Thanksgiving Day

Not much is happening around here on Thanksgiving. We didn’t get the day off of school, but we do have Black Friday off, so celebrations with friends will take place then. My white friend, Melanie, and I are cooking a whole Thanksgiving dinner (complete with two turkeys!) for about 15 Indonesian friends that we love very, very much. I’m excited for the day! Since I’m cooking both turkeys tomorrow, I’m trying to get other things out of the way tonight, so crescent rolls (made from scratch, thank you very much) are in the oven now.

Rainy season is truly in full swing starting this week. It has poured down rain every single day, and it’s been starting earlier and earlier every day. Today it was raining by lunch time. The cold and the damp have made things feel really fall-ish though, so for possibly this week only, rainy season is not entirely unwelcome.

Since I really have nothing exciting to report today, I’m going to post instead about what I did two weekends ago. Remember how I went and planted rice at Pak Kur’s house approximately 3 months ago? Well, at 91 days, Pak Kur declared the rice ready to harvest, so three of the four same ladies who planted the paddy went and harvested it! One moved back to Germany temporarily and due to that, we ever so kindly excused her from her harvesting duties.

Dunja, Melanie, and I in a nice self portrait after we were dirty, sweat, and sunburnt in front of the petak (section of a rice field) we planted all by ourselves! The baby rice that we used to plant the big petak is growing right behind us.

The bule (white person) petak! All the neighbors knew that bule had planted this petak, so they joked with Pak Kur that the rice would grow more quickly and the harvest would be more plentiful and that if that really did happen, they were going to start having us plant their rice too! Also, we came back the next day with one other friend to plant that empty part on the right.

Here is the bule petak after 64 days, I think it was. So about two-thirds of the way grown. The rice is starting to get heads on it – a lot like wheat! This is the time when Pak Kur started spending a LOT of time out there making sure the birds, bugs, and rats didn’t eat all the rice!

Aaaaaand here we have our full grown rice – precisely 91 days old – along with the majestic farmer himself, Pak Kur! (The following five pictures are courtesy of Kathryn, who helped plant the second day and came to harvest with us.)

Whenever we work in the fields, Pak Kur’s wife, Ibu Indah, brings us lunch, and we eat it beneath the chocolate tree (as I affectionately call it – it’s actually a cocoa tree or a cacao tree or something like that).

Pak Kur’s aging mother grew up working in the rice fields. Nowadays, they generally don’t let her come out for fear she’ll fall and hurt herself. But the day we harvested, there she was, walking around making crazy bird noises to keep all the animals away while we cut the rice. I kept a close eye on her while we worked, and she fell into one paddy once, but out of fear of shaming her, I merely watched from a distance to make sure she could pull herself back out. It took her roughly 2340793457 hours, but she slowly but surely got back up on her feet, no worse for the wear. I love this picture Kathryn got of her looking out over the lower paddies.

And here are some more pictures that I pulled off my camera.

   

Our petak completely harvested! We left the front bit because that’s where all the baby rice was growing when we planted, and so it ended up being planted later than the rest. It needed three more days, Pak Kur said. Rice harvesting is a VERY precise event.

We did the easy part of the work. We used sickle type knives to hand cut and stack all the rice. Later, the men of the family went out to thrash the rice on pieces of wood to get all the grains of rice off. THAT is hard work.

  

While we were eating our lunch beneath the chocolate tree, I could have sworn I heard the sound of horses walking nearby. I turned around, and instead of horses, I saw a neighbor herding his two buffalo along! Indonesian tractors!

Standing on one of the mud walls that separate one petak from another. Look how dirty my feet are! (PS – That rice is about three weeks old. It’s not Pak Kur’s.)

One time I noticed a bare light bulb hung on a piece of bamboo out in someone’s rice field, and I asked Pak Kur about it. He said that most rice farmers in that village run electric lines through the water in their paddies to keep the rodents out at night. He comes out in the morning and fishes up to 50 dead rats out of the edge of his various petak. He told me that if the light bulb is on, you shouldn’t go in that particular petak because it means the wire is live. They only turn the electricity on at night though, so in the daytime, it’s safe. I asked him what would happen if someone’s kid wandered out into the fields at night and got into the sawah (the Indonesian word for a rice paddy. I’ve felt awkward calling it a paddy throughout this entire post because I’m so used to calling it a sawah!). Matter-of-factly, he told me, “The kid would die”. I asked him how much electricity they have running through the wires, and he said, “Oh, more than enough to kill a buffalo”. Call me crazy, but that seems a bit overkill for keeping rats away…

So the moral of this post is: If you see a rice field with a light bulb shining in the middle of it, DON’T GO IN IT. I may have just saved your life.

