A Holiday Interlude

It’s my favorite time of year, and I can resist the blog-itch no longer!

But before we dive deep into the vortex of candles, spiced wine, gingerbread, and all the carols our little lungs can sing, an interlude…

Some of you may have been wondering where I’ve been these past few months. To answer that question, we need to go back almost exactly half a year.

Paradise.

After concluding my service as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Indonesia (and a short stop in the paradise of Raja Ampat, Papua), I hopped over to Australia. Ever the adventurous woman, my mom met me in Sydney. We took in the vibrant metropolises of Sydney and Melbourne, brushed up on Australian history in Adelaide, toured the vineyards of the Barossa Valley, rode the rails into the rainforest, ate wattleseeds, ooh-ed and aww-ed over tiny penguins (and kangaroos and koalas), shivered in the mountains, saw whales from the top of a lighthouse, discovered glow worms (and millions of stars) in the forest by night, and dove the Great Barrier Reef. Just to name a few highlights.

Our hearts were warm, but our teeth were chattering.

It was a trip of a life time, and a truly extraordinary experience to share as mother and daughter.

But it certainly wasn’t the end of the summer’s adventures!

After two weeks back in Gainesville, my parents and I joined my aunt, uncle, cousin, and cousin’s wife in Alaska. ALASKA. Talk about dreams coming true.

Moose Family!

I grew up tracking the Iditarod every year, and becoming a dog musher was my childhood aspiration. Anchorage, Denali, and Juneau delivered on sled dogs, glaciers, moose, bears, caribou, foxes, beaver dams, and some darn delicious king crab. We traveled by plane, car, boat, and then train, arriving in Whitehorse, Canada.

Another trip of a life time, and another irreplaceable memory of time with family.

The family that travels together…

Then I was in Spokane for a few days with more cousins, back to Florida for three days, and finally we set out on the last installation of the marathon summer: driving up the east coast to our old stomping grounds in New York and back. Along the way we visited friends and family, which (after more than two years) was some honest-to-goodness chicken soup for the soul.

Good times with good friends – we’ve come a long way from middle school!

All this to say that I am now in Germany – surprise! I arrived in mid-September, and have been working as an English Teaching Assistant via the Fulbright Commission. That’s a fancy way to say that I help English teachers out in their classrooms in exchange for paid living expenses and a great excuse to spend a year in Germany.

Now that you’re all up to date on the happenings of the past six months, we can move on to the important stuff: German Christmas.

But before sending a post your way that is full of holiday cheer and all things beautiful, let me address one more question.

Why?

Why travel? Why spend more than two years in Indonesia only to pop over to Germany? Why so many trips in one summer?

First, I need to point out that I understand my ability to travel is a great privilege. I have benefited from the taxes that many of you pay in order to live and volunteer abroad. I have also received help from my family and friends along the way. These are both gifts for which I am immensely grateful, and I hope that the work I have done and will continue to do to encourage better education and international cooperation will act as my gift in return.

In the end, it’s quite simple. I travel because it connects me to people and the world we all share. At the risk of getting a little cliché, I believe that peace with one another, peace with our world, and peace within ourselves starts with stepping out our doors, meeting our neighbors near and far, and respecting and delighting in the natural world.

Ok, I admit it…probably about 50% of my interest in travel is related to food. You caught me! (But seriously, there are international delights to discover right in your own community, like this Ethiopian food I tried in Spokane. Spoiler: it was amazing.

Understanding different perspectives, both human and ecological, help all of us live together with greater harmony and dignity.

These principles apply to all people and environments which lie outside our daily spheres. They can be located across the world, but also across the street.

In a time when many seem willing to withdraw from global conversations about poverty, war, and our environmental impacts, I hope that the spirit of travel will continue to work inside each one of us so that we may connect with the individuals, cultures, creatures, and ecosystems that all deserve a voice in shaping our world.

Alaska

The Final Bucket List

Somehow, the handful of months between March and July have passed as if they were days, and here I find myself back in the United States, a bona fide “Returned Peace Corps Volunteer.”

