11-18-19 - Confused roosters and volunteer orientation
/Day 155. Kyle & Leanne joint blog. Ubud, Bali, Indonesia.
Cock a doodle do. Well, actually it sounds more like “aaaaouuuuu, aaaaooooouuuu, aaaachaaaoouu!!!!!!!”
But unfortunately it is 3:45 am and still pitch black outside. How did we end up sleeping in the vicinity of a time-challenged rooster? Our vision of sleeping soundly in this quiet small laidback rural village are now crushed. In our village of Geopaken, they take their roosters very seriously as there are at least 50 roosters within hearing range of our room and we have no understanding yet why one might need more than one. Note to self: inquire about roosters. The roosters continue whaling until the sun is finally up more than 2 hours later. It wouldn’t be so bad if we didn’t desperately need a little thing called sleep. Kyle looks at the schedule and projects that he will completely lose his sanity by dawn this coming Thursday due to the daily morning rooster revolution.
After a hearty breakfast of banana pancakes and cereal, we head to the top floor of the center for our training day with 40 or so other volunteers to learn about Balinese culture and more about our teaching assignments. We introduce ourselves and see that there is a large group of high school students from Hong Kong and others from countries including Germany, Netherlands, the UK and the US including and a family from California with two younger girls.
Vive, an incredibly energetic Balinese 20-something year old, gives the introduction and overview of Balinese culture. While Indonesia is predominantly Muslim having the largest Muslim population in the world with 225M people, Bali is actually 80+% Hindu so many of their Balinese traditions are intertwined with Hindu ones. They make daily offerings in the morning and afternoon and have numerous festivals including national, village and family festivals.
We learn that Balinese are offended by public displays of affection thus ruling out any hopes Kyle had of putting the moves on Leanne during break time of volunteering sessions at the school. We are told it is also offensive to use your left hand when handing something to someone or pointing at something. Locals use their left hand when going to the bathroom therefore they use the opposite hand in interacting with each other (the opposite holds if you are left-handed). We are told we will be warmly received by the Balinese people if we dress nicely and smile whenever making eye contact. However, you have to smile at someone because if you are just smiling at yourself walking down the street, the locals will think you crazy. This part of the culture could be a real problem for our ever-smiling Leanne but we see this is as a way to lose our “tourist” image.
At lunch, we meet the other American family serving this week —Kerri and Troy of Sacramento who came to Indonesia to celebrate one of their two girl’s Golden Birthdays with this service trip. A Golden Birthday is where the year you turn is the same as your day – e.g. for April 11, your 11thbirthday would be your Golden Birthday. They are involved in service back in California and we talk about their service and Leanne’s minds matter. We really enjoyed trading travelling stories with them over lunch as they have been to many countries as well. It was nice to see another American family as it had been about 2-3 months since we last saw one.
The afternoon is a training session for our actual volunteering led by a different by similarly energetic 20-something year old Balinese. She goes over what we can expect from the kids and the classroom. The kids had been having English during the school day twice per week but it was recently cut back to once per week. The volunteer program is after school from 2 – 4pm every day to help with their English.
We are told almost all of the students are very eager to learn English but need help talking more and feeling confident speaking English in front of people. In Bali, learning English is necessary for a “good job” in tourism and Bali is heavily dependent on tourism. So learning English will provide job opportunities outside of farming work that the majority of the village families are engaged in.
We are told that while most of the school children are enthusiastic, there can be a couple “troublemakers” in the class. The trainer pleads with us not to hate the troublemakers but to “love and embrace them.” This warning will turn out to be prescient for some of us.
Next, we receive our teaching assignments. We have all been assigned to the same school (grades 3-6) in a rural village about 45 minutes from the center location. Kyle and Corey will be teaching environmental science to 6th graders. Leanne and Ashley will be teaching English to 5th graders. Justin and Ashley will be teaching English to 4th graders and John will be teaching English to 3rd graders.
We are responsible for preparing the lessons during the mornings. We are given an update note completed by the previous volunteer teachers. The notes reveal that is has been several months since the school has had any volunteer sessions. Kyle asks Gita and learns that our school is the farthest away so the school only gets assigned volunteers if the Green Lion program has a higher than usual number of volunteers in a given week.
The program provides dinner but some of us want to explore Bali’s city center. Kyle, Leanne and Justin opt to head out for the 20 minute ride into Ubud for dinner while the rest of the kids opt to stay back for dinner at the center. We walk around town which is comprised of restaurants and shops with temples intermixed between them. We settle upon an open air restaurant called Oops! for no good reason except the promise of live music. It was a great night of extra time with our always-positive Justin.
