Dear Family & Friends,
School Break
Ramadhan is winding down and will be officially over on Wednesday. Thursday and Friday of next week are holidays, and most Muslims go home to their villages to celebrate the holiday with their families. The boys don’t have school for the entire week, and our household staff has the whole week off, too.
It seems like people have been crawling out of the woodwork to ask for a “Lebaran Bonus.” (Lebaran is another name for Ramadhan, and by law major employers – including Ford – must give their employees 1 month’s salary as a bonus). We gave our staff their 1 month’s bonus, which we expected, but then other people kept asking us to pay them a Lebaran Bonus, including our security guards (who are compensated by their company, not by us directly), the pool man, the bottled water delivery guy, and the neighborhood security / garbage man. We ended up giving at least a token bonus to most of these people because we figure it is better to give them $10 or $20 and keep them on our good side than to have them mad at us for the next year.
On Saturday we went with our friends, the Willis family, to a go-kart place by the mall, then just before the rain started we went into the mall to eat a late lunch and then to see the new “Zorro” movie. I just talked with my parents and they saw that movie yesterday, as well. Some movies open here at the same time as the US and other movies take months before coming to Jakarta. Movies are not in the theatres very long, though – only 2 or 3 weeks, so if you want to see a movie in the theatre, you’ve got to go as soon as you see it advertised.
Mallory’s Walking
I think we are officially ready to say that Mallory is walking now. She took about 4 steps one day this week, then each day she has gotten more and more confident – I think she is up to about 8 steps on her own now. Sometimes she is braver than she should be, I fear. So far she hasn’t fallen too badly, but sometimes Mallory is so excited to try walking on her own that she starts walking even before she has her balance. It is cute to see how excited she gets when she does it – she usually claps for herself and gets us to clap for her, too.
Halloween
Heidi took the boys out trick or treating around Pondok Indah on Thursday night. The school had arranged a list of homes to go to, so Heidi went out with the boys and I stayed at home with Mallory and handed out candy. It was fun to see these American families here and how they decorated their front gates. One of the greatest things was seeing all the Indonesian staff and security guards of these homes and how much they go into it, as well (at most of the homes, they were the ones who handed out candy). You rarely went to the door of the home, most of the time you just stopped at the gate to get the candy.
Developing Country
Not that I need a reminder or anything, but I have had two conversations recently that reminded me that we live in a developing country. Last week I was speaking with someone at work about sports (everyone from work got together to play volleyball one night last week). She said that in addition to volleyball, she really likes swimming. She then said she has liked swimming since she was a child. She said that she grew up in Kalimantan (the Indonesian province on the island of Borneo), and that her family lived by a river, so she and her siblings always swam in the river. She then told me that her house was actually built on the river, meaning that part of the house was built on poles or whatever, actually over the river and that it was very convenient because the bathroom didn’t need plumbing – it was just a hole in the floorboards that went straight down into the river. I confirmed with her that this was the same river that she and her friends always went swimming in.
The second thing that reminded me that Indonesia is a developing country is that Cartim (our driver) told us that when his brother goes to his village this week for Idul Fitri (a 9 or 10 hour bus ride from Jakarta), he is taking a TV to his parents. Cartim told us that his parent’s village got electricity only last year.
Trip to Jogjakarta
Well, we are really looking forward to our trip to Jogjakarta next week. It will be nice to get a little bit of a break from the hectic pace of Jakarta and to see some interesting Indonesian cultural and historical sites. We’ll let you know how it goes.
