A New Site

There's a new site up by a friend of mine with some brilliant portraits of Indonesians. You might want to check out his work at the link on the side. It's called Faces of Indonesia.

Ceremonies and getting things done in Paradise

Living in Paradise. It ain’t that easy. Why? Because it takes forever to do small things that tourists think are easy everyday things to do. One example: I wanted the box on the wall that I plug the phone in to, to be changed so that I could have the phone and the computer plugged in at the same time. No one knew what I meant even though I thought that I explained it fairly clearly. I found the little box today down in the south of Bali in the first store that I entered. I can do the installation myself, but the whole issue of purchasing it has taken six months (well I’ve been gone for six months so maybe it’s only taken me a month.

It’s called wasting time in Paradise. I asked for some mosquito curtains and there’s a person that makes good ones, but she’s off to ceremonies. I forget about it and expect that when she returns in a few days she’ll give me a call or my wife will call her. Six months down the road, we still don’t have them because she forgot to call my wife and my wife forgot to call her because …there are always ceremonies, regardless of religion in Bali there are always ceremonies. The Hindus have theirs, the Muslims have theirs, the Buddhists have theirs, the Christians have theirs. When you add them all up, the island seems to be on holiday or preparing for a holiday almost all the time

Impressions and wandering identities

Impressions are not easy to gauge and usually we don’t want people to give us their real impressions of us. It’s one of the little joys of teaching Middle School students – they can be brutally honest if they like and trust you. And you can see how people can have wildly different impressions of you even though they may be interacting with you in the same environment.. So they are probably working with a different cognitive map. But we act differently depending on our environment as well. That’s probably pretty much accepted wisdom these days, but actually “getting” it isn’t always the easiest thing to do.

Case in point. Here I am in Bali now with a friend from Sumbawa who knows me only based on what he sees of me in Sumbawa. He came with us to Bali to check out a girl that he might be interested in, and he apparently (I say apparently because I am never sure what my wife is up to) agreed to come and do some remodeling work our house in exchange for a tv for the bungalow that he lives in that we own. (Lots of stuff here to digest for those who are only reading this blog because I mentioned sex and Indonesian women once in a title.)

So my friend says to me the other day that I’m different here than in Sumbawa. Hmm, I’m interested in this. Just what does he mean? He says that here there are masses (yes, there are masses) of people coming and going throughout the day – especially children as we live in a somewhat extended family situation here which means that we often have as many as 20 “children” (saying this as a 58 year old means that some of my children are actually adults in their early 20s) running around the house. Then there are the adults which sometimes number up to 15. So in this structure that we live in, we sometimes have from 30 – 40 people wandering around at various times throughout the day. (If we get a little more specific in an anthropological sense and ask who sleeps here – we have six adults and 11 children for the most part although sometimes it gets much more crowded.

In Sumbawa, I have a fairly large house which sleeps my wife, me and four kids (I’ll leave out the animals because they sleep outside.) During the day we may have a few more kids wandering through and maybe another six or so adults. Basically, it’s a small group if we compare it on a person per square meter basis.

In Sumbawa, I spend a lot of time on the computer doing school work so I have limited interaction with the people there. Here in Bali, I wander around, occasionally coming down my sanctuary on the third floor. The kids make little pilgrammages up to the third floor to ask for money so I can say, “What! Do I look like the Bank of America?”

So to get back to the main point. My friend sees me as a shy person who is somewhat reluctant to interact with people (somewhat similar to my own perception of who I am). But he was somewhat amused by all the interaction I have with people here and how I deal with all the comings and goings.

The big kids (10 -30) see me as a teddy bear with a big bark and a small bite. The little kids are afraid of me because I’m the American with the big voice and sarcastic deameanor who call them on their spoiled behavior (Indonesian kids tend to be terribly spoiled, but I think that American kids are spoiled too so this perception might be a function of age).

Umm, main point is that our identities are flexible to a degree (although diehard Freudian that I am), I think that the basics of our personality are formed as children and we only negotiate minor variations on the theme as we age.

Back in Bali

Back in Bali after six months. It’s nice to be back as much as I love Sumbawa. The house here always seems smaller although it not that much smaller in terms of square meters than the house in Sumbawa.

