Starting the W!

We did it - my first two weeks here! It’s important that I say “we” as so many of you have gotten calls from me asking for encouragement…I may have been a bit dramatic at the start of this whole transition, so thank you for that…

To get the logistics out of the way: I’m in Indonesia on a cultural exchange program called Darmasiswa Indonesian Scholarship through the Indonesian government. I’ll be intensively studying Indonesian language and culture here. Boy did I make this sound way more organized on my LinkedIn announcement! (I’m essentially getting paid to explore Indonesia)

My travels started off with a 44 hour journey from the time I left home to the time I got into my hotel room in Jakarta. Darmasiswa has 236 awardees this year from 67 different countries. They had us all meet in Jakarta for an orientation before we would be sent off to our prospective universities across the country. The journey felt fated when I sat next to a boy on my program on the planez ride there, and even more fated when I shared a BED (not a room, a bed) with a girl that I was next to on the bus from the airport to the hotel. I would like to re-emphasize that they had us share beds with strangers for our orientation immediately upon arrival.

Orientation taught me many interesting things. We learned that culture shock and culture exchange typically follows a W pattern with many ups and downs. That’s proved to be very true so far. We also talked about collectivism vs. individualism. In a study done in the 1980s and retested in the 2010s, countries were rated from 100 (individualism) to 0 (collectivism). The US scored a 94 and Indonesia scored a 14. It was obvious then that I (and the other four Americans) was going to have some of the most intense culture shock in the room of awardees. This difference means that Indonesia prioritizes the group more than the individual, whereas the US demonstrates the opposite. This shows through in the simple fact that there is no word for “privacy” in Indonesian, but there is a word for “lonely.”

They also mentioned the privilege of deciding which cultural practices you want to lose and keep from your own culture and the new one you are learning. That’s a really special sentiment to me, that we, on an individual level, can choose to take pieces of our experiences with us everywhere, or leave it behind if it doesn’t suit us - we are just a mosaic of all the places and people we’ve loved. But if these 10 months end up just making us appreciate our own culture and country more, that’s okay, too. For the last event of our orientation, they had all the awardees wear the traditional clothing of their home country. Seeing the different clothing and flags made it apparent how proud people were of their background, yet they are so eager to spend a year learning something else. Everyone just seemed so open-minded and excited. Some Americans wore frat t-shirts and artillery manufacturer sweatshirts.

After our orientation, we traveled to our universities - around 70 different universities across Indonesia. At my university in Malang, there are five Darmasiswa awardees: one girl from Germany, one girl from Vietnam, and guy and girl from Uzbekistan, and me. I felt beyond unsettled flying from Jakarta to Malang, like I was getting shipped off to some recluse for the next 10 months. My anxiety dissipated when we flew over the mountains and rice fields near Malang, and I remembered that I chose the city for the accessibility to nature that brings me so much peace.

The tarmac was lined by palm trees and hills and the drive into town didn't lose any of the greenery. We stopped for a local dish called Rawon (black soup or beef in a dark broth with rice) and iced jasmine tea. I’ve since learned that all the foods in Indonesia are either extremely spicy, fried, or filled with sugar. The country is currently struggling with rising diabetes rates because of the sugar. The food (fried rice, fried tofu, fried chicken, vegetables in peanut sauce, shawarma, coffee with sweetened condensed milk) is delicious, but I think feeling healthy is what most of us are struggling with still two weeks in. I already got sick and had to skip my second day of class - thank God I’m removed from my normal control freak-ness here or I would be worried about missing class already. And, I now eat bananas: small wins.

Our dorm is not like the pictures they sent us. We are staying in a dorm for all the international students on campus. This includes my program, other exchange programs, and international students getting Bachelors, Masters, and PhDs. The windows are all open at the top so there are constantly mosquitos everywhere. There are no sinks, only the shower faucet coming out of the wall. However, I’ve come to realize I have a luxurious bathroom as I have a hot water heater and our toilet is not a squat toilet. The kitchen, however, is shared between 100 women (the 100 men have a separated one) and is constantly sopping wet. Cats from the street have made their homes crawling around our kitchenware, so my roommate and I leave everything in our room. Luckily the food at our student cafeteria costs less than $1 usd a meal, so lunch is always easy to cover.

