For your edification, however, I will give you a synopsis of things that have ended since I’ve last had time to sit and write a significant post:

• My visit to Indonesia ended with a tolerable homestay with a family in Pekan Baru.  There is close to nothing of travelling interest there.  The guy, who waits in the bus station in the mornings for travelers before work begins, lives at a “university” which is oddly familiar to a boarding high school based on the ages of the kids.  I gathered that formal state education ends around middle school, and so the university had general education courses as well as a nursing and midwife program, all for kids 13-18.  School was not in session, which was sad, and he promised if I stayed an extra two days the dorms would be full and I would have hordes of young muslim women with whom to talk (the school, less balanced than Malaysia, had 400 women and about 38 men).  This place reminded me in part of a little school in Malaysia I had taught at for 7 months in 2008.  Gee, I probably need a little more critical distance before I can make references like that.
• My time involved in the Fulbright ETA program fully ended.  Depending on your own whims, the point of enditure may have been when I finished teaching, when the school followed me to the airport to wish me good bye (viewable films taken, but unwittingly left on the computer), following my exit interview at MACEE, following the return of my phone and pickup of my luggage from MACEE, or at the point of departure from the nation of Malaysia, on Monday.
• I finished Walden Two, a very interesting utopia by B. F. Skinner, the bio-psychologist.  It deserves a post on its own and it may well get one.
• My stay in Malaysia, insofar as it was home and a base for my travels, ended, and now I am once again wandering nomadically through eternity.  No phone, no computer, no mailing address.
• My interaction with my computer ended.  It was working fine at the time, but I ran the battery down, put it in a box, and shipped it to my parents.  I did not want to lug it through all of India.  That would probably be une idee mauvais.
• My proximity and visits to Singapore ended, as I flew out of there into Bangalore on a flight that cost roughly $150.  It should have cost $100, but the sale ended before I had my act together.
• I finished Animal Dreams, a book by Barbara Kingsolver.  It’s an excellent book and I recommend you read it.  Nancy Pope might be proud of me finishing two books in a week’s time, but then again, she might say I should have read 5 more in the same span.  It also ends a rather long phase in my life of not becoming emotional as a result of media.  I think of it as a grand triumph, years in the making.  Some out there know of my quest to overcome my emotional guardedness, which was a struggle since around Freshman year in college (at a realization that I likely hadn’t cried in about 8-10 years).  Although I had done very well at being more emotional, cognizant of those emotions, and somewhat more expressive, the common welling up at sad movies and books didn’t really come to me until recently.  I few movies had a minor effect, but it wasn’t until Animal Dreams that I really had to stop to wipe my eyes.  I see this as progress
• There’s probably lots of other things that have ended that I haven’t listed and may or may not be very important.  Thus is the fate of classification.

And of course, consistent with my own appreciation of Shiva, the destruction and end of something is intimately connected to its recreation (think of reincarnation as a motif, not an afterlife), and so all of these endings are remanifest in some new beginning that I may or may not be aware of.  The most obvious is India; curiously, Bangalore is the first city outside the USA that I have re visited (it’s been 5 years), and it will be interesting to get a feel for it again.  Or I might just hop a train to Hyderabad on my trek to Uttarachal and the mountains.  Nous verrons.

Kevin

(pardonez moi pour francais qui est torte, s.v.p.)

My enjoyment of Medan was much less about Medan itself and more about my experiences.  For one, I am entirely sans guidebook, being too occupied with everything else I didn’t have time for in Penang prior to leaving.  My general idea was that this would be manageable once I got somewhere reasonable, and that seemed less and less likely as my flight moved from 6pm to 10pm at night.

