News, news, everywhere news!

This week had been a slightly weird one. And it’s just Tuesday. There’s been news from all sides from home. And by home I mean the two countries that are now the reference point for this word – Netherlands & Romania (I am still not sure if to be happy and grateful that I have two places that fit that definition or to just feel confused about it. Some more thoughts on that will come later, as I am struggling to find or build at least a temporary home in Malaysia also).

Finding news from home when you are far from it always lives you with mixed feelings. There’s the “Wow, that’s amazing, how  great is that!” (luckily most of the news this week have been positive:)). And there’s also the sadness for not being able to share the joy with the people, but mainly the sadness of not sharing the emotions provoked by the news: the panic (good news sometimes come with screaming of sorts…internal or external), the fear (what if), the excitement (that one is easy to comprehend). You can’t be with those people properly or you can be there just partly. Not that the people necessarily need you to…it’s just sometimes I feel the need to be there. And then there’s the “Wow, things are changing” feeling. Which I know sounds ridiculous…of course things are changing! But when you move so far away, you know something major is happening to you. It’s just somehow harder to envisage how things will massively change for the people close to you also in the meantime. 

Blast from the past

Today I got reminded of Cameron. At almost every step I took.

For those of you who are not former high school mates of mine, Cameron was our native speaker. He was Scottish in the most Scottish sense of the word (i.e. pale faced, red haired and blue eyed, skinny and with rather a strong accent). And for the year that he spent in Romania, he was the sensation in our home town. He would walk down the street and people would literally turn heads after him. He would go in shopping malls and the shopping assistants would all be extra nice to him while looking funny at him. You would think that the excitement would wear off after a while, but somehow his presence was always deemed special and interesting.
And then, there was us. The groupies that were finding him super interesting because he was Scottish and he had the cool accent and he was doing this cool thing of coming and teaching us for a year. So we would basically try to be around him as much as possible – take him for a drink, go with him to the movies, go with him in the park or wherever…just trying to hang out with him as much as we could, in our broken (but eager to be practiced) English.

I never really wondered what Cameron felt or thought about us or about his position in our town, until today when I realised that I am the Cameron of my community!
Today, I went with some of the kids in my teenager class (ages 14 – 16) to see Inside Out. The movie was very enjoyable but that is not what I want to dwell on. The point is my kids were like we were towards Cameron – shy but wanting to hang out, not understanding everything that I said but eager to please, trying to show me stuff but not knowing how to explain themselves. When I told them that they can ask me any question, no matter what, the first thing they asked was: “When are you getting married?” . I found this terribly amusing (and also thought they should discuss with my mother) cause they did not ask if I was married or if I had a boyfriend or anything else…just WHEN exactly was I planning to do that :))

All in all, it was a very enjoyable morning. But I keep thinking…how did Cameron get us to open up? I’m pretty sure he managed and I would love to know how…some of the kids here are sooooooo shy that they barely open their mouths. Advice needed people!!!

Update on this post: My very muslim teens just asked me to explain to them what FUCK means and why Americans use it so much :)) I believe this at least means that they trust me enough to ask that 🙂 Yeyyy! Happy Ana!

Dillemas of a teacher in a Muslim country

This whole week is school holiday. Hence, because a lot of the children are away, we are doing more fun type activities, rather than actual grammar lessons. So with my teenagers (who are really cool by the way!:)), I have this whole “storytelling” week going on. And today we also did a song. I am not sure why but I chose We Are The Champions – it felt like it struck the right chord…they were sort of familiar with it but did not really understand what it was about. So it was definitely a good choice.

I also wanted to talk about more than just the song, so I gave them an intro to Queen and their musical influence and got to Freddie Mercury and then I realised…that I was not sure if it would be ok to tell them that he was gay. I did tell them he died of AIDS…they did not ask exactly why or how. I did not dare tell them he was gay though.

Don’t get me wrong…I am all for sharing the knowledge. But I am here because the community, my very Muslim community, has contributed to me being here…so I was not prepared for a parent revolution right away. I am still not sure if that was a good decision or not yet. Any thoughts, opinions etc?

How to spend the night in the emergency room

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I will start off by saying that everyone is ok, me included. I was not the reason for which we went to the emergency room. I am safe and sound and with no scratch upon me.

