Part XIII:

So then there was that time I was evacuated because the air pollution from the forest fires had reached “very unhealthy and hazardous levels.” Yep. I’ll catch you up on the smog and lack of exciting activities this week in another post (trust me, not much to tell except I’ve been reading a lot – finished Station Eleven and am half way through Missoula – books about the end of the world and sexual assault on college campuses… I think I need a happy book next – any suggestions?).

But I jumped ahead on the last post. Our seventeen hours of travel was due to the fact that we were coming back from two weeks of orientation with my fellow fulbrighters in Bandung!

Two weeks ago, I met Carlie at the airport and we headed back to Jakarta. Once there, we found the rest of our cohort settled in to an airport restaurant and it felt like the happiest of reunions! We had each been deposited in varying types of places in every corner of this country. No one could speak Indonesian and none of us had fully understood that our new role is half teacher, half pest killer. Needless to say, that was one of the funnest moments of this whole journey so far – as we shared stories of our new normal and laughed with each other about all the people we accidently offended by forgetting to only use our right hand, and never our left, and sitting with the bottom of our feet pointed at someone (both signs of disrespect). It was also a delight to see Ceacealia and Thasia, and later the rest of AMINEF, again. We were back in safe hands.

Once everyone had arrived, we loaded up a big bus and began the 3-ish hour journey to Bandung. Bandung is a large city of 2.5 million people and it was fascinating to see something so entirely different from my week in Palangkaraya. Then, we pulled into the Sheraton and the differences multiplied exponentially. Um, we got to stay at a beautiful 5-star hotel for two whole weeks. The staff waited on us hands and feet, always at our beck and call, and providing us with more food than I’ve ever been offered in my life. Incredible breakfast and lunch buffets every day, with both Western and Indonesian food, and then… outside the rooms where we had our sessions and Bahasa class, there was always a huge table, piled with beautifully crafted snacks and desserts. It was heaven. I’m also pretty certain I gained five pounds in the first two days, when I then decided I had to have some self-control, none of this food was going anywhere… I was here for two weeks.

For two weeks, we had session after session, covering everything from Indonesian faux pas, to teaching strategies, and of course, Bahasa.* On our first full day, we had to take a placement exam and were then divided into four classes. As the majority of us knew no Indonesian, there were three beginner levels, and one “post-beginner.” AMINEF had hired four Bahasa teachers from a language school in Jogja to teach us for the whole two weeks. I was lucky enough to get Moko as my teacher, who in my completely biased opinion, is by far the best and most fun teacher. Every day, my class of 7 had about 3-4 hours of Bahasa class and moved at a quick, but comfortable pace through greetings, introductions, basic objects, colors, basic questions, numbers, time, activities, shopping, days/weeks/months, food, places, positions, directions, transportation, imperatives, and adjectives. Needless to say, it was a very thorough introduction to Indonesian in just two weeks! *(Bahasa = “language”; Bahasa Indonesian is the correct term but I’ll refer to the language here as both “Bahasa” and “Indonesian”… sorry)

Bahasa class was absolutely my favorite part of every day. Moko is an incredible teacher and gave us unique tasks to practice and the funnest of games to play. We got to know the hotel staff quite well as in the middle of class, Moko would send us out to use our latest vocabulary of “Anda bangun jam berapa?” “What time do you get up in the morning?” on our nearest (unlucky?) interview subjects. They were quite amused by us everyday 🙂

We also got to spend a lot of time outside the classroom with Moko and the other teachers. They came to karaoke with us, took us to the market to practice using Bahasa to bargain, and enjoyed a few meals with us. I love that in Indonesia, the relational divide between students and teachers is small – it’s perfectly normal to be friends on facebook with your teacher, to text them, to go to dinner with them, and to drink a little too much in front of them. We had a blast.

I’m planning on continuing taking anguage classes from Wisma Bahasa through their one-on-one skype classes. I could keep working with Moko as my teacher and would get to continue learning the language in a structured sense, in addition to the practice I’ll get just by living here. I finally have a modem so have a semi-reliable internet connection to use skype… Really excited about the possibility of improving my Indonesian to the point where I can maybe actually understand what is going on around me!

The US Ambassador to Indonesia came to visit us one day. That was pretty cool.

And we got to practice teaching at a real public high school in Bandung. We each had a partner and taught for 45 minutes! It was a blast and the students loved it.