Stations

I have geometry students in teams of five rotating between different stations today. I just told them it was time to rotate but that they could have a 5 minute break first since they'd already worked steadily for 40 minutes. Of course, they were being loud and obnoxious as they moved their things to the next station, and everyone just sat down and started working right away. Naturally, I figured they hadn't bothered to listen to me, so I asked, "Did anybody hear me say that you can have a 5 minute break?" Several students said, "Yes, we heard!" So I asked why they weren't taking a break. They said, "We don't want a break. We want to keep learning."

WHAT IS HAPPENING?!



** Edit - 30 minutes later **

And now we have this.

Pedro comes to my desk feeling very frustrated.
Pedro: TEACHER. The people in my group DON'T GET IT.
Me: So help them.
Pedro: But THEY CAN'T DO MATH.
Me: So be patient with them.
Pedro: I have to teach them EVERYTHING!
Me: Yes.....?
Pedro: You don't UNDERSTAND.
Me: Pedro. I teach them math EVERY. DAY.
Pedro: HOWWWWWW?????

Zee Avi

There is a Malaysian singer that I really like. Her name is Zee Avi. The two songs she does that I love the most are "First of the Gang to Die" - an excellent Morrissey cover - and "Kantoi" - a song that blends Malay and English (Manglish). Malaysian is so close to Indonesian that I can understand the language, but if I were to speak it, people would know that I live in Indonesia, not Malaysia. There are some grammatical differences, and there are also a few words that have slightly different meanings. For example, budak in Indonesian means slave, but in Malay it means child.

But back to Zee Avi. "Kantoi" just came up on my iTunes (which I have playing on shuffle for the majority of the day), and I thought to myself, "I should blog about this". There aren't many songs that blend two languages into almost every line of the lyrics, much less one that blends two languages that I can understand! So this song makes me happy. Also, it tells a story, and I like songs that tell stories. Admittedly, this song doesn't tell the most edifying story in the world, but it's meant to be a silly song.

You can watch her sing the song live here:

And the lyrics are these:
Semalam I call you, you tak answer                   You kata you keluar pergi dinnerYou kata you keluar dengan kawan youBut when I called Tommy he said it wasn't true
So I drove my car pergi DamansaraTommy kata maybe you tengok bolaTapi bila i sampai you, you tak adaLagilah I jadi gila
So I called and called sampai you answerYou kata sorry sayang tadi tak dengarMy phone was on silent I was at the gymTapi latar belakang suara perempuan lain
Sudahlah sayangI don't believe youI've always known that your words were never trueWhy am I with you, I pun tak tauNo wonderlah my friends pun tak suka you
So I guess that's the end of our storyAkhir kata she accepted his apologyTapi last last kita dapat tahuShe was cheating too
With her ex-boyfriend's best friend
Tommy

Geometry

We just finished a chapter on geometric constructions today. At the beginning, I told students to be careful with their compasses so that they wouldn't poke holes through the paper and into their desks. When doing constructions, I made them put their papers on top of their binders or on top of a few other papers to protect the desks. The desks in my classroom are the only desks at our school that were not made in the cold war era. I'm not even joking. They are nice desks, and I'd like to keep them that way.

Today, I made everyone check their desks. TWO out of TWENTY had no holes in them. Geometry got a nice long lecture first thing this morning. And then the test was a disaster. (This was my crazy 9th grade class from last year...) Everyone actually brought a compass. But TWO of them didn't bother to tell me until after they'd started the test that they'd brought BROKEN compasses to the test. Then I had to answer the same question, "What are concentric circles?" NINE times. Out loud for everyone to hear. I was exasperated.

On the test, I decided to have them do a little writing. It never hurts to get the kids writing, especially since only three in the class of 20 aren't ESL. So the last question on the test (after all the excruciating constructions and other geometric work they had to do) was, "Which construction did you find the most interesting and why? Write three to four sentences explaining your answer".

From my lowest scoring student who has turned in roughly 25% of his homework so far this year, I got this answer:

My favorite construction was the heart. Mostly because that is how I feel about this class. Love for geometry drives my motivation and I strive for success in this class. That is why I love the heart the most.

