Week One

It’s been a busy week since arriving in Denpasar, Bali late Monday evening. After catching up on some sleep Tuesday, two volunteers who have been in country for a year took us, the four new vols, for a peek around Sanur - one of the touristy suburbs of Denpasar - including a walk along the beachfront and dinner. On Wednesday our orientation training began, Thursday we had our first language lesson, more orientation, and Friday was taken up almost entirely by bahasa* Indonesia. While feeling the continuous mild stress of a new environment, the VSO staff and Pam & Salim, the experienced volunteers, keep the tone relaxed and low-key, allowing us generous time to adapt at our own pace.

Traffic really does flow - unlike Canada there are limited stops and starts, rare sudden turns - even though the streets are packed with cars, buses, and trucks, while scooters and motorcycles outnumber these by ten to one. And believe me, I’ve been observing the traffic very carefully, since next week we get out there on our motorcycles for road training. The first thought is ‘No bloody way am I driving here’, but I’ve been told (and now agree) that it is quite possible, even easy. The only thing I have to do is NOT drive like we all do in Canada. Here’s the conclusion: It’s not a matter of you, in your own vehicle, driving to where you want to go. The trick seems to be to integrate yourself into the river of traffic, flow along with it until a branch heads off in a direction that you wish to follow, and allow it to carry you to your destination. Tidak apa apa*, right? Well, we’ll see - I’ve got the theory.

Same thing with language, apparently. Indonesia, as an archipelago of over 17,000 islands with hundreds, perhaps thousands of indigenous languages, adopted bahasa Indonesia as the lingua franca for their national language. One of the easier ones to pick up (fingers crossed), with no tenses, and incorporating words from Dutch, Arabic, and Hindi, among several others. Our teacher, explaining some of the basic grammar rules, tells us that it’s quite acceptable to switch phrases around in a sentence. Speaking bahasa Indonesia is another example of following the river - language should flow from your thoughts rather than restricting the expression of an idea. Instead of taking a few extra milliseconds to worry about exact phrase order, more than one sequence is perfectly OK. So, you could say “What is your name?” or “Your name what is it?” depending on how your brain feels at the moment. The construction of the sentence is not allowed to slow communication more than necessary. I quite like the idea of it, although I’m not too sure that I, personally, can do without the additional milliseconds of thinking about what I’m going to say.

*bahasa = language (therefore, bahasa Indonesia = Indonesian language)

*tidak apa apa = no problem (lit. no what what)