Merry Christmas. Running water has temporarily run out, so we’re all washing dishes with, and wiping our asses with, and drinking, boiled rainwater, or, you know, we would be, except it hasn’t rained for a week. Because of this, Nick has reinfected himself with the same stomach virus two or three times, whereas I remain inexplicably immune. I would really like to take a break from the squalidity for awhile, though. Is squalidity a word? I am heavily feeling my American privilege right now. The fact that I can even consider taking a break. Even though it will stay that – just considering – it somehow sets me apart.

Christmas here is a little like Halloween in that everyone cooks a feast and then waits for everyone in the neighborhood to come visiting and partake of the feast. Wade says that the reason behind that is that any of the visitors could be the Messiah. And who could live with themselves if they accidentally refused food to the Messiah? Unfortunately, bules can’t be the Messiah, I guess, because even though our household, too, cooked a feast, we just get LOOKED AT all weird when we show up at other people’s houses. This, plus the fact that all the stores are closed for Christmas, plus the fact that there’s no water, means that we’ll pretty much starve all day, except for the gratuitous amounts of chocolate my parents sent in their Christmas packages. Isn’t Papua great? Isn’t Christmas great?

I’m depressed here lately. I don’t know if you can tell, because I focus endlessly on minutae instead of whining about it (thankfully). But I am. I wish my culture shock would follow the approved trajectory outlined in my helpful ‘Dealing With Culture Shock’ pamphlet, but my culture shock apparently doesn’t read pamphlets, because it’s marching to the beat of its own depressed little drummer. According to the pamphlet, I should have had a honeymoon period for the first month or so, then about three months of frustrating assimilation paired with sleepless nights and homesick thoughts; then, at five months, begin to feel at home in the new culture. In truth, I had a honeymoon period during the second month only, during which I happily drew all the nature around me, took photos of it, chattered away in broken Indonesian to any curious local who approached me, obviously creepy or no, and spent lots of free time coming up with fun, complicated games for my classes. The first month was spent getting pissed off about showering with cold water from a bucket and the like, and the third and fourth month were spent in a foggy state of apathy. Now, in the fifth month, I’m just sick of everything. The next person who tries to get my attention with a ‘Sssst!’ through their lips, like I’m an animal, is getting punched in the face. The next person who tries to touch my arm while we’re both riding motorcycles really fast by riding up dangerously close to me and yelling ‘BULEBULEBULEBULE’ is going to get ridden off the road, and then punched in the face.

Louise used to tell me stories about how she bloodied people’s noses, and I would be amazed at how anyone could take that much offense at what was obviously harmless, but now I understand perfectly. I am so on edge that I get filled with rage now when I think of how uncreative Indonesians are with their cooking, even, or when I see someone throwing their soda cans and peanut bags into the ocean, like everyone does all the time, or when I rent a movie and notice that half the scenes have been censored. If I try and comfort myself by eating, my choices are some form of rice or some form of noodles with bitter, tough spinach and some overcooked fish, all generously soaked in MSG no matter how many times I tell the person to tidak pakai vetsin. I mean, please. MSG COSTS YOU MONEY TO BUY, AND FOOD WITHOUT MSG DOESN’T COST LESS TO SELL. IF SOMEONE SPECIFICALLY DOESN’T WANT IT, YOU SAVE MONEY BY NOT PUTTING IT IN. I’m so lucky my Indonesian is still terrible. If I could say everything that I wanted to say, someone would have shot me by now.

Awards to Things I Brought In My Suitcase

Most Useful:
Laptop Computer, but that’s cheating, I think, so A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson

Most Ridiculous:
Warm fuzzy slippers

Most Weather-Appropriate; Unfortunately, Also Most Culturally Inappropriate:
A red bikini

Most Initially Useful, But Eventually Gave Me a Painful Esophageal Infection:
8 bottles of Doxycycline malaria-preventive pills

Most Unethical:
A DVD set of Penn & Teller’s Bullshit! that I forgot to return to my friend Molly before I left the States

Most Curious to the Locals:
Contact lenses

Most Regrettable:
A relatively expensive, heavy speaker system that cost me $50 in overweight baggage costs and then promptly fried the second I plugged it into the wall here, despite the presence of the appropriate voltage converter

Most Reminiscent of Home:
Blueberry body lotion, or a necklace of dried roses

Thing I Most Wish I Had Brought, However Unexpected This May Sound:
100 packets of Kraft Macaroni and Cheese Mix

December 21, 2006

All my interactions with people here are accompanied, always uncomfortably, by The Smile. You know the one. It’s the fog of nonthreateningness that you wear when you know that very very few actual words are getting through. The Smile persists through every kind of encounter; with fruit vendor dudes, with chicken saté dudes, with post office dudes, with random dudes on the street who want to have conversations about where I live, etc.

The Smile is distinct from the tight-lipped half-smirk that Americans give to each other when two strangers or remote acquaintances pass each other in a place where it would be considered rude not to look up. Here we call this the bulesmile because nobody uses it except white people. I’ve seen a few white people here, and they all do it. Look up from the ground, twist the lips, look back at the ground. Like ‘I see you, and I don’t want to get into anything with you, goodbye.’

This is not at all like The Smile. The Smile is broad and toothy and involves the entire face. It puts a laugh in the voice of the person using it. The doggedness of it made itself clear to me today when I wore it all through the following encounter with the guy who works in the package room in the post office. I was picking up a package sent to me by my dad. The postal service had failed to actually deliver it, like always. Instead they hoard it in the far reaches of the post office (I’m writing it in English for obvious reasons, but it was all in Indonesian):

Post Office Guy (smiling): Okay, that’ll be Rp.10,000.
Me (smiling, pointing at the postage mark, which reads $34.15): Paid already.
Post Office Guy (smiling): Yes, but you must pay 10,000 to pick it up.
Me (smiling): No.
Post Office Guy (smiling): Yes.
Me (smiling): The people at EF told me I shouldn’t have to pay.
Post Office Guy (smiling): Oh yes, yes, of course, that’s okay. Goodbye, Merry Christmas.
Me (smiling): Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to you too.

Like, that’s the conversational equivalent of smiling brightly, laughing a tinkling laugh, and saying ‘Hey, you’re trying to extort money from me because I’m a bule and ostensibly don’t know better, and I totally see right through you! Tee hee! And now that you know I speak Indonesian and have actual knowledge, you’re trying to pretend that you never tried to extort it in the first place! Ha ha ha! You’re an asshole!’

But even if I could say all of that in Indonesian, which I can’t (the closest I can come would come out something like ‘You person not good’) I wouldn’t, because I don’t want to make him angry. If I make him angry, he can pretend my packages never arrived in the first place, or steal them, or do any number of things I don’t want him to do.

Another conversation inappropriately permeated with The Smile:

Guy Who’s Bothering Me While I’m Trying To Write A Song On The Beach (smiling): Do you like Indonesian men?
Me (smiling): All individual men are different.
GWBMWITTWASOTB (smiling): Can I come to your house?
Me (smiling): No. Definitely not.
GWBMWITTWASOTB (smiling): Am I disturbing you by sitting next to you?
Me (smiling): Yes.
GWBMWITTWASOTB (smiling, continuing to sit next to me): Oh, okay.

What’s especially perverse about it is that it’s the exact same Smile I use when I’m having pleasant conversations with nice people (contrary to what my blog may have you believe, these people do exist):

Woman in the Back of a Taxi (smiling): Hey, hey! You dropped your motorcycle helmet out the window!
Me (smiling, relieved because I would have lost my helmet): Thank you SO much!

or

Fruit Vendor Dude (smiling): You buy rambutan so often, today you get half free.
Me (smiling): That’s nice of you!
FVD (smiling): You must watch out for that man – he is trying to touch your butt.
Me (smiling): Thank you, I will.

So it’s an indiscriminate Smile, which makes it even stranger. By looking at me, you would never be able to tell what kind of conversation I’m having, or how I feel about the person I’m having it with.

The Smile is also often accompanied by the Awkward Southeast Asian Half-Bow of Acquiescence, but we won’t get into that. Let’s just leave it at the fact that it’s mostly used for everything except acquiescing.

Apologies and such for the long absence; they were doing porn-based repair at the internet café for a few weeks, or at least that’s what I gathered from the repeated denials of the front desk guy that they were open even though there were 6 guys inside downloading porn.

(Oh, and incidentally, who keeps posting comments and then deleting them? That drives me insane. Like, I’m ‘blessed’ with an overactive imagination that keeps conjuring up images of lovelorn secret admirers when the truth is probably closer to people getting drunk and typing rambling comments which they delete the next morning. Either way, I need to know.)

The entries I had had written follow:

Thursday, December 14

Things are looking up. Whenever I use that idiom after four months of teaching English I picture all the animate and inanimate components of the improved situation literally looking up. Scanning the sky. Getting a suntan. Desks, students, cheesy posters, the EF building in general. Although most of it, actually, is still looking down, the small part of it that I mean is that I was looking at the teachers’ schedule the other day and realized how insanely better my schedule is than everyone else’s. Better for me, anyway… meaning that when everyone else is teaching loud obnoxious misbehaving children, I tend to be teaching Pre-Advanced Level 10 adults. Loud obnoxious children still figure significantly into my schedule – there’s really no avoiding it – but definitely not to the degree that they figure into everyone else’s. I salute you, fate. I salute you, Director of Studies.

Friday, December 8

I’m struck sometimes by how inaccurate of a portrayal of everyday everydays this blog, or any blog, is. I wonder if it’s possible to depict an atmosphere, a general feeling, in words. I’m struck by inconsequential things too, though - I’m struck by the location of my commas, and not in a complimentary way – so don’t attach too much gravity to it or anything.

How many times must I impress upon cyberspace the lingering odor of durian in the open market before I feel vindicated? Is there an upper limit to the number of entries in which I can mention the many ways in which being a bule sucks? How about the hundreds of beautiful beaches? Does it ever end? It’s repetitive because my life here is repetitive. Remember that and you will have something of a grasp on what my entries are failing to communicate.

To attempt not to whine in the midst of something crushing is fruitless. The last sentence I said aloud was ‘Stay the hell out of the Mody chocolate paste – I mean it.’ Before you ask, it’s basically icing in a glass mug, but it’s the cheapest form of chocolate there is.

