Punkins

Now that I've decided that fall is my most missed season, I'm obsessed with pumpkin. But you can't buy it in a can here. So I drove up the mountain until I found a lady selling pumpkins by the road. I bought just one. It was green. It looked funny. But all the orange ones were teeny tiny. So I put a giant pumpkin on my motorbike and drove it back down the mountain.

And I took my green leprous pumpkin and I made it into pumpkin puree. Two quarts and seven pints of pumpkin puree. It was a little more than I was bargaining for, and I'm getting annoyed with how all these jars of pumpkin are hogging the space in my fridge AND freezer.

Since they are taking up lots of valuable space, I've been trying to use them up fast. So far I've made pumpkin vanilla muffins, pumpkin bread, olive oil and sea salt roasted pumpkin seeds, pumpkin snicker doodles, and several pumpkin spice lattes for various people.

I've only used two and a half pints. 

Maybe I will start feeding it to my cats. Do cats like pumpkin?

In other culinary news, I have also taught myself how to make refried beans from SCRATCH. And tortilla chips. But then I ran out of tortilla chips and I was too lazy to make any more. So I finished off my bowl of refried beans with a spoon. Then I ate a papaya. Because fun fact - papaya counters the gaseous effect of other foods.

AND I made two jars of maple syrup. But not REAL maple syrup. Obviously. Sadly. But it's pretty good anyways.

If the cats don't like the pumpkin, maybe I'll put some maple syrup on it. Because who wouldn’t like that?

Cray Pays (Or: How You Know Someone Reads A Lot but Maybe Doesn't Get Out Much)

Me: What are you eating? Looks good.
Student: Oh, I'm just having some cray pays.
Me: Some WHAT now?
Student: Cray pays.
Me: *looking dubiously at his plate* Do you mean crepes?
Student: I suppose so, but for some reason, I've always been more of a fan of the original French pronunciation. Cray-pays.
Me: I'm pretty sure the French also say crepe.
Student: I don't think so.

Kenya

Those of you who know me well know that I lived briefly in Kenya before moving to Indonesia. And even more than that, you know how much of my heart I left there. When something happens that hurts Kenya, it hurts me.

Saturday, al-Shabaab militants - the same Somalian Muslim extremist group that kidnapped my former co-worker, Jess, and held her hostage in the desert for 3 months - stormed a mall in Nairobi and basically barricaded themselves in Nakumatt, a supermarket that  I frequently shopped at while living there. So far, 68 civilians are dead - many of them children since the mall had been hosting a children's day - and nobody knows how many people they are still holding in the mall. We're in day 3 of the siege now.

I got news yesterday that 2 families from the school I worked at in Kenya were trapped inside the mall. I got news today that they are all out. Two students were wounded and one parent was killed.

I don't personally know those families, but I think how profoundly a death in our community would affect us here, and my heart breaks for my old school. When you live overseas in a small international community, you become a support network for one another - a lot like extended family.

I have friends, Kenyan and American both, who are teaching at two different schools there, and members of both schools have been affected directly by this situation. When kids ask questions in hard times like these, I know that I don't have the answers. So my heart goes out to the families who have lost loved ones, to the families still waiting to hear, bracing themselves for the worst, and also to those who now have the arduous task of helping hundreds of young ones process all of the whys that go along with any tragedy.

Please pray with me for Kenya.

Home

I may not have painted a single wall in my tiny apartment, but I have hung a few decorations, and every time I put up a picture or re-arrange the furniture, or buy a new dish for my kitchen, I start to feel like my house is becoming more like a home. It only took me 5 years…

I haven’t posted pictures of my place for so long, so I decided to do that today! I tried to take wide enough pictures that you can kind of stay oriented in each one as I move through the place and get a feel for what is where in relation to what. Hopefully it’s not that hard. My entire place consists of around 400 square feet (the exact same size as my classroom!) divided into three rooms – a bedroom, a bathroom, and one long room that serves as a kitchen/dining area and a living room. Here is the general layout.

I drew it perfectly to scale! 1 cm = 30 cm. I only know that because each of my floor tiles is 30 cm x 30 cm. Handy, no?

Soooo… Tour time! When you come in the front door, this is what you see.

I used to live almost entirely in my bedroom, but lately, I’ve made this little corner into my living area.

I put on a show or a movie and I sit on the couch and work on schooooooool. That is what has consumed many of my at-home hours the past several weeks.

Behind the front door is where I hide my jackets and cardigans and shoes and helmets and umbrellas and rain boots! It is dark behind the door and geckos like to crawl around in there. Sometimes I put a jacket on and a gecko falls out the sleeve. Not my favorite thing, but at least they keep the cockroaches from getting in there!

The couch used to be up against the wall in the corner, but I pulled it out a few weeks ago and decided I liked it like that. It kind of divides the room up into 2 more distinct spaces. I have cooking/eating space, and I have couch/TV space.

Looking the other way, you have the kitchen!

  

I still don’t know who put all those baskets on top of my cupboards. But I’ve never moved them. I really probably should someday. Because I’ve also never cleaned them. I’m sure they’ve got a nice layer of grime by now.

My stove and water dispenser are to the right of the sink.

And then my table is to the right of THAT, kind of in the middle of the room. The front door is just barely out of the picture on the right hand side.

Opposite the table is the doorway into the rest of the apartment.

To the left leads into my bedroom. Take the right, and you’ll end up in the bathroom.

Immediately to your left when you enter my bedroom is this wall.

The wall my massive desk occupies is straight ahead when you enter my room, so a 90 degree clockwise turn from the picture above. It was hard to take overlapping pictures in my bedroom because it is awkwardly shaped and very full!

