Maduran regalings

we got back from what was my second trip to madura at about 2 this morning.  before i interject my own opinions, let me tell you about the trip. we left thursday with 24 people total: 20 students, 2 teachers, and 2 indonesian friends – yohanes and aan.

the drive there was fantastic. no difficulties or stopped traffic anywhere. we passed the place where noordin m top, the terrorist, was killed a few months back. our bus driver was sure to point that out to us. we made really good time and got into madura at a decent hour. we took the suramadu bridge – one of the longest in the world (almost three and a half miles)! last time we went, all the lights had been stolen from the bridge, so it was entirely dark. but this time, the lights had been replaced and the suspension portion of the bridge glowed in a variety of irridescent colors. it was a little… strange. the bridge starts in surabaya, the second largest city on java. getting to the bridge is quite the feat. no main road goes anywhere near it. in american terms, it would be the convenience equivalent of getting off the highway, driving through six subdivisions, negotiating a couple ghettos, and driving up and down every lane of three wal-mart parking lots. in a tour bus. however, it is still easily the fastest way to get to the island of madura.

we had twelve hotel rooms waiting for the 24 of us when we arrived in the city of camplong. we quickly paired off, grabbed our luggage and keys, and headed to our rooms. nasreen, my roommate, and i were in for a rough night. as soon as we walked into our bungalow-style room, we were hit with the overpowering stench of kerosene. we took one look at the beds and quickly decided to strip them down to the mattresses. then one look at the mattresses almost made us change our minds. we instead found whatever blankets and towels we had brought with us and spread those across the mattresses. my mattress had blood stains on it. nas’s smelled like it had something dead in it. both our sheets and pillows had blood stains and large holes ripped in them. also, the windows in our room didn’t shut and there were no screens, so the room was full of mosquitoes. we decided to sleep in jeans and sweatshirts in the sweltering room to prevent bug bites. but there was no AC and the fan shut off when you shut the lights off. we jimmyrigged a way to keep the fan on with the lights off and jumped into bed fully clothed. notice i didn’t mention anything about showering or brushing our teeth. that would be because our bathroom had no running water and the toilet was unmentionable. there was a room above ours that 2 other girls were staying in. they also had no running water, but whenever  they used their toilet, some curious smelling liquid would drip down into our bathroom.

so back to sleep times. i think i slept a total of about 10 minutes when i heard the sound of something in my bed. i mumbled some kind of “what is that?” to which nas mumbled back a “ggrgrrrrrwhat?” i was too exhausted to say anything back. until she said. “rat.”  that woke me up. rat IN MY BED. WITH ME. i sat up quickly – a little too quickly for my kerosene fume induced headache, and scared it out of my bed. i was sitting there trying to absorb this all when i saw the rat thing run from under my bed to under nasreen’s. i have to say, it didn’t look like a rat. it didn’t look like anything. it was black. it had teeth. it ran with no sound. later i asked nasreen if she ACTUALLY saw that it was a rat. she said no. she just saw something black sitting on my bed, but it didn’t look like anything. we are still not sure if i had a rat or a demon in my bed. either one is equally as likely.

at the time though, i thought it was a rat. we decided to sleep outside. except we were locked in our room. after banging around with it for awhile, we finally got the lock to work (horray for skeleton keys) and let ourselves out. we slept on the porch with nasreen using me as pillow. until mosquitoes started biting her face and going up my jeans to bite my legs. and then a gecko pooped on me. so we went back inside and decided to sleep with the lights on to keep the rats away. oh, my. such a disturbing and sleepless night. including time spent sleeping on the bus ride, i think i slept a grand total of 2 hours that night.

nasreen in our bad, bad hotel room

our entire bathroom. the only water we had was in that bucket.

me holding up my bedsheet. notice the giant hole and the bloodstains.

friday morning, we woke up at 6:30, had some rice and coffee for breakfast, checked out of our hotel, then drove to the local middle school to teach english. i mostly walked around taking pictures of my students teaching. i helped teach head and shoulders, knees and toes to one class. later, i walked by another class that had no teacher in it. the students were reaching their arms through the barred windows of the classroom shouting “come here! teach us!” as a teacher, you can’t ignore that. so i went in and talked with them for awhile and then took a picture of them, which got them REALLY excited!

