Podcasting and other computer projects at our school

We completed our first podcast last week; it was in an interview between two eighth graders here. One is from the international school and the other is from the national school. I have the podcast up on my cyberbali.com site for now as we can’t access the server for our schoolweb site as we need to ftp files over 500K and the company won’t let us use ftp. I also put a link up on the Education Podcast Network. It seems like it works, but there’s something wrong with the rss feed – well, it works but it looks funny. As I’ve written other rss files that have worked, I must have done something wrong with it as it was the first xml file that I tried. I’ll try to clean it up in a week or two.

We played the podcast over the school emergency broadcast system, and other than trying to get the sound on the system right, it worked well and the students liked it. Every class is working on podcasting now. I have the first/second grade combination working on them as well. They are looking forward to hearing themselves on a Friday morning.

After we’re done with this project, I’m going to have students work on developing an internet presence where they can save websites that they need. I started working on delicious, and I’m going to look into working with that again. It was a bit complicated for some of the students, but I think that if I introduce it very slowly this time, the majority of them will be able to handle it.

The photo actually has nothing to do with this post. It's my second daughter dressing up for one of the independence day activities last week.

More on Daily Life in an Indonesian Village

We’re deep in the dry season and the weather has been clear and cool lately. Last night it was 64 degrees F, and even now at 7:30 in the morning it’s only 68. As usual during the dry season, water is at a premium, but it’s something that you get used to here in Sumbawa.

Despite the lack of rain and water, we have some crops growing: our cauliflower in the back is doing well as is some green, leafy vegetable that tastes like spinach. We also have hundreds of tomatoes, which are doing well, and dozens of cucumbers that we have already started eating. Five of the banana trees and five of the papaya trees are bearing fruit. It’s not mango season yet, but it will be soon.

We continue to have baby animals arriving here on the farm. Six baby ducks hatched last week – two mysteriously disappeared, so we have four left. We had to use one of our hens to hatch the duck eggs because the mother duck destroys her eggs after she lays them – we don’t know why she does this, but she always does. So, this time we placed her eggs with one of the chickens who sat on the eggs until they hatched. They follow her around (was it Lorenz who did that experiment with the baby ducks?) like she is their mother which she is in a way. She in turn protects them, but our two geese have entered the picture. They have adopted the baby ducks for some reason – they don’t adopt the baby chicks so somehow they sense some affinity with the ducklings. Having the geese protect them gives the ducklings a lot of security because all of the other animals are afraid of them including Dave the dog. Whenever Dave or the puppies get close to the ducklings, the geese attack. It’s quite humorous to watch.

On other local events:

Little League baseball started again yesterday. This will be my last time coaching a team after 30 years or so of doing this. Hmm…a part of retirement that I won’t particularly enjoy. We lost 19 -15. Not too bad. We had two innings of sloppy fielding, but otherwise did well. Anyway, it was fun to be out there.

Four more weeks until vacation and a chance to see my eldest daughter in Bali.

A Long Weekend

This is Indonesian Independence Day. It’s a national holiday, and I have the day off. The kids had to get up early for ceremonies at their schools, but then they were able to come home after that and take the rest of the day off. This is my only long weekend for the term so I’m intent on enjoying it. The only school work that I have for the weekend is grading some social studies exams, and setting up a hardware database for the merger of the international and national schools in January. Other than that I plan on enjoying myself, relaxing, playing with the puppies, and doing some cement work on the house.

Another Anniversary

This is also my 18th anniversary of living in Indonesia (I do have the four years that I lived in Pakistan during this 18 years, but the family was still here, and I thought of Bali as home so…). When I left San Francisco for Indonesia, I never thought that I was leaving for good; the move was pretty much a change of scenery for a year to clear my head and then get back to life in the Bay Area. I had everything I owned stored and fully expected to pick up where I left off. But, here I am 18 years, four kids, three houses, and a wife later. My life is one of those strange hybrids that you find over in Asia of the Western guy married to the Asian girl along with their kids and quite often some of her relatives somewhere around. I know guys who live basically an American life with their Asian wife in Asia; then I’ve met a few who have pretty much gone native, and then there’s the ones like me. I tend to by located on the gone native end of the continuum although just a little way over. Food is basically a fusion of the east and the west; entertainment is more or less the same – I like traditional dance and music here, but I also like Western movies and tv, and I read a lot which sets me off from most Indonesians that I know. Hmm…

