Well, I’ve been a bit lazy & haven’t written anything for a couple of months, & then thought I’d wait until the one-year anniversary of my landing in Indonesia (October 8) - maybe pull out some profound ponderings on how the year has been for me. I find myself bereft of clever & profound right now, ‘though. Maybe it’s because I’ve never been someone who paid a lot of attention to the past - always trying to see what’s coming next & hoping it’s different. But I’ll try. Here are a few observations.
Lost about 20 pounds (yippee) - mostly due to drastic reduction in alcohol intake - which makes the heat more bearable - fewer fat folds in which the sweat can accumulate.
Learned to love riding a motor scooter, even in wicked traffic. Still swear at other drivers but that’s not going to piss anyone off because (a) it’s in English & most of them wouldn’t catch the meaning, & (b) it’s mostly just resounding inside my helmet.
I don’t get to go swimming hardly ever! Imagine living in the middle of a bloody island archipelago & I can’t manage to get down to a beach even once a month. Conclusion: I need another vacation, soon.
I can plan the hell out of the organization I’m working for & none of it will survive 5 minutes after I land back in Canada. After a year, I’m still trying to figure out how to convert anything I do to have even a minimal lasting impact.
Finished an online social psychology course which reinforced & complemented a lot of impressions I have about society in general & helped me understand some things about Indonesian society that are a mystery to me. The most interesting thing I took away was the affirmation that attitudes & behaviour are often completely disconnected, so if you want to change something people do (like littering) you’re probably wasting your time (& money) trying to change attitudes (for example, through a public information campaign). The effort may be better spent on simply working to change the behaviour. So I yelled at one of the university students on campus yesterday for throwing a used water bottle on the ground (well, OK, I didn’t actually yell - but I did tell her she shouldn’t be littering).
It’s great having 2 homes here - one up in the cool hills among trees & one down in the city. I don’t think I’d be happy living full time in either one & it’s like a mini-vacation / change whenever I go back & forth.
Makassar is the fourth largest city in Indonesia & I’m surprised to find that I kind of like it. It’s dirty, noisy, confusing, hellish traffic (as I may have mentioned 6 or 7 times by now) - but it feels alive & vibrant. And the Starbucks has the most reliable wifi connection I’ve found yet. I still have 90% of the city to explore - have generally been staying on the streets I know & I still get lost with remarkable regularity - but there’s tons more of it with interesting little shops & restaurants.
Social connections are the central fact of Indonesian life. People thrive through their relationships with others - that’s how the majority of time is spent by an average Indonesian - simply maintaining existing relationships & creating new ones. Anything that has to get done is accomplished by making those connections with others. This is probably the most foreign concept to me & the most important thing I’ve learned here. I don’t know if I can acquire any kind of skill in social networking (& not the computer kind) but it’s revelatory to me to have the examples in front of me all day, every day & I think I’m improving.
So - am I going to persist for another year? I don’t know - don’t know if I’d even place good odds on it. I miss my fam - but Kir & Alex are getting along fine without me - & I think I even have fewer gray hairs since I’m not looking over their shoulders worrying about them all the time. Well, OK, technically (in the technological sense) I’m still looking over their shoulders, but they find it a lot easier to ignore me for some reason.
To sum up - this experience has been & continues to be frustrating, infuriating, confusing, discouraging, even depressing, but always & still interesting. I’ll probably be here next month, so sampai jumpa.
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