Some of the wonderful things that I’ve experienced in the last two weeks… From the beginning.

This gallery contains 46 photos.

Two weeks in Indonesia! Two more wonderful months to go!

Someone has clearly been searching for my blog. One of the search queries yesterday was “alex the nomad bali volunteer”

I’m flattered, but I wonder who it was?

I’ve been in Indonesia for two weeks now. I haven’t updated because I’ve been quite preoccupied with everything and felt a bit frenzied. And to be perfectly honest, once the initial euphoria of the first 72 hours here wore off, I felt very homesick. Yes, I made several teary phone calls to home and questioned just what the hell I’d gotten myself into, but I’m just so glad now that leaving wasn’t an option, because I would have missed out on what I am starting to experience: ease and comfort with my new surroundings and environment and all of the new challenges and experiences. Now I feel like everything is going very well and I’m so excited to see what the next two months will bring.

Three days ago, I was fortunate enough to be invited to a wedding in the village; I took plenty of photos and uploaded them to Facebook, but will have to wait to upload them to WordPress. I can upload them to Facebook because I do it via my phone; for some reason, at the homestay, it’s very difficult to upload via my laptop. The children are everything I hoped for and more. It’s so rewarding. I help with the disabled children 10 AM – 12:30 PM, and then I teach an advanced English class for non-disabled children aged 12 – 15 from 2 PM – 4:30 PM. It’s 5 days a week. My students are unfailingly polite and shake my hand after class and say “Thank you for teaching.”

Edit: I uploaded them to WordPress successfully and will post them after this post.

To be continued…

The first step towards getting somewhere is to decide that you are not going to stay where you are.

Laying awake in bed just now, I sprung up and thought Am I really doing this? Is this actually happening? Am I crazy to go all alone for two and a half months to the furthest place from home where I don’t know anyone? I am starting to get quite nervous, indeed. But it’s the good kind of nervousness; the type nervousness that’s excitement bubbling below the surface ready to pour out, like what happens when you know you’re on the cusp of something great. All new beginnings are scary, but always worth it. As trite and cliche as that may sound, I fully believe it to be true. I leave in 6 days – technically 5, because I leave just after 1 o’clock in the morning.

It’s helped that I know that my fear and trepidation is not foreign (pardon the pun).  I’ve read many journals on WorldNomads.com (where I decided to get my travel/health insurance from) where many-a-prospective teacher started out with “When I got there, I laid awake crying in my hotel room in a foreign country thinking ‘Have I just made the biggest mistake of my life to commit months to a place so far from home where I don’t know a soul, the language, the culture, not a single thing!'” that finishes with “And then I ended up having the best time of my life and am so sad that it’s time to leave.”

I have a stack of clothes and a suitcase ready to be packed, but I have still have a lot to do, and thankfully I am not going to have to do it alone. My mother is flying in from Nanaimo tomorrow morning to help me get all the final preparations carried out.

I am perhaps most excited about teaching the disabled children, although I am very much looking forward to teaching English to the other children as well. As a somewhat shy person who gets nervous in front of groups, I do find the prospect of teaching to be a bit daunting, because of the behaviour that I witnessed as a student myself. I often recall very clearly a young teacher who was the same age that I am now who taught my grade 8 science class. She was a lovely, gentle young woman and the class preyed on that; instead of yelling, she’d flick the lights on and off when the students were bad, but they’d just carry on. I didn’t take advantage of her kind nature, because I felt very sorry for her and could tell that she was very overwhelmed, and I hated seeing the bullies win. In the end, the next year, she had a nervous breakdown and quit teaching for good. I’ve always felt very sad about that because even as a 12 year old, I could tell that at the beginning of that school year when she was a brand new teacher,  she was just bursting with anticipation and excitement, but was not prepared in the end to deal with a gaggle of children who turned out to  be bratty, entitled pre-teens and teens.

However, I’m confident that the children that I’ll be teaching in Indonesia will not be like the children I went to school with. I’ve been in touch on Facebook with a lovely school teacher from Holland who volunteered at the same non-profit that I’m volunteering with and she’s given me some excellent pointers, both about teaching in general and what to expect. Most touchingly, she added in one message, “the children are very afraid of thunder when the weather is bad.” She speaks of the children with such love and protection that it’s hard to feel nervous about teaching them, and it makes me want to meet them all the sooner.

What are my goals? It’d be awfully lofty and a bit arrogant to say that I wish to change lives, but I hope that I can be a positive impact. And symbiotically, they will be a positive impact on me. I just want to use my gift of language for good; for far too long, I probably used it negatively as a political blogger. At the time, I thought I was writing things that by their very nature of being critical and negative, would ultimately become positive. Criticize this policy and that politician or make sweeping generalizations about entire sides of the political spectrum and sectors of society, and good will triumph over evil. Not so. I thought I was passionate; I suppose I was, but it was the kind of angry passion and I am not an angry person. In the end, it did not do me nor anyone else any good. I was not using my talent positively or my genuine heart in the way that it was meant to be used. By teaching English and helping disabled children, I just hope that I am putting good into the world. My heart was always in the right place as a political blogger, but I see now that no good will come of negativity. Hence my abandonment of it. People predict that I will be back to politics, and perhaps I will, but many years down the line.

I feel my calling is with teaching disabled children. But who knows? I once lamented to a trusted confidante whom I’ve known many years that I was very unhappy because I felt stuck. “Stuck?” he asked. “How can you be stuck? You’ve been blessed with free will; it’s yours to use. You’re never stuck. When you feel stuck, it’s a sign that it’s time to try something new.”

It’s kind of apropos of everything that I was laying in bed when I thought to write this post, because it’s about a long-held dream becoming a reality. /end corniness

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