Baseball

I’ve been a St. Louis Cardinals fan my whole life. As a kid, I also rooted for the Red Sox (Ted Williams was still playing then along with Jackie Jensen) and the Yankees (it was the era of the great Yankee teams of the 50s and early 60s with Mantle and Ford and Berra and Howard). For most of the last 18 years, I haven’t had much of a chance to follow baseball, but the last four years here in Sumbawa I’ve been able to watch games on the weekend on ESPN. As I’ve noted before most of the games are Yankee games so I’ve decided to make the Yankees my second team since they’re really the only team that I get to watch regularly, and I hate just watching baseball without supporting a team so I’m now a Yankee fan (St. Louis as well). And for my first day as a Yankee fan? They lost to the Tigers.

Independence activities

This is independence week in several countries – Indonesia is one of them. Independence week involves a variety of activities including a lot of marching. Go anywhere in Bali during the month before Independence Day and you’ll often be slowed down by kids and adults marching in columns along the road. The first few times you see this, it’s one of those scenic things about a foreign culture that you take a photo of and write about to your family and friends. After you lived in the country a few years, the traffic congestion that long lines of marchers cause gets to be irritating. But once you get around to having some children that grow up and start taking part in the week’s activities, you develop another perspective on the whole thing.

So this year, there have been a few events involving kids from the local schools. Today my son and the two daughters that are still here were involved in the annual march. I didn’t know that it was today, so it was kind of a pleasant surprise when I entered the village on my motorbike to see lines of kids and adults marching through the village. By the time I reached the house, my son and youngest daughter were already finished, but did get a chance to see my second oldest daughter march.

Last night Rebecca was in a dance competition along with some of her friends. As usual the plan was to start at 8 pm, so I drove my motorbike over to the community field where the dances were going to be held. The dances started at 8:45, but the delay gave me time to have a nice conversation with my daughter, Mercedes’, former math teacher. The actual performances only lasted about an hour. I filmed all the dances – some traditional, some Indonesian pop – with my mini dvd camera and found out that the camera actually works better in dark conditions if I’m farther away from the light source.

Events like those of the last two days provide some form of entertainment for folks living in remote villages.

Interesting News from around the Net

More on weird weather –

Salon’s How the World Works had some interesting facts on world weather:

Cyclone Gonu, the first documented cyclone in the Arabian Sea, landed in Oman on June 6 with maximum sustained winds of nearly 148km/h, affecting more than 20,000 people.

In east Asia, heavy rains in June ravaged southern China, where flooding affected more than 13.5m people; while in England and Wales the period from May to July was the wettest since records began in 1766.

Germany also saw its wettest May since countrywide observations started in 1901; in sharp contrast with the previous month, which was its driest April since 1901.

Further south, the worst flooding in six years hit Mozambique in February, while abnormally heavy and early rainfall in Sudan since the end of June has caused the Nile River and other seasonal rivers to overflow.

A series of large swell waves (3 meter-4.5 meters) swamped 68 islands in 16 atolls in the Maldives, while to the west, in Latin America, early May saw Uruguay's worst flooding since 1959.

The article also noted that global land temperatures reached their highest level since 1800. Hmm… does this bode well for future generations?

And more from HTWW about living the low-carbon life. For someone like me who is just discovering the discussion about carbon-credits and low-carbon like and such, this article was pretty informative. I did learn that calculating everything in your lifestyle to see how it balances out in the healthy planet balance sheet is becoming a popular parlour game (presumably among liberals as I know no one who does this – but that’s another issue).


Retirement update:

My impending retirement continues to draw a variety of comments most of which still favor the “you’ll be back working at another school within a year” opinion. Just a snippet from a conversation with a friend the other day got me thinking about the continuing to work elsewhere option when he said that he had to keep working for a number of reasons (he’s ten years younger than me for one) which included keeping up his lifestyle. I started thinking about that as soon as I got on my motorbike to drive home. Hmm…making my current income, we can buy pretty much what we want when we want it (and we’ve done so pretty much for the past 17 years) – the kids want ipods, my wife wants a new handphone, I want a new computer, we want to renovate one of the houses, someone needs an expensive medical procedure. It’s nice to be able to buy things when you want them, I have to admit. Not worrying about money is certainly enjoyable, but…is that really where I want to be at this point in my life?

