Jakarta: Part 2

Aug 31

After a bout of severe congestion (probably the smoggy Jakarta air) compounded by the runs, I'm feeling much better. Ashleigh lent me some sudafed, which helped with the congestion, and orientation today was pretty interesting, as we got to meet the ETA (Fulbright English Teaching Assistants) that we'll be supervising. There are three girls that I'll be working with, all fresh out of college, never having taught before. I see why I didn't get that position as I'm a bit too experienced--one of them said, after a brainstorming lesson where I taught them the basics of lesson planning for a language classroom (warmup, major lesson, closer), " Are we only going to get to work with you today? I need more help!" That made me feel pretty good--I told them that I'd send them lots of lesson plans that I developed in Japan, and that we'd work on some projects together. One project, the National English Contest, seems pretty awesome. We choose a theme for the contest tomorrow (and the contest is multimodal, meaning that students can sing, dance, write, etc. as long as it's in English). Then, one student from each of the ETA's schools gets chosen as a finalist, and we fly them to Jakarta (most students have never left their village, much less visited their capital city, so it's a big deal), and they get to present their work at this big celebration of writing. Then, 5 finalists are chosen and these students get scholarships to finish high school (they have to pay here). That's going to be fun to organize, I bet.

I also broke my dry spell tonight--I haven't had a drink since the River Ale I drank with Nate after running up Mt. Skinner, two days before leaving MA--which is a long time for me, if you think about it. Tonight after orientation we all went to this Italian restaurant and drank sangrias, wines, etc. You can't imagine how expensive the wine is here--while food is around $3 (even in an "expensive" Italian restaurant), wine is 8 or 9 dollars. But it was worth it. I feel much more relaxed and happy. You know what they say: "A drink a day..."