Being a Teacher

Is it possible to start a composition with an aside?

[Aside: **In a posting back in April or May, soon after I’d arrived in Indonesia, I said I would try only to write about specific topics, because capturing my “experience” in Indonesia in broad terms would not be possible.  I stuck to that model for some months.  Recently, however, my posts have become more about…me…and less about Indonesia.  That’s odd, because as far as I can tell, the other PCV bloggers have gone in reverse—that is, they started out talking about themselves and now are talking about Indonesia. 

I just don’t feel the same urge to transmit cultural insights that I felt before.  Perhaps this is because, for me, the exercise of writing is a tool to organize and process new information.  Seven months in, there’s not as much "foreignness" to deal with.  The primary challenge is no longer personal adjustment to this once-alien culture, but carrying out professional responsibilities.  That, of course, entails its own series of headaches and what-the-hell-am-I-doing-here moments, but it’s more focused, less all-embracing, than the original challenge. 

Anyway, I think all of that accounts for both my reduced writing output and the shift in tone over the last couple months. **]

____________

General Information

Some people have asked me what it’s actually like teaching in the school.  Kind of weird, I haven’t really written much about it, even though I’ve been teaching at my school for some four months.  Here are some facts about my situation:

·      I teach at a madrasah, which is an Islamic state school.  In Indonesia, there are non-religious state schools, overseen by the Ministry of National Education, and there are madrasahs, which are overseen by the Ministry of Religious Affairs.  Usually around 10:00, there is a 20-minute break for solat (prayer).  There is another solat around lunchtime after 12:00.  And Monday through Wednesday, there is a third solat after school ends.  It’s very funny to watch the kids and teachers doing ablutions (ritual washing) before prayer, because their clothing gets drenched.  The boys always horse around splash each other with water.

·      Appearance is extremely important in the culture here.  All the women must wear headscarves (jilbab), and all students/teachers wear uniforms. That is, except for me some days.  Three days per week I wear my own preference, and three days I dress like the other teachers.  People here aren’t as crazy about footwear though.  It’s pretty amusing to see kids and teachers wearing ties and full-length pants and skirts, but no shoes.  They like to kick them off when they sit down in class.

·      Those of you clever in arithmetic will have deduced that the school week is six days.  Sunday is the only day off, but Friday and Saturday are shorter than Monday-Thursday.  And Thursday is shorter than Monday-Wednesday.

·      In Indo, high school lasts from 10^th until 12^th grade.  I teach four classes of 11^th grade and one class of 10^th grade.  When I say “class”, I mean group of students.  Indonesian high school is organized rather like American elementary school.  Like class 10-A has its own classroom where they have all their lessons, and the teachers move around.  After tenth grade, kids are differentiated by “tracks”, of which there are four in Indonesia. 

·      There are more than 900 kids in my school.  That’s not the most for any PCV in Indonesia, but I think it’s top five or top three.  Because it’s such a large school, it actually has all four tracks: IPA (science), IPS (social), Bahasa (language), and Agama (religion).  All four tracks study certain core subjects, and there are also subjects specific to certain tracks.  For example, all students must study English and Indonesian, but only Bahasa and Agama students have to study Arabic, and only Bahasa students have to study Japanese (at least in my school).  All students have to study history, but only IPS has to study sociology.  And so on.  I hope you get the picture.

·      Outside of the track system, there are no electives.  In my school, students study eighteen subjects per semester.  No, this does not make any sense or have defensible logical underpinnings, so don’t bother trying to figure it out.

·      For 12^th graders, the entire year is dedicated to preparation for the national exam.  Whether a student passes is determined by an average of the kid’s grades in school and scores on the national exam.  As a rule, schools inflate grades to offset poor scores on the national exam, which is very difficult, so that all or almost all of the kids graduate.  Schools here are businesses, and it’s bad for business if “clients” (students) fail.  

This is what the schedule looks like at my school.  I spent two or three days studying it before the semester began just so I could understand how it worked.  The time investment paid off, because I got to skip several months of chaos and confusion.

_____________

Frequently Asked Questions

Q.  What are your class sizes?

Two of my classes (IPA) have 32 students, two (Bahasa) have 26-27, and one has 15.  The class with fifteen is 10^th grade Acceleration.  It’s a new program in my school.  Those kids are supposed to graduate in two years, rather than three.  I feel grateful that my two most challenging classes are relatively small, at 26 students apiece.  My heart goes out to the PCVs trying to teach 40 rowdy, unmotivated kids per class.

