First Days

Tuesday, January 12, 2010

For First and Second Graders (and older students and adults too!):

Selamat Pagi! Emma Bear and I have arrived in Balikpapan, Indonesia! We had easy flights to Detroit, Tokyo, Singapore and finally to Balikpapan, Kalimantan (on the island of Borneo). Can you find those places on a map or globe? Altogether we were in the air for 25 hours. That’s like being in the airplane for three school days!

Emma Bear and I are traveling with Samantha, a high school teacher from Amherst, and Mike, a political science professor from UMass. Yesterday we all walked to a local market and bought pineapple, mangoes, rambutan and salak. Delicious! In the late afternoon we walked to a nearby beach and cheered on some small boys as they were playing soccer. A man was repainting his fishing boat.

Today we woke up early to the beautiful sound of the Muslim Call to Prayer. The majority of Indonesians are Muslim. In the Muslim religion, also known as Islam, there are Five Pillars (parts). One of those pillars is to pray five times a day. In most communities here, a religious leader leads the Call to Prayer over a loudspeaker, so we can hear this singing recitation several times a day. It’s a very beautiful sound.

After we woke up, we visited two high schools and met the mayor of Balikpapan! At the first high school we visited different classes and the students asked lots of questions about life in the United States. What great questions they asked!

Tomorrow we are off to visit some elementary schools. I can’t wait to read the book that I brought to these Indonesian children. My students in Warwick wrote this book about what life is like in Warwick. I wonder what the Indonesian school children would like to share with us about life in Balikpapan!

For Older Students and Adults: (Or for younger children with the help of an adult!)

The second high school that we visited was a vocational high school, where students were learning about hotel management. They also had an extracurricular debate club and we got to listen to the students debate about whether schools should teach about controversial topics in health education. They also debate about other topics, many of which are controversies regarding local and national government.

This was so fascinating to me! When I was in Indonesia ten years ago I was present for the country’s first democratic election. Until that time it was quite taboo to openly question the choices of the government. High school students were not able to have that kind of open debate about controversial political issues. Times have changed under this new democracy.