We’re making the beginnings of the move next year when I retire. The last few days we’ve started renovating the second floor bathroom. Living on the ocean is lovely, but you pay a price in damage to the house (and electronics) from the salt air. And, the house is been empty for most of the last four years and built as it is to be as open as possible, the house does take in water during the rainy season. While we’re here we can clean it up quickly, but as there’s no one here most of the year, the water sits and ruins all the tiles on the floors. So we’re replacing them. I have a friend from Sumbawa who has incredible skills with building things and fixing things and just generally getting things to work right. He’s been doing most of the work for me along with my brothers-in-law, nephews and me.

We’re also getting Mercedes enrolled in a high school here in Bali. A lot of the students who graduated from Junior High in Sekongkang are moving to other islands for high school as a high school close to us just opened but it doesn’t have a very good reputation, and we were advised by several teachers to put Mercedes in high school in Bali. I’m not really thrilled about sending her off, but we don’t have much of a choice as I still have another year to work.

We all came over on the ferries as usual. The trip took 17 hours this time as we had several long waits for ferries in Sumbawa and Lombok. I’m fairly impressed that I can still make what is a fairly grueling trip. Most folks here thought that I overnighted in Lombok, but I hate spending money on a hotel when we can just gut it out some and make the distance in one trip.

The ferry rides were really different this trip. I had a number of extended conversations with folks – high school kids wanting to use English, older folks just wanting to chat about my kids, where I was going and the usual. It passed the time. The ferry from Sumbawa to Lombok was packed because there were four buses on the ferry. There weren’t enough seats for everyone so a lot of people sat on the rather dirty floors. I stood the whole two hours. The ferry from Lombok to Bali was only half full, and I laid down on a mattress on the floor for a few hours which helped pass the time and give me a rest.

So here we are again. I’m looking forward to the next 14 days.

Finally, vacation!

Finally on a month long vacation period after what seemed like an incredibly long six months. I definitely do not like the school schedule that this school uses. Now that the school day is longer than most schools and the school year is longer than most schools, we’re essentially working an extra two weeks a year for free. Fortunately this is the last year for me. The extended school year that we have with the new schedule is just one of the problems that comes with working for a company school – they have little idea about what education is and teachers are generally not highly valued in the status system that is a large part of living in a mining community. Well, so much for my end of the year complaining.

Baseball. I get a week of watching baseball in the mornings on ESPN from my satellite connection. Today is the Mets and the Yankees. It’s a day game in New York, and the weather there is great – it’s great here in Sumbawa today as well with a nice 80 degrees at 10:30 am. If Indonesia had baseball, it would be almost paradise. With three weeks in Bali coming up as soon as the kids get their school reports at the end of next week, I’ll have internet access at home so I can follow baseball better. One of the key things that I’m looking forward to in retirement is having internet access everyday. Being able to use the internet at school just doesn’t cut it as I don’t have anywhere near enough time to follow what I need do professionally on the internet, and forget about personal stuff.

So on my second day of vacation (the first was spent as it usually is – playing games on the computer), I did lesson plans for fifth, sixth and eighth grade math classes for next semester. Tomorrow, I’ll do the Seventh grade math and then the seventh’eighth grade social studies class. I’ll do the 2-8 grade computer classes when I get to Bali and have some online access so I can use my del.icio.us account to post links there to go with my plans which will be online at the school’s website. I like getting lesson plans done early in the vacation as there isn’t enough time to do them when school starts. As you can see, teaching in a small school means doing extraordinary amounts of work for lessons. Even more in this school than in the other two small schools where I taught. Compare this to the lesson plans I did at the medium size school in Lahore where I had to plan for three levels of math each week.

The rural/urban divide, mobile phones, and Indonesian dating

Rural versus urban; mobile phones and Indonesian dating

I was watching an interview with the Indian actress Mallika Sherawat this weekend, and in the course of the interview, she mentioned the divide in India of rural versus urban. I got some sense of that during my four-year stay in Pakistan when I traveled to Amritsar for weekends. And, when I was out in the rural areas of Pakistan with my students, I could see the large divide between the folks in the countryside and the Lahoris.

Actually, it’s not often that I think of this in regards to Indonesia, even though I see evidence of it everyday on TV when I catch a glimpse of what my children and wife are watching. Of course, the sinetron – Indonesian soap operas which, like the old American prime time soap, Dallas, show the lives of the rich and warped.

