Part Twelve

See The World, Subjugate The Ocean

“Kids Learning English” Story #1

A friend of a friend is looking for a Native Speaker to judge an English Speech competition at UNY (Universitas Negeri Yogyakarta) in the first week in January and I enthusiastically volunteer. For the first round, the 12 competitors have prepared speeches about:

a) Whether the Indonesian government lowering the price of fuel was a good idea (All agree: YES!)

b) How Obama’s victory will affect Indonesia in the coming years (All agree: President Obama will be good for Indonesia! Because he used to live here!)

c) The Young Leader Phenomenon (Each one mentions Obama’s victory over McCain and makes a vague reference to how younger leaders know more about things like The Internet.)

Most of the speeches are mediocre and repetitive, with few coherent arguments coming across. Five finalists move on to the second -and final- round, in which they’re given 10 minutes to prepare a brief speech on “Israel’s Recent Aggression Toward Palestine”.

The frontrunner from the first round once again gives the best-pronounced, best-thought-out speech. However, her speech is barely 5 minutes long and before addressing the topic she takes a moment to define the word “Holocaust” and brings up discrepancies between different groups’ claims about how many people were killed in the Holocaust, plainly explaining that: “The Jew uses the Holocaust to get sympathy from the rest of the world…” [That’s right. ‘The Jews’ would have been special enough, but no. The Jew (singular). Like how Borat says it.]

However, her arguments and her English are by far the best of the group and she wins easily. To her credit, she goes on to acknowledge that the issue is a complicated one and that blame cannot be laid solely at the feet of… The Jew.

This is the nightmare tree with long human-sized fingers

for roots next to where we park our bikes.

“Kids Learning English” Story #2

The same acquaintance needs help a few days later, so I join Dora (Darmasiswa from Hungary) in administering a conversational English test at a school where Indonesian kids are trained to work on American and Dutch cruise ships.

The test covers basic introductions and personal information, then describing a few simple photographs. They’ve only been studying English for a few months, but some show remarkable progress. When asked why he wants to work on a cruise ship, one young man happily replies: “I wish to work on cruise ship so I can see many places and subjugate the ocean.”

“Ha ha ha," I say, "Uhh, are you sure that’s the word you want to use?”

He nods earnestly. “Yes, yes! Subjugate!”

“Kids Learning English” Story #3

When Jeannie goes on a school field trip, one of her [normally conservative] female tutors arrives wearing a t-shirt with this on it:


If there were any questions about how much English this tutor knows, this would answer them. Jeannie opts not to explain the meaning of the shirt to the tutor, to avoid an immensely awkward conversation and –I expect- hysterical outburst of shame from the girl.

[Australian] Carla and I have been practicing for weeks, putting together a set under the name Kilat Khusus (from an Indonesian postal service slogan alluding to their lightning speed, a reference I find particularly laughable since the package I’ve been expecting has taken more than a month to arrive). Some moments sound a little like Glass Candy or Suicide or The Deckers. Audio/video evidence of a possible show in late January will follow.

We’ll have to work quickly though since they just got word that Darmasiswa canceled the Short Course for Second Semester, so Carla, my friend Alexandros, his sister, and all the rest who were applying to extend their studies for the rest of the year are out of luck and will have to vacate the country soon. This is especially lame since the administrators here were telling them all along that extending their programs would be no problem. (Apparently it was 100% possible right up until the day it suddenly wasn’t.)

I recognize Pooh and Mickey, but which Copyrighted character

is that blue …thing on the right supposed to be?

“Kids Learning English” Story #4

Helping kids learn English is fun, so I agree to take Maya (Darmasiswa from Wisconsin)’s place speaking English at a local high school. This assignment turns out to mean accompanying a group of a couple hundred kids to a local herb plantation, then to a park at Kaliurang (near the foot of Mt. Merapi). It also means free lunch.

Seen from outside, Kaliurang is super cool; tall hills covered with jungle trees arouse the imagination. Unfortunately, upon entering one finds paved paths and state park-style structures everywhere. The group of students -which includes several contestants from the Speech Competition from the previous week- crowds around me to practice conversation and endure long, ranting answers to their questions about American culture.

My excitement at seeing “wild” monkeys for the first time fades quickly. The park monkeys are less wretched than the cats and dogs I’ve seen in town, though they are afflicted with the same hideously drooping Malnourishment Teats.

As one monkey scampers along about 20 feet away from me, my eyes catch a quick flash of red. I follow him to get better look and that’s when I see the Worst Thing I Will See In This Country. This poor monkey has sustained a terrible injury to the balls. His sac has been slashed or torn on the right side and movement pulls the wound apart, revealing a wedge of the bright red stuff inside.

After attempting to draw this horror at home with unsatisfactory results, I manage to recreate it using a pink t-shirt inside a plastic bag. From behind, this poor monkey’s pouch looked like this:

And yet, there in the park, somehow no one else seems to share my dismay. They can't NOT notice. How could ...THAT... be unremarkable? FOR GOD'S SAKE, SOMEBODY RENDER SOME ASSISTANCE!

But they don't. The injured monkey disappears, the field trip concludes without further incident, and they give me some nice batik for my trouble. The End.

Part Eleven

Crappy Holidays! (ZIIIINGGGG!!!)

