On Sunday I went diving for the first time in Gorontalo and the experience was so remarkable that I can only relate it to maybe living in Paris for nearly three months before finally seeing the Eiffel Tower. I finally had that “pinch me I’m here” moment that hits every tourist when they finally visit a place they’ve always dreamed of seeing, like the Eiffel Tower in Paris. Gorontalo may not have much to offer tourists above ground, but the underwater world here offers first-class diving and the opportunity to see various endemic species found only in these waters, many of which are still unknown to science.
The local dive shop, Miguel’s Diving, is run by Rantje Allen, an American who has lived in Gorontalo for over ten years and has done a lot of work in establishing dive sites and educating local fishing communities about the dangers of common fishing practices, such as blast fishing and potassium cyanide poisoning. He works closely with the governor of Gorontalo, who is also a diver, on marine conservation issues. It was a privilege to dive with him. Along with Rantje, there was an American from Ohio, two Swedes from Stockholm and Rantje’s local assistant dive guide, Yunis, on this trip.
Our first dive was at Swirling Steps, a site normally not recommended for inexperienced divers because of its strong currents. But on Sunday there was no current so down we went. The water looked so clear from the dive boat that I was doubtful about doing a back roll entry because it looked like I was going to hit my head on the coral! But I was reassured that the coral was actually several meters underwater. For the next 44 minutes I was submerged in a world of sheer exotic beauty. Rantje had a writing slate with him and helpfully wrote down the names of some of the creatures we saw. Not long into the dive, he turned towards me and made a punching-like motion with his fist. This is the diving signal for “danger”. Intrigued, I looked past him to the coral wall as he scribbled “scorpionfish” on his slate. Scorpionfish have venomous fin spines and are not to be messed with.In worse case scenarios, scorpionfish stings can lead to violent pain, unconsciousness and even extended comas. After taking a look from a safe distance we moved on. Some other curious creatures we saw included garden eels and jaw fish. Garden eels stick up from the sand and sort of move their bodies like a beckoning finger. Likewise, jaw fish also live in the sand and poke their heads up to see what’s going on. Other highlights included seeing a blue spotted stingray, a giant clam and the best one of all - a green sea turtle!
The second dive was at Traffic Circle, located right off Olele Beach, where I had previously gone with some students; from the dive boat I could even see the hut we sat at. More captivating than the hut though, was the pod of Risso’s dolphins that were swimming in the distance. These dolphins are distinguished by their blunt noses and the fact that their bodies become lighter in color as they age, while their dorsal fins remain dark. They also like to fight each other, which explains the scars below:
We all watched the dolphins for a while and then some of us hopped overboard to snorkel for a bit. It felt so liberating to be in the water sans scuba gear with just my swimsuit, mask and snorkel and it was exciting to know that the dolphins were frolicking just meters away.
The second dive brought even more surprises. Rantje’s assistant, Yunis, is an expert in spotting very small creatures. On this dive, he showed us all a teeny, tiny bright pink soft coral crab that was clinging to some coral. Remarkably, this soft coral crab has the ability to mimic the spiny appearance of the coral it is on. How cool is that? I also saw my first Salvador Dali sponges - the name that Rantje gave to these previously unknown giant sponges that resemble a surreal Dali painting with their ornately swirly carvings. This is the only place in the world where these sponges exist. Other endemic species we saw were cigar sponges and a small fish known as a yellow blenny. And I probably swam by countless other endemic species without even realizing it. That is part of the reason why diving in Gorontalo is so thrilling.
The third dive was at a site called Honeycomb East, not too far from Traffic Circle. The big feature of this dive was a “swim through”, a hole in the reef that you can swim through. Even though you can see the other side from the entrance, I decided to swim around instead, since I haven’t been trained in overhead environments. Like Traffic Circle, there were numerous Salvador Dali and cigar sponges here. There were also Napoleon wrasse (some pretty big fish!) and beautifully colored clown triggerfish with black and white polka dots. A highlight of this dive was seeing a yellow pufferfish taking a nap in a coral crevice. So cute!
