Reflecting

This evening, I sat in a botanical garden in the town of Bogor, 60 kilometers south of Jakarta, and was trying to remind myself that I’m in Indonesia. Sometimes it’s been really clear to me that I’m in Indonesia, far from home (think food, language, heat) and at other times, I think it’s easy to forget (think nice hotels, air conditioning, WiFi, airplanes). And Indonesia is quite complex that way. It’s many things for many people in many places. What’s important to me—I think—is that I spend my last two weeks being in Indonesia, as I may never come back to this part of the world, and it would be nice to make the most of it.

Does that mean that I need to sit on a crammed bus for 40 hours? Maybe it does. Should I eat only Indonesian food, even when it might make me a bit crazy meal after meal (my tempeh dish today, actually one of my favorites, had lots of little fish eyeballs in it, and that didn’t help). Should I unplug myself from the Western media for the next two weeks, and instead use that time to learn a bit of Bahasa Indonesia, the language that I really should be speaking more of by now? I’d like to think that I’d do all of these things, but they also seem hard, and I’m not sure that I want to put myself through them.

Maybe one of the problems is that I didn’t really have any clear goals for the trip, I don’t think. I just wanted it to be nearly as good as my unbeatable trip to East Africa. But I’m not sure what that looks like in the real world, what that means I should do on a Monday night after my work is done and when I’m due to be up early for a flight the next morning. It’s become a little like my life at home in this regard: I work a little, and am quite programmed when I do, and then I sit around, rather lazily, and do things I fancy as they arise. Maybe it’s good that Indonesia is not all that different for me, but maybe it’s not. Perhaps I’m missing out on an opportunity to really learn and grow, to stretch myself a bit. Perhaps.