A Day in the Life of Language School

What does a typical day look like for our family right now, you may ask?  I'll walk you through our day.

4:30 AM- Call to prayer from the nearby mosque(s) starts broadcasting and wakes me up if I fell asleep without my earplugs.

 6 AM- Alarm goes off.  I get out of bed and make my morning cup of coffee.  (Lighting the burner on the gas stove with a lighter doesn't scare me anymore, so I am making progress).  I read my Bible, and of coarse my Face Book, and look over my pengalaman (more on that later).  I wipe the ants that have migrated onto our kitchen counter off so I can make breakfast.  Scrambled eggs, pancakes, leftover papaya, or toast is the usual fare.  Sometimes the kids are awake to eat with us, if they are still asleep I cover their plate of food with plastic (so the ants don't carry it away).

7:45 AM-  Ibu Yani our pembantu (house helper or more accurately lifesaver) arrives to watch the children and help with laundry and cleaning, she also cooks us lunch.  We say goodbye to the kids (if they are awake) and walk to IMLAC, our school.  IMLAC is about a mile walk from our house.

8 AM- School starts.  On Mondays we have chapel together, but every other day we go to class right away.  There are six people in our Unit 1 class.  We all take turns at the beginning of the class sharing our "pengalaman"  which means "our experience".  We write eight sentences in Indonesian about our past day and stand in front of everybody to read it.  Starting next week the teacher would like us not to read off of the paper.  Yikes!  After we are finished the teacher (or pilatih) will write down our mistakes on the board and we all practice the correct way together.  Intimidating, yes.

9 AM- We split up into two groups and practice short drills.  We are given about 3 phrases to learn for the day, we then repeat the phrases with the pilatih.  Later in another class we learn words we can substitute in the phrases.  We also have a 20 minute class where all we do is repeat words the pilatih says.  By the end of this class my mouth is sore, there are a few sounds our mouths just don't make in the English language that are hard to get used to.  

11:45- At the end of the day we dialog with the pilatih (in front of the class) the text we have been working on all day.  This whole process is quite draining, by the end of the day the first week I honestly was holding back tears I was so tired by the last class.  I would get crushing headaches and forget simple phrases.  Anybody who is close to me knows that I am NOT a crier.  :)  It is getting easier, class is still crazy hard, but we are getting used to the schedule.  

IMLAC Campus

I forgot to mention that about 1/2 of the pilatihs don't speak much English and the entire class is taught in Indonesian.  If we have a question, it is asked/answered in a mixture of Indonesian, drawing on the white board, and charades. 

12 PM- Class is out.  Mike and I walk home, which is perfect because it gives us time to decompress from the day.  We arrive home to an amazing meal that Ibu Yani and Ibu Janarti have made for us, from scratch.  The meal of coarse always involves rice in some form.

2 PM- The pembantus go home for the day and Mike and I try to get out of the house so we can practice our Indonesian.  Our neighborhood isn't good for practice so we usually take a walk, with the kids, and try to strike up a conversation with people, or we hop onto the angkota and walk around downtown.  It is super intimidating to try and strike up a conversation with a complete stranger and this is the most stretching part of our day in many ways.  We are trying to find ways to be immersed in Bahasa Indonesian more, which is difficult because all the locals speak Javanese to each other so we can't just listen to their conversations to "get an ear" for Bahasa Indonesian.

5 PM-  We rotate between eating out for dinner and eating leftovers at home.  By this point of the day we are exhausted and cooking is too much to think about at this point of our overseas journey.  Of coarse heating up leftovers is a lot of work here too because we don't have a microwave.  Funny thing is if you asked me a month ago if I could live with out a microwave I would have screamed, "NO!"  Now I don't even really miss having one, leftovers taste about 10 times better reheated on the stove anyway.  There are not a lot of convenience food items that require a microwave here either, so you don't really need one.  They are available here, but many people joke if they plugged a microwave into the wall of their house and tried to use it, it will overload the breaker and their power would go out!

6:30 PM- I help the kids take showers, we only have showers in this house no baths.  Yes, we do have hot water!!!  The water is heated by an LPG tank outside, the system has broken on us three times so far in one month, but who's counting?  I am thankful for a husband who can splice wires.  

8 PM- We try to have the kids in bed by this time.  After this Mike and I start on our homework.  We try to study our vocab words, translate the next day's lesson, and then we write our Pengalaman and try to read it a few times before we have to recite it in class.

3 AM- During Ramadan, which just ended 2 days ago, we would be awoken to a drum parade and cries of, "Barung!" that would last about 30 minutes.  This went on for an entire month.  I'm glad I can delete this from our current routine.  

For now, that is a day in the life.  August 12 it will change a bit because the kids will be starting school. 

Random Pictures of Town

Today our internet is being cooperative with me so I am going to post a few photos from around town here in Salatiga.  The internet repairman has already been out here twice to fix it, the speed seems to come and go.  We can never get enough speed to watch Netflix :( which is probably good, because we have a new language to study and learn this year. :)  For those of you who would like to keep in touch, we have found Face Time works much better for us than Skype.  Call us!  We would love to chat, or as they say here bercakap-cakap.

Here are a few pictures of our new town (life).

We don't own a vehicle yet, so we get around town mainly by walking.  Language school for Mike and I is about a one mile walk from our house, it is a nice way to decompress after school by walking home (more on that in a later post).  If our family wants to get downtown we hitch a ride on the Angkotak (a little blue buss) which costs 2,500 rp. (about 25 cents).

If we need to travel to a larger city to do some shopping or enjoy some American-ish food, we can hire a driver to take us there in a car.  It is still a bit different to travel without car seats, but half the time there isn't even a seat belt in the car to hook it to anyway!  We won't be able to travel to the larger cities that often, because we are so busy with school; trips like this will probably happen once a month.

The best way to get around town in Salatiga is by scooter.  I was shocked by how narrow the roads are here, they are about the size of a bike path in the U.S.  We are planning on purchasing a scooter in the future, but we are going to observe how the traffic flows here for awhile before we hit the road.  When we need to get somewhere in town quickly, or after dark when the Angkotak stops running, we hitch a ride on the back of a fellow teammate's scooter.  Macie LOVES riding on the scooter and is the biggest advocate in our family for buying one right away.  We purchased some really nice helmets in town here for only $90 dollars (total).  Of course in Indonesia you can ride a bike barefoot with no helmet if you want to (I have seen this on many occasions).

Here is the road in front of our house, it looks quiet in this picture but it is quite possible to get hit by a scooter if you aren't paying attention while walking on it.  We have a good view of the volcano from our house, but it is quite rare for the clouds and haze to clear away for it to make an appearance. 

Indonesians take their badminton seriously, there is a store downtown that sells some pretty nice rackets.  If you want any "street cred" when you show up for a game, you need a descent racket.  Mike and Colton went into town and picked up a racket and net, so we can practice and play in our yard.  We don't have enough yard for a full-sized court because our banana tree gets in the way, but it works. 

There are some pretty incredible restaurants in town, that is of course if you are brave with your stomach.  We have had good luck so far (just don't eat the uncooked veggies).  The phrase, "Lord please let this food be a blessing to my body" takes on a whole new meaning while eating out here!  This picture was taken at a restaurant we went to after church this past Sunday.  It is beautiful if you don't look too closely at all of the trash floating in the water alongside the rice patties.

I know this post was random, but with the culture shock and diving into learning a new language my head is feeling a bit random at the moment.  We are loving our new home and are settling in well, the people in Salatiga are super friendly and they make us feel welcome.