In the waiting area and on the plane, some older Malay was moving around to the locals-in-appearance and trying to sell them vitamins from a shop he just branched out to in Medan.  He spoke English to a girl in her 20s and as he was giving his harangue, we made eye contact and I couldn’t help but laugh.  This opened the door to conversation once he moved on to his next victim, and I investigated as much as I could about how the “middle class” of Indonesia fares.  By that I don’t think I actually mean the “Middle class of Indonesia” but the Indonesians who share a western “middle class” lifestyle.  She, ever since her collegiate education, has been working with a successful money changer that has (in a little irony) just branched to Penang (Malaysia) and she was managing the shop there because she could speak Malay.  Although she has neither been to Padang (Southwest Sumatra) or Aceh (North Sumatra), she frequently goes to Jakarta and has been to other places of high interest on Java.  She has been to Thailand, and nonchalantly threw in that she would probably not go to China even though she had the visa already.  Sure, the Chinese have no difficulty giving an indifferent Indonesian a visa, but not me.  Bastards.  To her credit, there was a business aspect to the trip that created the indifference and she might just go to Hong Kong, which doesn’t require a special visa.  She also recounted to me that (wealthy?) people in Medan often will take trips to Thailand to go shopping, very much like people in Malaysia often will make trips to Java to go shopping.  She also said that it didn’t much interest her and cost about the same if you translated the costs; I wonder if Thai people go to Malaysia to shop?

Once in the airport, we parted ways and I sought out the western looking travelers that possibly had an idea where the cheap accommodation in the city was.  The first couple, from Cali + New York, were doing relief work in Aceh (which itself has a really interesting story of separatists that reunited following the Boxing Day Tsunami of 2004).  They were great to talk to, but not terribly informative; I then moved on to a pair of Finnish girls that were doing the backpacker route and split the taxi with them to the area of cheap lodging and leached off their Lonely Planet based knowledge.  They are with me today, by virtue of the LP recommending for them to not stay in Medan (and, since I’m on the schedule I am, knowing I can’t possibly stay there).  I also met a Finnish guy today, which has allowed, Finland, with 5.5 million people, to edge out the USA’s 300 million people in “folks I’ve met traveling” once again.  This is more of an idiosyncrasy, and on the long-scale, there are no mostly-developed countries that don’t edge out the USA in travelers met.  I just like to point out Finland because Tommy L used to talk about how much Russia would beat up on the FInns.  Other than their representative value, I haven’t found much terribly interesting to say about the Finnish girls.  The arrogant Canadian working in Taiwan and the anti-Arrogant-Canadian Pollack that I had a couple drinks with last night were much more interesting (though I’m not going to tell you much about them).

I also fell in a gutter.  It was missing the grate and I was walking around Medan trying to see what I could see, and wasn’t paying attention and in I went, ankle high in what I hope was storm drain runoff since it didn’t reek like sewage.  I overheard that one of the ETAs in Malaysia recently fell into a gutter, and I’m rather satisfied that my reaction to that was “these gutters do seem to be rather precarious in placement and safety.  I wonder how often that happens” instead of “Silly ETA.  How could you not see that.”  I’ve almost not seen badly maintained gutters in the past.  If Malaysia and Indonesia do not reach developed status by 2020, it’s probably because of septic infection of their elite from mis-maintained gutters.

Of other current events that don’t relate to Indonesia, I did have the opportunity to spend an afternoon in KL with special agent R.U.T.H., an anonymous political blogger in Malaysia.  I don’t think I’ve overtly mentioned her before because of that “anonymous” thing, but it is doubtful the Malaysian government is reading my blog very carefully and Homeland Security is still a supporter of limited free speech across the globe (hi!).  But yes, since Malaysia limits both political free speech and the press, there has been quite a movement towards publicizing real issues through blogging and text message news subscriptions that report to your handphones (cell phones).  The special agent has also been responsible for my expanded understanding of corruption, graft, and scandal in Malaysia over the past few months, some of which has probably leaked into my blog.  Perhaps Malaysia could hold me captive if they wanted to and my ability to pass through customs is due to their intense desire to get me out of their country.  I’M COMING BACK, YOU KNOW!  I’M NOT GONE JUST YET!

