On Workshops, Presentations and Conferences

Somehow I managed to survive the past two weeks of non-stop presentations. After my five presentations in Makassar, I flew directly to Java for five presentations in Yogyakarta and five more in Solo – which amounts to 2 weeks, 3 cities and 15 presentations. It was exhausting, but also surprisingly rewarding and entertaining.

One thing I like about presenting in Indonesia is that my audiences seem to genuinely appreciate what I’m sharing with them. Participants thanked me profusely for workshops I gave on Communication Repair Strategies, Learning Styles and Learning Strategies, Using Peer Reviews, and Developing Vocabulary Through Reading. In my mind, this is all very basic stuff, but to many of the participants this was cutting edge material. As an added ego-booster, many participants expressed an interest in having me come present at their own schools or universities or in contacting the RELO office so they can get an ELF of their own in the future.

I’ll also admit that I kind of like being treated as a celebrity guest speaker. I get chauffeured from venue to venue in a university sponsored car, I get taken out to dinner and shows and get put up in hotels, I pose for hundreds of photos with seminar participants, and I’m lavished with tokens of appreciation at closing ceremonies. I’m much more comfortable with this kind of celebrity than with, say, posing for photos with random strangers just because I’m a bule. At least at these seminars the people I’m posing with know who I am - even those who didn’t understand a single word of my presentation. And the gifts of appreciation are always interesting - in Yogya I received a beautiful handmade batik scarf while in Solo I received a giant framed painting of Krishna on a piece of furry goat skin!

When presenting in Indonesia there is always a high risk of cultural or organizational misunderstanding. In fact, this is pretty much guaranteed to happen so you might as well just go with the flow and try to see the humor in all of it. For instance, when I unpacked my photocopied handouts for my first set of workshops at a university in Yogya, I discovered that my handouts for two entirely different workshops had been stapled together. An assembly line team was then promptly formed to take the handouts apart and re-staple them in the right groupings. As another example, when Sarah and I showed up at a vocational high school in Solo prepared to present on Managing Large Classes and Using Peer Reviews, we were greeted with a huge banner that announced we were presenting on Developing Vocabulary Through Reading and Reading and Critical Thinking, topics that we had presented on the day before at Sarah’s university. We apologized to the audience and proceeded with our planned presentations. I also had to deal with brief power outages, impromptu opening and closing speeches, and having to cut a presentation short.

None of that, however, compares to the shocks I experienced at my first Indonesian conference last month when I attended the TEFLIN (Teachers of English as a Foreign Language in Indonesia) Conference in Malang. When Indonesian moderators take questions from the audience, they are oddly methodical about it. They will ask for 5 questions total or a question from the left, the right and the middle of the room or a question from one man and one woman. The people asking the questions then ramble on with ridiculously long questions while the moderators write everything down. The answering of these questions doesn’t begin until all the questions have been collected by the moderator. This question and answer time is so important that once when Bill Grabe, the reading guru, was presenting and the program was running late, the moderators cut off his hour-long plenary talk after about 15 minutes to make sure that the participants had plenty of time to ask questions. And you know what they asked questions about? About the material on the slides he didn’t have time to present because he got cut off! He was none too pleased.

But my personal favorite amusing story comes from my own presentation at TEFLIN. It was my first conference presentation ever and the other four lectures from UNG who also traveled to Malang for the conference had promised to attend. My workshop went well, but I was slightly baffled and hurt that none of the other UNG lecturers actually showed up - until I got this text message from one of them: “I set my reminder, I set my alarm clock in my mobile phone, I have a promise with you, I do want to go to your presentation, and the reality is I couldn’t. It was raining just now. Please forgive me Julianne…” And that’s when I learned that some Indonesians really do stop everything when the rains come.

The Club Sandwich That Broke the Camel’s Back

Makassar is a rough town. In 2003 some students at Universitas Negeri Makassar burned down the university library in protest of a variety of things. Even today, my friend Mark reports that the students still riot and throw rocks at each other. It is a city where the rainy seasons bring such intense rains that the streets are permanently flooded with pools of garbage and oil. It is a city where the revolting corpse of a dead cat with bulging eyeballs was left for God knows how long to decompose by the main entrance of the building that houses The American Corner. It is also the city where I ate the club sandwich that broke the camel’s back.