Q.  What are the students like?

They’re mostly wonderful, and at times they make you want to bang your head against the wall.  Social harmony and respect for elders or “superiors” is much more deeply ingrained in people here, so it’s very rare for me to feel personally disrespected.  I wouldn’t label any of my ~130 kids as a troublemaker.  Unlike American teenagers, they are not “too cool” for school.  It’s very easy to get them excited if you know the right buttons to push, and they become very spirited in class games.  They love to sing.  As far as I can see, they do not form cliques like American kids.  They love to cheer and clap and make noise as a group.  This is a collectivist culture.

That collectivism can make you want to break stuff at times, because collective cheating is so widespread here.  I’m very strict about cheating, and I feel confident saying that it doesn't happen too much in my classes during assessments.  I’m always on the lookout.  Most students have a fear of being different (is this really so different from American kids?).  They are usually petrified if they have to speak in English with any degree of spontaneity or creativity.  It’s also pretty common to laugh at mistakes here, so I had to make clear to my classes that it is forbidden to make fun of people who mess up. 

Anyway, the kids love to smile and laugh, and they always say hello when they see me.  Because they so readily accept authority and have (in my opinion) very low standards for teachers, it takes a lot of pressure off of me.  For some of my classes, I can always count on the kids to be bright and cheerful, and that really lifts my mood.   I usually leave a class feeling better than I did when I entered.

Q.  How are the students in English?

Skill levels within classes vary wildly, but the general level of English is very low.  I’d estimate that about 15% of my students would be able to converse comfortably in English about their daily activities.  Perhaps 5% could do it with grammatical accuracy.  At the other extreme, I have kids who have scored 0% on vocabulary quizzes, failing to produce the English words “take, go, say, make” etc.  Mind you, those kids have been taking English classes for at least five years.

Q.  How are the teachers in English?

There are six English teachers at my school plus me.  Their levels vary.  Three of them have what I would call very good English.  One of them is pretty good.  One is not so good.  One could hardly be said to speak English.

Last week we instituted a new policy: English teachers MUST always speak English with the other English teachers.  Every violation means a 1,000 rupiah fine.  The teachers love it, and we’ve all had to pony up.  So far the jar has over 10,000 rupiah.  They love policing one another—I never have to insist that they follow the rule.  The money is used to buy teaching supplies.

Q.  What kind of resources do you have?

Most classrooms are quite large, but drab.  There is a whiteboard and a desk for the teacher.  Some classes have painted slogans or pictures on the walls to beautify the room, but the rooms are horribly underutilized.  Students usually sit in pairs at big, clunky wooden desks.  The school has two printers, which are old and crappy and don’t do color very well at all.  There is no photocopy machine, but paper is available to buy at the cooperative store.  There are a couple digital projectors, but these are hardly ever used.  There are no transparency projectors, as far as I can tell.  There is wireless internet in the school (my most important resource).  There is a language lab, but I haven’t used it yet, and I’m not sure if it’s really functional. One cool resource is the mosque, which is really big at my school and much cooler than the classrooms.

Doing an activity in the mosque on 11/11/11

There are no English textbooks at my school.  The kids all have these cheap paper workbooks called LKS books.  The LKS books are awful--they are riddled with mistakes, they are illogically organized, and they assume the students have a level of English comparable to native speakers.  They're so awful, in fact, that my counterparts and I are not using any book at all.  We are creating all our own materials.  Obviously this makes planning more taxing, but we are teaching material that is realistic for the students.  The kids were raised on the LKS books, and their English is terrible.  For me, that’s enough justification to throw the books out if at all possible.

There is no store of English teaching materials that have been put to good use.  Some of my counterparts have books about teaching English filled with ideas for activities and worksheets and such, but those are very rarely opened.  There are no posters or realia or maps.  All in all, though, there are enough resources for a creative teacher to deliver high-quality lessons.  But it requires imagination, which is sorely lacking here.

Q.  What’s good about teaching?

When things are humming in the classroom, it’s a great feeling.  When kids are actually speaking in English while engaged in some silly contest, it’s awesome.  I suppose the best part is, as I said before, going into a classroom feeling low-energy and coming out of it feeling pumped. 

One of the most interesting things is getting to know the students’ individual strengths and weaknesses, as well as to measure how they progress.  It’s interesting to grade a quiz and be pleasantly surprised that a kid is doing much better than before, or conversely to be perplexed as to why a good student did poorly.  And it’s delightful when the kids catch you off guard with their creativity.  I’ve gotten a couple writing assignments that really just lit me up.

Also, as a native speaker of English and a person not shy to take charge in group situations, I get a ton of respect from the other teachers.  My ideas are taken seriously, and when I ask for help with things, I can usually count on someone wanting to help me.  And there’s really no pressure from the other teachers.  I could literally just take a vacation for a week, whenever, and nobody would say a word.  Basically all of the stress I feel is self-generated. 

