Saturday, November 21, 2015

Yesterday, Sri invited me to visit her English school. It was all terribly confusing and somewhat unsatisfactory. The confusion extended even to the name of her school. In Indonesia, they call these schools “courses.” Sri attends the Alex Essential English Course. Every time I called it a school, someone corrected me and called it a course (pronounced “curse”). In my mind, you take a course at a school (or an institute or an academy). But here, you sign up for an English class at a course.

I’ve had a lot of experience with these sorts of events, and they always follow the same basic pattern. And this pattern never ceases to amuse me and bother me. Sri invited me to her school, and I discovered through some other people that all of these classes begin at 7 p.m. So I made plans to ride my bike to Sri’s school to arrive shortly before that time. That made sense to me. I probably should have taken a becak, since it was dark, but I prefer to have my own transportation whenever possible. Her school was about 2 kilometers away. I could have walked there, but on these streets in the dark, that is an undertaking.

The ride wasn’t as bad as it could have been, but it wasn’t easy either. Part of the problem was that my bike’s headlamp had broken. I’ve lost count of the number of headlamps and rear lights I’ve had to replace. They just break and break and break. The lamp itself still worked, but the mounting mechanism was missing a piece. It would not stay in place, so I had to hold it in my hand as I rode. I didn’t always need it to see the road ahead of me, but it was necessary so that other people could see me.

Sri had explained to me in great detail during her visit to my hotel that Alex Essential English Course had three locations. The main location showed up on Google Maps, and she pointed out where the second and third locations were. We spent some time over this and figured out exactly where she would be. I just had to go there and ask for Sri. So when I got to the correct street (using the GPS function on my smartphone), I easily saw the main office for Alex Essential English Course. There were a hundred or so students milling around outside and there was a big sign on the small building. I could have stopped there, but I rode past it intending to find the other buildings where Sri would be. Not surprisingly, I never did find those other two buildings. I had ridden half a kilometer when I heard Sri calling out to me from behind. She was racing toward me on an electric scooter. She was in a panic. She had seen me ride my bike past Alex Essential, and she had gotten her scooter to come get me. She then escorted me back to the main Alex Essential building. That, apparently, was where her class was. What happened to the other two locations and all that time we spent talking about them? I have no idea. I guess we were talking about something else altogether, but I have no idea what it could have been.

My entering into the area around the small Alex Essential building was roughly the equivalent of a bomb going off in a chicken coop – total chaos. Everyone wanted to talk to me. Sri wanted to introduce me to all her friends. The teachers all wanted to talk to me. And everyone wanted to take pictures with me. And the noise level was out of control. There was so much shouting and yelling that I couldn’t hear what anyone was saying and I had to shout loudly in turn to be heard.

Over the course of my time at the school, I had a lot of separate conversations, and they all amounted to them trying to figure me out, which they couldn’t do. They were understandably curious about who I was, why I was in Tanjungbalai, and how I came to know Sri. There were no easy answers to any of these questions, as nothing about me made any sense to them. That I was alone was the most difficult concept to understand. It made no sense at all. No one goes anywhere alone for fun. So I had to have some kind of business or mission. And when I insisted that I was on a kind of extended vacation, they just shook their heads and furrowed their brows. They tried to process this information, but I could tell that it never sunk in. They also wanted to know why I came to Tanjungbalai. After all, there is nothing in Tanjungbalai to attract a tourist. They kept extolling the wonders of Lake Toba. THAT is where tourists go. Why don’t I go there? I tried to explain that I didn’t come to Tanjungbalai deliberately. I needed to travel from Malaysia to Indonesia, and this is where the boat docked. I didn’t choose Tanjungbalai. I had never even heard of Tanjungbalai. It was where the ferry docked. Considering they grew up in this city, they would understand that, but this, too, never sunk in. And when it came to my chosen mode of travel – the bicycle – it was hopeless. It was not something that made any sense at all in their world.

My visit to the school didn’t work out at all as I planned. It probably wasn’t satisfactory to Sri, either. This was because we had different ideas of what my visit would entail. I had certain ideas, and Sri had absolutely none. She really had none. It’s a puzzle. If I were to invite anyone anywhere, I would have a certain idea of the purpose of the invitation. “Let’s meet at Tim Horton’s for coffee and conversation.” “Let’s meet downtown to see a movie.” “Come to my house to meet my family.” Something. Anything. There would be a suggested time and a length for the visit and there would be some idea of the activities. But Sri had invited me without any plan at all.

