pause and all players on the blacktop field needed to dance by themselves in place. Ultimately my dancing role as striker inspired more awe than my mediocre soccer abilities.

As soon as I leave my house, privacy is nonexistent. Everywhere I go on campus I am surrounded by a radius of short, young Indonesian boys in uniform five deep. When I engage the one in the front in conversation, he carefully crouches down and slinks to the back of the group, the space he left quickly being filled by two more eager uniformed bodies. Even when I am not surrounded by students I am confronted with constant stares that, once looked upon, pretend that they never existed.

Miscommunication is rampant. I can go through an entire day and be almost sure that nobody has fully understood what I wanted to say. Communicating with the English teachers is especially difficult. Today, all 11 of them met with me to talk about my teaching schedule. Rapid and lengthy exchanges in Bahasa Indonesia were interrupted by brief sentences or sometimes mere single words in English for my benefit. I felt like a terrified and helpless bunny rabbit locked in a cage with a pride of lions arguing over who gets the first bite. Ultimately, very little was resolved and I still don’t really understand my teaching schedule. Oh well, we will see how it goes.

Although it is tough, for now I am reveling in the experience of culture shock. This is a very genuinely different world, legitimately off the beaten path, an experience that many people my age purportedly strive for yet rarely achieve. It feels good; I am privileged to have this opportunity, although it is at times very lonely and intensely uncomfortable. The good side of the coin is that everyone’s enthusiasm for my presence has rubbed off on me. Although I may never understand them, and I feel more alone than ever standing in a crowd of hundreds of bashful Indonesians, I can’t help but smile at how privileged they feel just to be in my presence. This smile causes a chain reaction of reciprocal smiles and then for a few spare moments each day I feel the loneliness momentarily dissipate. Reason enough to wake up again at 5 AM and hop straight into that cold shower—exhausted, gasping with the shock of the water, and dizzy at the overwhelming possibilities the day may bring on a planet that I can scarcely still believe is my own.