The enormity sometimes hits me right around the times when I’m giving a Papuan Catholic bishop (the same one who was present when I had to explain was a cock was) his final speaking test, and the question is on fears and phobias, and I’m expecting spiders, I’m expecting cockroaches or maybe crocodiles, but I get the Indonesian Army; I get that he and other local religious leaders – Hindus, Buddhists, Muslims – are traveling to Yogyakarta to meet with the Indonesian President about the problem of violent clashes between the military and the people. I ask a sixteen-year-old girl about a stressful day in her life expecting too much homework or a breakup with a boyfriend, and instead I get that her mother sold her pet dog to people who made it into dog stew for a feast, and they killed it in her living room where she could hear its screams.

There are these times, where I’m captivated and saddened, and I think it will last forever. I think it will last forever until I step out into the evening heat of the marketplace and insert the hum of complaints about being treated like a celebrity here. Actually, don’t. There’s nothing I can say after the image of the girl’s pet dog being killed for stew that won’t sound, that won’t BE, trite.

Wednesday, December 6

There’s one pitted lychee on each finger. One finger on each letterkey. Typing still feels alien to me. When I look at my hands, I remember why. If I squint right they look like a frog’s, the finger pads splayed and glistening.

I’m writing this for you, so pay attention.

This morning there was a thin beaded mask of sweat on every surface that I touched. A band around my upper lip and the back of my neck like a slipped bandanna. I was dreaming about stretching out on my classroom floor. Seven-year-olds shuffled flash-cards by my feet, chorusing mixed vocabulary and screams. Sun-browned teenagers with ankle-sock tans furrowed their brows and questioned me telepathically about relative clauses. They whispered to each other and their faces faded when I tried approaching. I don’t know if I’ve mentioned it unequivocally here or what, but I kind of hate my job.

Coasting on perfectly placed dialogues with strangers, or between strangers, sends sparks to a halt when everything is in Indonesian. I’m clinging to the tail of intonation now. The sun on the tile when I unstick one eyelid. My school dream this morning was centered entirely within a cubist painting. Waking up, my feet and their shadows rippled living rectangles onto the mattress. Eight o’clock. His grandpa’s pocket watch has sand in the winding mechanism. Waking up, capsizing to ‘Fuck!’s.

At this rate, will anyone be able to understand me when I return?

This exchange slid softly into my head:

Someone says something perfect.
“Be careful of saying that… you’re going to make me fall in love with you.”
Someone says something perfect.
She laughs, and behind her laugh is something starting, finally, to distill.
Someone. Says. Something. Perfect. Deliberately.

Has this ever happened to anyone? I hope so.

Thursday, November 30

Here is the true face of everyday Jayapura: me about to stuff my face with rambutan. I’m having second thoughts about moving back to the states, knowing that they don’t have rambutan – I mean, what other fruit looks like a pod alien and tastes like a cross between a grape and a coconut?! You tell me.

Strange things keep happening. If this wants to become the wacky cultural anecdotes blog, so be it. It’s itching to do so, and I don’t have the energy to try and derail it, at least not right now.

We bought a box of green tea awhile ago, and when we got home and opened it, there was an rp. 5000 bill folded up inside – exactly the cost of the tea. Apparently when Indonesian advertisements claim that if you buy their product you might get a rebate, they mean that there is actually hard cash inside some of their products. No clipping coupons or sending in a self-addressed stamped envelope – just money, already put inside the product. I find this amazing. Since then, I have found empty decorated Idul Fitri envelopes inside my buckets of Sari Kelapa, stickers buried in my palm sugar, a plastic tiger in my oatmeal, and a 500 coin wrapped in Christmas paper in my motorcycle helmet.

There’s also this thing here among 10-13 year old boys where, if there’s a fat boy in the class, every other boy will try to be his partner or otherwise sit near him. Can you guess why? It’s so they can climb all over him and intermittently spank him. I have a class with three fat boys (nearly unheard of in Jayapura) and it’s… really awkward to teach a class when all the boys are spanking each other. I think they actually just see fat boys as jungle gyms, because when they’re partners for group work, they don’t sit next to each other – the fat boy lounges on his stomach and the skinny boy lounges too - on top of the fat boy. Double decker. This makes the fat boys very, very popular and sought after.

Nick’s parents’ Christmas package arrived today, nearly a month early. It smells of spiced tea. There isn’t a ‘Do Not Open Until Christmas’ sign anywhere on it, but there may as well be for all the fuss Nick is making about not opening it until Christmas. From the looks of it (and by ‘from the looks of it’ I mean the ever-increasing greedy-looking trails of ants) there are pfeffernous cookies somewhere hidden inside. Over Christmas we might be on Biak. It will be hot. This will be strange. It’s already strange. Jayapura has badly dubbed versions of Christmas songs playing all over town, with, like… MIDI keyboard instrumentation and techno backbeats, and they’re either in Indonesian, in which case the words don’t fit to the song because Indonesian hardly uses any words to convey the same meaning that English would need at least a paragraph for (Indonesians could have written that sentence better), or else they’re in English, with an accent that renders the lyrics indecipherable.

Speaking of. One of my punishments for late students (it’s sort of universal EF punishment, actually) is having them sing a song in front of everybody. It’s the only way to kind of keep people from being late, because this is a culture of extreme lateness – two hours or more. Anyway, someone in Level 2 was late recently. Level 2, even though their English is necessarily pretty bad, is one of my favorite classes because they’re essentially self-governing. Virtually all of them really want to learn, so they tolerate no disobedience from their peers. If someone starts speaking Indonesian, I don’t even have the chance to open my mouth (and anyway, usually in a level this low I let them speak Indonesian) before there’s a chorus of ‘Eyyyyyy, speak Inglees!’ and indignant looks and, often, reprimanding slaps. And if anyone is late, the entire class takes up a chant: ‘Sing! Sing! Sing! Sing! Come on, sing!’ If the person hesitates, the class dissolves into: ‘Eyy, ma’am say!’ and ‘Hurry upppp!’ and ‘Time is finissed, do it!’ The last time this happened, the late girl, a talkative 14-year-old Muslim in a veil, immediately broke out into “My humps, my humps, my humps! My lovely lady lumps!” – and the entire first verse - to a round of genuine applause and ‘Her English so goooood’s echoing around the room.

It is something of a sight to see, for Indonesians, when I ride our motorcycle anywhere. I’m a woman – a bule woman at that – riding a blue and purple man’s bike very fast, and I have a man riding on the back! This is completely unheard of. You never see a woman riding with the man on the back. Never. Couple that with the fact that my hair in the wind, from under my helmet, is like some kind of waving blonde beacon in the sun that draws everybody’s eyes to me, and you get lots of commotion. Near accidents. Things like that.

As people are yelling at me (usually ‘EY!’ or ‘Wooo! Mister, mister!’ – very articulate) they are ignoring miracles that are happening on the same road, not a half-block away. I know that in America we have NASCAR, and we have highways where the speed limit is 75, and we have, especially in Colorado, mountain roads that wind so steeply you feel like you’re on a rollercoaster. We have downtown traffic jams that don’t move for hours, and we have motorcycles that weave around in the 1 centimeter of space between the stalled cars without losing control. We have motorcyclists who speed over jumps, who fly over any number of obstacles to land squarely on their wheels. I realize all this. But you haven’t seen impressive, you haven’t seen amazing, until you’ve seen a little old Indonesian man manuevering his groaning, creaking old motorcycle over a half-eroded gravel road with a straight drop to the ocean on one side and honking taxis on the other – carrying AT LEAST 300 EGGS STRAPPED TO HIS BACK.

People do this. They gathered their eggs across the bay, and they sell their eggs in Jayapura. But there are no delivery trucks, at least not the way we think about them. You have to ride in the truck with your produce. So what do you do? Strap 300 eggs to your back, of course! You see these guys, and they all invariably have crappy motorcycles that look as though they’re about to fall apart. From the back, you can’t see the guy. All you see is carton upon carton of eggs, at least as tall as the person riding and about four times as wide, lashed together on all sides with rope (I mistyped and typed ‘hope’, which is probably not entirely inaccurate), wobbling away down the road. And it’s not as though there’s no other traffic; it’s not as though the roads are all perfect. No, everybody honks at the egg guy, because he goes slowly. He goes slowly because, on any road at any time, there could suddenly be a ten foot deep hole, or a flood from a water pipe breaking, streaking down the middle of the road, or a mother chicken with her chicks all in a line behind her, or a lost cow, or a sideways pickup spilling durian and mango. But people still honk at him, instead of saluting him. Nice.

I've been thinking about whitening soap. Louise’s boyfriend gesturing at her face with its undissolved sunscreen, saying ‘Bagus, bagus.’ The shoe salesman trying to stroke the tiny hairs on my arm: ‘Bagus.’ Rambutan – deep red hair-fruit – the seller choosing the two most withered stalks and assuring me: ‘Bagus – limabelas ribu.’ Here, any arm hair on a woman shows that she satisfies her lovers. People want to touch it. People think I am exotic and wild. People think I am unworthy of respect. People think things that I am unable to put into words because my words are wasted and racing, trapped inside my head, pounding to come out. Pounding to come out, but coming out changed; coming out as the definition of a relative clause and how to express ability. My mind is rotting.

And my language center is beginning to transform; Spanish and Indonesian are starting to melt together. Tidak ada gente que bisa habla español, pues, puedo decirles que saya bicara eso. When Indonesians march up to me now and I am trying to relax and they start asking me the usual list of questions – where do you come from? where do you live? can I come to your house? do you want an Indonesian boyfriend? – I pretend I speak Spanish, and do, rapidly. They have never heard Spanish – when would they have? – and they don’t know how to follow up. Can bules be from Spanish-speaking countries? They don’t think so, but they don’t want to venture a possibly incorrect declaration.

This is all nothing, though, without someone to break it down with. Where have all my articulate friends gone? That’s right, I left them all behind, choosing instead to jet off halfway around the world seeking… something… and I took – who could I have taken?! and I took someone who would be just as contented with his mouth and his brain sewn shut, gardening among the cassava. This is not an insult. Believe me, it isn’t. But I… here is an excerpt:

-

I said this: “Make sure you have a lot of fun with your pickaxes for me. I’ll be dreaming about sushi.”

I said this last night, before I knew what I would dream about, but I did dream about sushi: mostly spider rolls, fresh toro, and seaweed salad. I held onto these things, especially, in my mind, because he wants to be a farmer, and farmers grow potatoes and vegetables. You can’t make sushi with potatoes and vegetables. Not even if you’re a Japanese farmer, which he… it’s fuzzy and uncertain, what type of farmer he wants to be, but genetics predispose him towards not being a Japanese one.

