I feel like some kind of bizarre, updated, less war-torn, Indonesian version of The Things They Carried (if you haven't read it, read it: it's by Tim O'Brien).

First year EFL teacher Hannah Enenbach carried a large black duffel bag which had had her full name sewn into it, red on white, by her mother in 1994, right before Hannah attended Interlochen Arts Camp for four weeks. The duffel bag which accommodated ten-year-old Hannah's four-week long camp needs in a stuffed and bulging fashion now accommodated twenty-two-year-old Hannah's year-long international teaching needs in a sagging, empty-looking fashion. With everything packed, Hannah, if she chose, could easily still fit her best friend, Camille; her cat, Moon Unit; her oversized subwoofer, and fifty squeezetubes of SPF-50 sunscreen inside without a problem. Camille, though, preferred to keep her life here, and as for Moon Unit, if she could talk, she would certainly voice her objections against being quarantined for six months. (The SPF-50 sunscreen might just have been tossed in.)

She carried cool yet modest, colorful yet subdued clothes, 14 outfits in all. One old, ugly, leaky raincoat that she would no doubt regret in the middle of monsoon season. One pair of jeans, ripped in the butt, that her lover swore he would patch, but hadn't yet. One Wild Oats sweatshirt, acting as the protector of all things cold ("cold" now being code for "under 80F"). One cranky laptop computer, prematurely set to Indonesian time and weather. Forty skeins of bracelet thread. Three journals. Hannah, while totally okay with tossing clothes, papers, tweezers, pencils, sunglasses, etc. all over the floor of her living space, was (how might I put this politely) anal as hell about journals. There was a song journal. A writing/ideas journal. And an odds-and-ends journal that might have hangman games scattered everywhere, or scribbles from pens reluctant to let go of their ink, or a drawing of a man with gigantic ears. There had been thoughts about an Indonesian-English phrasebook journal, her fourth journal in all, but even Hannah realized that this would be carrying it a bit far.

She carried mosquito repellent for both skin and clothes. She carried 8 bottles of Doxycycline, sworn enemy of malaria. (She decidedly did NOT carry Lariam, sworn enemy of both malaria and human sanity.) She carried garlic tablets. All of which were funny because since Hannah was a little girl, mosquitoes have disliked the taste of her blood. She carried a syringe kit, a vaccination certification passbook, electrolyte drink mix packets, and a healthy sense of outrage towards anybody who tried to push paranoid health-related kits, medicines, packets or preventative sprays upon her ever again.

She carried two tiny wood briefcases containing artists' pastels, but no pad of paper. Why? She is sick of going to the damn store and asking for more damn stuff when she already has so much damn stuff that it's a full-time job simply to sell all of it.

She carried a desire for adventure coupled with a wish to sleep through the entire plane ride. She carried the phrases 'good morning', 'good afternoon', 'good night', and 'I don't speak Indonesian' in Indonesian in the very front of her brain, ready to randomly spew at the slightest nudge. She carried a mental picture of the teachers house that looked suspiciously like a Mexican hostel in Puerto Vallarta, a mental picture of the school that looked suspiciously like the one in the pamphlet for Surabaya, a mental picture of the coastline that looked suspiciously like the coastline of Nayarit. She carried a sense of distrust in her own imagination.