But before I sum up my final Peace Corps Indonesia thoughts and experiences (or perhaps in an effort to avoid undertaking that impossible task), I want to share some of the highlights of my final months – the last checks-off my bucket list, if you will.

***

Summiting Java’s Highest Volcano

First, let me take you back to Christmas Day 2015. With gravel in my shoes and the sun rising over Indonesia’s tallest volcanic peak, I summited Mount Semeru. The wind was frigid, the views were breathtaking, and the victory was sweet. Holidays away from family and friends can be tough, but spending the day off the grid and sharing in the simple joy of my fellow hikers as we finally reached the peak was something special.

***

Getting Lost in the Rhythm of Balinese Kecak Dance

Kecak dance combines dance, body-percussion, and drama. A ring of men sits around the “stage” area while clapping, clicking, chanting, and occasionally singing while the characters of the drama dance in and out of the circles. Oil lamps burn in the center and bathe the faces of dancers, singers, and percussionists in an enchanting, flickering light that seems to join in the rhythm of the dance. Kecak dance is a staple of Balinese culture, and transforms the tourist haunts of Bali into sacred spaces steeped in harmony, movement, and story.

***

Baking an Apple Pie

PCV Danielle and Ibu Linda hard at work.

The more astute among my readers may have just taken a moment to blurt out, “Apple pie isn’t Indonesian!” But before you click away and never return, let me explain. Goal Two of Peace Corps reads, “To help promote a better understanding of Americans on the part of the people served.” Central to my personal identity as an American is my love of baking and eating pies. In a desert of ovens, however, sharing that part of America wasn’t so easy. But fortune smiled upon me when I started attending a church in Ngawi city that had, what else, AN OVEN! It was a treat – to the soul and palate – to bake and share a pie with my Indonesian church family.

***

Learning to Make Batik Fabric

Indonesians, especially on Java, take pride in their beautiful and varied batiks. The colorful textiles form an integral part of national dress – I’ve seen farmers in the fields wearing old batik and pictures of President Jokowi shaking hands with foreign dignitaries while clad in the creatively drawn and richly died fabric. My experience in Indonesia wouldn’t have been complete had I not learned and attempted the batik-making process myself. The visit of a good college friend presented the prefect opportunity, and we spent an afternoon trying our hand at drawing with hot wax and mixing and dabbing various dyes onto our own, personal squares of cotton. It was equal parts of heat, color, frustration, and education – a fitting metaphor for my time spent in Indonesia.

***

Becoming a Javanese Diva

Me with some of my graduating students.

Batik is all fine and good, but when Indonesian women really want to dress to impress, they pull out their eye-shadow, hair spray, and kebayas. Originating from the Javanese Majapahit Kingdom, kebayas range in design and extravagance based on location. On their home island of Java, the glitzier the better. In anticipation of 9^th grade graduation, the women at my school decided to go all out and wear kebayas (the men looked rather dapper themselves in suits and ties). That meant going on a special search for a kebaya that would fit a non-South East Asian giant like me. The one we found was golden – figuratively and literally. I’ll always fondly remember the shocked faces of my students when they saw me walk out of the teacher’s office. Trading in my pony-tail and canvas shoes for rhinestone studded hair clips and fake eye-lashes, it was pretty fun to be a diva for a day.

***

Diving and Taking Relaxation to the Next Level in Raja Ampat

Our porch-front beach.

The big finale! Having successfully completed two years of Peace Corps service in Indonesia, I headed straight for island and underwater paradise in West Papua. Raja Ampat is famous among divers for having some of the best reefs and marine life in the world, not to mention breath-taking beaches and crystal clear water. From the hammock stretching across the porch of my peacefully simple bungalow, I read, napped, and allowed my thoughts to wander among 27 months’ worth of Indonesian memories. The reverie of gentle waves smoothing the sand and the sun drifting between exquisite sunrises and –sets was only broken by delicious meals, good conversation, and world-class dives. It would be pretty easy to lose all sense of time and urgency out there in the islands of Raja Ampat, and I wouldn’t be surprised if I wake up to the sparkling waters and swaying breezes of West Papua again someday.