The event was rather surreal, just because it came from where you least expect it. Friday night we had a farewell party for one of the guys here – his volunteering days have come to an end, so people gathered from all corners, had nice dinner together and then went out, drinking and dancing and such. We ended up at a club where the music was not so nice, so at one point some of us went to another place. We must have been there for about 30mins, but when we came back, everything had changed. Two of our friends had gotten beaten up, one of which quiet badly and one of the girls had been punched also (but not too bad, so that was good at least). Now , everyone knows that when drinking is involved, things can easily get out of hand but the shocking part of all this was that the aggressors were the bouncers from the club! The actual people that are supposed to protect and prevent fighting had actually started the thing and continued the punching! You will rightly inquire what my friends had done. The short answer is nothing. One of them had ordered a pizza, and then left without paying. But one of the other guys paid for her. The bouncer however felt that the manner the money had been given had been “disrespectful”, and then decided to go out after them on the streets and beat them! HOW IS THAT POSSIBLE????!!!

As I mentioned, one of the guys especially has been quite badly hit. So part of us took him to the hospital where we spend some beautiful 3 and a half hours. Where he also figured that his wallet is missing also – because all “good things” come together! And where I decided to look at the bright side of things – I was now experiencing treatment in the emergency room at the KL General Hospital. I must say I was really positively impressed. As a local (which he was), you don’t have to pay anything – subsidised medical care. As a foreigner, you do pay, but even then…65 RM (which is about 18 Euros) is rather a little amount. For consults, xrays and medicine.

The hospital was very clean, even though the building itself was quite old. It felt quite organised – there was some paperwork and sending from one office to another. But it all went smoothly, people seemed to know what they were doing and he was well taken care of. I have not recently experienced Romanian emergency care (nor do I hope to), but the stories that I heard do not make me believe that things are just as smooth. I know it’s bad to keep comparing countries, but somehow I can’t help it. Another Romanian actually just joined the team and it was funny to hear him go “Romania and Malaysia are not that different actually” – which is one of my thoughts also.

Anyways, I can now brag that in my first month and a half in Malaysia I have experienced both police encounters and hospital care. I just hope these type of experiences stop here 🙂

Lost in Putrajaya

I recently bought a book called “Lost in Putrajaya”. It was 2 or 3 days after I found out I would be placed here, I was walking through a bookstore (as one does) and the title just sprung at me. I thought it was too much for it to be just a coincidence so I got it. It’s basically a collection of short stories that take place in, around or involving Putrajaya.

Initially I thought the title refers to that metaphysical feeling of “being lost” – probably why I jumped to buy it, since it reflected my current state of mine anyways. But reading the stories I realized the title refers to the literal feeling of being lost. Actually not finding your way. And now that I’ve officially been living here for about one week, I can also understand why.

This is a weird city. And it’s even weirder when you think that it was designed from scratch at the beginning of the 20^thcentury, but nonetheless, it lacks some very simple things that would make life much easier. Such as proper sign boards with directions. I will jot down some of the contradictions that make this city special (I am not even sure I should call it a city but I can’t tell what else it could be).

Firstly, unlike KL or basically, the rest of Malaysia, Putrajaya was designed to be walker and cyclist friendly. Hence, you have huge streets with also huge pavements, trees planted on the sides and biking possibilities everywhere. The contradiction? There’s no one using them! The streets are empty except for a few cars that walk by from time to time, no one is walking and there are no cyclists anywhere. You might ask why… I still haven’t figured it completely out. One of the main reasons is probably because Putrajaya was basically built for government institutions – as a consequence, all the people living here work for the government. They are thus working all day long. I also saw they have quite a big cancer research institute here, where apparently a lot of foreigners work also. But I have seen no other, nor do I yet know where they live or hang out.

Secondly, Putrajaya prides itself with having the best public transport in Malaysia (small comment: it’s rather easy to do that when the streets are emptyJ). They have their own bus operations, that go only inside Putrajaya (regional transport is done by private companies) and that are heavily subsidized. The price of a ticket is 50 sen, which basically means 1/8 EUR. Cheap, very cheap. The contradiction? Most of the times the buses are empty. Literally empty. Probably for the same reasons as above. Plus the fact that absolutely everyone in this country owns (or wants to own) a car! The buses seem to have people on them only when work finishes and people go home. For the rest…freedom baby! Even more contradiction? The last bus that could get us to the main central station has its last ride at 7:30p.m. That tells you a lot about the level of activity in Putrajaya in the evenings…

Thirdly, Putrajaya was built after the Washington model. A place where all government institutions should be based, “the heart of the nation”, with imposing buildings and grand surroundings. And it does not fall short on its model. The main street has at one end the huge office of the Prime Minister. It then goes on for 2km, boasting huge buildings on either side of the road. Says a lot about how the government wants to be perceived…

