ON THE TEACHING LIFE, MINE

Here are a few tales from my life as a teacher in Indonesia.

To set the scene: I live in what is nationally notorious as the most rude and obnoxious city in Indonesia. In this city, I work and live at an Islamic boarding school, called a pesantren. It is run like a boot camp. If the student's hair get too long (longer than a finger), the teacher cuts their hair in front of the whole class. If the student comes to school late, he or she has to crouch down in the "number 2" position for about 2 hours. If you do not go to the mosque at 4.30 in the morning, you have to sit in that position all day. Every night the students go to the mosque for 2 hours, listen to angry speeches and recite prayers from the Al'Quran. On Saturday mornings, a pair of teachers give a lecture from 4:30 until 8:30am, with no breaks (I kept time this morning).

The teachers at my school are currently on strike - it's really an exciting time. They stand up on desks and make speeches to other teachers. They are angry because the administration recently created a policy that stated this: "If teachers do not go to class, they will not get paid for teaching that class." The faculty are furious. I thought it was funny, until they started citing me as a reason that it is not fair. They say, "Mr. Keen is able to miss a day of class, but he still gets paid!" And I say, "No, I don't. I am not an employee of this school. I don't get paid by this school EVER." And they say, "Exactly!!!" So I am currently avoiding the teacher's office.

I usually do so anyways because everyday the teachers cook a big lunch in the office, and the lunch always involves deep fried sardines, bones and all, or some other kind of fish they got out of the local river. The local river is a poop-brown color, because there is an industrial fertilizer production factory right on the river that pumps excess poop into it. Somedays, the whole city smells like poop. Somedays, the fish they cook smells like poop. They always insist that I eat the meal they cook. So I try avoid the teacher's office, strike or no strike.

Another reason I avoid the teacher's office is because I keep accidentally stepping on all the cats that live in it. All cats in Indonesia, except the tigers, are tiny, malnourished mangy demons. They crave attention, so when I get out of my chair, the run after me and under my feet. I have permanently injured more cats than I like to admit. Some of the cats clearly have rabies, and sometimes they get in fights. It sounds like the gates of hell are screeching open against a chalkboard floor, but the teacher's don't mind. They don't seem to even notice it.

Another reason I avoid the teacher's office is that the teachers have been gossiping lately about a certain pattern they have noticed: wherever I seem to travel, there is flooding in that part of Indonesia immediately after, and therefore I caused the flooding. This isn't just a non sequitur, the pattern they seemed to have noticed just doesn't exist. Furthermore, it is currently the start of the rainy season in Indonesia, and it is flooding everywhere. This week, I walked into the office and the teachers fell silent, and a few glared at me. One came up to me and asked me to apologize, and when I asked why she said that her hometown, Padang, is experiencing bad flooding. When I asked why this is my fault, she said, "You travelled to Padang last weekend, didn't you?"

I still have one teacher who wants to be my friend, but she is insane. Like most Indonesians d0, they take befriending an American as an opportunity to loosen up and disobey the usual cultural rules they must adhere to so strictly. This insane teacher friend, a 30-year old unmarried woman (pretty rare in Indonesia) likes to talk to me about menstruation and flatulence - ALL the time. She updates me via text-messages about her menstrual patterns and farts out loud in my house when she invites herself over. She makes me promise not to tell anyone. I just can't resist.

In the afternoon, after classes are out and after I sneak into the teacher's office to grab a cup of Sumateran coffee, I walk the 50 meter path to my house, past the volleyball court, past the girl's dorm, past the entrance to a junior high school, past the mosque, and past some other teacher's houses. The students yell things at me the whole way down, and the teachers' children, playing in the front yards of the houses, yell things at me, like "You Crazy, mister!" or "You eat grass!", and I wave and smile and count the seconds until I get into my house.
Once in my house, I sit and listen to the junior high students standing at the stoop of my front patio, giggling and screaming as they dare eachother to run up to my door, knock, and run away. They treat me like the old witch of a small Southern town that the brave kids mess with in efforts to impress a girl. Sometimes I open the door and invite them in, and they run away screaming. Sometimes I wait until a kid runs up to my door, and right before he knocks-and-runs, I open the door and yell "BOO!" and they ALL freak out and don't come back for a couple days.