The generally non-political outing took me around to some points of Indian and Chinese heritage to get me a bit of a broader view on a holistic Malaysia.  Of note, she said that while the (Malay) government has been maintaining and preserving the historically significant European buildings (in Melaka and Penang, for instance), they have been quick to tear down buildings of Chinese (and presumably Indian) origin for new construction projects.  We ended it with me threatening to jump off a ferris wheel into a deep looking pool.  It didn’t happen, but that would have been a lot of fun.  I was recounting the times I’ve jumped off bridges and light houses and the like.

Ok.  My hour’s about up.  Take care (I’m saving the grammar check for the future)!

Failures

For this post, I’ll catch you up on some things in the last few weeks that kept going wrong. I started to write a bit about this in the previous post, but it was just getting too long and too melodramatic. I believe I said something like “My life has become a string of catastrophic failures.”

It’s not nearly that bad, of course, but it does feel like there have been a remarkable number of “bad” things happen since Earth Camp. The Camps, if I end up having anything interesting to comment on, will still have to be saved for another post.

Anyway, let me see what I can conjure up. There were a few big bad wolves of the past:

1. Vague sicknesses: possibly brought on by the increasing rains in Terengganu, I’ve been on-and-off sick for the past couple weeks, and it culminated on the my last week at the school.  That made it difficult to get out and get all of the supplies I needed for my closing camp program. It went back and forth between stuffy-head, stuffy-nose, cough (which I still have now), to something much more like a persistent acute headache and fogginess of thought. That was the bad stuff. I drank a quart of fruit juice a day and that might have helped a little bit.

2. On my last supply run of, well, forever, and about 1 hour before my final closing ceremony with all my campers (who are roughly the most important 50 students in my life), and with about 5 km left to go until I reached the school, I hit a downpour: a huge, massive, downpour that came without the warning of lightning (usually I can see the lightning for about 10 minutes before I hit the storm). So I stopped at a little covered place and put a bag around my computer, as usual, and continued.

I got to school, stopped at the room, and brought everything in as quickly as I could. I took my computer out and realized that the backpack had actually collected a pool of water at the bottom which the computer had been sitting in (I drape the plastic bag over the top of the computer, so the bottom is open).

The computer didn’t work, and I couldn’t play the slideshow, or set up a place for the students to exchange pictures from Earth and Space camp, or project the words to the closing song we were going to sing. The rain also destroyed the posterboard for the final activity, but we got around that problem and made a substitute.  With only, at this point, 30 minutes before the meeting time, I couldn’t put together a good substitute, and so the kids and I just wandered around and played some music from one kid’s handphone and made the poster and sang a few songs.  It was a little stretched for the time I had reserved, but still fun (and the biggest problem was not being able to exchanged photos, since they all brought their thumb drives).

Since then, happily, my computer has been slowly limping back to life. After a day, I could tell the hard drive was doing something, and I connected it to a monitor and it would start to boot up and shut off.  After a couple more days, it would boot up completely and I could access all my files (and saved the important ones), and weird sounds came out of the speakers. The night I arrived in KL, the screen came on, but was faded and hard to read, and the computer booted all the way up. Now, it has a bunch of water marks on it, but seems to be alive and I’ve read the water marks on the screen will recede.

The computer not working, however, led to the next problem, though, since I had been typing out all of the goodbye letters to my students.  Now that they were lost to the water god, I frantically tried to write some of them out in the middle of packing on my last night. This was a reasonably poor remedy, and I didn’t get that many done, and got even less sleep, and felt particularly bad that I had letters for some important students but not for others.

2.b It also seemed that my camera got wet and wasn’t working, but it’s quite the trooper and has recovered both from the water balloon attack during capture the flag and from the rainstorm.

3. Visa to Pakistan and ETA closure. You’ll notice on my travel itinerary that I’m no longer planning to go to Pakistan. I spent many hours when I was in KL trying to find the Pakistani Embassy and talk to someone about getting a visa. I finally had it down, and the plan was to go at 4:30pm for the afternoon session and get back to the hotel at 6:00 to see the ETA’s off. Plenty of time, in theory. However, they didn’t actually open for the afternoon until 5:30, and waited to handle all Malaysian Passport holders because they could tell me that they cannot give me a visa because I am not a legal resident of Malaysia (being on, technically, a tourist visa). So then I rushed off to get back to the hotel, thinking that they wouldn’t actually leave on time, they did, though, and I missed saying goodbye to the ETAs that were flying out that day.