And it’s fantastic to see other teachers adopt improved practices.  It makes me really happy when my counterpart wants to enter grades into our weighted spreadsheet on her own because it's "fun".

Q.  What sucks about teaching?

It sucks to feel like you’re constantly swimming against the current.  The flip side of being the native speaker/leader-type is that I am under all the pressure to be creative.  It can be tough to stay motivated when other people have lower standards and try to avoid responsibility for creative work (i.e. sitting down and designing interesting, logical lessons).  Trying to inspire others to a higher standard of professionalism can be tiring, and staying level when things don’t progress as quickly as I’d like requires patience.

Additionally, the culture surrounding education here is (in this American’s perspective) seriously flawed.  Certain crucial components are missing:

·      Accountability (at all levels)

·      Punctuality

·      Commitment to a predictable learning environment

·      Fostering of critical thinking/originality/creativity

·      Pragmatism (i.e. the goals of the curriculum considering the resources actually available)

Compared to the US, there is a much greater emphasis on developing “character”, which I suppose they do a pretty good job with, because 99% of the kids seem to be good kids.  But as a product of an education system that places performance above character, it just sucks seeing how inefficient education is here.

_______________

Other Observations

In all five of my classes, the girls do significantly better than the boys.  Average difference in test scores range as high as 20%.  I think the trend is the same in American schools, but it seems more pronounced here.  Boys goof around more. Interestingly, however, the “smart” kids are not ostracized or jeered—they are actually more or less the top dogs in my classes. Boys and girls never sit together here, and one-on-one interaction is extremely rare, though group interaction is common enough.  I’ve learned not to try to pair boys and girls, because they become painfully awkward, even sullen. 

The only time I’ve felt actually angry over “insubordination” was when a boy turned sour over being asked to work with a girl.  He nodded his head as if he understood, but didn’t move and tried to pretend that he was looking through a book, despite being told repeatedly.  To avoid a standoff, we had him work in a trio of boys and the girl in a trio of girls, but it really got to me.  At first I was irritated with the boy, but I cooled off by reminding myself that it’s not his fault he’s so uncomfortable with the prospect.  Just the way he was socialized.  I shouldn’t expect him to react like an American kid would.

Dating is prohibited in my school.  Kids who are known to have girlfriends or boyfriends are subject to expulsion.  This kind of freaks me out.  It’s normal for people here to get married in their very early twenties (especially girls), or even their late teens.  But by that point, they still have never really had much opposite-sex interaction outside of their own family.  People get married with terribly limited knowledge about the other sex.  The thought of locking oneself into a lifelong partnership with someone without really understanding the commitment or without having explored other options is just…chilling.

I haven’t had any real disciplinary problems.  During tests and quizzes I police the kids quite strictly to discourage cheating, but other than that they’re all good.  At times they can be screechy, annoying sixteen-year-olds, but with the proper management they don’t become too unruly.

Last week I carved pumpkins with my English club, and it was awesome!  One of counterparts gave his 12th graders a break from class so they could come look at what we were doing.  Not bad for kids who had never done it before.  The one second from the left was declared best pumpkin.  It had eyebrows and ears!

For a solid five minutes, I had most of the kids and the other English teacher scared that there was actually a ghost in the room.  I showed them a photograph of the jack o' lanterns with a white streak in front.  They were relieved when I said it was just a trail from a boy who was moving across the frame.

I’ve already said many times that appearances are more important in this culture than in American culture.  One consequence, or corollary, is that it’s also a more visual culture.  Students put so much more effort into making simple papers and projects look nice.  I had teachers back in America who told me, “I don’t care if you write your essay in pen, crayon, or blood, as long as I can read it and you’ve done good work.”  Here it’s the opposite.  The quality of content can be absolutely horrendous, but you can rest assured that the presentation will be attractive.  During Ramadan I asked some kids to write about the fasting month, and they turned in some things that I’d never seen before.  One pair of girls glued their paper to a triangular piece of wood.  Another made a multi-colored folding heart (see pictures).  One wrote their thing on a neon-colored cutout of Donald Duck’s face.  Several groups glued small fuzzy butterfly dolls to their paper.  

Now that's some serious creativity. 

That’s as much as I’m going to write about this in one sitting, so I hope it was informative!  If any of you future Indonesia PCVs are reading, good on you for getting informed ahead of time!  We look forward to meeting you and hazing you ruthlessly. 

Just kidding.

Maybe.