I arrived in Makassar for the ELF/ETA Mid-Year Conference on a cold, wet, rainy Sunday afternoon after having just spent the last 4 days of my vacation in paradise on Bunaken Island. I crash landed back into the world of work, presentations and meetings with a suitcase full of dirty, smelly, wet clothes and the panicked realization that I had not planned a single bit of the three workshops I was scheduled to present at a tourism school and a local high school. Pushing those thoughts aside, I joined a small group of ELFs at a restaurant around the corner from the hotel for a quick bit to eat.

And this is where it happened. Still hungry after a round of fried tofu, I ordered a club sandwich because it was the most appealing item on the menu. When the waiter placed the sandwich of untoasted white bread (sans frilly toothpick) and wilted lettuce in front of me, I looked at it dubiously. When I picked it up and noticed the unidentifiable piece of luncheon meat dangling off the side, all the accumulated stress that had been building inside me reached a breaking point and I burst into tears. I ranted to my somewhat astonished friends that eating food should be a pleasurable, sensual experience and this sandwich was anything but. In fact, all Indonesian food is completely horrible. In a true act of solidarity, Courtney reached over to try a piece of the sandwich and instantly declared it disgusting. Then she buried it under a pile of tissues and garbage, which made me laugh. And then Mark, with a typical male how-bad-can-it-be attitude, proceeded to devour the rest of the sandwich. Go figure.

After this incident, I was reassured to learn that I wasn’t the only one who was tired, headachy and not at all in the mood for a jam-packed week of workshops and random meetings with the teachers, rectors, and Vice Presidents of the schools that we were supposed to visit. None of us, in fact, have been in top form this week as we battle jet-lag, sore-throats, colds, diarrhea, hangovers, exhaustion, holiday flirtations that amounted to nothing, family problems back home and other assorted woes. But we all rallied and managed to pull off our workshops.

However, it is against this backdrop of stress, fatigue, and general unpleasantness of my surroundings that I need to make my final decision about renewing my contract in Indonesia for a second year. I had been leaning towards staying on but to be honest, Indonesia, especially the cities, is not a place I can say I really enjoy living in. For instance, on our way to dinner tonight, we walked by a garbage truck full of such foul smelling garbage that Sarah almost gagged. Then we passed some more burning garbage, begging children and cat-calling men. On the way back to our hotel, I had to roll up my jeans to prevent them from being dragged through filthy garbage and I also coughed up some sort of bug that flew into my mouth. Unpleasantness abounds here. And the food is really and truly awful.

Should I stay or should I go?

Night Diving

Depending on where I’m living, I’ve been known to flirt with the associated “extreme” sports. This is somewhat odd, considering that I don’t really think of myself as a particularly athletic or sporty person. Nevertheless, there was that semester in college when I took up whitewater kayaking and mountain biking in Maine. Then I moved to Switzerland where I spent many years trying to learn how to ski. Now I’m in Indonesia and not only have I taken up diving, but I also find that I particularly like diving at night.

I just finished my PADI Advanced Open Water Diver course in Bunaken and elected to do a night dive as one of my five “adventure dives”, as they call them. I was more apprehensive about this one than I was before the other four dives – peak performance buoyancy, navigation, deep water, and underwater photography. Night diving would be challenging because I didn’t know how I’d feel underwater at night. Would I feel claustrophobic? Disoriented? Scared? What if I lost sight of the others in the group? How much does one really see underwater in the dark anyway? These fears disappeared as I held on to the reference line and descended about 12 meters along a coral wall.

My eyes quickly adjusted to the light of my flashlight and what I saw amazed and delighted me. During the day, the reef looks very blue and all the colors sort of get washed out the deeper you go. At night though, with a flashlight, the colors suddenly come alive and are made even more vibrant against the blackness of the water. And the creatures are different too. Most of the colorful little reef fish go to sleep in the crevices of the wall while other more mysterious creatures come out to play. The ones that fascinated me the most were the painted spiny lobsters. Large, colorful, and somewhat resembling space aliens, they were mesmerizing. At one point I saw some long white feelers poking up out of a crevice. I ascended a meter or so to get a better look and as I rose up, the rest of the enormous lobster came into view and my flashlight revealed two big glowing eyes staring right at me. I felt like I was in a science fiction movie.

I loved shining my flashlight into all the nooks and crannies to see what creatures might be lurking about. There were lots of big crabs, coral banded cleaner shrimp, beautiful lionfish and even a scorpionfish. A highlight included seeing a sleeping green turtle. Our lights must have woken him up because after a couple of moments, he swam away. I felt slightly bad about disturbing his slumber but it was also an incredible sight to see him so close up and then to see him swim off into black oblivion, gently flapping his flippers.