Christmas Eve 2008! Unprecedented snow? Familial warmth? Delicious prime rib, pies, and whatnot? Sadly, no. In Jogja it was last-minute gamelan rehearsal that forced me to postpone beach travel plans until Christmas Day.

The rehearsal is held in a dusty shack full of gamelan instruments somewhere in backwoods Bantul. My classmates and I practice a new song for about an hour as members of our teacher’s gamelan group trickle in. Once the whole group arrives, Amateur Hour comes to an end and they get down to the real business of the night - running all the music for the next show. Here’s a taste (Note: the video's a little dark):

Things conclude at around midnight and we [Yuri –from Japan, the other non-Indonesian in class- and I] are told to report to campus in the morning to get new text for the show on the 29^th, when we will be “opening” for Pak Udrek.

I get up and go to school at 10 o’clock on Christmas morning without protest [since, really, what else do I have to do?] and find the wayang building locked. I wait around until 11:00 when Yuri shows up to tell me that Mas Udreko is still typing up the text, he’ll be here at noon and can I wait there til then? Uhhh, NO. I have to catch a bus to Pacitan. I’ll get it in a couple of days. Bye!

Actually boarding a bus to Pacitan turns out to be more difficult than expected. Jeannie and I barely make it to the bus station by our scheduled departure time and everyone there is aggressively unhelpful. We’re pointed in all different directions, usually by dudes hoping to hustle us onto their own buses. All insist there is no direct bus from Jogjakarta to Pacitan, despite the fact that our friends Alex and Paula took that bus on the previous day. Suspicious but tired of waiting, we end up getting a bus to Solo [around 2 hours] then transferring to a bus to Pacitan [almost 3 hours].

In Solo we eat Christmas Dinner: sate ayam and water at the bus station, choked by the fumes of a dozen shabby buses. It is at this point that I realize that I will never have to worry about having a worse Christmas than this one. Maybe there’s some long-term satisfaction in that. In the short term, though, it just sucks.

Real hat, real chair, cardboard girl. From a distance = alarming!

Exhausted and smelly, we arrive in Pacitan after 9 PM. Having spent the entire day rushing around or crammed into bus seats designed for a people whose average height is 6-12 inches less than ours, we manage to chat with Alex and Paula for a bit [and ascertain what a nice, relaxing Christmas Day they had, those jerks], and we all retire to our small, hot, mosquito-friendly room.

We spend most of the next day (December 26^th) at the beach. As a town Pacitan is unremarkable, but the beach is nicer than Krakal. The sand is softer, the water is cleaner, and there is ample area for swimming. We play in the waves, eat tasty watermelon, and escape with manageable sunburns.

Alexandros goes in for the close-up.

Later we venture out for food and I finally get to try roti bakar. For the uninitiated:

-Roti Bakar begins with a loaf of bread.

-The loaf is sliced lengthwise three times, until it looks like a tall book with four thick pages.

-Each “page” is painted with butter.

-Chocolate sprinkles are poured over the butter.

-Condensed milk is drizzled onto the chocolate.

-Then they fold the thing up, smear butter all over the outside, and grill it.

The result is like a chocolate sandwich between wedges of French toast. I have heard it aptly described as “apocalyptic”. [Note: In Jogja, Roti Bakar is sold alongside local Fresh Milk stands. More on that when I experience it.]

After more confusion and misinformation at the bus station, I get the bus from Pacitan to Batu [2 hours] and the bus from Batu to Jogja [3 hours]. The Batu-Jogja bus is particularly crowded, as they seem to stop at every wide part of the road to take more villagers on.

Several times I think I detect the smell of shit. It passes so quickly, I assume it was my imagination. Not so! Apparently that’s an intended use for the plastic bags dispensed from the ceiling of the bus. The kid in front of me hands a bagged-up package to his mom (who is standing in the aisle, hovering over him) and she dutifully flings it out the window.

[photo coming soon]

December 29^th is my first wayang performance in front of an audience. While the shows I’ve attended so far have been remote village affairs, this one is in an open-air building on a [relatively] well-trafficked Bantul street. Before the show, they take me to the epic wardrobe at Pak Udrek’s house where all the group's traditional dress is kept. It takes two of them to assemble the dhalang outfit: a fancily wrapped batik sarong thing, tightly wrapped and pinned sashes and belt, flowery shirt, and kris (plus another 20 minutes of rooting through the many hats to find one that I can squeeze onto the huge melon on top of my neck).

[photo coming soon]

The performance goes well. The next few days are quiet, New Year's Eve is mellow, it isn't until the following week that they mention that the show on the 29th was NOT my exam, that in fact my exam performance will be on January 5th. We meet on the 4th to dismantle Pak Udrek's wayang screen, cut down some banana trees (puppets stick into banana logs just below the screen), load it all into a truck, and spend the rest of the day setting it all up in the place we practiced on Christmas Eve.

The second performance is better than the first. Even though I'm still in the dark on the exact meaning of most of the script I must still read phonetically, the jokes get laughs and my singing elicits fewer jeers than at least one of my fellow students'. Considering these circumstances, not being The Worst in some respect feels like a major victory.

Next: Judging English speeches, finding a job, and adding YouTube videos to old entries...