Peace out, Indonesia! (Photo Cred: E. Braaksma)

If nothing else, my final months in Indonesia were a reminder of how much I’ve yet to discover in Indonesia – a land impossibly rich in culture, language, art, flavor, and nature.

 

Dive In

Big shout-out and thanks to Gili T’s Blue Marlin Dive for making this post (and all my future under-water adventures) possible! Check out their wordpress blog here.

After watching a rather frightening movie about cave diving, I resolved that diving – of any kind – was something I had no interest in trying. Around the same time, I developed a fear of drowning while sitting on the bottom of a university pool and waiting to be “rescued” during life-guard training. While sitting there in the hazy blue, not knowing when someone would come for me as the seconds ticked and my need for air grew more and more desperate, panic tumbled over me.

The grainy glory days. I’m the one in the swimmies.

I had always loved swimming – so much so that my mom used to call me a “water rat” when I refused to get out of the public pool. I had no problem doing the “rescuing” as a life-guard trainee because I was confident in the water and I was in-control of the situation. But putting myself at the mercy of a rescuer, surrounded by a suddenly hostile environment and not knowing what was going to come next was well outside of my comfort zone.

Fast forward to my trip to Flores last June. After a truly magical two days of waking up to dolphins, swimming with mantas, and splashing around in a kaleidoscope of fish, my good friend Erin told me that she was getting her dive license in January. The prospect of diving brought back cinematic scenes of out-of-air divers drifting away into inky blue caves and frankly, scared the pants off me. And that, precisely, is why I agreed to do it.

Trying to get my under-the-sea legs…channeling my inner-frog perhaps?                         (Photo cred: Erin B.) 

If living in Indonesia has taught me anything, it is the collective human need to overcome our fears. Fear drives distrust, insecurity, bullying, hatred, and traps us in the little boxes we know as our “comfort zones.” Unwilling to dive into the unknown, we fanaticize about all the worst-case-scenarios that come with exiting our fortified boxes. Some days it is so much easier to stay curled up in my bed, my mosquito net shrouding me in the safety of a good book and a long nap. Goodness knows my life would have been “easier” had I just stayed home. But would it have been better? I think not.

I have come to believe that it is a requirement of all members of the human race to stretch into the unknown. Although this need sometimes runs counter to our centuries-old survival instincts, it is this very urge of nature – to risk – that makes us who we are as a species. It sent us to the moon, discovered a cure for polio, and fought for the rights of women and minorities to vote. And lest we think this ability to risk is a privilege afforded to only the most adventurous of souls among us, let me suggest that sometimes the most daring and difficult risks we take are those closest at hand – offering to help a neighbor in need, telling someone we love them, opening ourselves to the people around us.

And thus I found myself strapped to an air tank and plunging into the very thing I feared. I remember one training dive in particular. I had had a bit of trouble with water coming into my regulator (the mouth piece that allows you to breath and therefore stay alive) on the dive prior. It turned out to be no problem, but being the green, literally wet behind the ears diver that I was, it had spooked me. I was keyed up before we even plopped off the boat and into the water, and once we started our decent on this next dive, I looked around and saw…nothing. Just blue haze.

Panic gripped at my chest. As we drifted down, I felt as if I was falling into nothing: the unknown. It’s a weird feeling that everything in my brain – hard-wired for my species’ survival – was trying with all its might to resist. Where do you think you’re going?! Who knows what’s down there? What if your air tank explodes? What if you pass out? What if you discover a new sea monster, and then it eats you?! …but you know what’s up there on the surface? Air. LIFE GIVING AIR. For a few tortured seconds my brain was torn apart in a battle between instinct and will. I HATED not knowing where I was going, not feeling like I was in control.