One of the most magical parts about night diving is seeing the phosphorescent plankton. If you turn your flashlight towards your body to mask the light and then wave your other hand back and forth in front of you, you will see a sparkling shower of small glowing balls that seemingly fly out from your finger tips. It is probably the closest I will ever come to feeling like a sorceress casting a magic spell.

Christmas in Australia

This year I decided to spend the holidays Down Under as I have a couple of friends living in Sydney and have always wanted to see Australia. The flight to Sydney from Bali is only 6 hours, which is much more reasonable than trying to fly back to the US for Christmas. The trade off is that I didn’t get to see my family, but I hope they know they’re invited to come visit me in Indonesia any time!

Courtney and I met up with Stephanie at the airport where our trip started off with a blessing in disguise. Our JetStar flight from Denpasar was cancelled and we weren’t able to fly out until the next day. We were slightly annoyed at having to miss a day of our Australia trip, but we quickly cheered up when we discovered that JetStar was putting us up in a posh luxury resort for the night. After spending the next day swimming idly in the gigantic swimming pool and eating our free gourmet meals, we finally set off for Sydney.

Sydney was a wonderful, restorative break from life in Indonesia. My friend Nat gave us a funny look when we arrived at the house and asked right away if it was OK to drink the water. Of course it’s OK to drink the water in Sydney. Imagine that. We walked around Nat’s Balmain neighborhood and marveled at everything from the sidewalks to the nice comfortable temperatures to the beautiful harbor views. We decided that Sydney might possibly be the perfect city.

Instead of doing the usual touristy things one does in Sydney, we mostly used our time to do normal everyday type things that we can’t do in Indo. (Kudos to Steph who got out and about a bit more than Courtney and I did). We spent many happy hours at the house Nat was house-sitting just lounging around using the high-speed wireless, taking hot showers, talking over tea, eating Nat’s yummy food and dozing off while listening to Christmas carols. Court and I also detoxed and beautified by getting facials, mani-pedis and new haircuts while Nat, Steph and I spent another lazy rainy afternoon browsing bookstores in Glebe and lingering in a comfy fair trade coffee shop. All three of us also stocked up on essentials like clothes, make-up, toiletries and other hard-to-buy-in-Indo items.

One night we tried out a wood-fired pizza place in Nat’s neighborhood that had best pizza I’ve had in the last four months. The place was run by a couple of Italian guys who charmed us with their lovely over-the-top Italian welcome. The place was still empty when we strolled up in the late afternoon. When we asked if they were open the answer was, “For four beautiful women we are always open!” This was our kind of place! The wine and espresso flowed - quite literally, as I knocked my espresso over in my enthusiasm for the phenomenal tiramisu we had for dessert.

We continued our hedonistic holiday with a short trip to the Hunter Valley wine country. Wine is very hard to come by in Indonesia, especially in Gorontalo. We therefore promptly signed ourselves up for a full-day wine tasting tour of the Valley, with visions of endless glasses of Semillon and Shiraz dancing in our heads. Out of the four vineyards we stopped at, including the well-known Rosemount, my favorite was a boutique vineyard called Savannah Estate. Here, each wine tasted better than the last and I immediately checked off three to buy later - a sparkling pink moscato that would be lovely with brunch, a sweet dessert wine called Botrytis Semillon, and finally, a dark, sweet muscat that the man behind the counter said paired well with chocolate. To prove his point, he passed around a container of dark chocolate pieces and advised us to first take a sip of the muscat and then eat the chocolate. Exquisite.

On my last full day in Sydney, we finally made it to the beach. We took a ferry from Circular Quay to Manly Beach – an iconic Australian beach full of sunbathers and surfers. However, I wasn’t interested in sunbathing or surfing; I was on a mission to swim in my first Australian rock pool. Ever since my sister sent me a link to a New York Times article about Australian rock pools a couple of years ago, we have both been obsessed with them. So, we walked past all the sunbathers and surfers, rounded the corner and came upon a little cove with a small pool nestled against the rocks. The pool was tiny and nothing like the pools I had envisioned, but it was still fun. Even more fun, however, was swimming in the Cabbage Tree Bay Aquatic Reserve right next to the pool. The cool but crystal clear water was full of interesting aquatic life and I happily paddled around for an hour or so looking at the pink rocks, kelp, purple sea urchins, a sparsely-spotted singaree and even a big blue grouper!