Post-IST

The trouble with not updating for several weeks is that it becomes hard to write anything at all.  There’s a backup of information, and the task of sifting through the sand for bits of gold is daunting.  And of course, all my PCV buddies have more or less beaten me to the punch in terms of blogging about recent highlights, and seeing as I read all their blogs, it’s a bit tough to say anything original.

_________________

Information

October 17^th to 28^th was In-Service Training in Surabaya.  The 26 remaining PCVs from my group were shacked up together in a hotel for two weeks, where we attended approximately six thousand sessions on teaching, safety & security, and a sprinkling of other topics (medical, our feelings, cultural, language).  One teaching counterpart of each Volunteer was invited to attend the last three days of the Training, which were basically dedicated to improving teamwork and communication.  Ambitious boy that I am, I co-facilitated two sessions (one for PCVs only, one for PCVs + Counterparts).  Days would last from about 8am to 5pm, with a one-hour break for lunch.  The nights were free.

The 2^nd Annual PC Indonesia Badminton Tournament, won by Nicole and Pak Winarto, was held in a stifling sauna that someone must have confused for a gymnasium.  Yours truly teamed with Megan from Peace Corps staff and appeared in the very first match of the tourney.  Under the glare of a thousand eyes, we handily dispatched our loathsome foes, Betsy and Cody.  Confidence running high, we were eviscerated in the second round by the eventual runners-up, Heru and Brianna.

The PC Indo Halloween Party and Costume Contest was held in my hotel room.  I will leave you with some links to the pictures, which are great.  I’m not gonna say I was shafted in the costume contest, because I think the best man won, but I think my cloud/pillow/sheet/flying squirrel/ghost/pious Muslim woman/toga/chameleon costume was worth an honorable mention.  Most embarrassing moment: Accidentally hitting PCV Whitney in the face in the middle of a party game when my face was covered.  

For pics of the Party and Badminton Tournament, take a peek at Dan's Post, Elle's Post, and Nicole's Post

_________________

Some thoughts, in whatever order they come to me

Surabaya might as well be a different planet from Kandangan (where I live).  The malls are tall enough to house Saturn V rockets.  You can buy alcohol, and even more shocking you can see people drinking it.  Some women wear clothing that doesn't cover their knees.  There are coffee shops and restaurants with “ethnic” food.  People don’t really stare at you for being foreign.  You can go out at night, and there are still shops open.  It’s a completely different side of Indonesia.  I can’t even imagine what it’s like in Jakarta.

In Surabaya, you can just feel the hunger to become Western.  But out here in the countryside, where I live, the mentality is utterly different and the culture is solidly traditional.  I wonder, as relative European and American power wane over the next few decades, will Indonesia (and the rest of the developing world) find some other model to emulate?  What would a world that wasn’t Westernizing even look like, and how would I feel about it?  As it is, watching people trade in misguided tradition for misguided modernity evokes ambivalence.  All I wonder when I walk through a nine-floor shopping mall is: This is progress?

Then I come back to the countryside and think how desperately this place needs to move forward, how a few “Western” lessons could solve so many problems the people face.  And then I remember how Westerners don’t seem any happier to me than Indonesians.  And then I think that maybe the happiness here is superficial.  And then I think what’s the difference?  And I just end up feeling confused, at least as far as society is concerned.  Being in this country has reduced the scope of my ambition.  I don’t even know what would be healthy for humanity, how can I hope to “save” it in any meaningful way?

My mind keeps going back to Voltaire’s maxim: Tend your own garden.  In a way, this service is making me more individualistic than I already was.  Where it concerns myself, I’m pretty certain what kind of change is good or bad, so I can endeavor to effect it with conviction.  For the rest of the universe and everything in it, I’m not so sure what’s best or how to get there.  At this moment, my best wisdom is just to take care of my own garden and hope the neighbors feel inspired when they look at it.

__________________

The last day in Surabaya and the few days after getting back to Kandangan were rough, mentally speaking.  My head was so incredibly full of information and thoughts and emotions, it was terribly difficult to concentrate.  I started feeling better after writing a long, meandering entry in my paper journal. 

Some of my personal highlights/random notes from Surabaya:

·      As I wrote, I co-facilitated a couple of the sessions for IST.  The first was with PCV Luke, the second with PCV Sarah and my counterpart, Ms. Ani.  It was an absolute delight to work with Americans again.  Even though planning for our sessions meant that I couldn’t socialize for a couple of nights, it was a great feeling to prepare and deliver presentations for the benefit of my friends.  It was also great to speak in front of Americans.  It felt like really meaningful work.  The positive feedback I got from some of my peers, especially for the second presentation, made me feel better than all the combined compliments I’ve received from locals for the last seven months.