One night, one of the returners organized a futsal match for us against the hotel staff. Futsal = soccer and in this context, it was an like a small indoor soccer field and you play with a heavier soccer ball. Although we were absolutely destroyed by the hotel staff, we had a blast. We played six on the field at a time and had three groups of six trading off every five minutes or so throughout the hour we played. I’m not sure if we were all completely out of shape or whether it was the altitude, smoke (pollution + cigarette smoke from the 20 or so observers), or some combination of all of it but man… each of our five minutes of playing was exhausting!

We also had plenty of time to explore the city of Bandung and enjoy ourselves. We learned the angkot system (public transportation – vans that are kind of like buses?), bought batik (special patterned fabric that you can tailor into clothes), explored the market, went to bars, sang karaoke several times (why is that not a thing in the US? It’s SO much fun), and overall, had a fabulous time together.

Oh, and we climbed a mountain. Sunday was our free day and we had met an Indonesian couple who invited us to go hiking with them. A group of us left with them at 6am and we hiked 7.5 miles roundtrip – up a steeppppppp dirt road to the top of a mountain overlooking the valley and the city of Bandung. It was stunning. Then back down through the jungle and through a cave!!! It was a man-made cave from about 100 years ago, that the Dutch colonizers forced their native Indonesian slaves to build to hide from rebelling Indonesian forces. It had all these passageways and rooms and the remains of a wire tap communication system. And bats. It was 100% epic.

Some of the sessions got a bit long and boring… and Chris decided to teach me how to do a Rubik’s cube. In two days, learning step by step, I mastered it! Then, came the fun of trying to do it as fast as I could! I got it down to 1 minute 59 seconds… I even found a (shitty) Rubik’s cube at the local hypermart (~mini walmart) so I can keep practicing. I could be a Rubik’s cube whiz by the end of this year with how much time I have on my hands.

The not so fun part of orientation came when I got sick 🙁 About a week into orientation, someone caught a cold and considering our close quarters, it passed around pretty quickly and by Monday of the second week, about half our group was feeling less than ideal. Luckily though, no one was too sick from stomach issues, which is what we had all expected to be dealing with – not to say no one had diahhrea. I’m quite certain we all did at one point or another, it just wasn’t too terrible.

For whatever reason, when I caught the cold, I caught the flu version of it. All day Monday and Tuesday I felt worse and worse, half the day sweating and hot, half the day freezing and shivering. By the last session on Tuesday I must have looked quite awful, for Ceacealia (one of the AMINEF staff, aka our mother/protecter) comes over to me and says, “Mackenzie, are you okay?!” I was not, clearly, and she offered to call a doctor, which, in my feverish state, I (foolishly?) declined on the premise that if I was worse tomorrow, she could call a doctor. I pushed through the end of the session before heading straight to bed. I slept fitfully from 6pm-6am and woke up having gained some stomach issues but lost the fever. I’ll chalk it up as a win.

It took most of the next day and on the advice of Ceacealia, lots of tea, orange slices, and watermelon, before I finally felt like myself again. By the end of orientation I felt fully recovered and glad that if I had to be sick, it happened in a five-star hotel with all my friends and under the watchful eye of aminef, and not by myself in the middle of Kalimantan. Knock on wood.

And now, I’m back in Palangkaraya. I’ve spent the entire week doing pretty much nothing. School was canceled from September 10th through the 17th and then extended again until the 25th because the smog is so terrible. This means I’m beem pretty much confined to my house with no means of transportation and hazardous levels of smoke outside (although my house is open air, so it’s not like staying inside is any better). Midway through my first morning back, I couldn’t believe how black my feet had gotten in just a few hours and so I figured I should sweep out my house. Well, that’s when I realized that a lovely dusting of ash descended on absolutely every inch of my house. The more I swept, the whiter my tile floors became but also the larger and blacker my dust pile became. Reality check.

And now, after a week of sitting here, we received a call from aminef today informing us that they are “temporarily evacuating” us to Benjarmasin until the level of air pollution recedes to less toxic levels. YAY! Because the airports are closed we are being driven to Benjarmasin, about 5 hours away in South Kalimantan. It’s supposed to be a large, bustling city and although it has some smog, it’s not nearly at the level that we have here. It’s also the home to Joel, a fellow ETA! We’ll be staying in a hotel during our Benjarmasin stay but we’ll get to hang out with Joel and his coteachers at his school. Pretty pumped about this extra vacation and the respite from the smog and its accompanying dreary, boring days.