I’m aware of the divide in Indonesia, but my life in this country over the past 18 years has been so non-uban that I have no idea how normal folks in Jakarta or Surabaya actually live. My experience is really here in a small village and in Singaraja, Bali, which is fairly small – I can walk through downtown in ten minutes. And the kids’ lives, up to now anyway, have been lived within the protective confines of the kampung in Singaraja or the village in Sekongkang.

I wrote the three paragraphs above over the weekend. Today I came in to work and checked on my Yahoo email and found an academic paper on Modernity and the Mobile Phone by Lee Humphreys and Thomas Barker. The article is about the role of the mobile phone in the evolution of dating in Indonesia, and the development of the production and distribution of pornography in Indonesia. It was noted that the proliferation of mobile phones, while increasing, is still limited to a defined sector of the population – wealthier, young and urban based. They suggest that as coverage increases and price decreases, mobile technology will spread to rural areas. Rural experience in Sumbawa, suggests, that the authors are correct in their assumptions about the spread to rural areas of mobile technology, but miss the already widespread use in some rural areas. Additionally, I would suggest that the use of mobile technology is a status marker for young people in rural areas as they mimic what they see on sinetrons which they judge to be sophisticated urban behavior.

More on the rural/urban divide later.

Technology, Teaching, and Retirement

Well, eventually, I was going to get around to this topic as it is one of the main areas of focus for me right now. As I’ve mentioned on my websites an probably here, I plan on retiring at the end of the next school year. I’ve been teaching on and off for the past thirty years – continuously for the past 20 – and I’m at the point where I’m ready to hang it up.

I love teaching. I always have. Back when I was in high school, I planned on being a high school history teacher. Later in college, I was going to teach university level anthropology (and picked up a Ph.D. along the way). Eventually – during a fieldwork stint in Northern California – I decided that I was going to become a regular classroom teacher. I was thinking about Fourth Grade; I’m not sure why Fourth Grade seemed to be the right level (it might have been Miss McNamara my Fourth Grade teacher), but it was the one that I fantasized about when I imagined having my own classroom.

So, let’s take it as established that I love teaching. Why quit? I’m finding that teaching just dominates my life now whereas it didn’t seem to do so before. I find that there is more to do in the same amount of time. When I taught math in Pakistan, I taught six periods a day, but to just three grade levels thus there were three lessons to prepare for each day. When I taught computers in Pakistan, I taught four levels. Right now I teach four levels of math, a level of social studies, and three levels of computers. That gives me 8 levels to prepare for. Class size is somewhat irrelevant here as I do more work with my small classes here than I did with my much larger classes in Pakistan. Add to this trying to keep a school full of aging computers functioning, I spend most of my waking hours working during the week, along with a significant amount of time on the weekends when I do grading that I should have done during the week.

So I have less personal time than before and more that I want to do than ever before. More to do? What’s the hurry? Well, the obvious answer is age. I’m at that age where friends, colleagues, and acquaintances have started dieing. Dealing with mortality is something that I may work on a little more, but death itself is not the worry. I’d just like to get a few more things in while watching the kids grow up. There are some things that I think that I could contribute to the educational community and teaching a few kids in a small school is getting to be at the bottom of that list of contributions.

Once upon a time, in the Pre-9/11 world, I had one of those dream jobs of Technology Coordinator where all that I had to do was teach a few classes and then teach teachers how to integrate technology in with their work. Wow! It was ideal, and kind of frightening. After all, I had wanted a job like that for several years, and suddenly I had it. But then it was what am I going to do? I took a few breaths and started slowly. It was going to be interesting, then 9/11 happened and the job was history. Having a tech coordinator who teaches full load just is not getting the best of the deal for the classroom teacher who wants to learn about technology, and wants to use it in their classroom.

So what can I do if I’m not teaching? I’ve been thinking in terms of being an online mentor , a virtual fairy godfather, for teachers who want to do things but don’t have the time and resources. That might mean extending what I do now (on a limited scale) with giving advice and hints to folks who email me based on reading one of my websites. It might mean developing some more easy to use lesson plans along with justifications for their use and cross-curricular references and connections. It might mean…Well who knows? I’ll be flexible, free, and willing. I’m looking forward to the possibilities.

More on retirement in the near future.