That night all of us divers (minus Yunis, but plus the American’s wife and her friend) went out to dinner at a Chinese place in town. Over bowls of delicious wantons and fried rice, we chatted about diving in Sulawesi and life in Gorontalo. The two Swedes came to Gorontalo after a week of live-aboard diving in the Lembah Straits in north Sulawesi. A week of diving, eating, and sleeping on a live-aboard boat sounds like heaven! I hope I get the chance to do that while I’m in Indonesia.
All in all, Sunday was the best day I’ve had in Gorontalo to date. Like I said, it was really a “pinch me I’m here” kind of day. I see Gorontalo in a whole new light now and feel supremely lucky to be living here. I finally understand why the people at the dive shop back in NJ were so envious of me moving to Sulawesi!
I recently got an email from my supervisor at the U.S. Embassy in Jakarta letting us ELFs know that it is already time to start thinking about whether we want to renew our fellowships for 2010-2011. Since we’re not even 3 months in to the 10-month fellowship, it seems really early to be asking this question, but that’s how the program rolls.
Given my recent posts about not wanting to learn Indonesian, power outages, lack of Internet connectivity, housing issues, food issues, etc., you may be somewhat surprised to hear that I am even considering staying in Indonesia for another year. Yes, there are a lot of frustrations to living here, but never once have I wished I didn’t come.
I am changing and growing every day here. In these two short months alone, I have learned volumes about Islam and have confronted poverty first hand. Moreover, for the first time in my life, I am living in a collectivist culture, which constantly challenges all my individualist notions about how society works. My intercultural competence is increasing daily and I know that this fellowship, whether it lasts one year or two, will be yet another defining experience of my life.
This fellowship is also a great opportunity to develop professionally. Earlier this month, I gave a workshop on “Integrating Skills” to lecturers in the English department at UNG. Next month, I will be presenting on “Using Peer Reviews to Improve Student Writing” at the TEFLIN conference (Teachers of English as a Foreign Language in Indonesia) in Malang. Then, in January there will be a series of workshops in Makassar, Yogyakarta and Solo.
Also, let’s not forget the incredible diving and travel opportunities that living in this part of the world affords.This year, I will be spending my Christmas vacation in Bali and Australia bumming around with Courtney, Stephanie and my friend Nat, who lives in Sydney. Then I’m heading back to Sulawesi to take the PADI Advanced Open Water Diver course in Bunaken with Mark. And that’s just talking about now until mid January. The travel opportunities here are fantastic and if I stay another year, then there’s so much more I could see…
Plus, this fellowship has introduced me to nine amazingly smart, funny and down-to-earth teachers who are quickly becoming good friends. As an added bonus, I also have totally awesome ETAs. I must admit, I really like the company I’m keeping here. Granted, next year this group will change, but fortunately some of the other ELFs are also thinking about renewing.
Finally, staying another year would guarantee me a job and an income. This gig pays pretty well for an English teaching job and there are all sorts of added bonuses like free housing, paid travel and living expenses, and program funding. I know many people back home who have multiple degrees and are out of work. I know people working part-time jobs but wishing they had full-time jobs. I know people in their 30s who have moved back in with their parents to save a little money. This is a full-time job that guarantees me a salary, housing, multiple allowances and a huge, life-changing adventure to boot.
So, what’s holding me back? What would be my reasons for not renewing? Well, the biggest reason is that I miss my family and friends a lot. Distance is hard and it’s even harder when you’re troubled by the thought that you might never see your loved ones again. This thought has haunted me for the past five years, ever since my family survived a fatal car accident in Iceland. This fear was brought to the forefront of my thoughts again when the father of one of the other ELFs died suddenly at the beginning of the semester. Knowing that life can be extinguished in an instant forces me to wonder if it’s not selfish of me to be living so far away from home for so long.
