A Slight Change of Plans part 7 of 8

After almost all two hours of milling about the dimly-lit house waiting for the tide to come in so we could make our exit, I was going a little stir crazy. I looked around to make sure none of my students were watching and I slipped out the front door. I figured I could steal a few minutes; after all, how many more times in my life in am I going to be sitting around an Indonesian village with idle time on my hands? Besides, I wasn’t planning on wandering far.

Less than a 50 meters down the dirt road –more of a path really- I came upon several women in a rickety road-side stall selling something hot. It smelled good. I had some Indonesia money on me and I decided to go for it. Somehow in the midst of all my pantomiming, we miscommunicated. I ended up with five of whatever it was they were selling. They better be good. They certainly were hot.

Turns out I should have bought more. They were a yellow cake batter bread-y thing with crushed nuts in the center. Think: a sweet pancake lightly smeared with crunchy peanut butter and then folded in half. Mine was gone by the time I got back to the house. Inside, I walked around like deacon on communion morning and broke off and fed a piece to each of my student. They all seemed to enjoy it.

Taking a chance paid off. It kind of makes up for those times my curiosity has gotten the better of me and I have bought something off a street vendor only to take one bight and then threw the rest away. Buying food from a street vendor in third world countries is always a risk, but it’s worth it because every once in a while you get a hot, sweet pancake with crunchy peanut butter in the middle.

A Slight Change of Plans part 6 of 8

No alarms were needed. All of us either woke up with the rising sun or from the rustling of the people around us. We made an early breakfast of whatever granola bars and Pringles we had left in our backpacks. Nobody was in any great hurry to pack up and leave. I thought about asking Eric what the plan was, but didn’t want to appear too anxious or ungrateful. My guess –which was later confirmed as correct- was that we were waiting for the tide to come in so that our boat could make its departure.

A few of the kids circled up and someone produced a deck of cards. Hudson pulled out his sketch pad and started drawing manga-style cartoon characters.

Through the front door, I saw local school children in their burgundy and white school uniforms walking to school. At the rate they were walking, I thought, they are going to be very tardy. They were all rubbernecking to sneak a peek of the surreptitious visitors who had arrived last night. I grabbed my camera. Of course. As I stood in the doorway, I alternated between snapping pictures and offering up the friendliest “Salamat Pagi!” I could conjure this early in the morning after a sleepless night.

A few of my students wandered over and together we filled up the doorway. There we stood, two groups of strangers staring at each other not quite sure what to make of each other. I just kept waving and smiling and saying “Good morning.” It must have broken through their timidity, because eventually their curious stares changed into suppressed giggles and jostling. Eventually, I managed to get back a few waves and “hello”s. I even heard one girl boldly try out one of her English phrases “Good morning.” Every time a few students continued down the path to school, a few more would wander up, so that for the better part of half hour we had a group of a dozen or so kids outside our front door. It was a photographer’s dream.

When the school children eventually all disappeared, several of the villagers started to come to the community well which it turns out was just across the street. Most of them carried a long stick across their shoulder with a five-gallon bucket hanging off of each end. Some of the women were decked out in full Muslim garb including headdress, but many of them were in long pants, t-shirts, and flip-flops.

A Slight Change of Plans part 5 of 8

We used the one stool in the house as a makeshift barrier over the hole in the floor. With nothing else much to do in the now-dark house, we all settled in for what promised to be a sleepless night. For the next couple of hours I drifted in and out of shallow sleep. I could hear bodies shifting as they tried to get comfortable on the wooden floor. Somewhere around 11:00 or 11:30 I heard the homeowner noisily re-enter the house. Apparently, he had slipped out earlier in the night when I wasn’t paying attention. Who could blame him? His house had been overrun by fourteen-year-olds from Hong Kong. In the darkness, I heard him rummaging around the big room. Oblivious to all the bodies sprawled about the floor, he started opening and closing drawers in the sideboard. He went into one of the side rooms and then came back out them back in and then came back out. I heard a large racket that sounded like dozens of empty plastic water bottles cascading to the floor. He flipped on the single overhead bulb which earlier had seemed so dim but now seemed like a miniature sun.

