Teaching

Today Hannah and I assume full teaching responsibilities. SO far teaching has been a very rewarding experience. It is so wonderful to plan a lesson, and then have it go smoothly. The misses aren't so bad, they serve a useful learning tool. Every day of the week Hannah and I arrive at school at 12:00 PM along with the other teachers. We plan lessons for classes that day until 3:00, when we start teaching. Three class periods a day, and we're done at 7:30. Then it's time to go home and eat dinner, play some games, watch a movie, read, whatever until bed time.

Banana bread and chili turned out great! The makeshift oven is constructed of a large cooking pot with some cinder blocks in the bottom. Pretty simple! Just put the ingredients in a small enough sauce pan, and place it in the oven at VERY low heat. Cooking in general here has seen few true successes. I'm still trying to cook all my favorite dishes from home (omelets, stir fry, dutch baby...) put the cooking tools and the food availability here won't allow it. So, until I start learning the local dishes well, Hannah and I will continue to be subject to bland tasting food that looks like it was scooped off the side of the road. Tea, mind you, is a godsend! There is tea everywhere in the world, and it's good! Another food note: yesterday Hannah and I picked up a deliscious fruit snack from a stand outside the school. Lots of sliced fresh fruit with an interesting spicy peanut sauce on top. Refreshing!

More news when more excitment comes.

-Nick

Montezuma's Revenge: Part 1

OK, on Thursday Hannah and I left the house here in Jayapura at 8:00.  We we're picked up by a car outside our house and driven an hour and a half to the PNG border.   At the border there was much confusion, as nobody spoke the other person's language.  We ended up waiting outside the immigration office for an hour waiting for the immigration guy to get out of bed or something and come to the freakin' office.   When he got there he took us into a small room where everyone had to survey our passports several times before we finally got our stamps and were able to walk a fair distance to the checkpoint on the PNG side, where we did the same thing, only much faster.   The car that was arranged for us to take us from the PNG border to the hotel didn't show up, so luckily a friendly Papuan who spoke English got us a ride in a bus for 10 Kina (4 dollars) a piece.   The drive of this bus was very friendly!  Once we crossed into Papua New Guinea it was like the people became magically very friendly.   I love the Papuans!  The ride to the hotel in Vanimo was scenic.  Little elevated huts thatched with palm fronds everywhere, people bathing in streams, and so on.   Also, no trash accumulation on the roads! (Jayapura has small amounts of trash everywhere.)  Our hotel was really a motel, and just across the street was the Indonesian consulate where we had our work visas processed, and then a short way down the road was a large lagoon.   Hannah and I checked in, ate some pretty good food at the motel restaurant, and then went for a swim in the lagoon.  Very nice!   Other than journeying to PNG from Indonesia, our trip was pretty uneventful.  More people speak English in PNG, which was a nice break, because there are still a lot of Christian missionaries there.   All the children was passed on the road said "'afternoon!"  We also bought some very unusual but delicious ice cream there!   Mmm!

Friday we arrived home in the afternoon, rested, then went in to school.  We received more in class training.   Yesterday we loafed around the house until about 1:00, and then Hannah and I took various taxis and such to a place inland called Santani.  There we met Louise (teacher at EF) and she took us on a hike up the mountain through the jungle.   Wild banana trees, wild pineapples, wild cassava, wild papaya, mangoes… wild everything!  Yay!  On the way back we got lost, and spent an extra half an hour getting unlost, but we made it.   Today we've been relaxing, and are now at the internet café in the evening (supposed to be faster, but it's not).  I'm writing this in Microsoft word, while I repeatedly load blogger until it decided to load the little login frame in the corner.   Ack!

On Thursday of this week I will be taking over Daniel's classes full time.  It should go well.   Wish me luck!  More to tell, but no time left.  Will fill you in later.

-Nick

The Internet is slow...

Everytime I want to write an entry here, I have to allow at least 10 minutes for my browser to download www.blogger.com. To all those in America, broadband is a blessing! Even satellite!

Monday night it rained all night, and it rained for most of yesterday (Tuesday). Today is Tuesday in the states, Wednesday here! Yay! Yesteray Hannah and I received the first part of our training as English teachers at EF (English First). We arrived at school at 12:00 and got a little tour of the teaching materials. Then at 3:00 Hannah and I sat in on Daniel's class of children. Daniel is one of the teachers that lives with us in the teacher's house. Daniel is a very good teacher, but of course has had almost one year of experience teaching here. His kids were very roudy, but he handled them well. At 4:30 I filled in for some an absent teacher administering a test. I gave a short listening and speaking exam to some 10-12 year-olds, and when they finished we headed down to the computer room. Funny English computer games! One about a barber shop where you are instructed to perform hair cuts and various things on customers, including combing a man's beard, whereupon the owner of the shop exlaims "He look funny!" I highly recommend this game, but I'm sure you will never get the chance to play it. Oh well, better luck next time. During this same time Hannah sat in with Wade while he taught a class.