·      I stood on a scale in Surabaya and found that I’ve lost between 10 and 15 pounds since coming to Indonesia, depending on water weight.  That is not insignificant, since there wasn’t so much of me to begin with.  Still, my weight loss has not been the most extreme among the group.  I don’t really see how I can gain that weight back on the local diet, but I hope that my weight has stabilized, because I don’t want to go south of 140.

·      I absolutely love spending time with other PCVs.  The more I get to know them, the more I like them and the more I appreciate the fabulous diversity of their personalities.  Just being able to float from one small group of Volunteers to the next and feel attached to all them was an amazing feeling.  It was also a pleasure to get better acquainted with the visiting ID-4s (that is, the PCVs from the group that arrived a year before I did [I am an ID-5]).  Specific shout outs to Luke, Sam, Sarah, and Noel—who is in Hawaii, the b----.

·      I got to eat food that wasn’t rice or noodles. 

·      Oh man, I almost forgot.  I was rooming with Cody, and we had to move to a different room after a week because there were bed bugs.  He had a bunch of itchy red bite-mark things on his ankles and arms. I had a bunch of red dots on my hands  and creeping up my arms (and even a few on my face), but mine didn’t itch and looked more like sea lice than bites.  Either there was a different kind of bug in my sheets or I just have a convenient resistance to the bites of bedbugs.  We took the minifridge with us when we moved to our new, smaller room.  The hotel did all our laundry for free, but it took them two days, so for a day and a half Cody and I looked like ruffians in the sessions.

·      I wore a sarong to the training sessions for a couple days because I didn’t have any clean pants.  I expected to be chastised, but people seemed rather impressed.

·      Repeat: I got to eat food that wasn’t rice or noodles.

·      Really, a ton of other stuff happened, but I cannot list it all and I seriously doubt whether you, dear reader, want to continue wading through the muck of my recollections, which are not pertinent to anything going on in your own life.

________________

End of an Era

I bought a camera on my last day in Surabaya.  I figured with all the money I’ve been saving up by living like a skinflint at site, I could afford to drop a bit on a camera.  This is actually the first camera I’ve ever bought—and so a new chapter begins.  The plan is to use it at site to take pictures of people and help me integrate better.  There are a handful of teachers whose faces I recognize but whose names I cannot remember.  A secondary consequence might be that Thought Porridge might turn into Thought + Picture Porridge, but don’t get your hopes up.  Though I might throw in some photos once in a while, I am not a photographer.  I hate carrying around a camera and feeling the pressure to “capture” moments, lest they disappear forever.

Okay, I think that about does it.

11/3/11

The Year of Shedding Fear

WHEN I was little, I was afraid I’d grow up to be a smoker.  Really, whenever adults warned me about some terrible potential future situation, I would worry about that exact thing happening. 

“Cigarettes are highly addictive and highly poisonous.”  Tim worries about somehow ending up as a smoker, despite being repulsed by cigarettes.

“An unwanted pregnancy means the end of your life as a free individual.”  Tim worries about knocking someone up.

“Ten years from now a large asteroid will have a one-in-ten-thousand chance of hitting the Earth.”  Tim worries about the extinction of humanity.

“Most people work jobs they don’t like / Men all have mid-life crises / Marriages are all unhappy / If you don’t do everything the right way you’ll never have opportunities in life / All these fools get sucked into empty materialism / etc. etc. etc.”  Tim worries about waking up at age 40 and realizing he’s wasted his life.

______________

NOW, I don’t think I was really an anxious kid compared to others.  But I remember distinctly that feeling of being afraid that somehow I would end up addicted to tobacco or drugs or alcohol, even though I don’t have an addictive personality.  I guess I visualized some gang of delinquent kids catching me as I walked home from school and forcing me to become addicted to crack or something.  I’m almost 24 now, and I’m still not addicted to drugs or alcohol, I don’t have any children, and life on Earth still flourishes.

Of course, a lot of the more ridiculous fear-fantasies dissipated long ago.  At some point you realize that certain things will never happen unless you want them to happen—nobody’s going to make me get addicted to tobacco.  But some fears persisted.  Fear of failure, fear of making mistakes, fear of being rejected, fear of choosing the wrong path in life, fear of ending up trapped.  Maybe it’s those last two that stuck with me the longest.  They might also be fears that are especially powerful among people of my demographic: upper middle class, relatively educated, world-is-our-oyster types.  So many choices to make, so much opportunity cost to consider.  It’s paralyzing.  I think there’s been a lot of research done that shows that greater choice only improves happiness up to a certain point, and after that it decreases happiness.  My generation definitely lives in a world with frighteningly many choices to make.  How many chances we have to take a wrong turn!  How easy it is to be seduced by something fair-seeming on the way, only to realize too late that you’ve turned off the true path. 