(I taught them last week to make a perfectly symmetric heart using only a compass and straightedge. It's pretty cool.)

And then I found this one on the second to last test I graded:

Constructing an equilateral triangle. Why? It's because of the sharpness of its edges, the beauty of its simplicity, and the fact that it's so easy it reminds me that one day I'll get out of this dark limbo of suffering called school. That one day I won't be slaving my days away like a rice farmer in China getting relocated to a government facility. Also, the triangle looks like a flat Dorito chip. Doritos are delicious. With cheese it's better, but plain Dorito is fine too. I wish they sell Doritos here. Then I'll go full Mexican and eat all day. Maybe I'll even swim the border to Australia with my Mexican border crossing powers."

I may or may not have audibly snorted while grading that response.

In other news, I have now been called "bro" three times today by students.

This Is The Life

Sitting at my desk at school.
Drinking fresh, cold mango juice (that I made myself) out of a Mason jar.
Tropical sunshine pouring in through the window.
All five AP Calculus students working diligently on integration homework.
I declare this Monday A Good Day.

Prayers

For those of you reading this who are of the praying type, prayers would be appreciated for my friend, Amber. After living and serving here for two years, she left this week on Wednesday to move back to America to get married. She was met at the airport in her home state yesterday by her boyfriend, parents, and sister. While they were still on their way home from the airport, her mother passed out and was rushed to the hospital.

She had a similar attack three years ago when it was discovered that her heart was very weak. Doctors recommended putting in a pacemaker at that time, but the family chose instead to let God be God. They have known about her weakened heart for the past three years and have known that an attack like this was probable, but in day to day life, their mom has always appeared healthy, making this attack seem very sudden and unexpected.

When she arrived at the hospital yesterday, she was put on a ventilator. The family made the decision to wait for Amber's brother in law to arrive at the hospital (he was in another part of the state at that time) and then to remove the ventilator. Doctors warned them against this, saying that she was not breathing on her own and that her heart was extremely weakened. The family chose once again to let God be God.

If I have my time zones correct, they should have taken her off the ventilator nearly two hours ago. I haven't yet heard any information at this time as to her mother's condition.

After three days of travel, Amber hasn't even made it home yet and is now in the hospital with her family. Needless to say, this is a hugely emotional time for all of them, but especially for Amber as she is jet lagged, tired, and dealing with the emotions of all the goodbyes she has said over the past week.

I know that Amber and her family are firm believers and that all their hope and trust is in Christ, even through this time. But even so, please lift them up in prayer. We are all part of the Body, and when one part hurts, we all hurt.

** Update **
Directly from Amber.

Hello friends, thanks so much for all your prayers, love and support. Mom's levels have stayed pretty stable for the last day or so, not a whole lot changing. The doctors say that she has some sort of brain function because she is breathing on her own, but other than that we don't really know or have proof of any other brain function. We know this is the end and are just waiting on the Jesus to take her home.
We are still in Wichita this morning and are hoping that mom can be moved to hospice care in Salina so that we are all a little closer to home. We were hoping that this could have happened yesterday and then at the last minute the plan changed and it didn't work out, still not really sure why. The doctors say that it could be anywhere from hours to days and for this reason we decided it would be best for the whole family if we could get her moved to Salina and only be 30 min from home as opposed to 1.5 hrs from home.
Everyone was able to shower and at least get a little sleep yesterday afternoon and evening, which we are praising the Lord for!! So thankful for friends that live close and have opened up their houses for us to come over and use. It's amazing how much difference a shower can make. =)
Anyways, I think we are all hanging in there. This has been really hard on dad as he was the one who made the call into 911 when everything happened and now he feels like the condition that mom is in is his fault, and he feels bad because he knows this is not what mom would want. Pray for him that he will be relieved of this guilt that he is carrying and know that God has a plan in all of this even.
Thanks again so much for the outpouring of love and support!!
-Amber

** The latest update **

We got mom moved to Salina around 1, and the doctor this morning said we were probably looking at another 24 hours. The nurse said earlier that they are starting to see more signs of death (there is a special term, but I can't think of it), so we are thinking that maybe tonight mom will finally get to see Jesus.

