Orientasi

Hello from the other side of the world! I apologize for not having updated sooner, but the Internet in Surabaya was impossibly slow...I tried for 25 minutes to access my blog to no avail, so I figured I'd just give up.

Orientation in Surabaya was lots of fun - we stayed in a great hostel, the hostel owner was incredibly helpful, and we met so many great friends. All of the volunteers are wonderful. We've got Liz, Brandon, Lia, Dan, Teresa, and Ainsley. They've all got such different personalities and hobbies, but I think we've managed to assemble a really great group.

Nothing too exciting happened during orientation. There was a French girl, Nora, and a Belgian guy, Uness, who were both staying at our same hostel and I became great friends with them. I felt like for a while I was in a French-speaking country because our hostel was flooded with French speakers (plus two of the volunteers speak French). It was fantastic!

A guy about our age, Antok, lived across the street from the hostel, and we did lots of things with him. He and his dad took us around Surabaya to show us the sights. We went to this beautiful turquoise mosque downtown, and were able to go up into one of the towers to look down upon the entire city. Of course, we could really only see a tiny bit of it because of all the pollution! Some of the volunteers were adventurous enough to head out to this little island near Surabaya, called Palau Madura, where there is a completely different culture than Javanese culture. In fact, they have one of the last remaining matriarchal societies in the entire world. Unfortunately I had to settle for pictures of the island, as I had to stay behind and prepare our trip to Malang.

So that's about all that happened in Surabaya. Yesterday (Sunday) morning we headed to Malang via private car. They call these things "Travels" and basically a driver comes and picks you up at whatever address you give them, and they will drop you off at whatever address you want in whatever city the car is headed for. The only downside is that if you are traveling alone, it could take a while for you to arrive at your destination because they put as many people as seats in these cars, and each person gets picked up and dropped off at a different location. Lucky for us we had 7 people and TONS of luggage, so we filled up an entire minibus!

On our way to Malang, we drove by the horrendous mud flows that are occurring in Sidoarjo, a city right next to Surabaya. It's unbelievable what has happened there - last year in late May-early June, an oil company found oil in Sidoarjo. Well, instead of getting the right people in there to survey the land, and instead of using the proper drills for the terrain, they just started drilling. And lo and behold, they hit something (and it certainly wasn't oil), and all of a sudden there were all these mini geysers all over the place. Think of Old Faithful times a thousand. So it's completely soaked the ground and made everything muddy - and the mud is flowing and flooding whole areas. So far over 10,000 people have been displaced. The train no longer runs from SUB to Malang, the roads are unusable, and experts say it may not stop for another 30 years (and that's being optimistic!). They've tried to stop it, but they just can't seem to. Most people think by the time the mud stops, Surabaya will no longer exist. Apparently this happened in Brazil, and it stopped after 40+ years - that is, after an entire city disappeared. Crazy stuff.

So anyway. Now we are in Malang. Once we all arrived at my host family's house, some of the HFs came and picked up their volunteers, and others of us went to the mall to catch some lunch, and then my HF took the remaining volunteers to their HF houses. The craziest thing happened when we were in the mall - we were walking around the food court trying to figure out what to eat, and we saw 3 foreigners sitting at a table eating - a light-skinned guy, a white guy, and a black guy - just hanging out. I was shocked, and so were they. They stared at us, we stared at them. It was really quite a comical moment. It's like whenever I see foreigners here I'm just automatically drawn to them, and prompted to talk to them (naturally) and find out why in the world they are in Malang, Indonesia. Turns out they were soccer players for Arema (the Malang soccer team - one of the biggest and best in Indonesia). We sat and chatted with them for a bit, and found out Darik is Moroccan, James is Australian, and Rafael was from somewhere in Africa and didn't speak a bit of English. Once again, I found myself speaking French with Darik, which felt really weird...I didn't realize there were so many Francophones in Indonesia!! It was fun, plus Darik and James were quite cute ;p

So now I am with my host family, and it is amazing. I feel like I've just picked up right where I left off with them. I am just so incredibly happy to be here with all of these people. Our program is creating a lot of interest, as well, in the area schools. My host sister (our LE Indo Country Coordinator) worked her bum off this year trying to get the buzz going in the schools. And whoa! Did it ever work! We're in 4 schools - in one school there are 177 students, another 134, another 103, and another 70. There are only 6 volunteers...they are going to be teaching A LOT! But I'm really excited because this means that Amelia (my host sister) and I can work over this summer to expand the program and set things up for next year and perhaps next year we could bring 20 volunteers! That's my dream, at least...

We just met some Mormon missionaries in this Internet cafe, and they invited us to come to their church on Sundays if we wanted. They also said they could help us out with our Bahasa because they all speak it really well. So I might take them up on that offer...it might be nice to be able to have service on Sunday in English! I told you - drawn to foreigners like moths to a flame!

Okay well that's all I'll update today. Please leave me comments!!! I want to know what you are all up to, and since I have limited Internet time I don't have time to wander all over the Internet e-mailing and Facebooking.

Miss you all!!!