“Tell him,” he said last night, indicating the Papuan farmer in our driveway, “that I want to be a farmer. Tell him that being a farmer is my dream. Tell him…”

She was already translating, eliciting the vague, yet impatient smile the man wears when he already understands something in English, but is still working it out, or working out a reply. “Yes, yes,” he nodded, but what else could he say? He comes from a place where, if you are not a farmer, you do not eat. Dreaming about being a farmer, to him, is like dreaming about knowing how to fart.

“We’ll tear up the driveway with pickaxes tomorrow, expose the soil,” he says, eliciting... you know what it elicited. You read it already.

-

What could this be like alone? I spend my mornings imagining. And reality keeps happening:
-
“Cassava. Fields of it! Cashew trees! Red dust! I wonder if it is paint?”
He spits on a crumbling rust-colored rock in his hand. “Hold still,” he says. “Roll up your sleeve.” Spits and smears. Scribbling in ochre on my upper arm. I turn brown; finally, two square inches of my skin are sufficiently Indonesian.
“Maybe if you do my whole body, I’ll be able to walk the streets in peace,” I suggest, half-joking; mostly joking, really. “Let’s draw designs on each other.”
“I’m getting tired, actually,” he says.
“Do you want to take some home?”
“Not really.”
“………..”
“………..”
“Would you make Zen paintings with it?”
“It’s too colorful. But maybe… yeah, maybe.”
Maybe.

-

Like I said, reality keeps happening, and I’m too far behind. For the first time in my life I don’t know what I think about how I feel, and I especially don’t know how I feel about my change in thinking.

I have, with considerable difficulty, refrained so far from filling this blog with teaching stories. Because every teaching challenge that comes up seems at the time to be enormous and insurmountable and obviously the most important challenge that anyone has ever been faced with ever, I follow the universal Rule of What Other People Will Care About, and realize that, to anyone removed from the situation, how infuriating it is when my High Fliers won’t stop fighting each other or how awkward it is when a Waystage 2 student tells an entire class he had a wet dream or how exhausting it is to teach 6 hours straight in one day isn’t really infuriating, or awkward, or exhausting, or even interesting at all – it’s just blurry, and thus boring. Plus, I’d hate for my students to see themselves portrayed in a light that is highly colored by my nervous energy. But (and you knew there was a but) I’m going to make an exception. Because I made the most genius lesson plan ever today, and I am granting myself bragging rights.

I have a small Keystage 2 (low-intermediate) class at night. 4-6 students, depending. Twice a week. This class acts as though opening their mouth to speak to me in English will result in their immediately being beheaded. It’s not because they don’t know English – most of them got at least 85% on their last test – and it’s not because I am intimidating – is it? I’ve had them for almost three months now, and have never yelled at or threatened or punished or killed any of them – but I don’t have any idea what the real reason is. Day-to-day, it doesn’t matter. All that matters is that I have tried everything in the world to get them to speak: roleplays, debates, putting my ear directly next to their mouths so they can’t whisper ‘…apa?...’ to each other in Indonesian instead of talking to me, sitting silently and staring at them when they sit silently and stare at me, getting Nick, who is an enthusiastic teacher almost to excess, to come in and parade his activities in front of them, etc., etc. The only thing that gets them motivated is competitive, fast-paced games. But the thing is, to get to the point where it is possible to play competitive games in class, students actually have to learn something first, which requires speaking, since EF is a fucking speaking-based school. A speaking-based school, and attempts to communicate with this class go as follows:

Hannah (slowly and clearly): David*, did you have a fun vacation?
David: (whisperwhisperwhisperwhisper, blank stare, giggles, whisperwhisperwhisper) Apa?**
Hannah (more slowly, more clearly): Where did you go for vacation, for Idul Fitri?
Students: (whisperwhisperwhisperwhisper, blank stares, giggles, whisperwhisperwhisper) Apa?
Hannah (you get the picture): Was your vacation good? Or bad?
David: (barely above a whisper): Good.
Hannah: What did you do?
David: (whisperwhisperwhisperwhisper, blank stare, giggles, whisperwhisperwhisper) Apa?
And so forth, until smoke comes out of my ears and I assign them an essay out of pure spite (and unwillingness to carry on a one-sided conversation for 80 minutes).

The thing is, the Keystage 2 book is also incredibly boring. Right now, we’re supposed to be learning about formal English in the workplace, which, I don’t know, these kids are about 14, so it’s pretty irrelevant. But I have to at least touch upon it or I have an entire class failing their progress tests. So today I wrote up two example job ads. One was for someone to sing and dance and play music in funny clothes outside the new music store in town to attract attention to it, and the other was for someone to live in Antarctica for a year with no human contact, observing and recording the weather patterns. I did NOT tell them that they were going to have to interview for these jobs, I just asked them which one they would prefer. Actually, I didn’t ask them, as that would require them to answer. I just told them that everyone who preferred the music store job to stand on the left side of the room, and everyone who preferred the Antarctica job to stand on the right side. Everybody – all 6 of them – went to the left. Not surprising, because any one of these students would rather be drawn and quartered than be singled out from the rest of the group.

And I smiled to myself, because they had all walked directly into my trap.

I told them then that all six of them wanted this job, and only one of them could have it (that was the necessary taste of competition), and that they all had to have an interview with me, the owner of the music store. They did not have to be themselves; they could invent a person who was perfect for the job, and interview as that person. After each had had their interview, I would decide which of them was best for the job. These kids don’t need any incentive, candy or otherwise, beyond simply being able to say that they won. So they all immediately began plotting and planning how they were going to prepare for the interview, and beat everyone else to the job. In the excitement, they all forgot what the job actually entailed, and what the interview was likely to consist of.

Gleefully surveying their preparations, I began writing the interview questions:

What is your name?
How old are you?
What is the highest level of schooling you have completed?
What are your previous jobs?
What musical instruments can you play?
Can you sing? Please sing a song for me.
Can you dance? Please do a dance for me.

Right about at this stage in the writing, students started realizing what they were in all likelihood preparing for.
Lidia: Ma’am! Ma’am! Can I switch?
Robert: I want to go to Antarctica!
Paulo: Can we change jobs?

Oh, now they were speaking. I smiled, shook my head no (to a resounding chorus of ‘Aduh!’s)***, and continued writing the interview questions:

Do you have any funny clothes? Please describe them.
How about funny hats? What do they look like?
Do you have a very loud voice? Please demonstrate by yelling ‘crocodile!’ as loud as you possibly can.
Can you talk to strangers? Please prove it by introducing yourself to the teacher teaching the class next door.
Why do you want this job?
Do you have any questions for me?

I must say here that the first student to be interviewed’s head nearly exploded when I got to the singing question. His thought process was almost visible: Must win… but… cannot…sing… in front… of the scary teacher… must….....WIN….....but….

He sang. ALL OF THEM SANG. None of them danced – they couldn’t bring themselves to go that far - but all of them sang, and they all had to yell ‘crocodile’ and describe their funny clothes and hats and walk into strange classrooms and introduce themselves in front of upwards of twenty of their giggling, whispering peers and six confused teachers, and they did all of this just so, at the end of class, they could be the lucky winner of a fake job in a fake music store for a fake salary.

I think that it is probably redundant to say that, in the Grand Battle of Wills, the score is now:

Silent Class: 50
Hannah: 9000

*These are pseudonyms, but people have amazing, often hilarious names here. That was a veiled reference, by the way. Email me if you want me to list some. It will be worth it.
** ‘What?’
*** ‘Ouch!’, literally, but used for a wider variety of situations, like when you have just realized that you will probably have to sing and dance in front of everybody.

Update: the police are taking prints from my PIN card, and polling the pool of people who could possibly have perused my purse, but my pity party will only pollute one post, so don’t panic.

Although there are countless types of food I yearn for every day that I am here, there is now one food that I will yearn for every day when I return to the States, and I am not sure how I will deal with the loss of it. It’s called Sari Kelapa – Coconut Fibre. It’s… all it is, is cubes of coconut flesh soaking in sugar-honey water, in a little green squishy bag, but it tastes marvelous for some reason. You take it home and I think you’re supposed to put it in a bowl and eat it with a spoon, but I just slice open the top of the bag and squeeze all the cubes right into my mouth. Each one has a different texture, but all of them have a texture never imagined before by man. Gelatin meets coconut meets carrot meets chicken. Amazing. Amazing and 25 U.S. cents. I thought they might be sneaking cocaine into the Sari Kelapa, because it has now come to pass that I can’t go a day without eating at least a bag, even though the recommended serving size is 1/3 of a bag, but then I realized that cocaine would make it a little more expensive than 25 cents. You know what else I realized? That I won’t physically be able to go shopping for food when I return without having a mild heart attack every time I see the price of anything. “Ten dollars for a fish for dinner for 1 person??!! That’s like a hundred thousand rupiah! I could live on that for three or four days! I could totally bribe a police officer with that!!” And then I’ll try to go out to dinner and fail, because 25 bucks for a meal, even sushi, is just… unthinkable. Actually, it was unthinkable before, but now…

Come to think of it, I am writing like the Sari Kelapa does contain cocaine. Every time I go out on the motorbike by myself, that happens. I am straddling this monstrous machine, and if I drive it wrong, it falls on me! If I stop too short, I go over the handlebars! It’s great! It wouldn’t be great if it happened, but that fact just makes it even better when it doesn’t happen. I don’t know that I would get the same feeling driving on the highway. The highway would just be terror, and terror is different. Terror is different from veering around jungled cliffs and having to brake to avoid chickens and dogs and goats that are wandering around in the road, trying to find the Pasar Dua beach and instead ending up on a road that appears to be paved with banana fronds, large rocks, and cats, constantly having to pass taxis driving 15 km/hr, three motorcycles deep, in no passing zones, finally finding the Pasar Dua beach road and suddenly noticing, one second away from too late, that the road ends abruptly and immediately becomes STONE STAIRS.

Stone stairs and a pair of talkative Indonesians, who talk to me about Arnold Schwarzenegger, religion, Papuan noses, short people, tall people, waterfalls, and American boyfriends for two hours. Sometimes, usually when I just want to quietly study shells and put my feet in things, this happens. But I have to be nice; I am the representative of buledom. I alone have to undo decades of damage done by imported porn, sitcoms, condescending tourists, and American foreign policy. This obviously trumps any desire I might have to spend a quiet reflective day at the ocean’s edge.