Some people deal with this choice by framing everything in terms of obligation.  I have to go to college, I have to get a loan, I have to get a Master’s, I have to get a job that pays a decent wage, I have to have a car, I need to have a girlfriend/boyfriend, I have to socialize in the way that others socialize.  It’s easier to make choices (and live with the choices you make) when you don’t see things as choices at all.  All the way through college, I felt oppressed by that fear of choosing the wrong path, ending up trapped, not doing things the right way.  At the same time, I felt that social pressure was pushing me to live my life in a certain sequence, funneling me into the kind of colorless, cowardly existence that the deepest part of me has always disdained. 

So few people seem to be truly free.  So many people seem to invent limits to the world that aren’t really there.  Things must be this way, I must act this way, I can do this, I can’t do that, I have to do what others do, I have to care what others think.  This is the way things are done. So many people worship strange idols.

______________

FOR the first six months after graduating college, I was in transition.  I moved to Europe to get away from things, think over my options, and look for direction.  I came to conclusion that it really didn’t matter what I chose, so long as I chose something and committed to it.  About a month before graduating the notion really hit me hard, all at once, that there are many right paths at any given time.  We are surrounded by them at all times, in all choices, and the fear of making a bad choice makes no difference to how your choices actually pan out.  Yes, caution is always merited, but fear and caution are not the same thing.

So after half a year in Europe I decided to apply to Peace Corps.  It wasn’t an impulsive action—the application process takes forever, which is good for rooting out the capricious types.  The two-year commitment seemed about right to me—it would be something tough and completely different, requiring long-term fortitude and not just the flaring passion of a twenty-something dreamer.  I did not see it as a flight from the real world into some fantasy existence.  I saw it as an escape from delusion into reality.

Anyway, the nine months between beginning my application and leaving everything behind could also be easily clumped into that “post-college transition” bloc of my life.  I had made the commitment, but I still wasn’t doing anything.  It was a long process of killing time and making mental preparations.  Of course, that isn’t to say that I didn’t change over that period.  Those fifteen total months saw some serious self-work.  I needed them to heal, get my head straight, and choose my next steps.  I was much more stable, secure, and resolute when I left for Asia than when I left for Europe.

On one of my last days in Florida I got a phone call from my friend John Kux’s mother, whom I hadn’t seen or talked to since high school.  He had told her I was leaving for Indonesia soon, and she called to wish me luck and share a piece of wisdom.

I’ve known people who served in Peace Corps.  I’m telling you, you’re about to go into the meatgrinder and you’re gonna come out on the other side a completely different person.

I wasn’t quite sure how to respond.  I didn’t exactly want to ditch the person I already was, and the image of diving into a meatgrinder wasn’t reassuring.  But I told her that I was looking forward to it, because personal growth was the whole point of doing this. 

______________

SINCE getting to Indonesia, it’s as if everything has kicked up to warp speed.  I’m not sure I’d use the term “meatgrinder” to describe it, but something has happened.  And here my words fail me.  I don’t know exactly how to describe or encapsulate it.  I mean, obviously, I have learned a lot of things I didn’t know before and I have had many new experiences.  But the change is much deeper than that.  I don’t know what exactly precipitated it.  Something profound has sunk in. 

I’ve always been a confident person, and since I was a kid people have been telling that I have excellent potential.  Sometimes it takes years for things you know intellectually to take root in your soul and bloom.  This is the first time I’ve felt truly empowered.  Like some of that potential energy has been transformed to kinetic energy.  I feel strength in me—a kind of strength of spirit and mind that lets me look at the world without fear in my eyes.  And all of a sudden those old fears—about making the wrong choices and falling into traps and living in delusion—seem to have disappeared, and my reaction to them is the same as my reaction to the fear of becoming a smoker: It’s not going to happen without your consent.  There is nothing to be afraid of.

All at once, the future has become this unbelievably exciting idea.  In the face of the last half-year of challenges, my understanding of myself as a person—my values, my strengths and talents, my triggers and limits—has developed at incredible rate.  Those clouds and doubts about what’s going to happen next, the anxiety about getting a little older and having to finally “join the real world”, have disappeared.  There is nothing standing between me and the life I want to live.  It’s just a choice, and I’m already living it.