** The final update - Thanks to everyone for continued prayers!! **

From Amber this morning:

Heaven is a wonderful place...
And that is just where my mom is, in heaven worshiping her Lord and Savior. She is healed and worshiping Jesus, and I'm kind of jealous that she gets to see Him first. She was a great mom, wife, friend and she will be missed, but we know that God is, has been and will continue to be glorified through my mom's life.

We made funeral arrangements this morning and picked out cemetery plots this afternoon. Because of Thanksgiving the funeral won't be held until Saturday morning.

I think we are all holding up alright, I am quite tired and looking forward to hopefully getting a good nights rest tonight, my first real nights sleep since last Thursday night when I was in Jakarta before heading out. There is a lot to figure out in the weeks to come, finances, life, budgets and all that, but with the help of my sister, we should be able to get that all figured out for Dad. I am so thankful that I'm here to help Dad during this time . . . guess I'm going to have to teach him how to cook.

Thanks again for all your love and prayers, we are such a blessed family!

-Amber

PICTURE TIMES!

It’s been a really long time since I’ve done a good old picture post. This is basically where I dump everything from my point and shoot’s 8G memory card onto my laptop, delete all the boring pictures, and post anything even remotely interesting on my blog! Since I almost always have a camera on me wherever I go, I end up with quite a collection of shots. So here’s the most recent batch.

1. I was eating lunch at a really nice outdoor restaurant in town when this bird flew into the trees overhead and caused quite a stir.

Javanese people REALLY love birds. In fact, there’s not a whole lot of them flying around because most of them live in cages. They are more for decoration and conversation pieces than anything else. They have songbird competitions, and winners can then be sold for as much as $5000! Crazy, right? Well, since this bird was so unique – apparently, white birds are hard to come by here – some of the restaurant employees decided to use a large net to catch it!

Sadly for them – but luckily for the bird – they did not succeed, and the bird flew away, out over the nearby rice fields.

2. After lunch that same day, we went to see a marching band parade. I knew some of the students who would be in it, and I love me a good marching band. I quickly found out that Indonesian marching band parades are NOT AT ALL like American ones. We were told a certain intersection that the parade would pass through, and when we arrived there, there was nothing out of the ordinary except for a police man posted there. Traffic was flowing from all four directions. So we asked the police officer if we had missed the parade, and he told us to just wait. And sure enough, after about 10 minutes, we heard them coming! The police officer stepped into the intersection to stop the flow of traffic… But the band had to weave through oncoming traffic that was now standing still!

These kids were in their FOURTH hour of marching in uniform in the mid-day heat.

And of course, right behind them came a huge rush of motorbikes and automobiles.

After each band was about 15 – 20 minutes of nothingness before the next band came along. So in between, I took the following pictures. These two boys tore by carrying bags of uncooked rice. Look closely at their shirts.

This is my best boy, Jafro, whom I’ve mentioned in other blog posts. He was being a good sport about the heat and boredom and playing nicely with me. This is the kid that the noodle guy thought was my baby. As you can see, there is a very strong family resemblance…

      

And then we have a wall that I liked and a bunch of random advertisement banners, much more commonly used than billboards here.

    

And a political ad for the Democratic Party painted on the side of a wall.

It says, “One for all. All for one. All for all.” But what I really like about it is that it uses the old Dutch spelling. These days, the oe vowel that came from the Dutch influence has been replaced by the u vowel in Indonesian – they have the same sound. So written in modern Indonesian, this would say, “Satu untuk Semua. Semua untuk Satu. Semua untuk Semua.”

3. Ibu Sri, my helper, told me that she wanted to learn how to make burgers. Obviously, I am totally down with that, so I left her written instructions in Indonesian on how to do it, not really sure of how they would turn out… This woman constantly amazes me. Not only did she make HUGE juicy burgers, she also made homemade buns AND barbecue-ish sauce, and served them up with two burgers per bun. Burgers are now in the regular menu rotation at my house.

4. The emphasis on handwriting in the Eastern world is so much more than that of the Western world. Here are examples from two females in the 10th grade, one Asian and one American. This is the exact same homework assignment.

5. While I’m on the topic of food, which I’m not, but was two numbers ago (/\ /\), let me show you a picture of something I cooked. It’s the last of 10 pounds of frozen tilapia filets I bought a year ago along with an entire box of cous cous that my mom sent me from America. Sometimes it’s like I don’t sacrifice anything at all to be here. Please also note my new dishes that I bought over the summer!

