This series is about my 15.5 year adventure in Indonesia - from teaching and public speaking to marriage and parenting to neighbors and partners to culture and religion to cuisine and art, and more! I'll give an honest, sometimes touching and even shocking look at what it was like to live there for all of you. I hope you'll enjoy it and support my effort to put it all into writing! If you don't mind, resteem it, please!
2002
My relationship with Mara wasn't going well, in sharp contrast to how things were going at EF (where I was popular with both my students and the staff). In fact, it was very tempestuous, and I felt that things just weren't going to work out. So, I sat down on the bed with Mara and told her that we needed to break up. She got VERY upset, grabbed a knife, and said she was going to kill herself! Well, I wrestled with her, got the knife away from her, and said we wouldn't break up! What else was I supposed to do? It's one thing to hear about it from someone else and think, "Yes, okay, but you should've called their bluff or something," and an entirely different thing to be party to such a crazed act! Thoroughly confused, I tried to carry on...TO BE CLEAR, I did not do this because of Ita - I didn't know her yet! It was because of the dysfunction in our relationship - on both sides.
Around that time, the director called me to his office and told me that a contract teacher, Anna, had come down with the flu, and would I mind teaching her class. I said I would, of course, and took over that one class. It went unremarkably - in fact, I really don't remember it! The next day, he asked me to cover it again, and it was a new experience! Another young lady was in the class - she'd played hooky the day before. She smiled a lot, was pretty and sexy, participated, and she even laughed at my jokes! I was really interested in her!
Now, let me clarify something right off the bat: I had a few students whom I thought were pretty and/or sexy, but they were MY students, so I didn't feel I could approach them. This young lady was different - she was Anna's student! I was entranced and so I was determined to talk to her the very next chance I got!
That chance came very quickly. Anna came back, and I found them talking in the hallway. She was giving Anna a package of home-made rumballs. We talked and she agreed to make some for me, too, which was great because I love rumballs! Not very many days later, she gave me them, and Mara was jealous! She said that I'd been given the rumballs because she wanted to steal me from Mara! Well, at that time, I didn't think so, but in retrospect...Perhaps Mara was correct!
You see, one thing about Indonesia is that amongst some people there is a very definite perspective about certain groups of people. The Chinese (SOME of the best people I ever met there were Chinese) are not to be trusted, the Indians (I knew some very nice Indians who did not...) stink, blacks from ANY country (except from the far eastern reaches of Indonesia) are automatically Nigerian drug runners (yet I had a very nice businessman who was my neighbor), and Caucasians...Well, you and I know it's all nonsense, right? They tended to think whites are very strong, very smart, and very rich. You could be traipsing about covered in filth, with tattered clothes and a backpack and people would still refuse to believe you're not rolling in cash! They also believe that white men are playboys who'll seduce as many young ladies as they can (and there are certainly foreigners who go there and do that!).
In fact, on the very first Independence Day celebration I got to watch, in which many events are available to watch or participate in, I was asked by one team of a tug-o-war to help out. The other team immediately protested and demanded extra team members to compensate, but they were denied. We won, but I'm pretty sure it was all psychological because there were some pretty muscular young men on the other side! I had other experiences that confirmed these perceptions, left over from 350 years of Dutch oppression, where Indonesians would put themselves down in comparison to whites - an attitude I was quick to correct! Because of this, and my comments encouraging Indonesia to improve itself, some people started calling me the new Daus Dekker (a Dutch who sided with the Indonesians in the struggle for freedom from the Dutch tyranny).
But I digress. Indonesia is a fascinating country, and you could spend centuries exploring all it has to offer, and still not see it all!
So, a few days later, I thanked her for the rumballs and said that they were very good (during our marriage, I helped her to refine the flavor so it was more like I remembered from rumballs I'd had State-side).
After that, when I saw her, I'd say "Hi," and she'd respond in kind. Then I'd ask "How are you?" and she'd say good and ask how I was, and I'd say I was good. Then, being shy and not sure what to say, I'd say "Good-bye!"
The truth is, I started waiting after I'd finished teaching on the days I knew she was there so I could see her and talk to her. It was always the same "Hi," "How are you?," and "Good-bye!"
For a month. Imagine how she must've felt. Well, apparently, some people reassured her that I was safe, so she didn't run away screaming!
Then, one night after the same thing had happened again, magic occurred! "Do you want my phone number?" she asked! I was elated and immediately jumped at the chance! Sadly, I still didn't know what to say after that, though, so she and her friend got on the "microlet" bus. Still, I was on cloud 100 because I had her phone number!
This was February, and I tried again to break it off with Mara. Again, she threatened suicide and, again, I resigned myself to not being with her. But I did one thing differently: I prayed. I started asking God if Mara and I were meant to be together. I was prepared to commit myself to her even further if the answer came back "Yes". I prayed pretty much every day. It took a month before an answer, if it was such, came. But you're going to have to wait for Part 5!
Now, you're not going to see me talk about praying much, if ever, because I rarely do it and, if I do, it is usually for others (although I did pray repeatedly that God would let me take Ita's cancer so that she could live).
After I got Ita's (yes, it is my then-future wife I've been writing about!) phone number, we started to meet after classes to talk. We'd usually meet at a restaurant and have a snack or beverages. I had to have a dictionary handy because her English wasn't that good, despite being at level 9 in EF, and my Indonesian was absolutely minimal. Afterwards, I'd call a taxi and offer her a ride home. She wouldn't let me hold her hand or anything.
I want to clarify about my relationship with Islam back then. In late 2001, I got a Koran (al-Qur'an) with English translation and I read through the whole thing. I wanted to understand it as best I could and I wanted to see if I'd get any indications of what God had planned for me. It was, like the other holy books I'd read (including the Bible and the Book of Mormon), replete with wisdom, history and boring stuff, too, but I didn't feel drawn or inspired. When I started dating Ita, I made sure to explain to her that I was studying Islam and that I would remain a Muslim if I was called to it. I'm not sure how well she understood that, though, because we often talked, thinking that we understood each other...but didn't. A relationship with language differences is a relationship full of challenges, not to mention if there are also educational, economic, cultural and religious differences! I finished it, borrowed a book about Islam from a friend, and did some other reading. In the end, I did not feel drawn to Islam, and I told Ita.
Thanks for sticking around, if you started with the first one, and thanks for reading if it's the first time. If you like my story, upvote and/or resteem it. I appreciate your kind support!
You may be wondering why I don't post a lot of pictures from my time there. Well, in my early years there, I had a hard drive crash that caused the loss of some of my photos, although I had many backed up to DVDs. Then, in 2015, my backup HDD was stolen, which contained the majority of my photos and, finally, I had to hastily leave Indonesia, resulting in the loss of all my printed photos as well as the old DVD backups from the early years. Thus, aside from what can be found online, I lost a huge number of photos. :(
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