On top of the fried food and sugar, Indonesian cities are not walkable. Not being able to just walk where you want to go is beyond frustrating - there are no sidewalks and crossing the road is a death wish. The cities are almost exclusively built for motor bikes - everyone either has one or uses Gojek, an Uber/Lyft-like app where you can hop of the back of a motor bike. It’s funny how the small details of being a foreigner can make you so anxious, like whether it’s weird that I had to grab my Gojek's shoulder to get on the bike. My first physical touch since being here! A rush!

As for my classes, we arrived here on a Saturday and started classes with our placement test on Monday. We are only taking language classes while we’re here. Darmasiswa doesn’t require any knowledge, so I showed up to this country with an open mind ready to learn, and I left my placement test completely blank. As it turns out, everyone else in my school has some base knowledge, so I got taken out of the lowest level to be in my own private class with the teacher for the first two weeks (until the first quiz) so I could catch up. I feel really grateful they pay that close of attention to our learning. I caught on quickly and ended up going back into our class a day early and took the same quiz as everyone else. The language is really easy to learn as there are no tenses and barely any rules about sentence structure. I still don’t understand anything they say in class, though, as they only speak in Indonesian.

Sometimes I feel like this country is just insane. My favorite small tidbit to share so far is that all the stores have their own theme songs they play while you’re shopping. It doesn’t sound that entertaining, but then you’ll hear people humming the tune to “Hypermart” on the street and everything is just funny. Indonesian people are infamously kind and have lived up to the reputation. They ask for pictures together a lot. They are obsessed with photos and social media - its unlike anything I’ve seen. I thought I would be here on an unplugged journey, but you need Gojek, most places only take e-pay, and everyone wants to connect through Instagram. Being unplugged is nearly impossible.

I feel lucky to be in my city, the air is much cooler in the mountains, and I will get to see the sun everyday for the next 10 months. Everything around me is so green. The students do all of their work at outdoor study spots. Malang is known as the city of cafes - there are over 20 universities in my town and without a large drinking culture due to Islam (fun fact: Indonesia is the most highly populated Muslim country in the world), most young people just hangout at cafes until midnight. There are over 700 dialects spoken in Indonesia. In Malang, they speak Javanese (as in Java, the island I am on) rather than Indonesian in everyday language, but I am still around more locals than tourists in this city, so it helps my language learning a lot. My friends I’ve made from the dorm are from Gambia, Palestine, Mali, Egypt, Thailand, and India. They all help me speak Indonesian.

I’ve gotten to involve myself in some local culture and activities already. My Darmasiswa friends and I went to Kampung Warna Warni (the colorful village); it’s a tourist spot but very fun and beautiful. I gathered a random group from the dorm to visit a street festival I heard about. Indonesian independence day is in August, but each neighborhood has their own celebration, so the festivities last for a month. We ate street food like fried bread with scallions, fried tofu, and potato cakes with chocolate sprinkles. They played traditional music and showed a traditional dance with elaborate costumes and masks, which looks more like storytelling than strictly dancing. On Sundays, they have “car-free day” so we can walk around the main street as pedestrians. We had to go at 6am or the heat would be unbearable, but people were doing zumba in the street and it was the most active I’ve seen the population here.

Between not being able to walk and sit in a park, cook the food I like in my kitchen, feel clean in my shower or open my mouth under the faucet (the water here is full of bacteria that can make you really sick), and sleep amongst the mosquitos, there are not a lot of moments and places to reset and unwind. I’ve felt constantly unsettled - riding the downhill of my W hard. But, I had a nice moment yesterday that I will leave you with. When sitting at the cafeteria, looking at all the students laughing and the green trees around me, I realized that only I am having this experience. It sounds so simple, but this outlook isn’t Indonesia - this is my perception of Indonesia. Indonesia is actually students laughing at the cafeteria around green trees bustling between classes. They don’t think twice about having to boil their water first or to remember to NOT FLUSH TOILET PAPER. This is their everyday life. I’m so blessed to have the opportunity to live an everyday lifestyle abroad rather than be a transient traveler here. All in due time.

Thank you for reading my words. As always, feel free to chat me in the Substack app, email me in response to this, or WhatsApp me as I won’t be getting iMessages here. Sending handshakes from Indonesia (they don’t hug here :/). Pictures below!