I assumed – reasonably, I thought – that I was to be a kind of guest speaker for her English class. I’d done this before in many places. I figured I’d go with Sri to her English class. A stool would be produced for me. I’d sit at the front of the class and the students would ask me questions, and we’d chat. Then we’d pose for pictures, and I’d leave, and they could continue with their regular lesson. But when I tried to confirm this, Sri and her teacher reacted with horror, like I’d suggested something terrible. Apparently, the worst thing imagineable was me actually attending Sri’s class. I could understand Sri’s teacher’s point of view if she was concerned about having an English expert present in her class and judging her performance as a teacher. When I taught English, I was never happy with having observers in the classroom. But I didn’t want to just sit there and watch. I would at least answer questions. I could easily have taught an entire class on any subject they wished and given the teacher a break. And when my role was complete, I’d leave. I wouldn’t stay and be a nuisance. But for some reason, the mere suggestion that I be physically present in the class for any time at all was greeted with emphatic shakes of the head.

So why was I there? Sri and her teacher had to leave me, and through some quick questions I got the impression that Sri wanted me to simply wait at the school for her class to be over. This would be in an hour and a half. Then, I assumed, she and I and her friends could go somewhere and sit down and drink some fruit juice or something and chat. I wasn’t entirely happy about just sitting there for over an hour, but I didn’t have anything pressing to do, and it would be entertaining to absorb the atmosphere. But when Sri’s class was over, she said she had to go home. I made it as clear as I possibly could that I was more than willing to spend time with her and her friends. There was a perfectly acceptable fruit juice stand across the street. I offered to buy all her friends some fruit juice and we could sit and talk. I was worried that I wasn’t giving good value as the foreign visitor. All I’d done was sit around and pose for a few pictures. And even then, according to the feedback I’d been given, I didn’t smile broadly enough for the pictures. I was told to smile better. But Sri wasn’t interested. She just kept repeating that she had to go home. I didn’t press the matter because, after all, I was in unfamiliar cultural territory. I did not want to offend or cause problems. I was letting Sri and her teachers take the lead in what I did and how I behaved. Yet their lead consisted of me just sitting on a plastic stool by myself, doing nothing, posing for a picture, and then leaving. Something was wrong, but I couldn’t figure out what it was.

It wasn’t a big problem or anything, but it relates to all of my experiences overseas, which in turn relates to what I was talking about earlier – how difficult it is to communicate across cultural and language boundaries. If Sri and I were diplomats representing two potentially hostile countries, we would both likely be going home somewhat upset with the other. We both came to this meeting with good intentions, but I left feeling confused and somewhat hurt. Wars probably have been started over less. It’s so hard to figure out what is going on most of the time.

The most satisfactory part of the visit was at the beginning when I had the chance to sit down and chat with the senior teacher and supervisor at this school. This occurred when I first showed up and Sri was introducing me to her teachers. The supervisor was sitting behind a small desk at the very front of the open entrance, and she invited me to sit down and chat. Our chat consisted mainly of her trying to figure me out – why I was alone and why I was in Tanjungbalai – but I managed to get that behind us and we talked about other things eventually. Not surprisingly, it was the economics of teaching English that interested her. We were basically in the same field. Yet, I had made enough money to travel. She said that the salary of English teachers in Indonesia was so low that they could barely cover their basic living costs. Saving money and traveling would be impossible. She was also very interested in how I had managed to get a job teaching English in places like Korea and Taiwan in the first place. My story of simply flying to those countries and then looking for a job upon arrival seemed fantastical to her.

I could understand her perspective just from looking around the school. From a Canadian or Taiwanese or Korean perspective, it didn’t look anything like a school at all. It was simply a concrete shell with an entire open front – just like every shop in Tanjungbalai. The equivalent in Canada would be a car garage made out of cement with the front doors permanently open. That is what almost all buildings look like here. You don’t open a person-sized door and walk inside a building. The entire front of the building is just a big open space. At the end of the day, they roll across big steel doors – just like closing a garage door – and that secures the place.

