Indonesia: Life In The Islands

Orientation

For the last month, we've been going to AMINEF (American Indonesia Exchange Foundation) in Balai Pustaka to learn about culture, teaching, and as much Bahasa Indonesia as we can cram into four weeks. Bahasa isn't a difficult language, but there's lots of new vocab to memorize! There are no tenses, which make it a little easier--you say "I went to the store" and "I go to the store" exactly the same way. The words aren't too hard to pronounce and are actually pretty fun to say. My favorite word so far is perpustakaan--aka library.
For the first two weeks we also had culture sessions everyday. These ranged from lectures on health and how to avoid avian flu (a very scary one) to how to not offend Indonesians with our relationships (no one of the opposite sex is allowed in your house with the door shut). Indonesian communities are very tight knit and each one has a leader. As boles (the Indonesian word for white people) everyone will know what we are doing at all times. It's definitely like living in a fishbowl--if we meet with a friend and go to the movies, the next day people in our town will ask us about it. Some of the other ETAs seemed really surprised that they wouldn't be able to date Indonesians. I don't think they realized how extreme the Indonesian views on dating before marriage are. I was told before I got here what the expectations were, so I wasn't as shocked--but it IS strange to be 22 years and told that even another male ETA, if he visited me, couldn't sleep on my couch. It would look too questionable to the rest of the community.
The rest of the time during orientation is spent on teaching. The first few weeks we focused on speaking and using the white board correctly. The final days we're each doing individual teaching simulations where we stand in front of the other ETAs and present a thirty minute lesson that we would give to our kids in high school. It's a little nerve wracking to pretend to teach nouns to a bunch of kids with college degrees (and a few with their masters's!) but I really think it's helped to make us all a little more secure about standing in front of classes of our own in a few weeks.
Our instructors at AMINEF are really great. Our Bahasa teacher is named Ony. He won a Fulbright last year to go to Stanford and teach Indonesian there. He is really funny and sweet and an excellent teacher. He has a really endearing high laugh that makes us all burst into laughter when he does. Our teaching instructor is named Lusi. She teaches at the University and has really been very patient with us (we're not always the most serious in our presentations). She's worked all around Indonesia observing teachers and can tell us a lot about controlling a classroom of forty kids. It's going to be unbelievably different from what we experienced in our high schools--for example, even though these kids are fifteen years old, we're still expected to play games with them at the beginning of every class. They don't study English very seriously, and our job as native speakers is to spark an interest in them and try to get them to focus and have a goal when it comes to learning English. All I have to say is, thank god English is my first language--because it's so complicated to teach I don't think I ever would have learned it if it wasn't.

posted by Caitlin @ 1:26 AM