6. This was my team for our all school field day a couple of weeks ago. The theme this year was Amazing Race, and each K-12 team represented a country and had to compete in many challenges. My team was South Africa. Our Kindergarten representative was the ever adorable Sammy who kept cheering things like, “I’M WEENER!” and “GOOOO SOUF APICA!!!” He’s the cutest.

7. This happens pretty much every day. The good news is I seem to be way less allergic to cats than I was before. Since it’s been at least threatening rain almost every day lately, the cats have been in my house more than normal, but I haven’t been sneezing at ALL!

8. When I first moved here, I bought this rug to put in my bathroom. I have loved it dearly because I love trees and circular things. But it’s been getting holes and such, so I bought a new, much more boring rug, and gave this one to a friend who wanted it. I took a picture of it before it moved to its new home. For posterity’s sake, of course. It was a good rug for 4 years.

9. A different parade that we went to at the town center. There were so many people pressing in to see, it was hard to tell what was part of the crowd and what was part of the parade.

10. Pak Kur, my friend whose rice field I often work in, invited me to his son’s baptism. So a few Sundays ago, I woke up at 5 in the morning in order to leave by 6 in order to get there by 6:30 so that we could walk to the village church by 7. This particular village church uses only Javanese. And not even the lower two levels, which I might have been able to understand. No, they use the third level of Javanese, Kromo Inggil. All I understood from the three hour service was “Gusti” (Lord) and “Amin” (Amen).

Two babies were dedicated and three men were baptized that day. The odd thing was that when they dedicated the babies, the pastor sprinkled water on their heads. But when he baptized the three men, there was no water used. He just prayed over them, and then they had to face the congregation and say something. Angga, Pak Kur’s son, is the one in the middle with the brown-ish shirt on.

Partway through the second hour of sitting on a stiff wooden bench in the growing heat while not understanding ANYTHING, I got REALLY drowsy. I was trying so hard to stay awake. Then God sent a miracle to keep me awake. We all stood for prayer. Then when I opened my eyes after the “Amin”, this is what I saw:

Do you see it?? Look closely…

This gecko randomly came out of nowhere and ended up on the shoulder of the nenek (grandmother) in front of me!! This woke me up and kept me HIGHLY amused for the next five minutes or so as Pak Kur alternated between whispering to me about whether or not we should try to knock it off of her before she screamed in church and elbowing me in the ribs for stifling my laughter a little too loudly. In the end, I used a piece of paper to brush it off her shoulder without her ever knowing. But it was so fast, I couldn’t knock it to the floor. It ran along the backrest of the bench she was sitting on and onto the shoulder of another nenek who was out of my reach!! That nenek then stood up (without knowing the gecko was getting a free ride) and walked to the back of the church because the baby she was holding had started fussing. After that, I didn’t see the fate of the gecko. But no old ladies screamed in church that day, so it was pretty anticlimactic.

After church, we went out to see the rice that we planted two months before. The grains of rice were starting to form, and it looked really, really good!!

11. And now welcome to a collection of really random things I have found around town/my house/my church/school.

a. The pimpest motorbike I’ve ever seen. EVER. Parked outside the karaoke place.

b. A new brand of ice cream I found at Alfamart. Dung dung anyone?? (It’s actually nangka (jackfruit) flavored.)

c. The biggest cockroach I HAVE EVER SEEN in my house. It lived approximately 4 seconds beyond when this picture was taken.

d. No church skit is complete without Sigit dressed as a woman. He’s such a good sport about it though.

e. I’ve been finding these NASTY bugs in my house. And nobody has any clue what they are. But apparently, just looking at one gives me a swollen rash on random parts of my body that lasts for hours or until I douse it with coconut oil. Weird.

  

f. I’m doing a senior portrait shoot. Our seniors at their finest.

  

e. Those seniors look an awful lot like how I found my cats the other morning. This is what happens when I forget to shut the front door before I go to bed at night. I wake up with two cats in my bedroom.

  

f. And for a charming touch, this is also what happens when I forget to shut my door on the same day that my helper feeds chili to my cats and they haven’t been wormed in about six months. IT ALL COMES UP ALL OVER MY BEDSPREAD. Then the intestinal worms crawl around and two of them end up on the floor before I find them two hours later.

  

And on that oh, so appealing note, I’m fresh out of pictures. Now I bet you can’t wait for the next time I upload a batch!!