Eating Color

Dear E,

I’ve decided that eating the fruit here in Indonesia is like experiencing the world in color for the first time. All the mangoes and pineapples and papayas back home are black and white compared to these. Breakfast has been granola and yogurt and fruit and I could eat this every morning.

The past couple of days I’ve been sitting in on my friend’s work. I won’t talk about the details here, but so far it is pretty interesting. There was a delay the first day so we’re behind which make for long full days. Still, it is good to see someone who has never heard from the book of life reading getting exposed to it. There are only 2000 people who speak this language but soon they will have the completed second half of the book in their language. 

Life here is hard for the people. Despite the country being rich in resources, there are still islands that are very poor, especially the remote villages. The village people we are working with are ancestor-worshipping animists. We are working with one woman who has three children, one of whom is with her and one college student guy. The woman has very little education but is doing really well at answering all the questions and analyzing the text. Her son, however, has proved to be very distracting but gives the room a little bit of a fun atmosphere while we are working. He was sick most of yesterday but seems to be better today. But this makes him more distracting.

My cold threatened to come back yesterday. I’m guessing from lack of sleep. Sleep has been really difficult because there is so much noise here. Last night I was woken up by two guys who parked their motorbikes by the corner of the house and were drinking and chatting very loudly. My friend (S) likes to say that the people here are “generous” with their music and their voices. Well these guys were very generous and it took me a while to get back to sleep. Last night I slept with my noise-canceling headphones which helped a lot. 

This (Sunday) morning we worshipped at a large charismatic-ish church. They like to have some of the songs in English apparently because it's cool, not because there are actually any English-speakers in the congregation. The pastor gave a really nice sermon which I could understand thanks to a friend translating for me. Apparently, English translation is a service they offer for the odd traveler. 

I don’t have as many pictures because I forgot my phone at the house yesterday. Today I could take a few pictures (but I won't post any about the work. You can private message me if you want photos of that). 

Today we finished all the work with the team here thankfully. We were worried initially about whether we could finish before heading to the other island but thankfully S got it done. To celebrate we went out to dinner with everyone and ate smoked fish, rice, calamari, satay, and shrimp. It was all good except for the shrimp. 

After dinner, we took a bus back home that was blaring American pop music out of a stereo in the back. Again, these people are just really generous with their music. Oh also, this morning I got to ride on the back of one of the many motorcycle taxis called Ojeks. Super fun. S told them to go slow which they did so I didn't fall off. I think we'll be doing a lot more motorcycle riding on the island we fly to tomorrow because there are fewer cars there. I'm looking forward to it.