My Indonesian is more broken than usual at the bank. I don’t know tenses. How can I say that I’m meant to have Rp. 10,000,000 ($1000) in my account, my full two-months pay, but instead have only 126,000 ($12.60)? How can I make it clear that my ATM card has obviously been stolen, that every transaction made in the past few weeks is unauthorized? Is it as obvious to them as it is to me that I couldn’t cancel my card because the bank was closed all week for Idul Fitri, and the whole time the bank was closed, this person kept withdrawing millions of rupiah per day? Most of all, how can I make them understand that I’m not rich, that without the salary I’ve earned since I arrived in Indonesia, I won’t be able to eat? In Indonesia, bules are rich; that is all there is to it. If you’re a bule, you have a lot of hardcore-porn-style sex, with anybody who asks, and you have a giant house and a fancy car and anything you do is just for amusement, because you have a cushy job your rich daddy got for you straight out of university, and any money that is stolen from you you probably deserve to have stolen, because anyone else needs it more than you do.

I won’t be getting any of it back. And this means, basically, that I’ve been working full-time in a lonely country, enjoying maybe half of it, the teaching-adults half, but dreading the teaching-children half with such intensity that there hasn’t been a night where I haven’t had nightmares about school, for a boss who demands materials-request forms for supplies as obviously necessary as sheets of white paper and whiteboard markers, and then often denies the requests, all so he can save a few pennies when he’s already quite independently wealthy, especially for Indonesia, and… I have been doing all this, and becoming ill with unexplained maladies, and eating rice for every meal, here, in Jayapura, for over two months, and my reimbursement for all of this is: $12. My salary was already somewhere around $3 an hour, but it has effectively just dropped to $.03.

It is causing me psychological turmoil, though, beyond just the initial brute rage and the temptation to loll depressively around the house, because I know that, despite this, I will live; I will not die, I will not starve, I will not lose my house – the house is free, the meals will come, somehow, from Nick’s salary, and in Indonesia, if you are poor, you get health care anyway. I am upset about the theft and I am angry with myself for being upset about the theft. I mourn the loss of the financial ability to visit other parts of Indonesia, like Hiron’s village in the highlands near Wamena, or the temple at Yogyakarta, or even just Biak, the Papuan version of a resort, at the same time that I suddenly become aware of the thousands of people who have never left Jayapura. I will miss my monthly treats to myself in the form of the expensive (by Indonesian standards; about $7 a meal) Chinese restaurant up the hill, and, but, here are people, right in front of me, every day, who eat fried rice for every single meal. It’s confusing. It’s confusing! I don’t know what I have the right to feel. While I hope that the person who took the $1000 is spending it on a lifesaving operation for their mother or something equally cliché, I know it’s infinitely more likely that they took it straight to Sip (the rich people’s mall) and bought a new surround-sound stereo system. It doesn’t matter what they did, anyway.

Maybe the thing that bothers me the most is that, when I return to Boulder, I won’t have enough money saved up to even put the security deposit down on an apartment. Because of this, I probably won’t be able to return to Boulder. And Boulder is where I want to be.

Louise takes my face in her hands when I tell her. It is a perfect gesture, but maybe just to me because I know if anybody hugs me I will burst into tears. She spends the next half hour brainstorming ways to help. It quickly disintegrates into distraction, because it becomes obvious that nothing will help, and she whispers in Indonesian to Hiron what happened, and then adds in English, to me, “I know! We can just sell Hiron.”
“How much do you think you can get for him?” Nick asks.
Hiron, who understands more English than he lets on, cut in: “Duapuluh.” (Twenty.)
“Duapuluh apa? Rupiah?” She laughs. Twenty rupiah is .2 cents. “Duapuluh ribu?”
“Duapuluh juta,” Nick and I say in unison. Twenty million. Still only $2,000, though. The gears of our minds grind slowly around the translation, how cheap it turned out, and then at the same time again, we say “Duapuluh juta juta.”
Twenty million million. It’s about two billion US$. Hiron smiles and looks down. “No, no, no, no, no…”

Anyway, nasi sudah menjadi bubur. Roughly, and very roughly, nothing I can do to change anything now.

This entry is actually two entries. (And this, hopefully, is a picture of Jayapura Bay from the top of a lighthouse at the beach). I have (finally) found a way to connect my computer at the internet cafés, so I can type my entries at home, where there is no SHITTY DISTRACTING MUSIC, and then post them in a lump later. And incidentally, everyone should use AIM more.

10/25
Idul Fitri. I find myself on a long, skinny speedboat with skids on the side, weaving in and out of of heavily jungled islands, with a family that is only tangentially mine – the family of a fellow teacher’s fiancé. Everyone is shy and they pretend we aren’t there. Where did they get the boat? I don’t know. Whose house is this that I’m standing in? Could be anyone’s. Why is there a Canada plate mounted on the wall? Why are we taking the baby parrot on a boat ride? Now we’re in another house. Whose house? Beats me. There’s an entire village built on sticks sticking out of the shallow bay. The roads are wood slats laid across stronger wood slats laid across stronger wood slats laid across… what? Does anybody know why our motorcycle isn’t falling through into the bay filled with Pocari Sweat cans and black plastic bags and sickly looking fish? Whose porch are we parking on? Why is that guy taking all our shoes and throwing them in a plastic bag? Why do biscuits exist that are flavored with salt, butter, and artificial grape syrup?

We maroon ourselves on a tiny beach at dusk that only gets tinier as the tide rolls in. I’ve been there before; it’s the one that takes the two hour long terrifying hike to get to. I prefer the boat, even with all the uncertainty and the fact that no one seems to notice that we’re going to have to eventually navigate our way back home on the open ocean around random rocks and coral reefs and treacherous cliffs’ edges in the pitch black night. I ask Nick if this is such a great idea, to which he replies, “No big deal, dinghies have pretty powerful lights.” Except ours doesn’t, because it’s made out of logs. But, you know, it’s all the same to him.

The anticipation of the night to come makes me slightly insane, and as I’m struggling in my soft, bare feet after the group as they clamber up the slippery, steep rocks of a mountain stream to see what is promised to be an amazing waterfall, I’m silently muttering in my head: “Myeh myeh myeh, I’m Indonesian! The soles of my feet are like leather! I can walk on volcanic rock that has sharp points sticking out of it everywhere! I like running across narrow logs balanced precariously on mysterious chunks of dirt that are suspended over hundreds of feet of nothingness! I can relax anywhere because I grew up without chairs so I can squat on absolutely any surface for hours without looking awkward and falling over! I can selflessly help the stupid American move maddeningly slowly for hours and hours without showing the least bit of impatience! Myeh myeh myeh!”

But, to tell you the truth, I loved them the entire time I was muttering, and after, when we all showered together under the waterfall, and before, when they fed everyone fish barbecued over a fire on the beach. “Hey, our people have custom,” Daniel, Ike’s fiancé, says. “Custom is, we must eat all we have brought, or else we not allowed to leave. It’s your responsibility.”

What it is is an excuse to get us to eat our eighth slice of fish without feeling guilty, and it works. “This is my favorite kind of responsibility,” I reply, pouring peanut and chili sambal over the fish and the rice. I have a pile of pink and purple and green and cream shells around my feet. Nick is trying to surf on a piece of driftwood. Hiron has the parrot riding around on his head like some kind of pirate. Daniel is telling me how bad he feels for us that we don’t have any family in Papua, and how, if we want, he can be our family. It’s a pretty perfect day as perfect days go, even with the bleeding feet and a cashew chocolate bar melting all over my backpack. Even with that.

10/20
We raced our engine up and down cliffs and our motorcycle is a quiet one so we had to scream the engine noises instead.
“BURRRRRRRRR!” Nick yelled as we downshifted for a steep climb and passed a pickup full of Papuans*.
“BA-BAP! BA-BAP!” I shrieked with the gearshift as Nick kicked it down, down, down, down, one for each gear, to stop at a stoplight.
‘REOOOOOH! REOOOOOOOOHRHRHRHHHRH! REEeeeeoooooHHEHEHRHRH!” we shouted together at bikers without mufflers as their exhaust pipes shot out blipblipblips of smoke and we went flying past them.
“Hey, QUIT holding onto my shirt!” Nick spat back at me, so I threatened to pull it up and flash passersby his tits. “Do it!” he said, so I did, as we flew around a corner and through a little cluster of warungs and markets screaming girls-gone-wild style all the way.
People don’t stare, or at least they don’t stare anymore than they do already just because we’re bules (Westerners, but slightly more offensive), which is always and hard, so I guess they do stare, but we’re past caring. I pull his shirt back down just as we pass a traffic cop, blowing his whistle in vain at every single driver on the road, because every single driver on the road is doing something illegal.
Road rules here are more like suggestions, anyway. "One Way Street" means "don't go the wrong way on this street, unless of course you're in a big hurry to get somewhere, or you are learning to ride your bike and don't want to make a bunch of right turns unnecessarily, or are going to speed down it so fast the police won't care about catching you." The other day Nick weaved around some blocking cones that were meant to control rush hour traffic and shot down a one way shortcut street the wrong way, and right at the corner was a police campout. One of the policemen yelled 'Hey!' and then went on chewing his betelnut. The others hadn't noticed because they were watching an attractive woman coming out of the marketplace.

*Is it clear what I mean when I say Papuans, as opposed to Indonesians? In Indonesia, there is, and was, a resettlement effort, to try and shuffle the population so it would get more evenly distributed. Papua has only recently become part of Indonesia, so the native Papuans look entirely different and have an entirely different culture than the Indonesians who have recently moved here. When I say 'Papuans', I mean the natives, even though they are also Indonesian, technically. They, however, are much much more polite, helpful, and friendly than Indonesians from other parts of the archipelago, and I know that this is a generalization, but everything I've observed so far holds it to be true. Every time I have spoken in this blog of someone helping me through the jungle or up and down cliffs or someone cooking me food for no reason, it's been Papuans who have done it.

