The succulent meal offered to me at the bus stop. Yum!
As a moderately well-traveled member of my generation of world travelers, I have come to expect this type of situation. Get on a bus at 2:30. A bus that is scheduled to leave at 3:00. The bus does not actually leave until 7:00. What do you do? Well, luckily I had a book on hand, a fully charged Ipod, and, if all else fails, I have developed the handy ability to sleep nearly standing up through any situation that would be considered by an American as an interminably frustrating long wait. One thing I did not count on was a full bus with the largest Indonesian man I have ever seen (maybe the only Indonesian who could beat me up) sitting next to me, and his adorable 5 year old girl bouncing up and down on his lap/her dance floor. I suppose the extra weight and movement was too much for the poor seat to handle, because at approximately hour 2 of a 9 hour bus session the entire seat detached from the floor and we fell suddenly back into the laps of the couple behind us. From then on, either I or the nice big Indonesian father had to clutch the seat in front of us just to keep ours from falling backward. This meant no reading, and certainly no sleeping as my muscles were in a constant state of exertion. After a long stop for dinner (see above) I finally arrived in Ken’s Pesantren at about 1 AM, nearly 14 hours after leaving Makassar for a journey I had expected (and hoped) would only take half the time.
It was worth the jaunt however, as Kenmore’s Pesantren situation provided me with an interesting perspective on my own. His Pesantren is significantly larger, with male and female students, which made it almost impossible for us to teach in the female classes because of the excitement level associated with our presence (something I am finally still not completely used to). They asked me questions amidst the jumping and screaming and clapping. The two most common questions were: “Can you sing a song?” and “Are you married?” Classic. The enthusiasm was so overwhelming that class time really wasn’t too constructive. Luckily, they invited Kenmore and I to be keynote speakers for a portion of the week-long celebration of the Pesantren’s anniversary. The speech audience: only the female students from the Pesantren and other surrounding high schools. The speech topic: global warming.
Okay, how do you speak to a bunch of devoutly Muslim Indonesian girls about their role in helping to fight global warming? We decided that visual aides were a definite must. No other speech I have yet seen in Indonesia has used a visual aide, so we thought that might really set us apart as the global warming “experts,” or at least presentation-giving experts from America. Kenmore found a great graphic explaining global warming on the internet (via his cell phone), and we decided to break every cardinal rule of presentation delivery and just read exactly what was on the screen so we could be sure that they might at least have a chance of understanding what we said.
Two tall Americans, one really short Indonesian, and a very important seminar topic.
In college, there was nothing that aggravated me more than attending a lecture where the speaker had not properly prepared the technology component of their presentation. Eventually they awkwardly ask, “Does anyone know how to work this thing?” and then make a horrible joke about how technology actually makes our lives more difficult and never works blah blah blah. Therefore, even though we prepared for the speech only for about 10 minutes, we were meticulous about making sure that the projector worked and the computer loaned to us by an Indonesian teacher was cued up and ready to go. Everything was set, we thought we would be speaking shortly, then a 45 minute prayer session began, with various girls stepping up to the microphone to recite portions of the holy Koran. Kenmore and I just sort of spaced out through that part, as we hear the recitations five times daily, and when we thought it was our turn, we stood up to begin reading our speech (turns out, they still had several more minutes of prayer planned, but we thought we had received the signal so everyone just let us start speaking). Much to our dismay, inexplicably the computer had permanently shut down at some point during the prayer. No way to turn it back on. So we were left standing together at the podium, gazing out upon hundreds of star-struck hopeful visages of teenage Muslim girls all wearing headscarves and uniforms, with their eyes so full of anticipation one would have thought they were at a concert of The Backstreet Boys. Luckily, Kenmore had a back up plan and we used our charisma and native English fluency to speak for about an hour about global warming. I’m not sure if we were understood without any visual aide. When it was all said and done, Kenmore put it this way: “That’s probably the worst speech I have given in recent memory, yet simultaneously the most praise I have ever received for anything I have ever said.” Apparently there is no positive correlation between admiration for us and comprehension of the speech itself. Out came the cameras, and we were required to pose in about 45 minutes worth of photos. Exhausting really. I’m glad I’m not a real celebrity every day.
Our starstruck audience shortly after we delivered our mediocre speech.
So, since going on that amazing tour of Indonesia’s eastern islands during the Ramadan holiday (see below) I have been living in my Pesantren for the longest continuous period of time so far. Some days, I really thought I might be going crazy. Honestly, it was definitely the hardest time I have had living in a foreign country to date. The romanticism and novelty of the experience had faded, and I was left feeling only incredibly lonely on a day like Thanksgiving when no one at the Pesantren could even understand my description of the holiday.