after the middle school, we headed to the pesantren – muslim boarding school – in sampang, the next town over. this was the school where i had such a bad experience last time, and i was just praying the whole way that God would help my attitude. we divided up between the middle school and the high school, and i ended up being the only adult at the middle school. at first, i was going from class to class making sure my students were ok. the kids there are extremely rowdy and have very little respect. one female teacher was trying to get her class to quiet down so that our students could talk, and one of the male students stood up and called her a whore in front of the whole class. she did nothing. i also saw a female student walk up to  male teacher to ask him a question. he raised his hand to strike her, and she ran away, back to her desk. emotionally, this school is a very hard place for me to be, because besides seeing others treated like that, that is how we are treated as well.

i eventually got pulled into a room to talk with some teachers, the head of religion for the school, and the headmaster. it was interesting… they wanted to practice their english, but when that failed them, i got to practice my indonesian! the headmaster was wearing a red track suit and smoking a cigarette. different. i spent about an hour talking to them. we had some good conversations. i had a lot of opportunities to mention Jesus, but because of where i was and who i was with, i felt like i had to hold back a lot. i was very unsure about how free i could be without jeopardizing our chances for being able to return to that school.  i got asked lots of interesting questions like “how many boyfriends do you have?”, “what is your opinion of terrorism in indonesia?”, “how much money do you make in a month?”, and “how free are christian men and women in their relationships with each other?” (they assumed that since america is a “christian nation”, all americans must be christians, and so what they see in movies and on tv must be what all christians are like.) wow. some hard stuff to answer. some interesting issues to address. in a foreign language.

after leaving the pesantren, we checked in to our (much nicer) hotel in sampang and the kids were free for the rest of the day. many of them met with old friends from previous trips and continued building relationships with them. i, however, was running on E and took a nap.  in the afternoon, some students from a language course came to our hotel to practice their conversational english with us. these students ranged in age from young children to people in their fifties. they were tons of fun to talk to because we could have actual conversations and teach them something at the same time! and they were all there because they WANTED to learn the language. i think that makes the biggest difference.

marjolein, a dutch student, talking to some students from the english course.

the students stayed at our hotel during a rainstorm, then after it cleared up, they walked with us to a local fish farm where we all hung out and continued to talk and take thousands of pictures.

on the shores of the fish ponds

after those students left, we gave each of our students some money for dinner and set them loose in town. white people are like magnets there. wherever a white person is, a crowd is sure to follow. so we just tried to spread out and talk to people. some girls spent hours in the dorm of the boarding school talking with and witnessing to girls. they understand that something is fundamentally wrong with their religion. they know the way they are treated in their culture isn’t right. but they don’t know what to do about it. this is how they’ve lived for generations.  our girls do an awesome job of being examples and lights to them.

i was eating dinner with a couple of girls when a friend that one of them had made on a previous trip came up to talk. her brother was with her. unlike most madurese men, who can be very pushy, domineering, and inappropriately forward, he was very respectful, kept his distance, and didn’t try to talk to us beyond greeting us briefly. it was refreshing. the sister (i missed her name) invited us to go to a night market with her, and we agreed. her brother excused himself and left on his motorbike. we took becaks (rickshaws) to the market and ended up in a little shop owned by her sister, who is 9 months pregnant. she was a cute little lady and we spent quite awhile talking to her, and we met her husband as well. after a short while, the brother showed back up, but he was acting different. he was very pushy and aggressive. he kept coming right up next to us and trying to take pictures with us with his phone. he even asked us to take off our head coverings! (roughly like asking an american girl to take her shirt off). we were so uncomfortable that we came up with an excuse to leave, and we decided to jalan jalan (walk) back to where we had eaten dinner, about a kilometer away.  one of our girls asked the indonesian girl why her brother had asked us to take off our coverings and show him our heads. the girl got very confused and said, “that’s not my brother.”  we described him and told her that she introduced him to us as her brother back in town. she said that yes, THAT was her brother, but the guy in the store wasn’t.  she said she had never seen him before in her life. and among the 5 of us, there was NO DOUBT that this was the exact same guy. he and his motorbike were both very distinctive. right as we were talking about it, the brother/not brother rode up to us on his bike, coming from the direction of the shop we had just left. the girl said that THIS was her brother. again, same guy. she was getting frustrated about the confusion, so we let the matter drop. but it raised a lot of questions in our minds about possible demonic activity happening there.

old ladies asleep on the sidewalk. this made me really sad.

while walking back into town, another old friend passed on her motorbike and invited us to her cousin’s house, which happened to be right across the street from where we were, to try rujak. we agreed. who can pass up the adventure of eating vegetables and cow lips in hot sauce?!

a lady making our rujak beside the street, in front of the house

eating our cow lips! 