Sometimes living in Indonesia is not too different, day-to-day, from living in the U.S., except that the following things can (and do) happen:

I wake up in the middle of the night to pee, and upon opening the door to the bathroom, I find that there is a baby parrot with no neck feathers and a dog leash around its ankle perched on a music stand with a green towel thrown over it.
"What the hell is that?" I ask Nick, waking him up.
"Oh, it's the bird," he says, groggily. "You haven't met the bird?"
"No. Whose is it? Is it anybody's?"
"Oh, someone found him outside getting chased by a cat, so they brought him to Louise as a present. Louise doesn't like pets, so she gave him to Shayna, and I guess Shayna's keeping him in the bathroom."
The parrot bites, but doesn't talk, and loves attention. He eats mashed-up bananas, but only out of a clenched fist. He gets stuck in my hair a lot. Soon, he will be going home to Wamena with Hiron, who is the subject of the next story in the list of Stories That Wouldn't Happen in the States:

Hiron is Louise's boyfriend. He is also a member of a tribe of inland-dwelling Papuans who, not fifty years ago, hadn't ever heard of the rest of the world. He's not sure how old he is, because they don't keep track or care. Hiron can make a meal out of anything - you know the common refrigerator affliction of having lots of food, but nothing to possibly make with it, such as mayonnaise, chili powder, half a muffin, and ketchup? He could make a meal out of that, and it would be delicious. He made a meal out of a bag of cassava, three eggs, and salt, and it was enough to feed four people. If he doesn't eat for three days, nobody can tell. He is making us an English-Indonesian-Dani dictionary (Dani is the language of his tribe) and it's just bizarre to see him sitting in the living room watching Indonesian soap operas, which he does often. How can you make the change from raising wild pigs and growing vegetables and occasionally warring with other tribes to sitting in a tiled living room with a bag of KFC and watching Indonesian soap operas in a matter of months?

The inevitable has happened, and it has happened after a deceptive string of innocent requests. "What's a Rolls-Royce? What's ESP? What's 'going bananas'?" Leading, leading, leading.
I tell him, but "Where do you hear these words?"
"Oprah."
"Ah."
"What's a call girl?" Okay, not entirely innocent. I tell him, though.
"Where'd you hear that one?"
"The internet."
"Ah."
"What's a detention? What does it mean to have a crush?"
And...
"What's a cock?"
A cock?
"Do you want me to spell it?" He thinks I don't know. It doesn't occur to me until later that it is an option to pretend I don't know.
"No, I know what it is, I just..."
"Is it a bad word?"
"Yes... no. No."
"Then what?"
Silence for a couple of seconds. It's a fifteen-year-old asking, and the class has another teenager, a 45-year-old Catholic priest, and a 39-year-old extremely devout Muslim in it. Can I say 'penis' in front of a Catholic priest and a fasting Muslim woman looking tiredly, but expectantly, at me, shrouded in her headscarf? I'm not entirely sure.
"I'm asking because... I was on the internet and someone said 'Suck my cock.'"
OH.
"I know what suck means! But I don't know what cock means!"
Now it's not just saying 'penis' in front of the aforementioned people, but talking about sucking cock. AWESOME. I shouldn't have given him the opportunity to use it in context.
I tell him, though: "Cock means penis."
"OHHhhhh?" he half-shrieks, then, as class is over, I have four students studiously avoiding my eye as they file out.

I am digging deep into the red dirt with all twenty of my fingers and toes. My sandals are somewhere about a hundred feet above me, hooked in Nick's belt loop. Two Papuan women are bracing their palms on my butt. Pushing me up as gravity is pulling me down. This is either a path from the beach or a cliff; I can't decide which. "Make your feet like a duck!" Nick yells down at me as the women strain against my butt. They are mostly immune to gravity because they are about five feet tall and sturdy, grounded, with strong toes that curl into any surface like roots. Both of them behind me going up. One on each side going down, linking arms with me, alternating between springing across the rocks and weeds and hesitating, motioning to me with hands that are half-encouraging and half-cautious. "Hati-hati!" they admonish. Three hundred feet of plunging crumbling grey rock two inches away from my slipping left heel.

It is the first day I have been able to carry on a conversation in Indonesian, and it has probably saved my life. Being able to say 'beach', 'I don't understand', 'we will be here for a year', 'bird of paradise', 'I am tall' and other completely random phrases has made us an instant crowd of friends who, upon seeing our growing procession, drop their cassava-farming-implements and join us, forming a parade down the terrifying cliff to the beach. This is my favorite beach - (mostly) lacking sea urchins but with high waves and with a high waterfall that pours down onto the back end of the beach with enough force to wash me completely of the coarse, sticky sand that one finds here and also to wash my hair better than any shampoo ever has or ever will. Standing under the waterfall at high tide, the ocean comes pounding up to my ankles. At high tide, there is no part of the beach that is dry. Have you ever stood beneath a waterfall cascading out of the jungle with the ocean ebbing around your feet?

The villagers have a little orange blow-up basketball. They want to play volleyball with it in the water as they point at things, shout their names in Indonesian, and inquire eagerly 'bahasa Inggris?' How do you say it in English? After 'beach', 'swim', and 'waves', they lose interest, and focus on correcting my water-volleyball technique, which I can't really figure out because there are no boundaries, no teams, no points, and occasionally a big set of waves will come and wash someone out to sea or deposit them roughly on the shore. They are mostly unconcerned about drowning, or about anything, really. I am gearing up to serve in what has been mild water when suddenly this 15-foot wave comes charging up and I don't have time to think about what to do. It comes crashing down right into my left ear, lifts me, wildly flailing and sort of surfing, but mostly just tumbling, and, as the beach rises before me, shoves my jaw and most of my head into the sand, and recedes. Children are rising, unruffled, around me, but my head is pounding so loudly that I feel like the entire ocean has been washed through my ear into my brain. My jaw is out of alignment and clicking. I sway and go down again. Nick washes up on the shore with the next wave and puts his arms around me, which causes everyone to shriek with giggles and to clamber over some rocks, singing a song in harmony and screaming every time the sea sprays over their rock. They are correct, of course, and in five minutes we are up and sharing our peanut butter and jelly, teaching greetings and colors in English because that's all they want, to learn English, and a great bargain it is, in exchange for saving me from plunging to my death about four or five times! Every time Naomi, the first to join our initial beach parade, speaks a word in English that hasn't been specifically modeled for her, she claps her hand over her mouth and collapses in giggles, out for the count for at least a minute. On the way back, I can hear one of the children chanting, "Red, green, purple, yellow, pink, brown, black. Red, green, purple, yellow, pink, brown, black!"

I begin wishing that I could quit my job teaching structured, boring English to rich people and kids with rich parents in exchange for a paltry salary and just teach fun, relaxed English to a village full of Papuans in exchange for food and shelter, and in between, we could play beach volleyball with no rules, get pounded by freak waves, pull the pineapples that grow, with no provocation, everywhere, and generally just wander around in the jungle looking at stuff. I'm not usually that kind of person, but I must admit that that would be THE life.

Face up, butt down, on a green cot in the military hospital. Muslim nurses; to my eyes, blurry, and my swimming mind, they look like Catholic nuns. But gentle. They murmur soft commands in Indonesian. Louise hovers in the background, translating on occasion. Someone asks her if she is my mother. I laugh, jerk, cough, cough, cough. Louise is 28. “Those fuckers,” she breathes, but she, too, is laughing. I wonder, in between fits of coughing, how I came to be struggling to breathe on a curtained-off cot with an ancient armpit thermometer tucked in my T-shirt and a young Australian near-stranger acting the part of my mother, right down to the part where she cooks me spiced salad, green beans, and cheesy mashed potatoes, and, on another night, pumpkin spaetzle, and refuses to let me move a muscle to help. How, also, did I come to be playing Hitler Has Bad Gas with six teenagers from all over the Indonesian archipelago, and how did that particular game come to depict Angelina Jolie as a purple marker stick figure with 3 arms? How did I come to live trapped in a tiny hot saggy-mattressed room with someone who seems to hate me, and, more importantly, how did I come to stop really caring?

Diyah, my team-teacher, tells me that she drank a noxious glassful of mixed plants and herbs that her sister concocted every morning during her senior year of high school to cure her nearsightedness. She thinks it is puzzling and quite hilarious that I, and every other Western teacher in the room, is immediately upon her: "How do you make it? How do you make it?"

Some of the plants, most of them, only grow in Java. She doesn't remember. Her eyesight is perfect now. She watches, fascinated, as I put in my contact lenses. I watch, fascinated, as she entirely fails to grasp the sheer awesomeness and power of what she has said.

Anyway, "You must stop Doxycycline," the blue-wrapped nurse tells me as she scribbles out a prescription for enough antibiotics to fell a hippo. "If you take, you feel like this every day." So no more malaria preventatives. But I can swallow. And I can breathe. And I am (mostly, at least) alive.

I woke up in the middle of the night two nights ago feeling like a giant had his pinky pressed against the inside of my throat. With the irrationality that comes from jerking out of an unsettling dream with something odd and inexplicable going on inside your body, I burst out of the mosquito net, tripped over the wooden slats of our bedframe to the wall, and flicked on the light, whisper-shouting 'Nick! Nick! Wake up! I think I have bird flu!'

The sheer terror of it caused my whole body to start spasming (another symptom of bird flu, I now know, though the sensation of a giant with his pinky in your throat is not, in fact, a symptom in the first place) which made me even more positive that I was going to die within the next half hour, maybe hour if it would be particularly painful and drawn out. My chest burned a little. I made Nick run around the house with a blue bucket and some hot water, not quite sure the path my death would take. We don't have a telephone, and the only one in the house with a cell phone was asleep, and I wasn't certain enough that I was going to die to make a big embarrassing scene by waking him up and calling the hospital, not that, once called, I could communicate with the doctors anyway.

Eventually I calmed myself down by convincing myself that I had swallowed my malaria pill the wrong way and it had dissolved in my throat instead of in my stomach, when, even in the stomach, it often causes vomiting and nausea as a side effect (in other people, not in me). So in the throat it must produce severe burning... right? RIGHT?

Two days later, it still burns badly to swallow or breathe deeply, but the pain has moved to my chest. Feels like chronic severe heartburn, the kind that never goes away for even one minute. Any ideas? It's (probably) not bird flu - bird flu hasn't been found in Jayapura or anywhere near Jayapura, and chest pain isn't a symptom. Heart attacks don't begin in your throat. Acid reflux doesn't just start in the middle of the night. Sorry for the roiling mundanity, but I need some input.