The other reasons I have for not renewing are not nearly as compelling. Clearly, life would be much easier and more comfortable back in the States or in Western Europe - I could easily find stores that sell the things I need and I wouldn’t have to worry about power outages or lack of Internet connectivity. I would be able to understand what people are saying to me and would have a clearer understanding of workplace expectations. What’s more, bathrooms in the U.S. and Western Europe have Western toilets, toilet paper, soap and light bulbs! How amazing! And then there’s the food issue - I miss cheese and wine and pizza and burgers and lox bagels and Mexican food and Italian food and New York City Restaurant Week. On a slightly more essential note, I feel like I have zero dating opportunities here and this is a part of my life that I don’t particularly enjoy putting on hold. For one, it’s rather hard to meet people here that I would be interested in dating and two, even if I did manage to find a boyfriend here, he certainly wouldn’t be able to spend the night, given the predominant Muslim beliefs about dating and marriage.
On the other hand, my philosophy of life is well expressed by this Anais Nin quote, “Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one's courage”. Accordingly, my life so far has been a collection of amazing experiences that probably never would have happened if I hadn’t found the courage to leave my comfort zone and strike out into unfamiliar territory. Living in Indonesia is my latest adventure and I’d like to think my life will be that much more extraordinary if I stay another year.
Having gotten some positive feedback from you, my faithful blog followers, I have decided to write another “Day in Gorontalo” entry. Actually, I think I will try to do at least one a month for the rest of my fellowship. It’s a nice break from the theme based entries I usually write and it paints a pretty good picture of the highs and lows I experience on any given day.
Tuesday, November 10, 2009
6:00 a.m. My alarm goes off early because I intend to mark some essays before breakfast. I then hit the snooze button repeatedly for an hour.
7:00 a.m. I am up and puttering around the house wondering when Nita will arrive with my tea. Yesterday she brought me tea and homemade cookies for breakfast. But today she doesn’t appear at all. So, I make a cup of instant Indocafe Cappuccino instead and sit down with my stack of essays from my Writing IV class.
8:00 a.m. Distracted by the sound of water coming from the front of my house, I tear myself away from my essays and angrily head towards the door. People are constantly helping themselves to my water supply because the gate that’s supposed to be in front of my house still hasn’t been finished yet. Prepared to confront thetrespasser, I throw open the door and am stunned to find a young man washing his face and feet not with the hose connected to the house water supply, but with the waste water in the dirty old bucket left under the dripping air conditioner. My annoyance suddenly turns into pity for this young man who apparently has nowhere else to clean himself. I say good morning then go back inside.
9:00 a.m. Taking a break from the drudgery of marking my essays, I decide to make myself a pancake breakfast. These are absolutely delicious and I wonder why I haven’t been making these more often. Galael sells a Pancake & Crepe mix. All you have to do is all water and an egg. So simple, so good.
10:30 a.m. As I make my way through the stack of essays, I discover that an alarming number of students have turned in work that is clearly not their own. For this assignment, students had a choice of four possible topics, including describing interesting places in Gorontalo or Indonesia. One student’s essay had the following sentences about Kuta Beach, Bali: “Rapid development and an influx of visitors haven’t kept the surfers away and Kuta still remains one of Bali’s best surfing beaches and a great place to enjoy a beach lifestyle. While the surfers are still part of the Kuta scene, it’s the shopping, nightlife and party vibes that attract thousands of visitors.” Perhaps this student is quite gifted. Perhaps these sentences were not lifted directly from some tourist website. But then consider that the same essay opens with “Indonesia is a country that popular with beautiful scenery and also tourist attractions” and closes with “In conclusion, there are three tourist attractions in Indonesia. It is interesting to visit.” Nope, I don’t believe for one second that the body of the essay was the student’s own creation. What baffles me is that the students have the gall to submit such work. I had been warned that plagiarism was a big issue in Indonesia, particularly at my university, but it’s appalling and also a little bit devastating to see it done in my own classes.