At 6:10 Hannah and I each administered tests for adult business english in separate classrooms. The adults wehre cheating like crazy!! Aparently cheating isn't a no-no in Indonesia. It is however, a no-no at EF, so next time I will have to run around with a ruler vigorously slapping people. :P

After school we went to the open air market across the street- amazing! A ture bazzar. We picked up a grilled whole yellowfin for a mere Rp 20,000 ($2.00) and journeyed home on the taxi and cooked up some yummy yellowfin stir-fry. Soy sauce is an imported luxury here- $3.00 per bottle (more than our fish). But, we bought it anyway. Soon, very soon, I will make banana bread in a makeshift oven. Just have to wait till the bananas are ripe (they take a long-ass time to ripen here! Who would have guessed?).

We ate dinner late, and so went right to bed.

Today we have more of the same I expect, starting at 12:00. Another teacher living in our house arrived late last night, her name is Louise, and she is from somewhere deep in Australia because she has a flamboyantly thick accent.

Anyway, tomorrow Hannah and I will be transported to PNG (Papua New Guinea) for a short one-night holiday while our work visas are processed here. The hotel there is supposed to be very nice, as well as the food and the beach. We are looking forward to it!

Sorry there are no pictures here. It might be an impossibily. I'm still looking into it. Depends on whether or not they have a USB plug in these computers, and whether or not they'll let me stick something into it. Hmm, come to think of it, uploading an image to the internet here could take a considerable amount of time. Pictures only if you cross your fingers and you're really really lucky I guess.

That's about it for now!

A little Bahasa Indonesia for you: "Hati Hati" means "Be careful"

Bye!

-Nick

Settling in...

OK! Post numnber one to the "Adventures in Papua" blog. Just to clear things up a bit, if you don't already know this, Hannah and I are living here in Papua Indonesia teaching English for a year. Papua Indonesia is the same island as Papua New Guinea. We are in Jayapura, the capitol, which is literally within sight of the Papua New Guinea border (PNG). If your lucky, there will be a map here:
http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&hl=en&q=Papua+New+Guinea&ie=UTF8&ll=-8.667918,139.790039&spn=21.810344,44.296875&t=h&om=1
We are in the north-east corner of Papua Indonesia, hugging the Papua New Guinea border.

Hannah and I have been here since last Wednesday (Tuesday for all of you in the states), and live in a teacher's house up the hill from downtown, overlooking the ocean. The first couple days we spend coping with a small amount of culture shock: mainly that the toilets are squat toilets, and... no toilet paper. You might have guessed, yes we have to wipe with our hands. I'm already used to it. Also, you shower by ladeling water over your head. Not so bad. A much more efficient use of water too!

Tomorrow (Monday) Hannah and start shadowing the other teachers in the classroom at English First (the school). On Thursday of this week Hannah and I will be driven to PNG (Papua New Guniea) to stay in a hotel for the night while our work visas are processed here. Then we will come back and start teaching classes on our own!

Things I miss already: Baked goods! No ovens here! Patrick, don't come, you'd be depressed. Also, I miss being able to ride my bicycle everywhere. It's so rural here that there is basically one road, and everything is so spread out that everyone either takes a taxi, or rides a motorcycle. (Taxis are like tiny versions of VW buses. All the cars here are very narrow.) Most of all, I miss my friends and my family. Wherever you go, the people you spend your time with are what make or break your time there. So be buddies with everyone! Yay!

Yesterday Wade (the director oif studies) and his Indonesian wife took us to a black sand beach. We bathed under some waterfalls in a stream up from the beach, then we went down to the water and I swam around in the pacific with some Papuans. The Papuans are the native peoples; they are very dark skinned and look very similar to Africans. They are generally looked down upon here (mostly because fair skin is considered the ideal of beauty), although I have a pretty big soft spot for them. In the water one of them shared with me a pair of underwater goggles carved from some sort of tree, with circles of clear plastic covering the eye holes. The water was very pretty at the beach, typical turquoise-blue.

Today Hannah and I are downtown doing some errands. We lunch at a Warung (local food joint), and are now in the internet cafe! Then we will go to the mall (yes, there is a small mall) and buy some clothes to complete our wardrobes here. Then we will shop for food, and head home! If we're lucky we will be able to scrape together enough ingredients to make Patrick's chili recipe. Also if we're lucky I will be able to remember that darned banana bread recipe (help Patrick!). We have bananas up the wazoo here. I bought a papaya on Thursday and it was so big that it'll last us until tomorrow. I've made most of it into jam already.

That's about all the excitment so far! If i've forgotten to include anyone on the email list (and I know I have), will you please forward the address for this blog to them? And when those of you I've forgotten read this blog, will you please please please send me your email addressess!

Selamat tinggal! (Goodbye to those who are staying; I'm leaving!)

-Nick