I wanted to shush him, but didn’t know the social etiquette for dealing with a crazy home owner while sleeping on his floor with eighteen eighth graders after showing up unannounced in his Indonesian village. I am pretty sure there is not a chapter on that in the Cross-cultural Training Manual. I heard him banging around on the other side of the big room and realized that he had decided that 11:40 p.m. was a perfectly reasonable time to repair the broken floor board.

Eventually, the old man quieted down and turned in for the night. I must have fallen into a slightly deeper sleep myself, because at 1:15 I woke up with a start, jerked back my right hand which had been sprawled out onto the wooden floor, and let out a cry. Eric woke. By the moon light that was coming in through the far door, I could see him looking at me waiting for an explanation. I paused for a second so as not to seem too panicky and took a breath to calm myself. With the calmest tone I could muster, I explained, “Something was gnawing on my thumb.”

He nodded in acknowledgment, but there wasn’t much he or I could do in the middle of the night. He rolled over and closed his eyes. I rubbed my elbow and only then realized that in between jerking my hand back and crying out, I had slammed my elbow on the floor in an attempt to scare away whatever nocturnal critter had decided to test whether or not I would make a tasty midnight snack.

A Slight Change of Plans part 4 of 8

Back inside, Eric explained that he had only been able to secure one mattress, which would go to my colleague who was seven month pregnant. I wanted to suggest that the only fair thing to do would be to cast lots to see who got the mattress, but I thought that this might not look very good in front of my students, so I let it go.

Eric explained to the students that they would have to do their best to use their backpacks and perhaps some extra t-shirts from their suitcases to make themselves comfortable. Students started to stake out their spots on the wood floor for the night. I picked a location near the sideboard. With nothing else to do, I lay down to test my spot and to see how my backpack was going to work as a pillow. Eric and I both lay on our backs and looked up into the rafters. I noticed that unlike many of the houses I had seen on our walk that had straw roofs; this house had a corrugated tin roof. I wondered if. . . . Eric interrupted my train of thought when he nudged me and point up into the rafters. By the light of the single bulb that was hanging from the ceiling, I could see a decent-sized rat scurrying across a roof beam. I thought about tapping the student next to me and pointing out our fellow resident, but decided it would be better not to.

Santi –one of Eric’s employees who was traveling with us, appeared at the front door with a large plastic bag in each had. She set them on the table and started to distribute Styrofoam containers. My first thought was “Why in the world, would this remote Indonesian village have a supply of Styrofoam takeout containers?” My second thought was “Hey, where do I get a fork?” By now it was after 7:00 p.m. and we were all famished and a little cranky. Never have fried ramen noodles tasted so good. Later, I found out that Santi –after buying all the ingredients- had cooked up our improvised dinner in a local woman’s kitchen down the road.

It was still well before 9:00, but we were all extremely tired after a full day of travel. I had just told my students to settle in for the night, when I heard a loud crack. I spun around just in time to see Santi falling through a floor board. Her right leg disappeared up to her hip. Her foot was dangling a few feet above the water below. Several people helped her out and up. She seemed to be more embarrassed than hurt. I felt bad for Santi, but I was secretly glad that it hadn’t been one of our students who had broken through. I thought about that rickety deck leading out to the outhouse and wondered if there was any way to get 18 eighth-graders to hold it for twelve hours.

A Slight Change of Plans part 3

The wooden house was not very wide, but it extended far out over the water and was surprisingly big. The front door opened onto one large room that made up over half of the house. All that was in this entire room was an old broke-down sideboard, a heavy stool, a small table, and the dirtiest mattress that I have ever seen. The house also had three smaller rooms that must have been bedrooms except that only one of them had a bed –with no mattress – in it. The other two were completely empty except for the coat of gritty dust that seemed to cover every horizontal surface in the house.