10:45 a.m. Once again I am distracted by the sound of water coming from the front of my house. When I peek out of the window I see that someone is at work washing his car in my driveway. Honestly! Again, I throw open the door and prepare myself for a confrontation. I ask the man in English what he’s doing and point out that this is my house. He answers in English, “I know, I know. Sorry!” Then he laughs and drives off. I glare at him as he pulls out of the driveway. I just don’t get it. Why do people think it’s OK to come over and help themselves to my water supply?
11:00 a.m. Fed up with my plagiarizing students and my water-stealing neighbors, I decide to calm myself down by taking a shower and getting ready to head to campus for my afternoon class. Since the water in my shower is usually on the cold side, I turn it off while I lather up. When I go to turn the water back on to rinse off, just a trickle comes out. And then it completely dries up. I feel that the water karma gods are getting back at me for denying my neighbor the water to wash his car. Either that or he used it all up. In any event, I need to get rid of all this soap. Dripping in sudsy water, I tramp over to my other bathroom and try my luck with that faucet. Luckily, there is just enough water in the pipe for me to splash off the suds.
2:10 Time for CCU! I love teaching this class - I get to learn all sorts of interesting things about Indonesia from my students. Today’s topic is classroom behaviors. We start off with a little situational quiz about what to do in certain classroom situations in the US. To extend the activity, I ask the students to get into groups and make a list of some of the differences they have noticed between Indonesian and American classroom behavior. I learn that my students have a lot of criticisms of Indonesian teaching styles. They find most of their Indonesian teachers to be very serious and authoritative in the classroom. Punctuality, on the teacher’s side, is also a problem. Classes might start late because a teacher sends a student out to make photocopies and then everyone just sits around waiting for that student to come back with the copies. Sometimes the teachers just write an assignment on the board and tell the students to have it finished by the following week. If students are late or don’t have an assignment they are sometimes punished by being forced to sing a song or recite a poem in front of the class. They even admit that they are afraid of their teachers most of the time. In contrast, my students seem to really like the American teaching style. They like that American teachers are friendly, informal, interactive and non-threatening. They also appreciate our punctuality, organization and use of body language to make difficult ideas understandable. I wish I could spend more time on this topic. I feel we are just scratching the surface of things we could talk about - things like plagiarism, sharing among students, saving face in the group, how students and teachers address each other, who asks questions, what topics are appropriate for discussion or writing assignments, the amount of experiential learning vs. rote learning, speech acts like greetings and how to start and end a class, social distance between students and teachers, etc. I think classroom behavior is a fascinating subject to study cross culturally.
4:00 p.m. Since the Internet isn’t working for the 7th day in a row in my office, I plug in my USB modem and wait a painful 20 minutes for something to happen. For some reason, the connection is being ridiculously slow and I consider shutting everything down and going home but then the rain comes. Rainy season in Gorontalo has officially arrived. So, I do like the Indonesians do and decide to just stay put until it passes.
5:30 p.m. On the way home I stop by my counterpart’s office to pick up some package notification slips that he texted had arrived for me. Packages!! Few things thrill an expat’s heart more than packages from home. I wonder who they’re from. Probably from my mom, as I know she’s shipped several packages of reading material, vitamins, dental floss and other essentials. Or they could be from one of my friends who responded to my Facebook plea to please send Annie’s Mac & Cheese. Oh what excitement! I’ll have to go to the post office tomorrow right away after work. I love having things to look forward to.
6:00 p.m. Back home, I decide I need to resume my paper grading work. The plagiarism issue is really bugging me because I have now identified 6 out of 18 essays read so far that clearly have something fishy going on. So I send a text to my fellow ELFs asking for advice on how to handle the situation. Suggestions and support pour in instantly; Maura reminds me that plagiarism is culturally acceptable here, Amber promises to send me some great paraphrase citation exercises tomorrow, Stephanie recommends underlining the text I’m suspicious of and then asking the students where they got it from, Courtney advises me to speak with each student individually, and Mark says he’ll read my book when I figure it all out. Ahhh…what would I do without the other ELFs? They are a constant source of support and their humor helps keep me laughing too.
6:23 p.m. I finally get to work on the next essay in my stack. I tell myself that I will mark essays for an hour or so and then take a dinner break.