Playing a game the Australians call 'Fruit Salad' in class. What do we call it? I've never heard a name. Someone's in the middle, and they say something, and everyone who agrees has to swap chairs. "I am wearing a headscarf," says one of the two girls wearing one, and the other groans in good natured embarrassment, but gets up to take her place in the middle, and a second later trips over her feet and goes down. In the scuffle between each statement, the Muslims are easy to pick out; they're the ones that appear to have to physically pick themselves up from their chairs, the ones that won't fight for the last chair, the ones that close their eyes in the gap from action where the person in the middle struggles to find their English. They are all so hungry that they're physically unable to coordinate.

It's the holy month of Ramadan, and, for Muslims, that means fasting all day: from dusk 'til dawn, no food, not even any water. One of the teachers is Muslim: this means teaching four hours of classes with nothing to fuel her, and yet she bears it without complaint; indeed, I had no idea until I see her running back from the market as night falls with some lumpia and a green coconut cake, staring into the black plastic market bag as if it held a million dollars in gold. She tears into it, and before she can fully get down her first mouthful, Wade interrupts. "Ani, what tastes better, the food or the water?"
"Oh, the water," she mumbles indistinctly, her mouth full.

Everywhere, outside and in, people are sinking down in chairs or on curbs or on the ground and closing their eyes, this time not out of exhaustion, but out of ecstasy. Their mouths and their minds are full of the special food that is on sale only for Buka Puasa; the chicken and vegetable egg rolls, the mochi with coconut and molasses, the burnt sugar green coconut rolls, the samosa-like pastries with potatoes and chilies. If they were me and the food were mashed potatoes, the streets would be awash with tears. It is close, though. It gets quieter. People are too overwhelmed to make conversation. As the moon becomes visible over the farthest mountain, Angkasa, the shouts of the market die down and the whistles of the parking attendants seem outrageous, out of place. Motorcycles spit and rumble in the distance. The women and men who spread their blankets in the street to sell their chilies, tomatoes, bananas, papayas, tofu, eggs, chickens, coconuts, lychees, sambal kacang paste, grilled fish, leeks, oranges ,and salaks, their knit Papuan independence purses and mats and bags, their woven flip flops, all start gesturing silently to their wares instead of shouting about them, feeling awkward all of a sudden about disturbing the immediate quiet. Expectant lines curl up behind the Buka Puasa food stands - silent not because of sensations, but because of the anticipation. Soon, they too will be part of the overwhelmed silent periphery.

Periphery because most Papuans are not Muslim. 80% or more of them are not. But that 20% is enough to create a subtle bend at dusk on weekdays. I don't know that most people notice it. Parking attendants continue to shriek on their whistles, pull motorcycle's backsides out into the slight lulls in traffic, and collect their Rp. 500 unspoken, unofficial fee. Students continue to lie on the floor, slapping the ground to practice for this card game that they play. The phones still ring and the electricity still flickers on and off and children still chorus 'Hi, Mister-Mister!' at me on the street. But I' m staring around me at those with their eyes closed and their jaws working and I'm trying to feel their amazement. I feel like I would be stealing if I were successful, but I am never successful. How could I be? To not eat or drink every day for a month? What must it feel like to break something like that?

Here's one for the culture-clash experiences file:

I was coming out of the girls' bathroom at school and Nick was coming in, a tiny four-year-old girl in tow. "Actually," he said to me, breaking off, 'will you help her use the toilet?"
"No," I said, automatically and immediately.
"Come on," he begged, "will you? If you don't, I have to, and I think... I think it's better if you do."

It's not that Indonesian four year olds don't know how to use the toilet. They do. But the toilets in Indonesia are formed completely differently than Western toilets, and the school, for some reason, employs Western style toilets. Indonesian bathrooms consist of a slightly raised mesa, maybe 10 cm off the ground, with what we call a toilet seat embedded directly into the tile. You squat over it with your feet on the rim, level with the ground, and go. There's no flush; instead, there is a bucket or some kind of reservoir that is filled with water, and you dip a little ladle in, and pour three or four of them in until it 'flushes'.

So I go into the bathroom with the little girl, who is chattering away in Indonesian, interrupting herself only to point at the odd bathroom accoutrements and look up at me with wide trusting eyes as she asks me questions about them that I can neither understand nor answer. She stands next to the toilet, easily half her height, and looks at me. When making pulling-down-pants motions at her fails to inspire action, I lift her shirt and realize that what I thought were her pants are some kind of elaborate facade for her real pants, which (presumably) lie underneath somewhere, once you can get past the fifteen ribbons and buttons and zippers holding them up. What reason could there possibly be for dressing a four-year-old like that?

Finally, after peeling away all her deceptive clothing layers, she pushes my hand away and starts trying to climb up on top of the toilet. Attemps to get her down only elicit screaming, whining, and the odd spat tidak (no). She wants to stand on the three-foot-high toilet seat and just let loose pee in any random direction, which, from three feet, could end up anywhere, especially after she falls off, and she will: her many pairs of pants are still all bunched up around her ankles, just waiting to get peed on.

So I lift her, struggling and squirming, until she's sitting, more or less, on the toilet seat, but she is so small that if I were to let her go, she would fall in immediately. I am holding this girl suspended an inch above a Western toilet in Indonesia as she tries to pee as fast as she can because it's... weird to have to pee while a tall, scary blond stranger who can't speak your language holds you aloft and your pants drag around on the floor and your mommy is nowhere to be found (come to think of it, where is her mommy?) and there is a button that could whisk you down into a big vortex if this stranger lets go and this stranger didn't even know how to work pants, so how can you trust her holding you above a fucking vortex? and so on...

"Hey, they're playing that song."
And you say that, and there is no follow-up "what song?" because there is only one: THE song. You know, THE song. The only song that exists in marketplaces, in taxis, in the Sip (mall) outside of pirated-CD stores, that is in Indonesian. The rest is '90's music from America, and my 13 year old ears learned to tune that shit out a decade ago, so all I hear is THE song, which most people are playing the majority of the time anyway, maybe to show cultural pride, which is admirable, but still weird, because it sounds shitty-90's-American-producer produced even if it is in Indonesian. I can almost sing it, and if I were to, out loud, it would probably sound just as bizarre as the teenagers in my class who can rap along with MC Hammer, but have no idea what they're talking about, because all they can say in English is 'Ma'am can I go to toilet', 'Reverse', 'Draw 2', 'Draw 4', 'Skip', 'Bye', and 'Britney Spears'. I told a 14-year-old student in one of my higher-level classes that Britney Spears was married, with two children, and she had also gotten really ugly, and he refused to believe it.

There's an exercise I do in all my classes where the students have to come up with classroom rules and punishments for them. By far the best ones have come from my tiny Waystage 2 class: 'You mustn't activate your handphone in class. If you do, you must dance to your handphone music!' 'You are not allowed to speak Indonesian in class. If you do, you must buy KFC for the whole class!'

KFC is the only Western chain restaurant here, and it's really popular and elusive. High-society dining. To have to buy KFC for the whole class would be a major undertaking, and would probably cost me, on my salary, about 6 hours of work. I guess I'd better not speak Indonesian in class. To ensure that I don't, maybe I should just continue not to know how to speak it.

It's drizzling the kind of jungle drizzle that's just enough to slicken the ground, but not quite enough to turn all the red dirt into a full-on mudslide. It is, however, enough to turn the area between my rubber flip-flops and my feet into a sea of orangish paint, impossible to grip. Each step up is a struggle, not only to push myself up the nearly vertical cliff, but to keep my feet in my shoes. There is a Papuan man and his three children going much slower than they otherwise would be, trying to politely make sure that we don't die. The man speaks little English, and when he does speak, I am easily distracted by his bright red teeth and his knife, which he uses to slash plants out of the way as we ascend. Both of his sons, from what I can gather, are named after Bob Marley. His children, running ahead in their bare feet, sing the Sonata in G Minor - honestly, they do. It's extremely incongruous.

We found the family because we decided to just get on our bike and ride until we dead ended near the jungle. When we dead ended, they were just coming around the corner, saying something about a beach. "Can we follow you?" Nick asked. The man nodded vigorously, though I'm fairly sure he had no idea what he was agreeing to.

Let me just say that if this were a hiking trail in the United States, it would be illegal to hike it. There are times when the grade gets so steep that it is necessary to climb on all fours. There are areas where a drop of over 2000 feet is an inch away from the trail, which is often, as I said before, paintlike in consistency. One slip and you would fall, straight down, impeded only by the occasional spiky-leaved plant, into, if you were lucky, rock outcroppings, but if you were unlucky, the rushing river that runs through the bottom of the canyon and would break your fall only long enough for you to catch your breath before it would then plunge you over the edge of one of its countless waterfalls, which are all at least twenty feet tall.

The final descent to the beach might as well be made on your ass for all the time I spent falling down. But then you're there. It's a tiny bay, but far west of the bigger Jayapura bay, so it's completely clean, and fed by a mountain stream, so marginally cooler, too. It's only accessible by the path from hell, so the only people there are people who live around there, people who get their food from the ocean and the surrounding mountains. Unfortunately the bay is also inhabited by sea urchins, and so now is the last joint of my middle finger and the middle of the bridge of my foot.

During the time I'm not trying madly to think of a lesson plan for 8 5-year-olds who like only to singsong laki-laki-perempuan (boy-girl) songs at each other from across the room while halfheartedly doing their color-by-number worksheets and kicking each other in the butt, I am reading the Onion's Volume 15 archives (October 2003 - November 2004, roughly). How this got the teachers' house in Indonesia along with mostly Charles Dickens and Arthur C. Clarke, I have no idea. But as a result, when I'm not dreaming about teaching, I dream in Onion headlines:

Inside:
Girl Brags About Perfect Health, Gets Food Poisoning
see page 4B

Boy Yells at Girl For Holding On Too Tightly To Motorcycle, Crashes Into Pickup
see page 6C

News In Brief:
EFL Student Asks Teacher If Pregnant
Jayapura - Unaware of the connotations that go along with such a question, local EFL student K.P., 15, asked his teacher Wednesday if she was pregnant. When given the gracious opportunity to save face by his teacher asking 'Why? Do I look pregnant?' he didn't seize the opportunity and say 'No! Of course not! I was just kidding.' but instead responded 'Yes.' The teacher was unavailable for comment as she is believed to be frantically in the process of becoming anorexic.

