The past 3 weeks have been especially crazy and it seems we are rushing headlong towards Christmas! It’s less than 2 weeks now till I’m back in the UK and yet I only just feel like I’m getting the hang of life here!
After my trip to Penang (and another Jungle Party at the one club) we were awoken early in the morning by a knock on the front door. Unhappy to be woken up so early we stormed downstairs to discover one of our staff with a bag containing 2 kittens, with little other explanation. So we now have 2 new wonderful housemates here!!! Meet Simba and Nala! Buying food for kittens is surprisingly difficult in Indonesia it turns out and we have already had to make 2 trips to the city to do so! They are settling in nicely however after an early on claw-in-the-eye incident which left me looking like a cyclops for a good day. Indonesians are not subtle when you don’t look good – sometimes I wake up and they ask ‘What happened to you?!’ so having a cat claw to the face was not ideal.
Shortly after Penang it was International happy teacher day, which, as with all good Indonesian traditions, saw our students assembling military formation style and singing to us. We were then awarded ribbons and presents – including cake!!
The weekend after Penang we worked the whole weekend, teaching a group of University age students at the farm. We also took them to the river and did some river crossing activities – which led to us quickly learning that it’s not all Indonesians who are good swimmers – just all jungle kids. Luckily the river was slow and everyone enjoyed their day!
Over the past week we’ve been trying to be more present at the school. Sometimes I spend so much time in the office that I miss out on actually spending time with the students and staff – who really are what this place is all about – not about advertising and websites etc. I’ve been slowly relaxing into the Indonesian lifestyle and thus remained calm when everyone was 45 minutes late for our staff meeting last week. In classic Indonesian style, on Friday we went for a river shower (following some confusing over whether there was a dead chicken in our well – 300,000 rupiah later we discovered there was not) and en route home were invited in by a woman who insisted that we eat her food. We had to be fed some fried items, to which soup was then added. A good place to pass if we are ever hungry!
On Friday night I had a go at helping next door with their chopping – they spend most of their days chopping small nuts out of shells. When I say ‘they’ I mean the lady who lives next door, all of her daughter, daughters in law, grandchildren and pretty much every other woman who lives on our street. You get 1,000 rupiah for 1kg of nuts things. 17,000 rupiah is equal to £1. 1 hour and only 10 nut things later I decided to keep my fingers and donate my efforts to one of the other women, rather than to continue playing with the machette.
This weekend, we set off at 3am (4am because rubber time) on Saturday morning to Berstagi. After 2 hours of driving we drove up an impossible road to watch the sunset – only to discover that outside of the car it was freezing cold, raining and foggy. After an hour (or two – it’s Indonesia) of being sat in the cold and sharing our breakfast with some locals, we abandoned our plan of camping and drove on past an active volcano (with an evacuated village at the bottom) to Berstagi. Once in Berstagi we phoned several hotels. Eventually one said they had enough rooms for us. We then arrived there, to discover it looked like this.
After some confusion, we walked through the building site to find actual rooms! Result. We then enjoyed the city for the day, exploring the markets and heading out to the Buddhist temple – where we all enjoyed dressing up in what I think was traditional Korean costume.
On Sunday the weather was luckily better! We headed out at 9am (10am and then we had to stop for breakfast) to climb a volcano! One very muddy hike later we made it to the top just before the cloud cover came down. We had a brief dance party here (curtesy of one of our teacher’s determination to create a vlog) then hiked back down. Once down we started heading home, although we took a quick stop by a waterfall on the Edge of Lake Toba.
Today it’s been back to work – although so far my day has consisted of a birthday party in Kindergarten and some class photos with the police – which shows how rare it is to see police here.
One of my highlights of today was going to the ‘supermarket’ in between lessons. We set off with 20 minutes till we needed to teach. We arrived with 15 minutes till we needed to teach. We then were offered 2 for 1 deals of everything we bought – ‘aha you want noodles, if you buy two more packs I will sell you them for 5,000 rupiah, oooh you want washing powder – well you can also have this bag for 2,000 rupiah because there is a deal on’ we now had 5 minutes until the lesson. ‘But wait, you have chocolate, I can give you one more for free!’. We somehow made it back on time with double the amount of shopping we had planned.
Now finally time to unpack and relax a little before whatever chaos tomorrow will bring, although having finally fixed our generator (turns out it was just dirty) it’s very tempting to sit and watch TV.
Only one more blog until Christmas now! On a related note – I’ve been updating our website with some Christmas fundraisers if anyone wants to help us out! https://www.bukitlawangtrust.org/campaigns
Rosie xo
Rosie Roams 