It’s time to leave. My bags are packed, my big ticket items are given away or sold. The travel agent in the US who does our tickets has told me that my domestic flight may be messed up because I changed my domestic flight myself, instead of emailing to the US to do it! At worst, I’ll have to re-buy my ticket and get reimbursed for it. So much for the movement toward paper tickets in our digital age. I can’t really reflect all that much on my time here at the moment; it’s too soon. I’ll discuss it more later, perhaps in person with some of you. For now, I need to get the rest of my stuff together and have that last bowl of oatmeal for breakfast. The next few days will be in Jakarta: saying more goodbyes, hunting down my passport so I can actually leave, storing my stuff at a friend’s, and getting ready for a short holiday. I don’t know if I’ll take the time to update during my travels (I know the readership for this blog is quite small), or even check email. Off the grid for three weeks?
Well, I have to take one more walk home and get things settled up completely.
It’s my last week and I’m giving the exams for four out of six classes–two are speech oriented and will be mostly an average of their performance on the speeches given. The last two weekends have been spent with groups of students having a field trip to the beach. We played games, ate lots of food, and had a grand old time.
I must say that I shed a few tears when they put gave me a parting gift. I’ve gotten to know these kids over the last two semesters pretty well and it’s going to be hard to leave Aceh.
For now, I’ll be busy grading and packing up. Then a few days in Jakarta before traveling to Cambodia, Thailand, and Vietnam, starting 1 July. After that, back to Jakarta to pick up my bountiful luggage and hitch a ride back to the US. It’s going to be the icing on some really good cake.
I’ve drank coffee quite a bit in the past few years and Aceh is a great place for coffee. The idea behind the brewing here is that the longer the drop from the filter to glass, the better the taste. In reality, a fair amount of coffee gets splattered around my cup rather than in it. However, this doesn’t stop the guys in the canteen from attempting to show off how high they can raise the filter.
Another coffee-drinking tactic I’ve seen here is to pour off some hot coffee into the saucer, place the cup to the side and drink from the saucer!
Monday Haiku #37 – 19.05.08
Submersed in the night,
naked stars sing the gospel
while holding you fast.
I decided to free up some space on my hard drive by removing all the files that are for other languages that I don’t speak. I used a nifty application named Monolingual. I used it last time I was trying to free up some space during my great RAM upgrade caper (which was only resolved by buying a new computer). It doesn’t matter that I have plenty of hard drive space at the moment. The past use of the application went fine. It went fine this time and I freed up almost 1GB. Only after using it did I notice I couldn’t open any Word, Excel, or PowerPoint documents. Luckily, my mail application and Firefox were still usable. After some sleuthing (and calling my personal tech support at Ironkeep Technologies LLC), I found out that in using the standard method of removal of the foreign languages I also removed some files that contained code needed to run other applications. The solution was to erase and reinstall the OS (after copying all music and documents over to several DVDs). I thought I had a copy of MS Office in my collection, but I was wrong. The upside is that all of my files are intact and accessible in one way or another. The downside is that I’m now using a 30-day trial version of iWork, which I’m unfamiliar with. I’ll check tomorrow to see if OpenOffice has their Mac version out yet. This is a moot point perhaps since the actual internet connection is like my kitchen tap, a trickle.
It’s the middle of May and I’m just giving my midterms. The academic schedule here has it’s own rhyme and reason, much of which I’m still trying to figure out after 3.5 years.
The first semester always seems to start in the beginning of September and goes for 16 weeks. This is really a ‘recommended’ number of weeks as most universities only requires lecturers to meet 12 times for a once-a-week class, or 75% of scheduled class meetings. On top of the that, the nationwide attendance regulations require 75% attendance of those class meetings in order to take the final. So, in order to complete the class, a teacher only has to come to class 12 times (two of which would be midterm and final) and students only need to attend eight of the 12 meetings.
This week I had three students come to me pleading to remain in class. One had dengue fever for the first three weeks and the other two just didn’t come to class. They had upwards of 10 absences over the first 16 meetings. I gave the one with dengue a chewing out and told him not to miss anymore classes. Unfortunately, I had to scratch the other two off the class roster. The Indonesian instructors who listened to my conversations were mildly sympathetic in that they have the same students and the students have the same attendance record. Of course, content classes and language classes are two different things in my book. Yes, you can just show up for the exams in content classes if you know your stuff. Language classes require one to show up to practice the language. It’s never a good feeling to boot someone from class, but they also have to set priorities if they want to study.
