As I was jumping around the expat blogs for Indonesia, I found a link on Jakarta Guru (linked in the blogroll also) to myself and an Indonesian guy I’ve worked with in the past, Jalu. I worked on a parallel session for the workshop that took place at UIN Alauddin in November. Lo, and behold! My name was dropped! Just thought you would like to know.
There is also a link to a German born expat who details her meeting of the Peace Corps advance assessment team trying to determine if they want to resume the program here. As a former PCV, I think that having English teachers here would be great, provided there is some development of collaborative teaching between an Indonesian teacher and the PCV. An Indonesian teacher will definitely have a better chance at maintaining discipline to a class of 30-50 raging children. With that said, I feel less on edge here in Makassar, Indonesia than I did in Boriya, Nepal. Insurrectionists are not coming to my school to extort money and the only loud sounds I hear are the fireworks for Chinese New Year. Heck, I may even want to volunteer again by the time (and if) Peace Corps returns. I could even vie for a pre-service trainer position given my time here.
Things to do in the next four months: travel to Surabaya twice for collaboration of some sort with Fulbright English Teaching Assistants, buy a suit (should be done this week), attend and present at Asia TEFL conference in Kuala Lumpur in June, sell off/give possession acquired in the past three years that are too big to put in luggage, spend about 15,000USD in grant money on trainings for in-service teachers, and enjoy the rest of my contract.
Dive info: My colleague Denis flew up to Gorontalo after the Grand Opening in order to go visit the Togian Islands for diving. He only had a few days and didn’t know the boat schedule from Gorontalo to the islands and ended up staying in Gorontalo to look for diving. Anyway, he tried to find diving around Gorontalo and the dive outfit that was in the Lonely Planet “didn’t know squat.” He finally found an outfit, Miguel’s Divers, that knew what they were doing. Denis has been diving for 10-15 years, so he should know when a company is a good one. I guess if you’re stuck in Gorontalo waiting for the boat, check them out for a good time.