A Day in the Life

Our Daily Schedule

This is generally what we do each day during the week: the prayer from the Mosque starts at 5. Sometimes that wakes us up but not always. Then various noises start in the neighborhood, mainly birds chirping loudly near our window. The top windows are only screens, no glass, so the bird and insect sounds come through clearly. Then one of our neighbors across the alleyway will always crank up his music with a big booming bass. I imagine some mornings that it is Boston “More than a feeling” and sometimes it sounds more like Bob Marley “No Woman no pride”. I have never looked at the clock but I believe this is around 5:15. This stops after a half an hour, though sometimes it continues throughout the morning. There is a motorcycle that is started up and warms up for what seems like an eternity, and then the driver zooms off, and accompanied by the sounds of various other motor scooters starting up with a loud noise and zooming off. Then there are many voices, including crying children, and more motor scooters. So we lay in bed and do our best to get a few more minutes of sleep despite the sounds of the waking neighbors.

I usually get up between 6 and 6:30 as the sun is usually getting bright by 6:30. I start the water boiling in our electric tea pot, which takes about 20 minutes to heat up. Nothing is done quickly here. We have looked for microwave ovens and we do not think they exist here. Of course ovens don’t really exist either.

Then I start my porch time. Our home has a nice covered tile porch, facing out to the paved road that connects many of the houses and the girl’s dorm to the campus. Students begin walking down this road, as well as the shortcut “mouse” road on the other side of our house, for their 7 am classes. The high school students are dressed in their uniforms: white shirts/blouses, gray slacks/skirts, and the guys were gray ties. White socks, black shoes. Meanwhile my water is ready and I fix a cup of tea and grab the devotional books and my Bible and do some reading. Since I do not have the Knoxville New Sentinel or the WSJ delivered to my doorstep, this is the next best thing.

After the sun rises a bit more and I have finished my reading I go inside for some breakfast. Though we have a plentiful supply of eggs, we usually eat for breakfast a local bread item or two, along with a slice of my homemade bread. Jacob loves to buy the sweets from the Bread Top, which is a little franchise bread shop just outside the main campus gate. Sweet breads are very popular, to the point that that’s all there is to choose from. There are many varieties, chocolate filling and candies on top are common, as are fillings of ground palm sugar. This always looks like an awesome combination of cinnamon and brown sugar, but so far we haven’t tasted any cinnamon in the bread. The flavor is subtle/sweet, which is unusual here because generally things are supercharged sweet, such as the coffee and the tea.

If Nancy is doing wash that morning she will try to start it early in the morning because the cycles on the washing machine are very long. The time readout on the control panel is only related to the specific cycle, so Nancy never really knows how long the process will take. Then she hangs it on the clothes line that is right outside the washroom/bathroom. This is the bathroom for our neighbor who lives in another section of the building.

We usually hold a workshop at 9 am, with the themes and the schedule decided by the Dean and Reina, his wife, who is head of the English Department. One of us will usually go to the Dean’s office just after 8 and print out the copies of the presentation. We have asked several times if there is a photocopy machine, a phrase they know, but nobody seems to understand the concept of printing out one copy of a document and then making many copies on the copier machine. I can’t believe they don’t have one on campus but that may be the case. Someone told us if we wanted to make photocopies that there was a store just outside the main gate. It takes a long time to print out pages on the computer printer but that is what we do. Then that person will take our laptop to the “hot spot” which is a wi-fi zone on campus that has very limited range and definitely very limited hours. We have been invited to sit inside the graduate school office while we use the “hot spot” and that is a nice place to be. Two words: air conditioned. Which means one AC unit for a big room, translating into a temperature of about 80 rather than the 85+ that is more the norm around here.

We meet at the workshop room (usually the library) a few minutes after 9, because nothing starts on time here. The library has no books within sight. To get a book the students must fill out a request form and the librarians then go into the back book room and get it. The technology guy, Hurmoko, shows up around 9:10 usually with the LCD projector (called an Infocus here) and sets that up. The attendees stream in between then and 9:30, when we start. Then for the next hour students will arrive one, two, three at a time. By the end of the presentation we will have a full house. Meetings begin and end with prayer, though Nancy and I often forget, since we are used to not being allowed to pray in our schools. The windows are wide open during the sessions, thank goodness for a little breeze, although there is a great deal of noise from the high school students changing classes and talking loudly outside. Many times there is a high school activity including a loud loud speaker that we have to talk over. The high school is run as an extension of the university and the teachers are largely college students doing their “practice teaching”. The morning session ends at 11 or 11:30 and most of the students hang around to ask us questions, show us papers they want to have reviewed, or chat with each other.