_______________

SOMETIMES I look back at the years and give them epithets.  2010 was Transition and Meditation and Healing.  2009 was Rupture and Trial.  And looking at 2011 (now that it’s approaching its conclusion) three names occur to me:

The Year of Shedding Fear.  The Year of Awakening.  The Year of Blossoming.

Circumcision, Repetition, Brainmelt, and Absorption of Wisdom

Last Saturday, my five-year-old host brother got circumcised. 

Normally Muslim boys undergo khitanan (circumcision) at age twelve, and it’s a big to-do.  I’ve gone to a pre-khitanan “party” in my village, and it’s much like any other social gathering that takes place here.  That is, a bunch of men gather at the house of the soon-to-be-foreskin-free youth, sit on the floor with their backs against the wall, and go through a certain catalog of prayers.  They may also pass around a microphone to ensure that everyone in a fifty meter radius can hear.  Then they all eat a plate of food, prepared by the host family, smoke cigarettes, and leave.

Fian—my five-year-old little host brother—had to get the snip because he was having trouble relieving himself, and that certain bit of skin was the culprit.  So on Saturday night his parents took him to the hospital, and the offending dermis was excised.  I was at home when they came back, carrying crying little Fian into the house.  Soon the living room was bustling with family and neighbors coming in to watch him wail, regard him with paternal pity, and grin at each other.  Kasian (poor thing)!

At five years old, the unanesthetized burning in your privatest part must seem like the end of the world, and the tone of his whimpering was pretty much exactly what you’d expect: devoid of anger, conveying only pain and confusion.  My host parents pulled the couch and the armchair into the living room and laid him down on the bigger of the two.  He was truly a pathetic sight, lying there with no pants on, sterile white medical bandage wrapped around his weenie, his diligent mother sitting over him, doing her best to ameliorate the fiery anguish with a handheld fan.  As I mentioned, family and neighbors came in to look at him and discuss what was going on, and most of them wore sympathetic but amused expressions on their faces.  One of them joked with me that it’d have to be me next (the second circumcision gibe I’ve gotten in a month). 

All of this is preface.  Every night since then, he has slept on that couch in the living room, and for the first few days he hardly ever got up to walk.  As I write this on Wednesday night (the fifth since khitanan), he is out there sleeping now.  The experience of the last five days has illuminated two aspects of life in the village that generate exactly opposite reactions in me.  First, the positive.  Every night he’s been out there, he’s been accompanied by both of his parents and his sister.  They all sleep in the living room.  Bapak falls asleep in the armchair, little Fian on the couch, and Ibu and Dela (his sister) on a mattress they dragged out from the bedroom. 

The whole family is together, ostensibly to make sure he doesn’t fall off the couch—though why he’s sleeping there instead of in his bed is also a mystery.  The whole thing is adorable.  I consider my (real) family to be close, but I couldn’t imagine all of us curling up on the floor and in chairs in the living room just so we could all sleep together in the same place.  The family here coexists without privacy and without the desire for it.  They just want to be close to each other—nobody, except perhaps the youngest, is thinking exclusively about his own comfort.  I wrote in an earlier posting about how impressed I was with the harmony and closeness I’ve observed in Javanese families, and this is a prime example. 

That is one facet of life here that has shone with clarity in the last five days.  The other one, however, is much darker.  Because the little one has been basically parked out in the living room, and his family is often sitting around with him, the television has rarely been turned off the last five days.  People here watch a lot of TV.  In my house, they switch on the boob tube at around 5:30am and—barring unusual circumstances—only shut it off when everyone’s gone to sleep, which can be 10:00pm or later.

As I see it, there are multiple things behind this, some harmless and some more ominous.  First off, this is just a noisy country.  People here are incredibly desensitized to sound.  In six months here, I have almost never heard anyone complain about sounds being loud, disturbing, or poor quality.  In fact, I think many people here feel strange if there isn’t any sort of racket shattering the peace of the air.  And that’s fine…there are plenty of Americans who need to have the radio on and can’t stand being in a quiet place. 

Beyond that, however, are some more troubling issues.  I absolutely cannot understand how groups of people here will sit in front of the television for hours and hours and hours, neither truly watching nor truly engaged in conversation.  To my eye, it looks like the worst mode of television watching.  That sort of television watching you might do with your roommates in the mid-morning after a late night party and you’ve got a hangover and you know there are responsibilities you should be taking care of but you’re too lazy and out of it to get started but you still feel bad because you’re not even watching the TV and really the programming is complete shit anyway so you feel even worse because some soulless daytime crap is your pathetic excuse for not doing actually important things.  I’ve watched some of the programming here, and it’s completely inane.  People may be momentarily entertained, but nothing at all is learned or gained. 