So those were the biggest events that went wrong right at the end that I felt a need to complain about. Nothing actually catastrophic, you see, but rather annoying.

It took me nearly 6 hours, until 20:00, to achieve the bare minimum to make me feel that I will be able to survive the next 2 months, 18 days, and 12 hours (roughly).

Itinerary

Let me begin immediately with the practicalities of the next 2.5968 months.  If you take my paid-for plane flights as a rough itinerary, I will making the following journeys:

• On 12-August, I will fly from Penang, Malaysia, to Medan, Sumatra, Indonesia: a stable, north-central city on the coffee-rich island.
• On 16-August, I will fly from Peka Bharu, Sumatra, Indonesia (yes, it reminds me of Pekaboo, too) to KL, Malaysia.
• On 18-August, I will fly from Singapore, Singapore, to Bangalore, India, which is central-south and on the Deccan Plateau.
• On 20-August, I have the option to fly to Mumbai, India, which is West by Northwest.  The “option” is a result of various failures to be explained later.
• On 17-September, my friend, Becky, flies into Delhi, and I have promised to save the Golden Triangle to travel with her.
• On 7-October, Becky flies out of Delhi.  I have not promised that I will see her off.
• On 27-October, I fly out of Delhi, stop over in Newark, NJ, and then continue down to Greenville, SC, where my parents will hopefully pick me up.

That is all of the booked plane flights at the moment.  Sometime in November, I expect to take my long awaited motorcycle trip to Austin, TX.  Sometime in November after the Austin visit, I expect to be back in St Louis.

What you, the reader, might expect now

From my current view, I will probably take the next few days to recover from the crashing down of reality (saving that for a future post), and I expect to replace or repair things lost, dropped, and broken.  You will probably get several blog posts in the next four days, after which I’ll be returning to my traveler’s routine that, I believe, had me writing an average of twice a week.  My travel plans, aside from the time with Becky, which will be more or less on the Indian tourist track, should keep me most frequently off the beaten finster.  I think that style of travel has traditionally led to some of my most introspective posts.

I may try to contact a school in South India that I have been donating to regularly to see if they are interested in a visiting teacher for a few weeks; however,  I have to admit that it would be hard for that school to be further from the two areas I am most interested in visiting: the Northwest (Kashmir and Leh) and the Northeast (Darjeeling and the more frontiersy states).  We’ll see what happens.

Although I have some qualms with the mode of transport and would not recommend an unmodified bottom-shelf 100cc bike for any significant trip, it was a lot of fun and it afforded me some resolution and reflection time, as well as the necessary decompression from camp.  I’ll take this opportunity to apologize for not posting since July 20, but prep for camp and its execution really did drive me crazy and I have been neglecting all sorts of important responsibilities.

I will upload some photos of camp later, and it’s possible I’ll be able to transfer my GPS recorded route to something interesting later, but that may take more work.  I’m leaving my position here on Thursday along with eight of the eleven other ETAs, and we’ll see what comes of my adventures afterwards.

That’s it for the moment.  Cheers.

I find that the Perhentians (this is now the fourth time I visited, I believe) are less interesting to me and are probably only good for about one full day.  Two days was much too much, even with most of Saturday spent snorkelling with Jackie and Ellie (Deepani had gone before I arrived).  To my general satisfaction, I also now find that I can manage the informational aspects of Malay pretty well and was surprised at how much I could understand when trying to get information in and around Kota Bharu.  I had several conversations in which people were delighted by the level with which I could speak Malay.  It’s still not good enough to have interesting conversation-conversations, but I can be a pretty good tourist

Most of this week will be spent working out the details for Earth Camp (no, the name is not a coincidence), and the end of the week will be another vacation as I go to the West Coast (probably Penang or Perak).

