West Timor 10 & 11

Expediting Kupang

Day 10: 20th March 2006
Argh!! The day has come. Today all of us were deployed to various city schools to interact with the students. Last night, we were all sent to Ibu Peggy’s boutique to get “proper” clothes for schools. But but but…the clothes in the boutique were mostly..erm..fashionably-challenged. Desiree had no school due to some miscommunications between Pak Guido and a school so she came to my school with me. The school? SMK Negeri 1. I think. The school is like a vocational institute dealing in secretary/office stuff, IT, accounting and tourism.

Des and I didn’t meet the students today because after being dropped off at the school (we were all dropped off one by one), there was not much time. So at around ten, we bade Ibu Non good bye and we walked up to Shuxiang’s school (just in front of mine) and waited by the road side to be picked up by either Pak Budi or Guido.


Des in her Kupang high-fashion threads.


This shirt is my own. Anyway, here I was..sitting by the roadside like a homeless hobo.

Didn’t manage to take a shot of my school..so here’s Shuxiang’s school.


After waiting for an hour and being roasted in the morning sun, Pak Guido came to pick Des, Shuxiang and me. We also went to pick Marinah, Weixiang and Esther. Then, haha, Pak Guido treated us to lunch at this food place. When we reached the hostel, Ibu Peggy was waiting for us at the gate with a super sulk on her face. She scolded Pal Guido for letting us eat outside food.

“Nanti sakit perut macam mana???”

“What if you get tummy upset?” she said to me. Sorry lah Ibu!


The view on my journey back from school for the next 4-5 days.

Anyway, back at the hostel, it was a super slack session. After a short rest, we had a briefing by the Goal Setting Committee. We were to conduct a goal-setting workshop the next day at the orphanage and we were inviting many village kids. At night, we were visited by some members of the Chinese Clan.

Nothing much happened….


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Day 11: 21st March 2006
Argh! I woke up at 0530 today to prepare for school. By 0730hrs, I was up and ready for my 1st class. It was the 2nd year Tourism class. Interacted with them..found out their favourite places, singers, actors, sports, etc etc. Talked a bit of sports and entertainment stuff with them. Also shared with them stories of Singapore. In between all that, I managed to “teach” them some of their curriculum/syllabus lessons which Ibu Non had told me the day before. Taught them phone manners and some basic speaking etiquettes.

[Before you say “What irony!” because I always swear a lot and I am not a teacher, well…I did go through some training in speech etiquette and pronunciation when I was a radio presenter 5-6 years ago. Humph.]

Anyway, I had fun talking to the kids who were about 15 to 17 years old. Being tourism students, they were very ambitious and wanted to travel the world. That was when my “preaching” mode (uh oh) kicked in. I shared with them my feelings upon visiting the villages the week before and I urged the kids to help their people when they grew up eventually. I was standing in front of the class…urging and pleading. I felt like Gandhi. Like Martin Luther King. Like Bill Pullman on Independence Day…like Mel Gibson (William Wallace) on Braveheart.


Aye, fight and you may die, run, and you'll live... at least for a while. And dying in your beds, many years from now, would you be willin' to trade ALL the days, from this day to that, for one chance, just one chance, to come back here and tell our enemies that they may take our lives, but they'll never take... OUR FREEDOM!


Then guess what? The kids began to cry!

Argh! What had I done?

Tsk tsk tsk

Anyway, at 1030hrs, I went to Shuxiang’s school. Des was with him also..since she had no school of her own. The students were younger in their school…something like primary and junior high. Then Vinz came over. And the kids, for some strange reasons, wanted to take pictures with both of us. Extreme weirdness.



Then at about 1130hrs, Pak Guido finally came to pick us up and we headed home.

After lunch, we prepared for the goal-setting workshop to be conducted at the orphanage. By 1600hrs, kids were steadily streaming into the orphanage. We started some ice-breaking games like Where’s My 10-cent Coin? and Big Fish/Small Fish. After that, we did some lessons with the kids…imparting values (hah!), civics and moral education to them.

At first I felt uneasy with this because who are we to do this? We are not moral advocates and definitely not teachers. But after a while, I went “Ah fuck it!” .. just have fun and share these life skills with the kids.






Anyway, the workshop was a roaring success. I think. Well, I had fun...though I was beginning to lose my voice from all the talking and singing..

We went back to the hostel in the evening, tired but happy. But we didn’t stay happy for long because we were then whisked to a place to have another interaction session with the local Chinese youths. We were hungry and tired and we had to wait very long for the local youths to appear. And when they did, they didn’t look interested in meeting us at all. We complained of being tired but we did make an effort to interact with them. We tried to chat with them and stuff. Them? Some of them couldn’t be bothered and they kept wondering off. Worse still, some couldn’t even speak English and Chinese. It was hard to communicate, man!

Anyway Marinah and I managed to befriend Irene, Pak Teoh’s daughter. She is studying to be a doctor in a university in Jakarta. She doesn’t speak English and Chinese…so we had to converse in Bahasa Indon.

The night soon ended and we all dragged our sorry asses home. I tried to prepare my lesson plans for the next day. Gonna meet 2 classes the next day and Ibu Non wanted me to teach phone manners to one class and adjectives/describing words to another. However, I couldn’t prepare much. Not feeling too good…I was losing my voice and I felt illness creeping in.

Damn.

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