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.

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.

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.