An Update of the Last 3 Months...

I am officially a Peace Corps Volunteer (PCV)!! About a week ago, my fellow trainees and I were sworn-in as volunteers by the US Ambassador to Indonesia in Malang and I just wanted to take this time to update y’all on what’s happened up to that point.

I arrived in Giri Purno (a village in the city of Batu) about a week after I arrived in Indonesia. Four of my friends and I lived there, each with a different host family. My family consisted of my mother (Ibu Lastri), her daughter (Didit, 15), her mother (nenek), and my mother’s sister-in-law (Ibu Tinet). Ibu is the Indonesian term for Mrs. /mother, so any older woman is called by “Ibu” (or Bu, pronounced “boo”, for short) and her given name. Bu Tinet’s daughter, Indra, runs a salon in the front of our house, so she and her family (her husband Titi and daughter Viven) were always there during the day. Bu Tinet’s son, Agung, attends a high school in Surabaya (about 3 hours away) so he is gone during the week, but comes back home on the weekends. It took me so long to learn everyone’s name and their relations to each other, but I figured it out eventually. Bu Lastri is so funny and a great cook—I ate so well there! She does the makeup for weddings all around Batu and Malang (there are so many!) and she is amazing at it. Bu Tinet sells rice at a traditional market nearby. Every evening, after coming home from work, she would eat dinner with me, help me study Bahasa Indonesia, and then we would watch “Karmila”, a popular soap opera. I didn’t really understand what was happening, but it gave me more exposure to the language, so I didn’t mind watching it with her. My 15-year-old host sister, Didit—lover of Taylor Swift, Justin Bieber, and Leonardo di Caprio—played the role of my primary translator any time words and expressions were lost in translation between other family members and myself.

The family dynamic of living in a house full of women was my favorite part of the entire experience. In a society with certain views and expectations of relationships between men and women, it was nice to always come home to a more liberal and free-spirited situation. Living there I was granted more freedom and autonomy than some of my friends who lived with more traditional families. The women came and went as they pleased, lived as they pleased, and entertained who they pleased without having to worry about impropriety on their part. One example of this is the phenomenon of smoking cigarettes in Indonesia; the men smoke heavily but it is considered inappropriate for women to smoke. While I don’t condone smoking for anyone regardless of their gender, I have to admit that it gave me a certain amount of pleasure knowing that my host mom could freely smoke a cigarette some evenings after she came home from a long day. She did what she wanted because she is the head of her house! I am eternally grateful to my family in Malang for their love, their easy friendship, and for the instruction in a different family structure from what my preconceived notions had made me believe.

Our daily schedule consisted of language training in the mornings and technical training for Teaching English as a Foreign Language (TEFL) in the afternoons. We were taught Bahasa Indonesia by Ibu Icha, who soon became our first Indonesian friend because of her open-mindedness, easy going personality, and her great sense of humor… she often laughed at our misspoken Indonesian words and we were able to joke with her about her English pronunciations as well! I will definitely miss having her around to accompany me to the market, assist me in honing my bargaining skills, and translate for when I don’t understand or am not understood. As I arrived at my new site two weeks ago, it was almost shocking to realize how much Bahasa Indonesia I learned over the past 3 months. During my first days in Indonesia I remember thinking that this language was so different from any of the languages I had previously learned and I didn’t know how any of it would ever make sense. Now, I have trouble thinking in any language but Bahasa Indonesia! I am nowhere close to fluent, but I have come a long way in the short time I have been here and hope to continue my education in the language for the next 2 years.

Part of our technical training consisted of completing a practicum at a local high school, Madrasah Aliyah Negeri 3 Malang (MAN 3). We went to the school twice a week for 4 weeks and team-taught English classes for an hour and a half. This was, undeniably, the best high school in all of Malang. The students were so enthusiastic, the teachers were so energetic, and they had all of the modern resources of a typical American classroom. It was completely impractical in terms of what we would experience at our future sites, but my friends and I definitely enjoyed teaching there!

One requirement of our Peace Corps service includes conducting a community project that would serve one or more of the 3 parts of the PC mission (learning about other cultures, introducing the American culture to others, and introducing other cultures to Americans) and serve the community in which you live. My friends in Giri Purno, Pandanrejo, and I had a few projects that we decided to work on. First, the 9 volunteers and I who had our practicum at MAN 3 felt like we should conduct some kind of a project there since they were so good to us and since we had created such a bond with the students. After talking to Pak Yoga, a teacher and our main contact there, we decided to have a Field Day for the students that we taught for the month we were there. What started as a half-day event to introduce some American games to a few classes evolved into a major International day/ farewell party/ talent show/ cheer competition/ costume contest with the 9 PC volunteers, the entire student body and staff, educators from all over East Java, other English-teaching programs such as English First and AISEC, and many news stations and press representatives. With the help and seemingly endless resources of Pak Yoga, the event was transformed from a small field day to “International Day at MAN 3… Connecting MAN 3 to the world”. It was HUGE. The 9 volunteers were dressed up in traditional Javanese Costumes, and then we operated our stations, which included a water balloon toss station, an American dance station (where Lauren and I taught the kids the electric slide and the cupid shuffle), a Peace Corps banner signing area, and a sidewalk chalk art station. We had so much fun and met so many amazing students and teachers there and are truly grateful for the experience!

Every 2 weeks, a group of women in our village came together to form a walking club. Dressed up in bright blue micro fiber jogging suits, they would eat hard candy by the bagfuls and walk through the rice fields and around Giri Purno. We would often join them on their walks, so when they told us that they had planned a cleanup of the village, we were eager to help out. After getting delayed many times, the cleanup was finally on! With our gloves on and trash bags handy, we were prepared to pick up the trash that was littered all over our village. As we soon learned, “cleanup” in Indonesia does not mean the same thing as it does in the states. For the walking club women it meant de-weeding certain areas of the village, not allowing men to help because it was not appropriate, and yelling at us to not pick up the trash because it was dirty! We were not able to convince them to allow us to conduct our version of a cleanup, but at least we know what we are up against in our permanent sites.

The last 3 months have sometimes been frustrating and extremely difficult, but they have also been eye opening and interesting. I’ve learned a language (and realized that I will soon need to know 3!); I’ve learned about a culture that is so different from my own; I’ve relearned how to do even the most simple tasks, such as doing laundry, using the bathroom, bathing, and even washing dishes. Even though I already knew that people in other parts of the world live so differently from how we live in the US, this experience has definitely made me realize just how differently life is on the other side of the world. The biggest lesson I have learned in Indonesia is that I need to be patient and just accept things as they are, things will never work as I expect them to, and sometimes that’s ok. Nothing will work exactly as I expect it to, whether attending a meeting or trying to take public transportation, and the sooner I embrace the ambiguity, the bettter my chances are of succeeding and actually accomplishing something here.

I know I am leaving out so much of what I have experienced here in last few weeks, but this is already so much longer than I expected it to be and I suspect that I may have already lost many of you! I am really excited about my service for the next 2 years and as soon as you forgive me for this really long letter I will update you with more details about my new home, my new school, and about all the unbelievable people here!