In the middle of Putrajaya is a huge lake, where you can do all sorts of sporty things also. They have the biggest botanical garden in Malaysia here (that we duly visited yesterday but will go back to again since the haze prevented the enjoyment to reach its full potential). You get the picture…all is big and intimidating and makes me shiver at the thought of maintenance costs. The contradiction? For a place that was built specifically to make admin life easier, it is a place where it is incredibly difficult to get around! Everybody ends up getting lost here! Maybe it’s because all the buildings look the same (they do – it took us forever to learn how to get from our house to our community center, and it’s like a 3 minute walk!); maybe it’s because there’s huge roundabouts and traffic lights every 50 m (ironic if you consider the lack of trafficJ); maybe it’s because the sign boards are so badly made (the city is split in Precinct, and you basically just get directed to a precinct, with no further reference of any important landmark you might want to get at). Not sure what is in the air, but getting around this place takes forever and leads to frustration…

Last but not least, the neighborhood we are living in has everything it needs in its surrounding 50 meters. So you basically never leave this place ever! It’s called Putra Damai (precinct 11) and is made up of a series of flats and buildings that add up to a sort of complex. We live in Block G, have lessons in Block C, do our groceries in one of the many shops that just pop around every 10 meters (no idea how they all survive), do our laundry in one of the many launderettes that are just everywhere!!, play in the swings that seem to be new (and also deserted – no kids ever use them!) at every block etc. You get the idea. It’s tiny, self-sufficient, and looks all the same. But I will give them something…there’s greenery everywhere!

To conclude, I am not sure what my life here will be like. My schedule will be rather free these first weeks – we have classes from 5:30 to 10 in the evening (more on that, later on). It will become more tight when we start teaching in schools also (probably end of September). But we are currently just settling in our new apartment, enjoying a bit the peace and quiet (the first month led to a bit of overexposure to everything!) and trying to focus on the actual work…which is the reason I came here in the first place J

The Haze…

Imagine you wake up in the morning and there is fog everywhere. A funny type of fog that does not only prevent you from seeing, but also sort of blurs everything around. But you just think it’s the fog and you go about your business as on any usual day. You go out again for lunch and you notice that, though you would have expected it to clear up, the fog is still there, making everything translucent, giving the impression that the sun is not beating right at you, when in fact it is. Dinner time will make no difference. It’s almost getting dark but the fog is still there, together with a feeling of heaviness all around you. You;re happy it’s the end of the day because tomorrow the fog will surely go away and the air will be normal again. Only it doesn’t.

This is what it’s like living in the Haze! A phenomenon that occurs yearly in Malaysia and Singapore and lasts from a few days to a few weeks and months. The cause? People in Indonesia burn out land for agricultural purposes. The lingering smoke creates this horrendous cover of grayness…the lack of oxygen and freshness is suffocating at times. They say it will last for another month…nobody however is too worried or seems to want to do something about the fact that this happens every year! That the air quality during this period drops to scary levels! And that maybe a long term solution should be thought through! 🙂

Slight  update…so you can understand what I mean by the haze…the grayness is all because of IT!!

Things change

And they change fast. Amazingly fast for a country that moves so slow normally.

I haven’t been writing for a while. Or it feels like a while because a lot has happened, though I doubt that more than a week has actually passed by. I haven’t written partially because currently I have internet just on my phone, and partially because I have been rather busy. My life seems a bit surreal at the moment…all aspects of it actually. But I am quite happy so I am totally enjoying the roller-coaster. Some pointers on my life in the past week:

– meeting and having tea with a Malaysian minister! CHECK!!
As I might have mentioned previously, every community center has a Key Individual (KI). This is generally a person of higher status in the community, that sort of sponsors the center and also supports the CDO (that’s me) in his activity with everything from admin advice to introducing him/ her to people to making sure he/she has everything he/she needs. Since my center is in the Federal Territory of Malaysia, I got myself a full fledged minister as my KI. So last Thursday we met each other in his huge office overlooking the beautiful lake and the pink mosque (if you want a more real depiction of what I’m talking about, google Putrajaya – it’s really pretty!:)).
The whole experience was sort of surreal because a minister here is like a tiny king (from what I could fathom so far), so basically everything he deemed as necessary to my well being would just start to happen all of a sudden, assistants would be everywhere and the general range of possibilities out there increased tremendously 🙂