The kids are going to continue to need money to continue their education, but I think that I have enough put away to cover all of them through college, and then they’re on their own. As for Su and me, well she generally doesn’t require much more than a present for her birthday; she takes care of her other needs out of the house money, and I don’t require much other than some tech toys to work with during my retirement and some book money. As for the other stuff, what’s the point? I’m perfectly happy wearing t-shirts and shorts with holes in them, I don’t like eating in restaurants, entertainment is watching tv a few hours a night. Being a consumer is like being a junkie. One more jones to get rid of. Add that to the smoking and drinking, and I have a few personal issues to work on during retirement. Should prove to be interesting, and as an old friend used to say, it will keep me off the streets.

Rural Life in Indonesia

Well, I’m just about over the nasty case of flu that I’ve had for the past four days. I actually took two days off work which is fairly unusual for me. Last time I took a day off work was in February after an operation on my ankle. I took two days off to recover from the surgery. Anyway, it’s nice to be able to breathe almost freely now.

I went over to the kebun with Su and the kids today for the first time in a week. The puppies are still hanging around and are still little chubby things so their mother is obviously still coming by to feed them at some point during the day or night. Bush, the daddy goat, saw a few young females pass by and he set about trying to destroy to fence so that he could get out and hang with the young ladies. It seems like Veronica, Bush’s mate, is pregnant again, and she’s keeping Bush away so he’s out looking for action. Hmm, goats remind me of some humans that I know.

So Sunday was pretty much of a garden day. I did correct some work that I had taken home when I thought that I might not be back in school for a day, but mostly I’ve been out in the garden across the road where we have the goats and the puppies and some of our fruit trees. All of us except for Rebecca went. Sam messed around with the puppies and built them a shelter; Meredith watched Sam for a while and then went in the bungalow and watched tv; Su started a number of fires as she likes to do; and I played with the puppies and searched the trees for snakes – there weren’t any.

Later in the day, Su and I went out and inspected the gardens in the backyard. We have a number of bananna trees which are producing fruit now; the problem will be to keep the monkeys away from the bananas until they are ripe enough for us to harvest them. Our cucumbers, greens and tomatoes are growing well, but again we need to keep the monkeys away.

The Environment and Global warming

Mercedes seems to be doing well in high school so far other than some problems with money because she has to buy books and new school uniforms, pay for school fees, and pay for additional lessons (known as les in Indonesia). We call her three or four times a day, and she calls us several times so there is a lot of communication going on. We’ll be going back to Bali in another seven weeks.

One of my more recent interests (as those who read this blog occasionally know) is the state of the worldwide water situation. Another one that I’m just developing is global warming. It’s fairly obvious that the weather has changed over the past 18 years here in Indonesia. Generally, environmental issues were never something that caught my interest (with the exception of rainforest destruction), but perhaps because I’m on the verge of retirement, new issues have entered my radar.

I was reading an article about the pollution of the atmosphere from air travel. I didn’t realize that there was so much activity around this area. I took a look at a carbon calculator to see what the cost would be in carbon emissions for a trip from Denpasar to Chicago and back. Well, I’m glad that I won’t be doing this much. Actually since I’ve moved to Sumbawa, I rarely fly: one overseas trip a year for the annual EARCOS conference, and occasionally, I take a short flight from Bali to Lombok, although usually we drive which is more environmentally friendly according to the article in Salon that I read.

The environment is becoming more of a political issue in Indonesia these days although public awareness still is fairly low. At my house in Bali, the neighbors still throw their trash in the sea; and here in Sumbawa, a neighbor still throws his trash in a patch of jungle in front of his house even though we mentioned it to him once. But, on the positive side, there are more public trash bins available, the cities have trash collection, and recycling has taken hold in some places in Indonesia. Eco-tourism is starting to develop as well. There is hope that environmental awareness will develop here. And just as I’m about to finish this, there’s a report that the Pope is committed to making the Vatican green. Good news from the Vatican and the Pope.

mileposts and new life

Last night was my last "Orientation" night as a teacher, as well as my last July workday. It was a quiet night as I am down to six students in my homeroom. Only three parent discussions. All in all, a nice way to end one part of the school year.

A feral dog decided to have her pups in our kebun. We have three cute little chubby puppies. My wife says that they have noses like hers. Now we just have to figure out what to do with them.