And so forth.
Lately, I am happier, with a few lapses allowed for when I realize I won't taste anything other than what I have been tasting for the next 11 months, food-wise and human-wise. But mostly it's okay. Biking is nice for that. It's beautiful here, really beautiful, and you can't tell from inside a low-ceilinged taxi with 90's music blasting bass and stuffed with sweating men and girls with their hijabs hitting you in the face, and you definitely can't tell from the heart of downtown, which just smells like motorcycle exhaust and looks like the cutouts from the cliffs are about to crumble down onto the Hotel Yasmin. But from a bike, you can see everything. You can see it panoramically. A beautiful day in a car feels like a beautiful day wasted, but on a bike, you're out in it, and you can go out of the city, up into the hills and out past the airport, to Sentani, to waterfalls and cooler jungle and thatched houses. You can bring a picnic and while you're eating it, you won't be surrounded by people with camera phones demanding that you sit on their pay-bench.
The other thing that contributes to my being happier is we found a raw-fish market about ten minutes from our house (previously, we could only buy cooked fish, and then only tuna, and then only cooked boringly), where there is a long strip of tables filled with freshly caught fish of every type, and you point to your fish and the man who caught it takes it back to a chopping block, guts it, and chops it into steaks, then gives you all of it in a bag (along with the head, in case you want to make soup). People around Dok9 have not grown used to us, as the people in Dok5, where we live, have, so while we buy fish, people point and stare and whoop at the 'bule' (foreigners, roughly, but a little more derogatory). But it's worth it. Tonight, we will have fish, corn, and mashed potatoes (!!!!) for dinner. Maybe this time I won't even cry when the mashed potatoes hit me.

If I lost heart and hopped a plane back, would you accept me?

I don't know, everyone. The whole country. You. Whoever 'you' are. Me, too. Everyone.

All the teachers are sick. All of them except me. Since we've been here, I've accidentally swallowed a mouthful of tap water (when brushing my teeth, I just defaulted to the... well, the default) eaten sugar with ants in it, poured a pile of what I thought was salt into my palm and ate it, only to discover that it was MSG (something important to know, actually: they often have MSG as a table seasoning here - they sell it in bags in the market along with salt and sugar) and that there was no place to spit it out, stepped in untold amounts of bird shit (with flip-flops on, but still), eaten an entire bar of Swiss chocolate in five minutes after not having eaten any chocolate at all for three weeks, peeled fruit with dirty hands and then eaten it (there's no soap at the school, so you just have to make do with water), had to use a bathroom every day that 3 and 4 year old Early Learners pee all over, had seven teachers coughing in my face for four hours for a week, eaten food out of a kitchen that the following thing happened in yesterday - a gigantic cockroach was scurrying around the communal cabinet, acting very agitated, and suddenly a rat darted out from a hole somewhere deep within the wall and pounced on the cockroach and ate it - and, I'm sure, more disgusting things that I can't think of because, out of necessity, they have become rote. And it's creepy: I feel extremely, extremely, extremely healthy. Everyone else is languishing in the heat, but I feel like I'm sweating out all my toxins, whatever those may be, every time I move, and it's ceased feeling unnatural to be sweating all the time. My skin, too, is suddenly perfect. It's either that my malaria medication is also often prescribed as an acne medication (which is true) or that the tropical air is good for me or maybe both, but I look entirely different to myself when I look in the mirror. Tan, kind of, but not in a skin-cancery tanning-booth Florida way; skinnier, true, but not like I'm wasting away - more like I'm not eating hot dogs and potato chips and, instead, am spending all my time tensing my muscles holding on to a motorcycle and praying for my life as Nick attempts to shift into fourth while flying down a 10% grade on the left side of the road with a sheer drop on one side and disco-taxies on the other as cars and bikes are braking ahead for the red light that the city, cunningly, has placed directly after a steep turn.
I guess the main point to take away from all this is this: if I don't die while I'm here, I will return healthy and strong and awesome. But both options are equally plausible.

It was nine at night and I was sitting cross-legged on the tile floor drawing my stuffed frog and my stuffed monkey hanging magnetically on the metal doorknob and I was hungry, but more than that, I was just acutely missing having access to giant grocery stores and restaurants from all over the world. I was missing the diversity of Boulder (I know, I know: !!!!!!, but it's true, despite the fact that Boulder is the least diverse place ever) and Nick came padding up the stairs holding a bowl full of stir-fried spiced brown rice, broccoli, carrots, and tempeh with a little side scoop of cheesy mashed potatoes. We were fighting, so he handed it to me silently and retreated. I took a forkful of something without even looking - everything's the same, so why differentiate? - and as the mashed potatoes hit my tongue, the flavor flooded, hit, and spread with such intensity that I started bawling my eyes out.

Sometimes when I'm hit with something that strong I simply freeze and my surroundings completely fade. I was sitting on a hard floor in Jayapura, halfway around the world from everything I'm used to and up until now have taken for granted, with storm clouds surrounding me, holding a brown pencil and a green pencil and a bowl of mashed potatoes, and crying, but my brain was reeling so intensely that I felt like I was in a black hole.

My stomach grumbled a long, low note of protest, shell-shocked from the complete unfamiliarity, but it was overruled immediately and almost on autopilot I kept dipping in my fork until my senses were drenched (as was my lap, from my tears) and my plate was empty, and if anyone had been looking... but nobody had been.

In my black hole I thought back to that afternoon, when I, finally, caved to pressure and bought a bar of Swiss dark chocolate with cashews. I unwrapped it right there in the street, the inner wrapping gold, like a Golden Ticket (Willy Wonka) and took a bite, and my mind became, suddenly, confused halves of one whole. My eyes were sending my mind images of a torn street with holes and open sewers and a crowd of brightly colored umbrellas protecting the lighter-skinned women from the sun (light skin is unbelievably prized here, to a ridiculous degree - it's nearly impossible to find a simple bar of soap that isn't called 'White Beauty' or doesn't have the byline '... with whitening papaya extracts!) and machines tearing chunks out of towering jungled cliffs and markets with falling down roofs and everyone dripping, dripping, dripping with sweat - and my mouth was sending images of heaven. I didn't cry - it, for some reason, was nowhere near as intense as cheesy mashed potatoes - but it was still a surreal experience.

I'm sorry, I'm losing my train of writing. I had everything written out in different (better) form in my notebook at home, and then I left my notebook at home. It's difficult to reproduce a feeling like that in words at any time, but especially at a time when it's not even close. I ate oatmeal for breakfast. I'm eating rice and vegetables for lunch. I weigh much less than I should. I will probably weigh still less in the future. Blah, blah, blah. But we have a motorcycle now, and if we can stop fighting long enough to agree on a place to go, we can go anywhere we want. And if we can go anywhere we want, that means I can sit on Black Sands beach again, letting the ocean kick my ass and forgetting everything else.

I woke up this morning with the sudden, sickening awareness that I couldn't remember which side of my body my heart was on. The realization paralyzed me briefly, and I stared at the blue curtains pulled tight across de-molding towels and pajama pants, at the magnetic monkey and frog clinging to each other and to the doorknob, as I wildly tried to think, to remember. I wanted to put my hand to my chest and feel, but my hand wouldn't move, so I had to lay there, on my back, as quietly as I could and listen. My chest was strangely silent. The room, too, was strangely silent; it had rained all night and the combination of the pounding on the tin roof, the rumbling of the fan switching on and off with the power outages, and the gurgling of the roosters' strangled crows made the sudden silence feel especially alien. In the distance, a ship's horn blew a long low note across the bay. My heart fluttered, skipped, and began again.

I'm sitting outside the police station, having just been fingerprinted for the second time. Every finger - twice - plus the palm and the print of all four non-thumb fingers together, like a stamp, at the bottom. It's standard procedure for foreign residents. I'm sitting out by the drainage canals, writing this by hand, peeling a salak, and tossing the peels into the canal by my feet. My shoes are off, but from a distance, even the distance from my eyes to my feet without my contact lenses, it looks like I'm wearing white flip flops. My tan lines are that deeply etched by now, or is it the lines of dirt? A skinny black and white cat comes wandering through the outdoor hallways. I am still quashing my urge to unconditionally love every cat that I see, to rush them and scratch their necks. Cats aren't like that here. They're not treated like that. A cat wouldn't know what to do with my hand other than bite it.

The internet is fast today! This page loaded in only two minutes! This is made slightly ironic by this little lying bubble that keeps popping up in the far right corner telling me that since I haven't downloaded any spyware scan tools, my internet speed is decreased by 39%. I guess from now on, when choosing a computer, I should look for one with that bubble, which is probably there to fool people - although it's in English, so out of Jayapura's 200,000-odd people, it's only fooling about 10.

Honestly, about 10. I read on the internet somewhere before I got here that there were 4 expats in the city, and they were all ex-missionaries. I saw one today while waiting for the taksi. I stared, like everyone else. It's a reflex. He stared back at me. The Indonesians around us stared at us staring at each other. One dropped a lychee. It rolled into the street, was immediately squashed by a motorbike.

I floated at Base G on Sunday, like I wanted. We've been 'there' once before, on a rainy Saturday with an especially swindling taksi driver, who, as it turned out, didn't take us to Base G at all, even though that's where he said we were. He turned off the main road at a church, bounced down a dirt road past a bunch of warring roosters and staring Papuan children, and then past all of that to a still more bumpy completely deserted road, staying there for about ten minutes before he finally let us out in front of a gigantic expanse of shallow coral. Then he demanded 20,000rp. There was nobody around. I was going to just throw him the actual fare, 4,000, and get out - that's what the other teachers do when they're overcharged - but then Nick opened his wallet, showing for all the world to see that we had just changed a bunch of money at the bank.

Anyway, it wasn't Base G - it was cool and beautiful and quiet and full of curious villagers hiding in their houses and peeking out the windows - but it wasn't Base G. We didn't know this until Sunday, when another driver let us out someplace completely foreign, saying 'Base G, Base G'. This turned out actually to be Base G, but we thought the other place was Base G and that this cab driver was playing a prank on us, so, arguing, we followed the forming crowd towards what we worked out to be northeast, arguing more as the road got hotter and bicyclists drove by in the opposite direction with ice cream carts trailing behind them, until finally the road dipped and suddenly there were big arches and screaming naked splashing children, and bakso (meatball soup) carts and rujek (sliced fruit, cucumber, and peanut/chili sauce) carts and mie (noodle) carts and a crazy drunk New Guinean man who set his sights on us from the moment we walked in. This was Base G.