– moving into my actual home for the year! CHECK!!
Also, one of the perks of having a minister as a KI is that I got myself quite a nice 3 bedroom apartment, that I am sharing with my assistant Kavi (who’s Malaysian of Indian ethnicity, and is just a lovely person:)). Now, we are an NGO, doing work mainly with underserved communities. You might not be shocked to hear that the general accommodation standard is way below my 3 bedroom apartment. So I am now deemed to live in luxury, while others rough it out in rooms located right in their community centers, or have to share bedrooms. Part of me is obviously grateful (I will admit that having some privacy back after living in a dorm for a month has been quite blissful). Part of me wonders what I’m missing out on and how would my experience have been different otherwise. But I have decided not to dwell on it and just to enjoy and make the best of the cards I’ve been dealt.

– meeting my community! CHECK!
Because my center is new, people are just registering for classes (these will actually start on Monday). So last Monday we had an Open House event – basically we had our center open and we waited for people to come, to tell us about what we do and to have them sign up for classes. We were quite nervous about turn out but we shouldn’t have been…150 people!! came and registered! Tons!! So I am now basically putting people on the waiting list and just trying to keep to my 40 maximum people per class. Which is also why I am so happy that Kavi is with me! Alone it would have horrible!

– acquire local boyfriend! CHECK!
I will not dwell on this for obvious reasons but I have decided to announce it to the world since it has been completely unexpected, very surprising and extremely enjoyable for the time being 🙂 And it is obviously shaping my life here in very different ways than I had anticipated so I found it relevant.

– feeling extremely grateful for meeting like minded people! CHECK!
In this organisation people change very fast – some end their contracts and go away, new batches of CDOs or volunteers come almost weekly. So the people you become friends with in the beginning might not be there in one or two or three months. As I probably mentioned before, in my batch of trainees, I’ve been colleague with two girls – and I could not help being very grateful that of all the people in the world, I managed to be in the same batch with people that I can genuinely be friends with! That I actually share interests with (what are the odds that all three of us would have done dancing???) and that are actually fun and nice people! So yes, I totally believe I have been very lucky and am profusely grateful for this! 🙂

– feeling sad for missing out on stuff! CHECK!
This week I forgot my cousin had a rather important presentation. And while it is not a big deal (because she’s smart and strong and still loves me:)), it felt very bad. Living on the other side of the world does have the effect of making you feel very disconnected. Just due to the fact that you’re exposed to so many new things, that you almost don’t have the energy to keep in touch with stuff in your normal life also. But that is wrong and is something I am desperately trying to avoid. I haven’t worked out the best system for keeping in touch yet with all the awesome people I have around, but I do hope I will not forget more important events. It’s bad enough I can’t be part of them live anyways.
For this weekend though, Cuba & Vlad…I’m totally with you at heart!!! 🙂

You never know what you’re gonna get!

The past two evenings I was supposed to go out. To various places – dancing and concerts and stuff. In true Malaysian style, that did not work out. People (including myself) got tired and lazy and did not feel like moving much. So we ended up having Egyptian food cooked by one of the guys here (that was yesterday evening) and doing a make-up workshop (no worries, I was not the one holding the workshop!) for the girls in the boarding school here. After which we ate again.

These were two relaxed evenings, which turned out nicer than expected because I met some really nice people. You know when you meet someone with whom you click instantly, the conversation is open and honest and non-pretentious? I had that with Tuba, a German girl of Turkish origin who made my last night much much nicer! And this evening I had the same type of feeling with a Dutch girl I knew for a while, also of Turkish origin, with whom I got to talk more with. And I realised something. I have never had Muslim friends. Never. I met Muslim people, but never actually had close friends. I am not saying that these girls are my friends but there is definitely potential. Plus, they are so open about everything, about living in such open societies and keeping to their religion, about challenges they’ve had (because they wear the scarf so it is way more noticeable that they are Muslim than it would be for a man), about how they think about things and how they view their life and the world. These are strong independent women! And it is highly refreshing to be able to ask all the questions in the world and be answered in such a natural way!

My point is: I am very happy I did not go out for the last two evening! 🙂

People and spirits

p { margin-bottom: 0.1in; line-height: 120%; } NOTE: I am just going to jot down what I’ve seen on the topic so far…I have no big conclusions or stuff and the post might turn long. But I am hoping that if I write things down it will bring some clarity on it to my head also 🙂

Religion is a big thing here. I am assuming it is in all of South East Asia, but the fact that in Malaysia you have so much ethnic and religious diversity, makes things more complicated. Or more interesting. Depending on how you want to take it.

