11-17-19 - Dinner with Luke & Sunny
/Day 154. Kyle & Leanne joint blog. Ubud, Bali, Indonesia.
We get to spend the morning relaxing at breakfast and by the pool before checkout. From there, Eka picks us up to take us from Nusa Dua to Ubud (both neighborhoods in Bali) for our service project.
A few weeks before we left on this year-long trek, Kyle found this particular weeklong service opportunity and applied as a family. Started in 2010, Green Lion aims to augment local education through additional class time helping teachers, building new schools, and even running its own kindergarten.
We arrive at Green Lion in outer Ubud and meet our Balinese volunteer coordinator Gita, a 25 year old Balinese native. Hip and enthusiastic, Gita has worked at Green Lion Bali for just under a year with plans of studying and working teaching English in Australia in the near future. At this point, our clan has no idea what this week will entail except that we will be teaching English and Environmental Conservation to primary local school children. We are eager to serve a deserving village in need.
Gita reviews the center’s rules (which includes 10pm curfews and no alcohol policies). In a very serious tone, Gita informs us, “you need to ask yourself what your priority is while you are here. Are you here to volunteer to help the children or are you here as a tourist?” Tourist is apparently code speak for going out and partying every night. The question posed made us think a fair bit of people are here for the latter. Apparently the center only has one version of the speech aimed at the 20-something year old backpackers.
Gita leads us to our rooms in a nearby family compound (as Balinese families typically reside in multi-generational housing on one plot including their own temple). It’s a lovely room with handcrafted Balinese wooden furniture, an oddly romantic mosquito net and flowered tiles that scream this small building was built exclusively for volunteers like us. The house is owned by the Wayan family, one of 50 or so families that make up the Geopakan village.
After we settle in, our taxi driver Eka takes us over to another part of Ubud for dinner at our friend’s house. Sunny and Luke are friends of ours from our hometown that we first met over a decade ago when Justin was in preschool with their son. They moved to Ubud last year to send their two kids to a local school based on the environment and sustainability.
At their house, they have dinner catered by a Balinese woman who started a nonprofit women’s shelter and other social enterprises to empower women. Her journey reminds us a little of Thander from Bagan, Myanmar, equally passionate on her mission to serve others. The Indonesian meal she prepared for us, which is served in bamboo baskets and banana leaves, includes chicken satay, spicy noodles and rice in a uniquely Balinese taste. Her helpers are the women she has helped at the shelter.
After dinner, we catch up with Sunny and Luke who having been living in Bali for a little less than a year and travelling around Southeast Asia doing everything from judging entrepreneurial competitions to hot yoga to riding motorcycles to building bamboo houses at their kids’ school. Their adventure is so inspiring!
As we head home, we are reminded how special it is to see friendly known faces from our community back home. It’s been over five straight months of traveling but the joy of seeing old friends in different parts of the world make this trip ever more special. Ever more magical. The gift of friends - old and new!