Eric explained this was a bigger-than-average house for this village and that he had been told that this man had raised his family here, but they were all grown and gone now.

My students and I milled about trying to acclimate ourselves to the place where we would be spending the night. Eric told me that they asking around in the village trying to secure some mattresses for us. Well, that will certainly help improve our situation, I thought. They might not be the best, but we certainly couldn’t sleep directly on the wooden floor. I could look between the floorboards and see the water below us.

The word spread among our group that there was an outhouse out back. I realized that I needed to make use of it. I stepped over and around backpacks and suitcases and a few students and made my way to the back of the house. I stepped out the back door and onto a large deck -the middle section of which was in complete disrepair. I had to be sure not to wander too far from the building as I made my way to the outhouse on the far edge of the deck. The outhouse was a little, wooden shack. The floor, like the rest of the deck, was made of rounded slats of bamboo spaced about an inch apart. In one corner, one of the bamboo slats had been cut short so as to create a square hole about the size of a tissue box. I thought of my co-leader, Amber, who was seven month pregnant and silently wished her luck.

A Slight Change of Plans part 2

What was I going to say? Over the rumble of the three engines, we explained to our 18 eighth-graders that we were going to be getting a little more adventure than we’d paid for. We were going to be experiencing a Indonesian village up close and personal. We asked our students to be patient and flexible. And for Pete’s sake, please don’t do anything to embarrass us.

The boat pulled up alongside one of the numerous buildings built on stilts over the water. Because it was low tide, our boat could only get to within thirty feet of the ladder we needed to ascend in order to be in the village. So we all strapped on our backpacks, lowered ourselves over the edge of the boat into ankle deep water, and tromped through the muck. We climbed the ladder and found ourselves in an Indonesian village. My students, two co-leaders, and I milled about the large porch of a local woman who was kind enough to let us use water from her rain barrel to rinse our socks and shoes.

“Use the scoop boys and girls. Do not dip your shoes directly into her rain barrel,” I had to repeatedly tell my students.

About the time the last shoe was rinsed, Eric approached me to tell me that he had spoken to one of the village elders and had secured lodging for us for the night. Miraculously, we were all going to be staying in the same house. So with early-evening darkness now settled on this sea-side village, we made our way single-file down the dirt path pulling our wheeled luggage behind us. I detected more than a few faces of the locals peering out from the shadows of darkened doorways as our procession made its way down their street.

A Slight Change of Plans part 1

We were supposed to spend our first night in a beach-side resort. But that’s not exactly how things worked out.

One hour into our two-hour boat ride, our host Eric and his local Indonesian boat driver had to make a command decision. It was late afternoon and we were going to be losing our last remaining light soon. Furthermore, the sea was choppy and it was low tide meaning that all kinds of hazards that would normally be submerged during high tide were now exposed.

We were on the last leg of our day-long tip from Hong Kong to Telanus Beach in Indonesia for a one-week service trip. So far we had flown, ridden a bus, taken a large ferry from Singapore to Batam, and then ridden a second bus. And now we were on a narrow, hand-made wooden boat that was just big enough for the 21 of us plus the four or five staff members from Telunas Beach who had joined us.

When we had walked out on the pier earlier that afternoon, out of the dozens of nearly identical wooden boats in the harbor, it had been easy to identify ours: it was the only one with all the bright orange life jackets (oh, those silly Westerner and their preoccupation with safety).

Eric climbed over the students who were now wearing those life jackets to fill me in on what he and the driver had decided. “The combination of darkness, choppy water, and low tide is making it too hazardous to continue. When my local driver tells me he is hesitant to go on, it’s time to stop. We are still an hour away from Telanus Beach, but I know of a village about five minutes away. We’ll see if they can put us all up for the night.”