Tuesday 16. Aug 2005

June 21, 2004

Well, finally on vacation for the next month. Small schools can be much more intense than large or middle size schools because teachers are expected to provide the usual programs and activities but without the faculty numbers that you have in the larger schools. Anyway what that means is that I am more than ready for a rest. The other faculty members have taken off for their home countries or vacations in other countries. I am staying here in Sumbawa which is home. Actually, I am waiting for my home to be finished. Still a few more weeks as the contractor says, although it seems like a few more months from what I see. The walls are all finished and the inside of the house has been plastered. However, there are still no floors, no roof, no windows, water or electricity. The joys of house construction.

The kids are just about finished with school. In Indonesia, students have to take exams at the end of the year to determine if they are going to be advanced to the next grade. All of the children passed: Mercedes will begin Junior High next month; Rebecca will begin Grade 5; and Sam will begin Grade 3; Meredith is too young to start First Grade so she has to do another year of Kindergarten. I have had a slight change of my teaching assignment and will be teaching the top two grades of math, social studies to the top grade, and computers to the top two grades. Even more work than last year. It should be interesting. In many ways, being the principal of a middle sized school was easier than my current position. Hmm.

No new photos this month; I'll add some photos of the house when they begin to actually put the roof on.

We bought another half hectare of land here on the road leading from townsite to the beaches. It's basically an investment for the kids as land here rises fairly steadily. We now have 1.25 hectares of land here as well as the smaller amount of land that we have in Bali. In spite of me seeing Sumbawa as home now, the kids still see Bali as home and want to go there for their vacation. Su and I need to stay here, however, and monitor the construction of the house. Back to the house again.

We tried to get the electric company to hook us up to the grid, but they wanted an incredible amount of money for the hookup plus a flat rate of $250 a month. Obviously we said no and bought a 10,000 watt generator which we will have to hook up to the house. We are going to have to buy another one as well to spell the main one. Who said that living in the tropics was cheap. Well, actually if you live in a place like Thailand it is. You can get a small apartment in Bangkok for a few hundred dollars a month. Living in more remote places is expensive because of the lack of infrastructure. We still have to figure out the water situation as well. Right now we have water, but we may have to dig a well or two to supply at least the orchard in the back of the house if not the house itself.

August will mark the 15th anniversary of my move to Indonesia. Sometimes it doesn't seem anywhere near that long; other times it seems much longer than that. I'm just getting into one of those period of reflection what with the 15th anniversary and my 55th birthday and Mercedes' 13th all arriving in the coming weeks. The old joke (based on reality as many jokes are) from my Irian days was that I arrived with $1.57 Australian and proceeded to buy up all the land in the north of Bali. While I didn't actually buy much land in Bali, I did arrive in Irian in August 1989 with the $1.57 and a debt of almost $10,000 in student loans. 15 years later - I have four more kids to go along with Aaron, three houses, a half dozen computers, a car, two motorcycles, more household appliances and furniture than I need, a collection of animals, stocks and bonds in the States, a nice sized personal library, dozens of Asmat and Komoro carvings, a few Balinese paintings, and all sorts of other material junk. So on the economic level, life in Indonesia and Pakistan has been good for me, but what about the other aspects of life? After all, I came over here just having turned 40 with a new Ph.D. as well as a new divorce and an empty bank account. I was hardly the material guy.

I've started to get some sense of what family means although it's been a long struggle that included trying to find some common ground between an Indonesian concept of the family and my decidedly Western self-contained concept. Somewhat miraculously, I have managed to stay married to Su for almost 14 years. Religion has become something more than an academic interest with my acceptance of Islam. The attractions of rural life have curbed my fascination with big city living, although I still enjoy a trip to Bangkok or Singapore, and I look back fondly on my four years of life in Lahore. The fascination with the ocean that developed during my 10 years in the Bay Area has developed to where I feel the most centered when I am within looking distance of the sea. The realm of ghosts, jins, tuyols, and other denizens of the unseen world have become more real to me than I could have ever thought during my graduate student days at Berkeley. I still look on this class of phenomena with a somewhat amused countenance, but I'm certainly more open to different levels of reality than I was when I arrived in this fascinating land. I often have the feeling that I was meant to end up here for some reason still slightly beyond my understanding. My teaching abilities have developed to where I have a good reputation as a teacher around the region and have been fortunate enough to find teaching positions based solely on word-of-mouth recommendations. Age or good sense has caught up with me enough so that I can sit still for more than 10 minutes and appreciate what is going on around me. I've managed to keep a fairly good sense of humor despite the somewhat trying circumstances that surround life for a foreigner in a strange land. All in all? Well, it's been a wonderful life as Jimmy Stewart might say.

I put a little guestbook here so you can leave a message here for us if you are having trouble reaching us by email. Thanks for the messages in the guestbook. I like hearing from you all.