K

I responded “You don’t need a man,” partly in reference to a song I  knew in the nineties.  I’m not really up on my Hip Hop and r&b flavor; I thought it was Salt n Pepper doubling with En Vogue, but that was “Whatta man.”  Dealing with her own 99 problems, she didn’t know what I was talking about, so I googled, and the first hit was a youtube video for a song, “I don’t need a man” by the Pussycat Dolls.  For those who, as myself, am still entrenched in the last decade, the Pussycat Dolls are the latest and greatest in cultured, classy, modern R&B.  I sent the youtube link to Andrea, which provided this (somewhat edited) train of thought:

andrea: I know it’s hot with all those lights on,
andrea: but really put some clothes on
andrea: and keep them on for the whole video.

andrea: if you’re going to say you don’t need a man…..
andrea: The pussycat dolls are wearing like nothing.
andrea: Why don’t men wear nothing like that and dance in videos??
andrea: it’s not fair
andrea: I want chair dances!
me: Sometimes men don’t wear their shirts…
andrea: yeah, it’s not enough.  i want my softcore porn videos like this.

andrea: why do they keep sticking their legs up in the air?
andrea: like a split but balanced on one leg
me: it shows how much they don’t need a man.
me: I think its a ballet move gone sour.
andrea: ooooooh.
andrea: this is another reason i don’t have children.
andrea: just b/c you can do it doesn’t mean you should in a video.

andrea: omg i’m finishing the PC dolls video. they’re putting on clothes
andrea: really looks like they need a man to sell their videos to
andrea: or they wouldn’t be dressed like that

Afterwards, Andrea did some background work and discovered this:

“On August 8, 2006, after a Dolls concert in Kuala Lumpur, their concert promoter, Absolute Entertainment, was charged with flouting Malaysian decency laws. The Malay Mail quoted Culture Arts and Heritage Minister Datuk Mohamad Arif Abdul Rahman as saying: “I believe the way the Pussycat Dolls behaved onstage amounted to gross indecency”. The charge was settled by paying a fine of RM5000.

Now, back at my apartment, I’m in my melancholy-after-community mood: pensive, reflective, and a little sad.  This is, for those who don’t know, quite normal for me, and in some ways a sign that it was a valuable experience. It is a frequent mood after Community Dinners,  road trips to visit family and friends, and most other events in which a “sacred space” is formed in wich I join  a community that manages to actively interact away from the everyday world.  To help you understand, actively interact might be replaced with “understand and bond with people on a deeper level than usual contact allows”; while that’s often the case, that deeper level isn’t necessarily required (and might not actually apply to Space Camp).  Yet, there’s something about the experience that requires one to be more conscious of what they’re doing and how they’re doing it– to be more active in their interactions.   Maybe it makes them do something they’re not use to or to see something from a different persepctive than they’re use to, and then again, sometimes it’s just because the enviroment is that much different and there’s a certain added awareness.  Whatever it is, it is that type of thing that brings my somewhat melanacholic mood afterwards.

It happens frequently whem I’m travelling, and there were times in Indonesia, Vietnam, Cambodia, and even the mere 28 hours I spent in KL last weekend, when I fell right in with the folks in my guest house and with an Indian-Malaysian blogger I met there.   To some degree, that’s also been mainly missing from my interactions with the ETAs and probably one of my biggest let-downs of the program (although the ETAs are fine enough people, most of our escapes from the everyday stressors have not been meaningful on the lame level).  For the kids, I feel it has been more of a lack of opportunity, since my interaction outside of the structured setting is limited.  If only there were more ways to steal kids away

To those who are unaware, they are now married.

Sorry for the lack of an update in a while – I’ve been busy.  I’ve had afterschool activities nearly every day, and even on the weekend.  It’s been relatively fun.

