April 11, 2015
Sir! Sir!: What is your favourite?
There were no classes the next morning and instead I had arranged to meet up with four of the students from the previous evening and go to visit a local mangrove forest with them. Vina and Danny and Donny (who continued to call me brother) and a girl whose name escapes me all met me at the English school. They had told me the mangrove forest was nearby and so I assumed we would walk, but they all had their motorcycles and insisted it was too far to go on foot, so I got my bicycle. 1200 metres later and we were there.
We stepped forward through a series of boardwalks around an area of mostly planted mangrove that was right next to the sea. Vina had spent some time volunteering here and introduced me to the creator and owner, Mr Darvis. He didn’t speak English but Vina explained that the poor man now had a fight on his hands because the powers that be want to turn the whole area into a new harbour. Such is life. And such a shame, for the mangrove forest was pretty and it was teeming with life. We saw a snake and we saw amphibious newt-like creatures and we saw little crabs with one giant pincer across their front – in fact we saw two such crabs having a fight. I took photos of these wonderful natural scenes for your viewing pleasure, but unfortunately I’d forgotten to put my SD card back in my camera and none of them were saved, so you’ll have to make do with one that I got from Vina. With her being young and Indonesian this was much more of the ‘selfie’ variety.
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After the forest most of them had other things to do, but Danny went with me to a restaurant for lunch. He was such a great good kid who taught me a few key phrases in Indonesian, and we both enjoyed talking more about the cultural differences between our countries. There was evidently some ambiguity between the life he knew as a 16-year-old kid from a Muslim family here in Sumatra, and the outside world he saw via Hollywood movies and American TV series, and he asked me adorable questions about girls that I’m afraid I can’t repeat here for he swore me to secrecy.
Back at the school I managed some conversations with Mr Muchsin. Although I wasn’t invited into the main house or introduced to the family he did come out and sit with me in the back yard for a while after he’d harvested his bananas. Here’s a picture of him harvesting his bananas for your viewing pleasure:
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I found interacting with Mr Muchsin a little difficult. Most of our ‘conversations’ consisted of him talking about how hard life was for him. He talked about how he wanted his four daughters to go to university and, whilst he could afford this, he was struggling to pay for his eldest to do a masters. Whilst I sympathised I found it annoying that he seemed to have the idea that for foreigners life is easy. Had I tried to explain that very few working people in England can afford to have four children and pay for them all to go to university, never mind the masters, I doubt very much he would have believed me.
There were two more classes in the afternoon, the first of which was really hard work. It was a class of shy 14-year-old girls and it was difficult to get them to open up and speak in English, even though I was sure that they could. There was no help from Mr Muchsin, who of course had buggered off again, and an hour and a half of trying to get blood from a stone later he returned to collect the money from the students and dismiss them. I’m not sure who was more pleased.
The final class was much better. Although they were younger, around eleven, they had lots of confidence and enthusiasm. “Sir! Sir!” They cried, shouting over one another to be the next to ask a question, 90% of which started with “What is your favourite…”
“Sir! Sir! What is your favourite number?”
(Long pause while I try to think of a number…)
“Five!” I declared, plucking a number at random.
“Why Sir?”
(Much longer pause…)
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