We walk home around noon and rest for thirty minutes, or talk about what needs to be done for our afternoon workshop or future events. Then we’ll fix some lunch, often either leftover rice cooked with some egg or sliced fruit and veggies. Sometimes we have been out for lunch at various events, such as the Teachers Training Meeting last week, or the trip to the orphanage.

We have had workshops on campus starting at 2 (generally during the first two weeks) and now we are continuing with our 3 pm HKI Sunday School Teachers workshops. They have scheduled a whole series of these workshops and we have largely run out of material. HKI stands for Huria Kristen Indonesia and is a Christian church which includes both Bataks and non-Bataks, and extends to regions of Indonesia beyond Sumatra. The HKBP Church is the Huria Kristen Batak Protestant church. The Batak are the local ethnic group, and there are five subsets of Batak. Batak has a language which is totally different than Bahasa Indonesia, and there are five dialects of Batak. Nobody has explained any theological differences between these two churches, and everyone gets along seamlessly, so we’ll assume they are largely the same.

When we go to the HKI headquarters, it only takes 10 minutes to drive there. Then typically we get set up (five minutes) and then wait around for more than 30 minutes. This gets to be very tedious. These SS teachers usually show up more or less on time, and our sessions last for an hour. We have talked about songs, activities, and special situations like dealing with kids who are misbehaving. Near the end of the session the helper person distributes little sealed cups of water and sweet buns (also sealed in plastic) to everyone. Nancy and I haven’t mastered how to poke the straw through the water lid yet, though Jacob claims to be able to do it. When we poke the lid, the sharp tip of the straw just bends over.

After the workshop concludes then we go outside for the obligatory pictures. Hopefully they will be happy with the 10,000 photos they have taken in past sessions and won’t need to take any more. How the photo op drill here: one person takes a photo of the group with their phone camera, then they rejoin the group and someone else steps out and takes a picture with their phone camera, and so forth. It seems to me that everyone ends up with a picture that doesn’t include them…but maybe they swap pictures afterwards, I don’t know. We used to offer our camera for group photos, but we found that there is no end to this process and you end up with 100 pictures that pretty much all look the same.

We’ll be driven back home by 5, relax for a little while, and come up with the plan for dinner. It depends on how hungry we are and if we have been planning on anything special, such as KFC. We also would do any shopping expedition in the evening, plus if we have been less than successful in the hot spot we will likely walk out to the internet café, right across from the main gate.

Our nearby shopping choices, within walking distance, are the IndoMart, pretty much just the size of a big convenience store but with a variety of groceries (including a big stack of “bag your own” eggs near the door) and the Orange Mart, which is located in the Ramayana shopping building just beyond our neighborhood HKPB church. There are several other major grocery stores we can go to, but that requires a micro-bus ride which is fun, inexpensive, convenient, and always an adventure. There are four or five routes for the micro-busses and the name written on the side indicates the route. In the city of Siantar there must be over a thousand micro-busses. They are everywhere and often in groups of four and five. As you walk along the sidewalk the micro-busses will swerve toward you and the driver will yell something (we imagine they say “jump on my bus, it’s the best!” and also honk at you. Honking is such a communication tool here that the horn is triggered with a joy stick protruding from the steering column. That way the driver can honk the horn with his pinkie 10,000 times (estimated average per hour) without releasing the steering wheel. So you jump on the bus, sometimes telling the driver where you want to get off, but that is not necessary. The busses are converted mini-vans with flat floors and bench seats along the walls in the back. Many of the micro-busses feature very loud music complete with a huge “kicker” box in the back to provide the throbbing deep bass sound. After a few minutes your head in throbbing and your ears feel like they are ready to bleed. If the micro-bus driver is looking for business, they will change their route in order to have you get on the bus. So sometimes later in the evening when their business is slow you can get on the wrong bus and they will take you wherever you want to go.

But for our normal evenings during the week we just walk to the store, the internet café, or the Bread Top. We usually try to do this before dark because crossing the street is scary enough in the daylight. For those who have not experienced it in a place like this, crossing the street is an act of faith and hope. If you were to wait for a gap in both directions of traffic, you would never get across. There is also the complicating factor that traffic moves on the opposite side of the street from what we are used to in America. So when you cross, you look for a small gap in the approaching traffic and you slowly begin walking across. Generally you look for motorbikes because they are much better at slowing down and avoiding pedestrians. Traffic steers to the left or right or slows down slightly to let you pass. In the middle of the street you pause, if necessary, look the other way, and search for your next small gap. Then you repeat the process. We learned this technique during our visit several years ago to Ho Chi Minh City.