The main area inside did not consist of separate rooms but of just one big space. It was divided into three areas by low dividers. There was a tiny space at the very front where the supervisor’s desk sat. Then the dividers created two spaces for two classrooms. The students sat on the floor along low benches which served as their desks. The teacher stood against the wall and pinned up pieces of paper on which she had written English vocabulary by hand. There was barely room for anyone to move, and the noise level was unbearable. Since the front of the building was open, you got all the roar of traffic pouring inside. To compete with that, the students and teachers had to speak louder and louder and louder to be heard. And there seemed to be no structure to the class at all. Everyone just seemed to be shouting all the time. I couldn’t make out any individual voices at all, so I had no idea when the teacher was speaking or when a student was speaking. No one seemed to be speaking to anyone in particular. There was just a roar of traffic mixed with a roar of voices. I couldn’t even make out any English words. From the back of the building and perhaps above, I heard other classes in progress. Sri’s class was back there. Once or twice, I heard a class break out into a loud English song. I wanted to poke my head above the divider and take a picture of one of the classes, but I didn’t want to disturb the class. My mere presence caused enough disruption. The sight of me would have every student turn and focus on me, and I didn’t want to cause trouble.

It was funny that the end of class time made no difference to the noise level. I’m accustomed to there being quiet during classes. Then when classes end, there is an explosion of noise and laughter as the students leave. But at this school, the noise continued non-stop. You couldn’t tell when the classes started and when they ended. I also had no clue how they studied. I didn’t see any textbooks. I had been hoping for a tour of the school and a glimpse into their methods, but this didn’t happen either. When the classes ended, I found myself surrounded by large groups of students who all wanted to take pictures with me. It was a bit of a perfect storm of madness and camera phones. I had no idea who I was posing with at any one time and which camera phone I was supposed to be grinning at. (I grin. I don’t smile.) I’d also lost all track of who was who. All the women and girls were wearing hijabs and I couldn’t remember the faces of the teachers I’d met. I only recognized Sri when she popped right up in front of me, and she gave me her dazzling smile from down below. It was her confidence and her voice that I recognized more than anything else. I’d met one male teacher, and he seemed like a reasonable sort of person, and I’d have liked to have spent more time with him, but he had duties to attend to. He was also a type of supervisor, and he had to roam from class to class and make sure that everything was okay. The various teachers and the supervisors also had to stand in the entrance area at the end of class. The students took their hands and raised them to their foreheads in a sign of respect as they left.

I could easily see myself returning to this school or perhaps to another school. I’d like to get a better idea of how they work, and, besides, they are good places to meet local people who speak English well. It’s often a struggle getting local people to stop being tour guides and just be regular people, but there’s a chance that could happen, and it would be nice to have local contacts who speak English fluently.

Oddly enough, I ended up encountering another English teacher as I was riding my bike back to the hotel. This man pulled up beside me on a motorcycle and started firing questions at me like shells from a tank. He eventually suggested (commanded) that I pull over so we could talk properly. He angled his motorcycle ahead of me and pretty much cut me off and forced me to a stop. Then began the usual interrogation about who I was and why I was in Tanjungbalai. There was an intensity about this man that I recognized from many, many English teachers around the world. I don’t know what it is about the profession, but it attracts people with a touch of the crazy in them. Perhaps it comes from a certain pride in speaking English well. They feel that since they can speak English, it is their duty to talk about important things. They don’t want to waste the talent. This man wanted to invite me to his house so we could have a discussion about the difference between Western and Eastern culture and how we view the meaning of life and that sort of thing. He was also not taking no for an answer, and he pressed hard for exact details of when we could meet and he wanted my cell phone number and address. There was no getting away from him. He had his own English school in a nearby town, and he had ideas about my coming to his school for two or three days to take part in some kind of event. I couldn’t make much sense out of what he was saying, but it was clearly something I had no interest in doing. He was a bit intense for my taste.

After a long talk with this intense man, I made my escape and returned to my second favorite restaurant to have martabak mesir for dinner. I was very hungry by this point and a bit frazzled. I needed to calm down with some good food. I returned to my hotel room after dinner to find that my computer had completed an update for Windows 10 in my absence. Unfortunately, the WiFi broke in the process and it didn’t work anymore. I spent an hour or two trying to fix it to no avail. It is still broken this morning. I’ve done a lot of research, but no solution has been forthcoming. The only option seems to be to roll back my computer to a point before the update. I’m going to try that right now and see if it works.

 

 

Tags: Sumatra Part 01