What disturbs me is the sheer amount of time that people spend in this sort of stupefied state.  They are 100% passive and not even really engaged in the thing that’s being beamed into their brains.  So many hours every day that could be spent in way more interesting or productive ways—reading a book maybe?—simply tick away.  In my house, when they’re not watching television, my family has liked to pop in the same two or three VCDs of dangdut concerts.  And they watch these things over and over and over, only without any hint of excitement.  I could almost understand it if these things really excited them, but they don’t even seem happy to be watching most of the time.  It’s just…something to look at.  A way to pass the time.  They kind of stare at the television and occasionally say things to one another.  Reminds me of the dropped-out-stoner types from college.

In moments of negativity, it can feel as if I’m surrounded by people who are simply bored as their lives tick away, with no motivation to change things up and really no concept that such a change might be possible or desirable.  Every day I bike to school and back to my house, and in both directions I usually pass the same people on the street, no matter the time of day.  There’s a set of people who are always sitting outside their houses, just staring at the road, making small talk with neighbors.  Some people sit and do nothing every day for years and decades.  How is that possible?  I mean, I’ve certainly fallen into slothfulness and laziness and passivity at times in my life, but even in those periods my brain is still seeking some sort of stimulus—reading a book, watching something I’ve never watched, staring at sports, getting immersed in some sort of storyline.  I just can’t imagine that kind of long-term stagnation not being accompanied by serious stupefaction.

I don’t mean to pick on Indonesians in particular, because there are plenty of people everywhere that live in this way.  I’ve just never felt it so strongly as I do here.  Everything is so predictable and repetitive.  I mean, shit, I think I understand better now why people are so incredibly excited when a foreigner comes around.  There’s so much monotony, so little impetus to change. 

Since arriving I’ve struggled with the uncertainty of how to judge the differences in the culture here.  Should I feel bad for people who live in such a tiny world, or is pity arrogant and inappropriate?  On an intellectual level, I try not to judge, because who the hell am I?  There’s nothing to say that an active and challenging life is, in a cosmic sense, more “meaningful” or worth living than a boring, passive one.  But on an emotional level I just feel sorry for a lot of people.  I could never accept such a passive existence, and in my heart I cannot accept that it is as meaningful as an active life. 

[Note&Disclaimer: This does NOT apply to all Indonesians, nor am I saying that everyone has to go volunteer in another country in order to have an “active” or meaningful existence.  I certainly have Indonesian friends and acquaintances here who are plenty active and whose outlook incorporates a concept of self-improvement.]

I’ve strayed a good way from the television thing.  This is the sort of track my mind gets after my brain is attacked for days on end by the sounds of SpongeBob reruns and dangdut concerts.  It seems like other people are sitting there as their brains melt and their senses and motivations and ambitions are dulled.  I physically cringe upon seeing my little host brother crane his neck around an obstructing person so that he can watch the same sports-drink commercial that he’s already seen dozens of time earlier in the day. 

The repetitiveness of life here can also make me impatient with people who ask me if I’m bored when I’m alone in my room. 

My internal monologue then goes something like:  Are you @#$%ing kidding me?  The stuff I do alone in my room is a million times less boring than the things you all do every single day over and over and over again.  If I’m in there, I’m exercising my mind reading or writing or actively listening to music or recording music or doing work for my job or having necessary venting sessions with my fellow volunteers, not just letting my brain rot in my head from lack of use.  Do you think I’m just lying on my bed and staring at the ceiling?   How can you be so inured to the tedium of routines here?

My external response:  Oh, no I’m not bored.  I’m usually doing stuff, and I like relaxing in my room.

And then my brain goes off in all kinds of directions.  Like, what would this society be capable of if people only blah blah blah, and how much time gets “wasted” every day just by people who blah blah blah, and is this tendency towards sloth and predictably an innate characteristic in blah blah blah, and a million other things. 

Being honest, one reason I wanted to live in a poor country is to see what sort of wisdom there is in poverty.  For all its wealth, there is a shallowness and immaturity in much of my native culture that leaves me yearning for other wisdom.  On the other hand, I was also guarding myself against accepting the wisdom of another culture simply because it was foreign, as so many New Age types do in the US.  Nothing is more annoying than the person who tries to tell you that Some Other Culture has “figured it all out”.  Coming here, my attitude was to look for the wisdom and the folly.  Up to this point, I feel like I’ve noted and absorbed a lot of both.

[End note: My little host brother is doing fine!  He seems very pleased with his new wee-wee, judging by the fact that he enjoys running around naked and staring at it/poking it/showing it to passersby in the living room.]

10/5/11