(Photo cred: Me by way of Erin’s GoPro)

But then I looked at the people around me. I knew that this was the big moment for me – the moment when I would decide to trust my instructors, my buddy, the haze that surrounded me, myself. And you know what? I did. And as I gave myself over to the feeling of falling into the unknown, slowly, shapes and shades emerged – a new environment that I never would have had the privilege of seeing and experiencing, cuttlefish, sharks, sea turtles, and nudibranchs that I never would have known were down there had I allowed my fear to take control.

I was enlightened, empowered, and humbled by the ocean – the unknown becoming known all around me. I have become mesmerized by the underwater world and, while still definitely a newbie, have logged 20 dives (more coming in June!). My fear has been transformed to curiosity, confidence, and an insatiable desire to discover more.

I mean, seriously. Did you know these little nudis were down there?  (Photo cred: Mindmaker at English Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=10522727)

It seems to me that, more often than not, allowing ourselves to step boldly (or drift along a current) into the unknown never disappoints. Yes, it’s scary. But it is also necessary. Our ability to reach out to one another and experience what is foreign and sometimes uncomfortable, is perhaps more essential now than ever to our species’ survival.

I’ll leave you now with this brief challenge: What scares you? What is calling to you at the same time that it scares your pants off? Is it, perhaps, time for you to face that fear?

Good luck, Godspeed, and happy diving.

Bucket List: Borobudur

By Gunawan Kartapranata (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0) or GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html)%5D, via Wikimedia Commons

When I first found out that I was going to Indonesia, I immediately thought, “That archipelago I learned about in 9^th grade – Cool!” But after my first stroke of high-school recall, I truthfully knew very little about this island nation. In fact, when I told my boss (Hi, Dr. Coffey!) at work the following day where I was headed and he mentioned something about Jakarta, I smiled and nodded – caught up in my own excitement – only to later ask myself, “What the heck is Jakarta?!” (It’s the capital of Indonesia.)

I don’t know if these are reflections on American education or my terrible memory, but knowing so little about Indonesia, I had a fairly non-existent bucket list of things I wanted to do here (beyond eat something new and see a volcano erupt, both of which I accomplished in my first week of training).

The upside of my general ignorance has been the pleasure of constantly allowing myself to be surprised, cobbling together a bucket list as I go along.

Stupas atop Borobudur.

Soon after arriving at site, Flores – with its mountains, beaches, and dragons – took the top spot on my list. Flores was closely followed by Yogyakarta – home of sultans and cultural heart of Java. My site is located fairly close to Yogya, and I have had a number of opportunities to go there, but somehow I always missed what is arguably the #1 attraction of the Yogyakarta area (technically located in Magelang): Borobudur Temple.

Peaceful Buddha.

School trips went to different Yogya destinations, plans fell through, and time slipped away. At one point I wondered if I would ever make it, but the visit of a fellow volunteer’s friend from America finally provided the perfect opportunity this past January!

Old fashioned selfie – I made it!

Borobudur temple is a UNESCO World Heritage Site and is frequently found on lists of places you should see before you die. I have been to other temples on Java and Bali, all memorable and unique in their own way, but Borobudur takes the crown for its sheer size and mass.

The 9^th century Buddhist temple is stacked in nine symmetrical layers to create a giant stupa. By walking around each layer in a clockwise direction, one symbolizes the ascent from Earth to Nirvana. Constructed completely from stone as a walk-through mandala, the lower levels feature carved reliefs depicting scenes from the Buddhist-Javanese narrative, while the upper layers are dotted with smaller stupas, each housing a Buddha.

Buddha chillin’ in a stupa.

With its flocks of tourists and students asking for pictures, the temple is no longer a peace-seekers paradise, but we were able to beat the majority of the crowds by splurging on the sunrise tour (entry before the main gates open is well worth waking up early and shelling out the extra cash).

Borobudur is as exquisite in its detail as impressive in its size, and I feel I found my own little piece of bucket list nirvana while watching the stones and their stories reveal themselves in the morning mist.