 

My craft shelf (to the left of my desk) could use some organization…

Opposite the desk is the rest of my room. The door into my room is to the right of my lemari (wardrobe).

 

Oh, hai, cat.

A parting view.

Down the hall.

Opposite ends of the bathroom. Not a whole lot to see here.

 

Everyone should make good use of their time by keeping a book by the toilet, I say!

So that was the entire tour! Not a whole lot to see, I know… So here are a bunch more shots I took today of random stuff in my apartment.

   

The end.

PS – If you ever want a REAL tour of my house, I’d be more than thrilled to show you around! ; )

Our World is Full of Lies

Every year in Geometry class when we learn about conditional statements (sentences in if-then form), I have my students do a project analyzing advertisements. I’ve changed the project to fit the class’s needs every year. This year what they were assigned to do was to find one print advertisement and analyze its message. Once they thought they found the message, they had to write it as two different conditional statements. Some are easy to find. Some are a lot more hidden beneath the surface. But the general message of all advertising is, “If you buy __________ (our product), then you will be _______________ (smarter, healthier, more athletic, sexier, desirable to the opposite sex, etc.).” They then had to tell if each statement was true or false. After that, they had to play the part of a marketing director and come up with an alternative – preferably more truthful – advertisement for the same project. We did those first two parts in class. The last part was to take home their project over the weekend, think about what they had learned, and write a one page paper on it. I gave them specific questions to answer to serve as a guideline for their writing; some about what a marketing director does, some about how logic and geometry relate to marketing and advertising, some about what most challenged or surprised them about their project. I love assigning papers like that, because it’s a great way to see the individual personalities of my students. Maybe I’m just way too used to grading 9th and 10th grade (primarily ESL) writing, but I really feel like these kids are saying some pretty profound things here. Here are some of my favorite quotes from their papers. Some surprised me with their depth. Some surprised me with their brutal honesty!

“I was surprised to see how many messages are noticeable in an advertisement.”

“I think it (marketing director) would be an interesting job because it would involve a lot of research with human behavior. However it also wouldn’t be desirable because often it involves a lot of deception, and as a girl I understand how greatly an advertisement can affect how you think about yourself.”

“This project was fun and difficult because it really forced me to consider how our world is so full of lies.”

“In my point of view, if you lie on your marketing message it is a sin, because lying is a sin.”

“This (logic) could help you a lot when you are buying something very expensive expecting for it to do what the advertisement says, and later on finding out that you have wasted money. The company you bought that thing from isn’t sad that you’re unsatisfied, they are just happy they have your money.”

“I think that it is hard to make ads truthfully while making the readers buy the product.”

“The very smart creative directors try to grab your attention and make you say: I HAVE TO HAVE IT.”

“Advertising is just like what the serpent did in the garden, tweaking little parts of the truth to make things tempting, intentionally making the viewers desire something they originally did not.”

“I can understand why many advertisements do not bother trying to make things honest, because there is a very low chance of making a product as appealing with only truths. What surprised me was that the director of the advertisement I chose was being very smart about how he/she used words. The words together made nothing seem like a lie, yet when you think about it more, it implies lies that seem to slip into your mind so easily.”

“I am very not interested in being a creative director because I am not good at encouraging and motivating. Instead I would probably just tear people down by telling them how bad they are because I am good at doing that and also I enjoy doing that.”

“I actually used my brain logically! I didn’t use my brain for such long time. It was actually pretty fun researching.”

“If you can’t convince them, then fool them.”

“Trust is one of the most important factors of marketing.”

“To make advertisements that are fascinating, they must have creative messages. Creative messages should have some facts but mainly include some lies that make consumers curious about some products. Therefore, we should use our logic to analyze these advertisements since they have some lies.”

“When looking at an advertisement, subliminal messages may not be seen right away, but the more you think about it the more obvious the message becomes. The problem with advertisements with subliminal messages is that they can make people think less of themselves and waste lots of their money on products they don’t actually need.”

“In a lot of ways, this project  will change my perspective in looking at advertisements in the future. Now I will consider advertisements more carefully and think whether or not I actually need it. Thank you, Miss!”

“Consumers have the right to have accurate information on things they buy.”

“The most difficult thing about this project is making an advertisement because it is hard to make it interesting without lying. Also, I’m not a very good drawer.”

“Even though it is the marketer’s job to have accurate information, it is also my responsibility to think about ads.”

“We often get deceived by advertisements that say we would not be happy unless we have their product. In that part a Christian will train himself and learn not to comply to the many traps of the world.”

“I might be interested in being a creative director. It kind of depends whether I don’t have anything else better to do. It also depends whether the pay is good or not.”

“Advertising makes us think that our lives will be better with the product so we forget that our lives are actually good and that we don’t need the product.”

“For me, the most difficult part about this project is to find an honest marketing message that can persuade people to buy it, because it’s hard to persuade people with honest marketing messages, since the easiest way to persuade people is to make them imagine good things that makes them attracted with the products, and the words that can create imagination mostly are lies.”

“Because adults are big and mature, when they look at an advertisement, instantly they know if it’s telling the truth or not. But teens and children tend to believe in everything the message is telling.”

“The devil is good at tricking us into thinking that our lives will be just as good or even better without God, and I’m learning how to reject that false advertising.”

 

That last one… MAN! These are 14 and 15 year olds, and sometimes they school me.

One last thing to leave you with – a picture I took of the alternative advertisement one 10th grader drew. I really like her advertisement because I never knew she could draw before! Also, it’s the first time I’ve seen Pop-Tarts advertised as being 100% halal!