One of the things that I really like about the environment that I am currently in, is that it gives me the chance to talk and get to know locals from all layers of life. The students here are coming from villages in the middle of the jungle and are Orang Asli. Some of the teachers around are people from poor backgrounds that have gone through the program of the NGO and have now reached a better status (for them I mean:)). Some of the people working in the organisation (in proper jobs in functional departments) are highly educated people, very worldly and having been exposed to many many different things. Getting to know people here is somehow very easy, so you can end up talking politics with your Uber driver quite naturally. Yes, I am a big user of Uber nowadays and I must say that one of the reasons is also that the drivers are generally middle class people that are very willing to talk and share stuff. Also, it feels safer than the taxi. Much safer 🙂 Then there’s other people we met through going out and stuff. My point being: the exposure to the local feel has been much greater than I had anticipated.

Throughout all the meetings, conversations and such, a topic kept coming back. First it was mainly among the foreigners working for the organisation. I kept finding myself in situations where “ghost stories” would be told. By quite pragmatic and not easily to influence people. I sort of dismissed it in the beginning but I found it very odd that three days in a row, with different groups of people, the conversation would turn to ghosts and spirits.

When I visited the centres, things started to make sense. The CDO at the last centre (a Serbian guy mind you) started telling us how spirits have utmost power in his village. How people just leave his classes all of a sudden because a spirit has been unleashed (he does not always figure out how that happens), how they get scared all of a sudden and tell him to go inside also, how they always burn incense and how the shaman in his village does not want to talk to him about such things (as it is not to be spoken of!). It started becoming clearer…people were always talking about spirits because they were being constantly exposed to such beliefs in their communities.

That was all very nice and interesting, but I also had a dismissive attitude…people in villages have the strangest beliefs, after all! 🙂 So I was really surprised when on Friday, a guy from Indonesia started telling us very seriously about the spirits in his home town. We had been mentioning that we would like to visit him there – he went on seriously about how it depends on the period. How you would not want to be exposed to spirits you cannot handle and so on. My first reaction was making fun. But I realised that the university educated, IT programmer, living abroad guy was actually very serious. The NGOs IT manager joined in the conversation…by this point I had a million questions that I just fired away (I still need to learn that bluntness is not as appreciated here as it was in NL :)). Their point of view was that they are not religious but they do believe in various things gathered around from various religions. Not the type of “I’ll take what suits me best from each of these religions” thing, but more the “I’ve seen, read, listened to, talked to various people and here are the conclusions I’ve reached so far” thing. As a consequence I got to hear the story of the pragmatic guy going to the shaman and trying to explain to me why he was doing that. The story of relatives of theirs going in trances and not remembering things afterwards. Stories of how they were affected by random things that they could not explain.

The whole evening and the conversation was surprising and conflicting on some level. I am still not sure why, but some of the things I tracked down are:

– The conversation is carried out at a totally different level than in Europe, and definitely than in the Netherlands. I don’t even mean a higher or lower level, just different. There is so much more direct contact with various forms of beliefs and religions here, that the discussion even starts at a different point. Christianity is almost the boring part of it and everybody knows so much about all sorts of different types of beliefs and religions.

– Things are blurrier here. In Europe I had the feeling you got the believers and non-believers. The grey area here is much larger…first the question of which ethnic group you belong to comes into play. Then the “what religion you have?” appears (by the way, I was reading a story of how you always need to tick a box with your religion here when filling in admin papers – the option of No religion does not exist 🙂 YOU MUST BE SOMETHING!!!). Then the “I believe that from that, and the other one from that, and some more from that” thing appears.

– I got intrigued by the spirits and shaman stories. In Romania you would have people possessed because of bad deeds they or their ancestors did. Here you have spirits being taken on by specially selected people as part of rituals, good spirits that come if you pray for them, evil spirits that actually take over your body and mind due to something you did in a past life – there’s also some interesting theories about how that comes to happen. It seems people actually sort of choose their spirit, in the sense that the spirit stems from weaknesses of the person’s past life, or from events that the person has not learned what they were supposed to.

– I am sooo ignorant! 🙂 Most of the things they were talking about, I sort of had some knowledge of. But I realised how limited my understanding is. And how unused to having such conversations I am. It made me wonder if I would have understood better, had I not spent so much time in NL. By that I do not mean that the experience in NL has been in any way bad. Just that it seems that the exposure to spirituality there is very different. Maybe only because it does not play as essential a part there as it does in every day life here, or even in Romania.