we got to go into their home and sit and talk to her family. i was talking to her cousin, and he asked if we were muslim (we get asked that a lot because we wear head coverings while there), and i said no, that we were christian. he got all excited and said that he was too. i was speechless! i’ve never met a christian on madura! it’s 100% muslim! but then he went right on to say, “but i’m not anymore. now i’m muslim.” danget. i got to meet his 4 year old daughter, who he said was very nakal (naughty). i thought she was really sweet! she kept sneaking up behind me to touch me but wouldn’t talk to me. they kept telling her “salam tantamu!” greet your aunt (term of respect), but she wouldn’t. until we left. she took my hand and kissed it. her dad told her that we were leaving, then asked if she wanted to go with me. she pondered it for a few seconds, then screamed, “NGGAK! RUMAH TANTA JELEK!” (no! auntie’s house is UGLY!) baha. nakal indeed.

as we were walking back to our hotel at 10 o’clock at night, God orchestrated this huge deal where i managed to run into EVERY SINGLE girl that was with us on the way, and so we all 9 walked back to the hotel together. that was awesome, because i was able to make sure that all my girls made it back safely. and also, we were a lot safer being in a group that large. there were no other women out at that hour, just men. we got a much better night of sleep and even got baths before bed! aahhh, so refreshing.

our MUCH nicer hotel room!

the next morning, we grabbed some breakfast at the hotel (fried rice… yum), loaded up the bus, and set out for home. but not before stopping at two more schools on the way!

the first was a local high school. it was incredible. the people there were super welcoming and had excellent english. two girls volunteered to give me a tour of the entire school. they had near fluent english. every classroom had a projector and besides having a library and a computer lab (most schools there don’t have ANY computers), there was also a physics lab and a chemistry lab. their school was more developed than ours! i think our kids had a really good time teaching there too. their students were very responsive and interactive, but polite and attentive. that’s the first time i’ve seen that in madura.

  me and my two tour guides

the 10th grade courtyard

  a team of our students teaching new vocab words

after our visit at the high school, we headed to another middle school in a village, jrengik. that’s a fun word to say. try it.  they were very excited to partner with us as they try to find new methods to teach english at their school. their teachers were watching our students teach to get ideas from them. i got to sit and talk to several teachers at that school, and i had opportunity to share with them about my faith. after about an hour, nasreen came in and said she needed some help, so i excused myself and went with her. she had somehow ended up by herself in a room with 50 elementary kids who wanted someone to teach them something. that “room” ended up being the school mosque. so i introduced myself and practiced some conversation with them and then let them interview me. they asked a lot of really good questions! then they wanted to learn an american game. so i taught them heads up, seven up. it was really hard to keep the nakal little boys from cheating, but they seemed to enjoy it. then their teacher asked me to teach them a spice girls song. uhhhh… i had to tell him that i didn’t know any. he seemed surprised. hmmm… i am a regular myth buster. i taught them some other songs though. slightly more appropriate ones. in a mosque. in indonesia.

playing games in the mosque

  the middle school students waving goodbye to us as we pulled away

on the bus once again, we headed back across the bridge to surabaya where we spent a few hours readjusting to javanese culture in the mall. one floor of tunjungan plaza mall has more square footage than my hometown. and the mall has 7 floors! it is definitely culture shock to go from seeing all women wearing head coverings to seeing women in tank tops and mini skirts! at the mall, i found havarti cheese, my all time favorite! i haven’t had that since america. so good. i also found barbecue sauce and droste chocolates and martin guitar strings! i got really excited.

suit for sale in a fancy store in the surabaya mall. fashion almost always makes me laugh.

our bus driver was basically amazing. he got us back fast without driving maniacally. throughout the course of the weekend, he made three u-turns on indonesian roads. in a tour bus (think greyhound). at one point, we turned left when we should have turned right. the driver realized it mid-turn, and managed to back up into rush hour traffic coming from two directions, and make the right turn. brilliant.

i really think that God designed this trip in a such a way that i was obligated to go and give madura a second chance. i was dreading it for days, but i spent a lot of time praying about it. and every single one of my prayers, big and small, was answered. so many good things happened on this trip. no hardship was too big. no situation was too unforgiving. i still don't know that madura is a place where i feel called to minister. but i do know that i no longer hold resentment in my heart toward madurese culture.

being at the mall yesterday made me miss america. so today, i had my havarti cheese for breakfast. i made blueberry muffins for lunch. and then barbecue pork sandwiches for dinner. all things i haven’t had for almost 2 years now. except for i have had 1 other blueberry muffin but it cost a lot of money because a 10 ounce can of blueberries costs almost $12.

the end.