Other days were great and I feel like I have made some good friends here despite all of our differences. My teaching has improved significantly. At the beginning of the year, the only way I could get the students to say anything to me was if I sang an Indonesian song “Aku mau jawaban, cukup satu jawaban.” This means “I want an answer, just one answer is enough.” It’s from a pop song about love by two Asian girls, but if I make my voice high enough my students love it and respond with cries of delight. Only then, after significantly embarrassing myself, would they stop with the blank stares and feel comfortable enough to speak to me or answer my question. Now, we all know each other better, partially because I took pictures of all 270 of my students and I am attempting to learn their names. Before, if I said ‘Muhammad’ I was addressing over half of the class by name, but I have since decided to establish a more personal relationship with the little guys. Also, participation is greatly increased by Meester Jon’s class participation policy. This policy transformed my classroom from a library into a carnival. Instead of staring at me blankly as before, today I had about 25 adolescent boys mobbing me in competition to be the first to answer my grammar question. How did I do it? Food.
My students like nothing more than food. One day, after giving a test, I brought them a few peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. The effect was similar to feeding overly aggressive swans and ducks at a duck pond. When one goes to a duck pond with a loaf of bread, and word gets out amongst the ducks that one possesses said bread loaf, the situation quickly devolves into a scene from an Alfred Hitchock movie. An aggressive duck knows no boundaries, biting on one’s fingers and also discovering and raiding the bread bag that is the source of the deliciousness. At that point, one needs to stop breaking the bread into bite-sized pieces, cut one’s losses, throw most of the loaf 10 feet away, and escape with one’s life and fingers intact. This happened in my classroom. With humans.
So that brings me to the participation policy. I asked each student what his favorite food is, and most of them said some of the local Makasssarese specialty dishes. Delicacies like coto Makassar which is a beef-gut soup served in a brown broth with…rice! Other favorites include nasi goreng aka. fried rice, and udang cobek-cobek or udang cobek2 as my students write it. This is shrimp with an incredibly delicious local sauce that comes from the Buginese culture. I’m not sure if they like it that much or if they really just like it when I say “cobek-cobek” but hey, it motivates them. So the system is that they are awarded participation points for each answer they give me, and the participation prizes are different foods which increase in value as the points increase. The top prize, at 50 points, is udang cobek-cobek at Pantai Losari (the cool spot in town right on the beach) with Mr. Jon and…da da da ta! Miss JANE! Miss Jane is Jane Erickson, another Fulbright scholar living in Makassar, a female with legendary beauty around these parts (within the Pesantren that is). What better way to motivate a bunch of boys at an Islamic boarding school than to offer them food and a date with an American… ahem… supermodel?
They always get really excited about pictures.
In general, my lessons have been really fun for me and them. We have taken several field trips out into the nature surrounding Makassar…one 3 day trip to Bira beach and one day to the Bantimurung waterfalls. Hiking around a bunch of waterfalls with 12 of my students was better than anything I could have hoped to imagine when I thought about what this experience was going to be like. It’s actually really easy to be a good teacher here because everyone is so enthusiastic to have me around, and most of the other English teachers don’t devote any time and/or resources to lesson planning. That's not necessarily their fault. They get paid a pittance and most teachers I work with need to teach at 2 0r 3 other schools which means they have over 40 hours of classroom time a week. When I’m not in the classroom, the student’s English lesson consists of them sitting silently and attempting to memorize a four paragraph speech. They are evaluated on how much they are able to memorize. That’s it. That’s the whole class. Worse yet, if the teacher doesn’t show up, which happens frequently, they just have to sit in the classroom for four hours. They can’t leave. They just wait, and wait, and wait. I think teaching English is great because you can really do anything as long as it is happening in English. Memorizing is the last thing I would like to do in class, so instead we listen to songs, look at pictures, talk about what they call “romantic situations” and so on. “Umm…meester Jon, could you tell me how to do the romantic situation with the girl?” A couple times, I referred to myself in third person as Mr. Jon and the class filled with a chorus of ‘yeah, ya, yeah’ at the mention of my name. At the end of every class, I am mobbed by 30 to 40 students who all want to shake my hand, and ask me a question like “Meester Jon, when you go back to your country the America?” When I assure them that I won’t be leaving until the end of next May, a smile spreads across both of our faces.
My students with Miss Jane in front of the ridiculous statue that serves as an entrance to the Bantimurung waterfall nature park. Actually quite beautiful.