Traffic here can be a bit crazy, not in the total quantity of cars and motor bikes but in the way cars and bussess and motor bikes coexist. The micro-busses are swerving toward the curb and back into traffic, the cars go a bit slowly to avoid accidents, and the motor bikes seem to travel on either side of the road as they merge into traffic. When you are merging into traffic here, it is not necessary to immediately cross over to the correct side. Rather, you pull out into the street facing the way you want to go, traffic forms around you, and you slowly move forward and gradually reach your correct side. All drivers are paying close attention and are not speeding up or trying to cut off other drivers. If you do get cut off in traffic you just calmly wait for the next opportunity and then you likely cut off some other person. But nobody gets mad at other drivers, they just take their next opportunity to move forward and do it.

Dinner at home can be rice or noodles or fried potatoes or chicken nuggets. Even though we mix in some vegetables with the rice, add soy sauce, etc. we are getting a little bored with rice. Indonesians eat rice with every meal, and don’t consider it a meal without rice. They eat the rice and everything but soup with their fingers. We are starting to get used to eating rice with our fingers, you just press the rice together in a clump and shovel it into your mouth. But don’t worry, we have forks and spoons at home and are still using them.

Usually we take until 7 or 7:30 to finish eating. Sometimes we will have visitors in the evening. Either Nala or Reina to tell us something about the schedule for tomorrow, or some students who live nearby stopping by, or Ezra, daughter of Reina and the Dean, stopping by the get some Jacob time.

Then it is shower time. Taking a shower here is not quite what you would think. There is no shower as such. The water we use comes from the bath tub spigot and collects in a big red bucket sitting in the bath tub (no bathing possible in this tub). There is a hand ladle (like a 4 cup bucket with a handle on it) that you dip into the big red bucket and pour over yourself. Did I mention there is no hot water? The water is cold. It is warmer than the cold winter time tap water in Knoxville, I would guess around 50 degrees. Maybe a little colder than the cold tap water in Knoxville during the heat waves of summer. It is cold enough that when you pour it down your back you involuntarily shiver. The motivating factor that makes us want to take this cold shower is the lack of air conditioning and the heat here. Though it has cooled down to the mid-80s this week, it is still humid and there is no cool place to escape to. So by the end of the day you are sticky (not stinky) and uncomfortably warm. So you take the cold shower and it lowers your body temperature, in addition to washing off the grime and sweat of the day.

It takes some time for the three of us to take our showers. While waiting we will read or work on presentations for the future. We usually go to bed between 9 and 10 pm. There is no 10 o’clock news for us to watch. We don’t have a TV Guide and we haven’t made a practice of turning on the TV (we receive two channels with English…One is kind of like Nova, sometimes, and the other is NHK, from Japan.) No CNN or ESPN. No Nascar or Fox TV, no late breaking news about the Big Orange. It’s actually quite peaceful. I think if something huge happens in the world, we will be told by someone. So far nobody has shared any outside news with us. I did spot the English language Jakarta Times newspaper in the graduate office and sometimes our neighbor brings it over for me to read in the evening. This newspaper has one or two pages about America, a rather eclectic collection of news, mainly US politics, and then the rest is about Indonesia. It’s interesting to read about what goes on here, the marauding elephants and the endless bribery and graft stories. The newspaper does include a few American comics and also sometimes a sports story (for instance, the National league winning the All-Star game). Since it’s not SEC football or basketball time, I can live without much sports news.

We move our fan into the bedroom and put it on full blast, directly at us in bed. Initially we did this because we were so hot. But then one early morning when the temp. had cooled, I changed it to low speed. In a matter of seconds I started hearing mosquitoes buzzing in my ears. The fan on high speed creates enough wind to keep the mosquitoes away from us. I anticipated that there would be mosquitoes here and ordered two mosquito nets from Amazon. Unfortunately they did not arrive before our departure.

Most evenings the neighborhood quiets down around 10 and we only hear an occasional car or motorbike. The main issue before the 5 am prayer call is the neighborhood dogs and cats. There is a big menagerie of mangy dogs and cats that have no apparent owner and know no bounds as to where they roam. Some nights the dogs get together and have a big barking party, or a dog fight. Some nights it is the cats turn to howl and screech at each other. Nobody comes out of their house and makes an effort to silence them. Nobody claims these animals. It is really quite sad because they are quite mangy and obviously uncomfortable. Somebody must be feeding them because they don’t attack any of the geese or chickens that live in the neighborhood. We have been repeatedly told to turn on our porch light at night and leave it on until the morning. This is partly because our neighbor Putra zooms in and out on his motorbike in the dark and it helps if he can see where he is going. We also understand that the Batak do not like the dark and therefore having a light on is important to them. We are now leaving the light on all night long.