The drunk crazy New Guinean had a mullet, and the back part of his mullet was braided into two long messy braids that ran halfway down his back. He latched onto us at the rujek stand, introducing first himself and then everyone who walked by as his best friend, all of whom would take care of us and be our tour guides and be our friends and make sure nobody cheated us and help us find the least rocky places on the beach and prepare log benches for us to sit on as we ate our rujek. The fact that nobody paid attention to him should have been our first clue, but we sat down on the nearest bench he indicated, as he stood in front of us, repeatedly telling us that the mountains across the bay were Papua New Guinea, singing 'America the Beautiful', and assuring us that he could find us a perfect hotel. For a half an hour. And then he told us that we needed to pay him 100,000rp for sitting on 'his' log bench.

This may have been, and will continue to be, the only time when we will have been saved by locals with cameraphones, but as we jumped off the log bench (without paying) and began making our way across the beach, families everywhere nervously jumped up, approached us, and mimed taking a picture. If we nodded, and we did, because we wanted, at that moment, to be surrounded, everyone in the person's family would come over and act like we were all best friends until the camera flashed, then be suddenly struck with debilitating shyness and run away.

After everyone on the beach, it seemed, had been our best friend for five seconds apiece, we were able to fade comfortably away onto a shady log on the south side of the beach. The tide was rising faster than I've ever seen it. The moon, too, was quickly rising. 'Hey, you think anyone would mind if I got naked?' Nick asked me. So I didn't have to see the answer to that question (yes, everyone would mind; nobody even wears swimsuits here: they just swim in their clothes) I jumped in the ocean, which was hot, completely clear, and filled with wonders like sea snakes and bright blue starfish. Often, swimming here is more like visiting an aquarium than swimming. You walk through the water, which never gets much above your waist, because the waves all break way far out at the reef, and the whole time you can see your feet displacing entire ecosystems. Schools of fish dart around rocks and settle mere feet away, only to have to dart again as you keep walking. The sea snakes contract to 1/8 of their original size if the water around them is disturbed. This happens every time a wave comes in, every two seconds or so. As the tide comes up, more water is able to make it over the reef and the waves get bigger, almost to the point of being able to bodysurf (if you don't mind being dashed upon the rocks at the shore when you're dragged in).

I have been drawing a lot. Because of our electrical crisis (the 'converter' we bought in the states fried my speakers immediately upon being plugged in, so I'm not about to plug my camera or my computer or my iPod in and risk the same fate) I can't take pictures, so I have to make them instead. I thought I'd be angry, but it's kind of nice - I'm not a great artist by any means, but I can depict what I see to a certain degree. When I get home and show photos, they'll all be in blurry pastel. There's one of Base G that shows a terribly colored palm tree - I need to learn my greens and yellows - but shows the water and coastline exactly how it is. I'll have to pick and choose from each picture what to show people it's like. Maybe there'll be one full picture by the end.

Daniel, the teacher who's leaving tomorrow, summarizes his year here like this: 'It's blurry.'
I can see that. How many days have passed? I've been counting, but lately I've been forgetting. There are the laundry-by-hand days, the days with so many classes that there's no time to think, the internet days, the hot days with umbrellas, the rainy days with umbrellas, the guilty days where I realize how many people I haven't yet emailed, the days soaked with color and fruit, the days soaked with regret that I chose Jayapura, the days where I assure myself that I'll be stronger at the end. They come in equal numbers.

Sorry about the string of identical posts. You have no idea what I just went through to try and delete the extraneous ones. At first it was going okay, though slow, but at the fifth try the page conked out halfway through and suddenly began displaying a mix of HTML and - I'm not kidding - pictures of naked women. The computers here are all rife with viruses, but... is there some kind of virus that surreptitiously hides porn in the HTML of blogger pages, only to be seen when page loading fails? When I publish this, will there be a bottle blond in a lavender chemise looking seductively at you, one finger stretching the band of her G-string, between this word and this one? I must know if this happens.

I am in a kind of bipolar daze at this stage in my trip. Is two weeks early for the bipolar stage? Is there even a bipolar stage in culture shock? I am seized by manic energy, especially when I come to this internet cafe, and I sit and finger the piano notes to the bad music that is always playing in an attempt to diffuse it so I can think, but it only revs me up more, and there are all these '404 page not found' errors, and Google admonishes me in the form of telling me my internet connection is too slow for the standard view, which, yes, okay, just get on with it, and by the time...

Here's the thing. This is not what I feel like at almost any other time. I am gripped with melancholy in the late hours of the night, or, not melancholy exactly, but a sense of emptiness, and it can't be filled with gado-gado or men leering, leering constantly, or with mango trees, even, or with my housemates, my fellow teachers, their initial friendliness and the dropoff, later, as they realize I am nothing special. It's hard to try and be something special, to sell myself as anything other than someone who just likes quiet and a good variety of books after the long hours straining my voice so nineteen apathetic teenagers can hear me. It's hard to keep up appearances. I'm in my pajamas halfway through a Saturday, furiously reading Crime and Punishment, as it pours rain on the scattered tin roofs above and below our own tin roof, and everyone else sprawls on the cushions in the hallway, shrieking with laughter, or if not that, somber and intense, and they have this; they've been stuck in Wamena with no tent or food together, been lost below towering cliffs on Black Sands beach together, had pitch black evenings under one of many electrical outages together. We - they and I - have nothing. And with two of them leaving next week, they don't care to start having anything, or building towards having anything.

It's hard even to write this. I look at my students' bowed heads when they're working on a project I've given them and I get wild bursts of 'What the fuck is going on? How did I get here? Who are these people?' My voice is quiet and nobody can hear me, of course, as I somehow totally failed to anticipate, so I have to raise my voice to what is, to me, screaming, and the tone - what must the tone sound like? - I am their teacher, but... I don't feel it, and do they feel it? Is this confusion I read, or defiance? They can't tell me. They are meant to be learning a language from me, and I can't correctly articulate a sentence. I can't correctly articulate a feeling, not even in writing. Not lately.

How I feel is not how I appear, even more so than usual. I have one person I see 24 hours a day, one person to whom I can confide everything, whom I ask for comfort, with whom I chose to share this entire year - and I feel most of the time like I never want to see him again. He... I could fill pages and pages with the little things he does that irritate me, and I'm sure he could fill the same amount of pages with those things about me, and I'm not sure if I've been driven insane by the sudden responsibility of 40-something students and 13 lesson plans per week and no variety of food and no variety of company and the immense irriation will, therefore, pass, or... that for the remaining 351 days I will feel constantly like I want to implode.

Tomorrow I hope to go to Base G beach and float among the coral for awhile. Last time we went, a Papuan villager and her three sisters played Frisbee with me, and by the end they were all more skillful than I was. There are things like this, of course, that, while they are happening, more than make up for everything else. But then we get in the cab and the driver's eyes light up at the prospect of asking more than the going price and us not having the language tools to protest, and, sure enough, we get home and he asks for 20,000rp instead of 4,000rp. Drivers keep doing this. Every day. I wonder every day, too, as I walk from Brasco Station to school, maybe a mile over rough stone sidewalks with oddly placed holes: when will people get used to me? There are horns honking and shouts and stares and people actually whirling around to look at me as I pass. There are conversations I can't make out, frustration on every face in the market if I don't stop. I'm not exaggerating. Nobody looks even remotely like me. Nobody is blond, nobody over 5'6". But if, every day, I walk past the same people, and every night, I walk the other way going home, wouldn't you expect that they would grow weary of me?

What I want is to be ignored. I suddenly want to live alone.

Something that is either a fruit cart or a strange bird starts beeping/calling every morning just about when the sun starts coming up. Because of this, my dreams always end with squeaking machinery.

I am teaching the alphabet on the back of a pumpkin harvest cart.
I am playing Sudoku and a garbage truck starts backing up onto my bare feet.
I am trying to explain comparative adjectives to a group full of apathetic teenagers, just a sea of dark eyes, in dreams, at least, and their whispers in bahasa Indonesia begin to hum, blur, into an alarm clock...

I don't have an alarm, but I don't need one. As it gets too hot to sleep, as birds/fruit carts start beeping, as churches fire up their choirs, as something that sounds like migrating geese, but isn't, starts honking, I roll over, and maybe Nick is opening the door, quietly, but still creaking a little, and Daniel and Lucia are out on the floor mat playing cards, speaking a mixture of German, Mandarin, English, and Indonesian, and Louise is carrying her mattress out onto the balcony to air out, and Rani, downstairs, is starting to crank up the Michael Jackson karaoke.

Nick is making breakfast. There are two choices for breakfast: scrambled eggs or oatmeal, both with sliced banana and papaya, and mango nectar. Sometimes, there is no running water. Sometimes, our gas tank will have run low, and someone will have to walk up the street and buy another one. Sometimes there is a note. Don't forget to pay Imelda. Imelda's the cleaning lady. The house is divided on whether we really need her or not, but everyone's friends with her by now, so we keep her.

I run outside, check if the sun has dried my laundry yet. Our whole downstairs balcony is strung with drying line, but only some of it is in the sun. Clothes fight each other. Lately, it has been raining at night and re-soaking everyone's clothes. What we need is five or more hours of uninterrupted sunlight, which isn't happening - not even close - which is good if you plan to be outside at all, but bad if you're out of underwear and have no more than one towel and your one good teaching outfit is dripping dirty water onto the ant colonies on the porch.

At 11:30, we start walking up the road to the main road to catch a taxi to school. Each taxi driver has decorated his own taxi, and we see taxis covered with hanging Jesuses (Jesi?) on crosses, along with posters of sad Jesuses with crowns of thorns, and taxis with pictures of sweating soccer players, and taxies with posters of Britney Spears, and taxis with posters of 13-year-old Japanese pop stars. One day, we climb into a taxi and it is bare except for a worn brown teddy bear perched on the dashboard.

At this point, my written day is catching up with my real day and I need to go across the street to school, but maybe the other half will come soon.

Oh, and Nick's blog - http://adventuresinpapua.blogspot.com - is more day-to-day details than mine, so if that's what you crave, head on over. He doesn't get distracted by details so much as I do, or have his writing style altered for the worse by bad Indonesian pop music playing in the fucking Internet cafes, like some people I could think of off the top of my head.