A New Beginning
Going from one program to the next, I left New Mexico after my last summer teaching at Breakthrough Santa Fe and directly transitioned to my next adventure as a Fulbright English Teaching Assistant (ETA) in Indonesia. Twenty-four hours after leaving Albuquerque I arrived in Singapore by way of San Francisco and Tokyo and met up with my fellow ETAs along the way. After a nice hotel stay in the very clean city of Singapore (where chewing gum is against the law!) and a quick flight toIndonesia, we arrived safely in Jakarta, a gang of thirteen jet-lagged, disoriented but excited ETAs, prepared and unprepared for the year ahead of us.
We made our way to the hotel in Jakarta which will be our home for the next month. I was so excited and exhausted at the same time. I swear I felt like I was on some reality TV show though: "Real World: Americans in Indonesia." See what happens when thirteen young Americans are plopped into a foreign country with no language training or teaching certification and try to teach English to Indonesian high school students for one year. Who will survive? Who will go home early? And most importantly...who will hook up? But what organized group progam doesn't feel like that nowadays?
There's another Filipina in this group so we've bonded over our Southeast Asianness: familiarity with pronounciation of Indonesian words (Bahasa Indonesia and Tagalog are both Malay-based), our ability to eat rice three times a day, etc. Yep, and we are often mistaken for Indonesians or some other non-American nationality. So it's interesting to go shopping with a group of obvious bules (foreigners) and have the experience of sales people turning to us to translate. For me that's further incentive to learn the language as quickly as possible. It's so frustrating not being able to communicate!
On that note, we started our first day of classes today. We took taxis to the AMINEF office (where we're going to meet everyday) and had our first lessons in Bahasa Indonesia and in teaching English as a foreign language (TOEFL). We do these classes for a month and then are shipped off to our various locations (mine is Tabanan, Bali).
As for visits, stop on by if you're in the area. Don't worry, you'll all be enticed once I get to Bali and can describe it to you.
We made our way to the hotel in Jakarta which will be our home for the next month. I was so excited and exhausted at the same time. I swear I felt like I was on some reality TV show though: "Real World: Americans in Indonesia." See what happens when thirteen young Americans are plopped into a foreign country with no language training or teaching certification and try to teach English to Indonesian high school students for one year. Who will survive? Who will go home early? And most importantly...who will hook up? But what organized group progam doesn't feel like that nowadays?
There's another Filipina in this group so we've bonded over our Southeast Asianness: familiarity with pronounciation of Indonesian words (Bahasa Indonesia and Tagalog are both Malay-based), our ability to eat rice three times a day, etc. Yep, and we are often mistaken for Indonesians or some other non-American nationality. So it's interesting to go shopping with a group of obvious bules (foreigners) and have the experience of sales people turning to us to translate. For me that's further incentive to learn the language as quickly as possible. It's so frustrating not being able to communicate!
On that note, we started our first day of classes today. We took taxis to the AMINEF office (where we're going to meet everyday) and had our first lessons in Bahasa Indonesia and in teaching English as a foreign language (TOEFL). We do these classes for a month and then are shipped off to our various locations (mine is Tabanan, Bali).
As for visits, stop on by if you're in the area. Don't worry, you'll all be enticed once I get to Bali and can describe it to you.
posted by Angie at 5:39 PM
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