On another note, I have become a complete and total super-dork (you probably already knew this).  Remember a few months ago when I said I was going to beta-test Linux (Fedora 9) and try to help the community?  I did, and when the final distribution came out I gave it a go and have been working to get everything working.  I have now found good replacements for most of the applications I used in Windows, and although I’ve spent hardly an hour in Vista for the past two weeks, I have finally drawn the “victory” line yesterday. About two days ago, I ran a clean Windows XP in a window in Linux (using VirtualBox) and played with it enough to be satisfied that I can run Quicken and MediaMonkey in it without any significant slow down (it runs about as fast as my 2004 laptop ran XP and it has virtually no impact on Fedora).  If you have an HP and are playing with Linux, you might check out my Documentation of the Adventure.  It explains how to get around the biggest problems – getting Broadcom networking, the nvidia drivers, and a DVD player to work.  Which reminds me, I still have to make sure I can write DVDs.

For the rest of you who have no idea what I’m talking about up there, keep reading as the rest of the post should be firmly anchored in the physical world.  In addition to my typical array of programs, I’ve been screening applications for English Camp and have been helping students prepare for a couple essay writing contests.

I’ve also been reflecting on the issues in learning that I have found here in Terengganu.  The following will probably be a concrete summary of the things that have irked me all year long.  It’s not to say that I’m feeling bitter this week– I’m still relaxing in the tranquillity of the last few weeks–but as my time left here dwindles, I’m becoming increasingly reflective (and a little sad) at the obstacles to the kids obtaining a “good” education.  For those who think that statement is insensitive, let me clarify: I don’t feel there’s anything wrong the values they teach or much of the content, but their methods of education focus on the “lower levels of the Bloom educational hierarchy.”  For the non pedagogically-literatue, that means it focuses on simple Knowledge retainment (like knowing the year of the Malay riots was 1969 (I think)), Comprehension (being able to understand that John McCain said he will lower your taxes), and Application (being able to grasp that 1 + 1 = 2, 2 + 2 = 4, and this “+” thing works essentially the same for any two numbers that you’re given).  Although this stuff is all important, it is the higher level of the hierarchy that deals with critical thought (understanding that statistics might be skewed or a narrator may not be reliable), problem solving (*note below), or genuine synthesis (using information you know/research to make a relatively new thesis or idea.  Some people consider creativity in this group, although others consider it separate of the hierarchy).  Regardless, the Hierarchy is a Hierarchy because the higher levels are *superior* to the lower levels; the most notable reason for this is that they require you to use the lower levels just to break the ice of the higher levels (see the *note, again).

* note: too long for the parenthesis.  As Harry Chapin said, “Wouldn’t it be great if, the week after Thanksgiving, the principal said on the loudspeaker, I want you all to know that we collected 2184 cans during our food drive and helped nearly 250 families to have a good meal for Thanksgiving. What we’re going to do this week— we’re going to stop all classes and work together and focus on this question: What are these families going to eat this week?’” The lower Bloom levels would lead us to know that “If we give hungry people food, they can eat.” The upper levels ask “How can this be done (regularly, in our society, given a limited supply of food, etc, etc, etc)?”

It often seems that the teachers here are on the level of early high schoolers in the US and that they never really grasp complex thought on the higher order of the hierarchy.  I believe I mentioned the teacher debate competition a few months ago in which one of our English teachers took three weeks off class to prepare and execute a debate that was an exercise in lofty, unsupported statements and lacking of almost all formal argumentation techniques.

The level of the teacher’s writing is also comparable to that of early high school students.  I’m not talking about grammar, which would be understandable, but the complexity of thought.  The drama coach first wrote a play that was a fairy tale presenting a woman as the protagonist.  Don’t get your hopes up that it was really gender challenging; the characters still all conformed to typical gender roles, but the peasant girl helped save the prince before he married her and they lived happily ever after.  The script wholly lacked foreshadowing and the various literary devices that we learned to use throughout our secondary education (I won’t mention the stereotype characters).

She eventually scrapped that drama, and the final drama at least had a somewhat better plot, but equally simple concepts and devices.  In a discussion about what activities we should plan for English Camp, one ETA said, “based on last week’s drama competition, anything involving screaming and little subtlety will go over well” (Haley 2008).

So, if you’re still reading, let me pose the question, “If that is where the teachers are, where are the students?”