After a mere nine days of comfort, vices and pampering, it was time to return to Indonesia. Court and Steph stayed on in Australia and headed out to Uluru (or Ayer’s Rock) for another four days while I headed back to Indo to go diving. It was a hard choice to make – four more days in the Outback or three days of diving off Bunaken, the diving capital of Indonesia. I chose to go to Bunaken, but I hope to return to Australia someday soon. There are so many more rock pools to discover…

A Traditional Balinese Healer

Happy New Year! It’s been a while since my last post and one of my New Year’s resolutions is to blog more often. December was a whirlwind of travel and finishing up the end of the semester and, as a result, not much blogging got done. And to be honest, I haven’t exactly finished up the semester either, since I still have a huge pile of essays to read and final grades to report. But never mind that. I think for my first post of the New Year it’s fitting to write about my trip to Ubud, Bali last month where I visited a traditional Balinese healer.

Ubud is the artistic and cultural capital of Bali, known for its traditional dances, shadow puppet shows, local artisans and now also for its prominent role in the bestselling memoir Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert (which is, incidentally, being turned into a feature film starring Julia Roberts). On her tri-country search for personal fulfillment following a divorce, Gilbert ends up in Bali where she befriends Wayan Nuriyasih, a traditional Balinese Healer. In the book, Wayan is described as a “strikingly attractive Balinese woman with a wide smile and shiny black hair down to her waist”. She is also unabashedly upfront about all issues related to the body, health and sex. Gilbert consults her for a number of ailments including a wounded knee, how to make her hair grow faster and a bladder infection. Along the way, the two become close, spending many hours laughing and sharing together so that by the end of the book, Gilbert eventually helps raise enough money to help buy Wayan a new house with a permanent address so that her healing center can finally be listed in Lonely Planet.

So, when Courtney and I arrived in Ubud last month, we consulted our Lonely Planet to find Wayan’s healing center on Jl Jembawan, just a couple streets away from our pension. Courtney is a strong believer in alternative medicine and had been looking forward to visiting Wayan for months. She was also battling the lingering effects of dengue fever and was eager to get Wayan’s help. I didn’t really have any pressing issues that I needed healing for but I was interested to go along anyway to meet this real life “character” from a book I had read.

We found Wayan in her shop and she looked just like Gilbert described – long shiny black hair and a welcoming smile. The entrance to the shop was hidden behind an array of potted medicinal plants and a soothing fountain. Wayan was in the middle of helping another client but she ushered us in, asked us to sit down and had a helper whip up a couple of glasses of freshly grated turmeric juice to strengthen and cleanse our bodies while we waited. It’s the Balinese way to treat everyone as equally important so instead of having to wait for Wayan to be completely finished with her other clients, we were sort of rotated in as Wayan jumped around from person to person.

After giving Courtney some herbal tea and rhinoceros water to help flush out the dengue, Wayan did full body energy readings for both of us. We stood up while she moved her hands over our energy fields, looking for any deficiencies or imbalances in our bodies. She also read our palms. I was fascinated by the results of this reading, although a bit suspicious that Courtney and I had so much in common. Regardless, I pleased to hear that I have a long lifeline and good luck. My energy fluctuates (no kidding!) and I have an easy time finding jobs (so far this has been true!). She sees me having two part-time jobs in the future, which makes a lot of sense if I end up teaching ESL back in the States. She declared me “smart, but not brilliant”, which Courtney and I both laughed about. And my memory is not so good. This is true, especially when I compare myself with my sister, who has an AMAZING ability to recall the smallest details about events that happened years ago. As for friendship, love, and marriage, I have four close friends in life. It’s unclear if these 4 friends are already in my life or if she means I will have four close friends over the span of my lifetime. But she was pretty clear about the fact that four men fell in love with me but I brushed them off. I wonder who they were… She also said I have had two serious boyfriends, which is true. She then predicted that I will marry later in life but it will be a “big and deep” love. I will only marry once. I wonder how late “later in life” is. I’m already 32… We asked about children and she said that I have 3 eggs – 2 good eggs and one weak egg. I interpret this to mean one miscarriage and two children but my friends have offered up other suggestions as well, including two healthy children and one handicapped child or two well-behaved children and one wild child. I guess time will tell. As for my health, I need more vitamin E and A in my diet, I need to drink more water and I need to stop worrying so much.

Following the readings, we were sent upstairs to have full body massages that were designed to treat our specific needs. I’m not exactly sure what needs I was being treated for, but I will say that I quite like being massaged by three young Balinese men simultaneously!