6:25 p.m. Mati lampu!! Plans to grade papers are foiled by another of Gorontalo’s infamous random power outages. I need to get these papers done tonight so I debate between firing up the generator and relocating to the Quality Hotel for a couple of hours. I opt for the generator.
6:30 p.m. I drag it out of one of the spare bedrooms and hook it up to the power source outside. I’m about to go through my start up checklist when Sarah calls. Sarah always has perfect timing. Some strange sixth sense leads her to call me just at a moment when I’m dying to complain about the latest Indo curveball. As per our standard routine, we update each other on the craziness of the day and talk about how we’re looking forward to seeing all the other ELFs for our early Thanksgiving in Yogya this weekend.I treasure these conversations with her; I think we help each other stay sane in a very challenging country.
The rest of the evening is filled with making a pasta dinner, finishing my grading, and writing this blog post. And now I’m off to bed. Another day in Indo is done.
Part of living in a developing country is not having the easy Internet access you’re used to at home. I knew this before I came here and although I try to be understanding, the situation drives me up the wall.
For starters, I do not have any sort of reliable Internet at my house. Broadband wireless access is available in certain parts of Gorontalo, but of course not where I live. Even if it were available in my area, I would need to get a telephone line installed but was told by the helpful people at Telkom that there are thousands of people on the waiting list already so there’s no chance of me getting a line installed this year. So, instead, I have a USB modem that I can plug into my laptop for a pre-paid dial-up connection. But this connection only works if God is willing, and God is often not willing. More often than not, I am left staring at a screen that says “Address Not Found” or “Page Load Error”. And the minutes on my pre-paid card tick by…
I thought I would outsmart the system by getting a cell phone that could connect to the Internet. Most of the other ELFs bought the cheapest cell phones they could find when we all went cell phone shopping in Jakarta during orientation, but I decided to pay the extra $50 to get a phone that would allow me to check my email and Facebook whenever I wanted because I knew Internet access in Gorontalo would be tricky. In theory this was a brilliant idea, but in practice the browser on my phone is just as fickle as the USB modem. Sometimes I can scroll through my inbox with no problem and other times I’m faced with the message, “Verification of server certificate failed”, whatever that means.
My saving grace, up until this past week, has been my Internet connection at work. I just plug in the LAN cable and I’m good to go. Well, usually. The connection is often strong in the morning and then fades to nothing by late afternoon. But I can deal with this inconvenience because at least I know that I can check my email first thing in the morning and respond to urgent messages. However, plans to catch up on Facebook or upload photos after work are often thwarted by lack of access in the afternoon. I also lose my Internet connection every time the power goes off, which happens at least once a week at school.
But for this entire past week I have had absolutely no Internet connection at all at work. The head of the department said there was a problem with the central office in Manado and the university technician had no idea when it would be fixed. And last week was a particularly difficult one to be without Internet at work. My supervisor at the U.S. Embassy in Jakarta has been sending us ELFs lots of emails about upcoming programs in Malang, Makassar, and elsewhere and expects us to respond ASAP. Workshops are suggested, partners need to found, flight itineraries need to be hashed out and I feel completely out of the loop on this.
Without Internet at home or at work, I’m forced to find other solutions. There are countless Internet cafes, known as warnet, in town, but ever since I picked up a local virus on my flash drive that deleted all my lesson plans of the past couple years, I have decided to avoid these warnet like the plague. Luckily, a student was able to restore my files, but I have been sufficiently scared now that I have decided to only use my flash drive in my own computer.
One place I can go to use free wireless is the Quality Hotel. This is the fanciest hotel in town, has English speaking staff, and even the occasional Westerner passing through. There’s a nice lobby with air-conditioning and comfortable chairs and it would be an ideal spot to catch up on emails, if only the wireless actually worked. It only seems to work about every other time I go there. Not being able to use the Internet whenever I want is just one example of how in Indonesia I don’t have the same amount of control over my life that I am accustomed to.
