Eyes on Indonesia

Komodo Island

2010-02-25T08:32:00.000-08:00

Travels with Tika

2010-02-22T16:06:00.000-08:00

A Wild Coast of Adventures: Oregon

2010-02-22T16:02:00.000-08:00

Keeping it active

2009-06-18T12:48:00.000-07:00

Still here.

Photos of Five Corners Two Art Work

2008-01-24T11:05:00.000-08:00

Five Corners Two

2008-01-24T11:02:00.000-08:00

On Words

Five Corners Two

By ANDREW GREENE

Jakarta – With OnWords’ recent focus on all things arty and creative, I thought that today would be a wonderful time to invite the readers to an upcoming artists party and exhibition.

The aptly named 5 Corners 2 is the second annual show for five friends who happen to be Indonesia-based artists. This year the artists, Charles Schuster, Gwen Shackleton, David White, Neil Bunting and Jeanie Merila are displaying approximately 80 pieces showcasing myriad styles, techniques, influences and results at the JW Marriott Hotel in Mega Kuningan from November 22^nd – 25th.

Schuster, an art teacher at Universitas Bina Nusantara and Monash University, is displaying work he has finished over the last four years. He writes, “My paintings are about the things I love: the sea, mountains, skin, tree bark, weather and, sometimes, the circus.”

I have yet to see any of Schuster’s pieces but am intrigued by the thought of an artist finding the miracle within such commonplace items such as skin and tree bark.

Shackleton, a Jakarta International School art teacher, says that she is influenced by colour, sentimentalism, and the Gestalt principles of perception. The latter explains how we unconsciously organize visual elements into unified wholes. An example of this occurs when we visualize four Pac-Man type shapes set up so that their mouths appear to delineate a rectangle. Our brains, seeing bits of the rectangle’s edges fill in the blanks giving us the sense of an entire shape that is not actually there.

Shackleton says, “I have no particular style of working, nor do I have a singular focus for subject matter – I paint when I am inspired by what I see, and I never know what, when, where or how that will happen – I merely react.”

Shackleton’s two meters by one, acrylic on canvas painting, Cirebon Sawah, Cirebon Rice Paddy, with its repetition and pattern makes excellent use of the Gestalt principles. More importantly to me, at a more animalistic level, its courageous bands of yellows, purples, greens and blues are simply beautiful.

She says about the work, “This is the largest work I have done to date and presented a great challenge to me in technique and scale. The colour scheme is complementary in its use of purple and yellow, but is only a slight exaggeration of the original intense hues seen at early evening on the harvested rice paddies of West Java.”

The second Jakarta International School representative, White has drawn on his experiences in Northern Africa, Sub-Saharan Africa and his current life in Indonesia for this year’s 5 Corners show. A figurative painter, White spent five years in Egypt and Zimbabwe exploring and creating depictions of their respective cultures before moving to Java a few years ago.

White says that he attempts to avoid the typical "photorealism" that is common to the figurative genre. Instead, the curly-topped artist veers toward interpretation through intense color selections, abstract mixtures, personality of the individual subject and their mystifying surroundings.

London-native Bunting, now a fortyish-something family man, revisits the influences of his youth with his My Punk Paintings 2007 collection. The Academic Colleges Group International School art teacher says that he is attempting to capture the “raw energy of late seventies ‘New Wave’ music through paint, pins and canvas. The album covers that inspire each image are a leading point into the painting, which, therein, has a life of its own.”

The pony-tailed Bunting adds, “It is interesting to me that this imagery and music derived from the UK is so popular with young people of Indonesia today. My paintings are created with a range of cheap, raw materials which are not usually combined together in paintings. I have used these materials because they seem fitting to a music form which drew its inspiration from urban and industrial living in the 1970s… I have deliberately aimed to subvert and challenge the rules of painting, as punk rock once rebelled against the rules of music.”

Another color-enthusiast, Merila, an Art & Design teacher at the Australian International School, has done much of her work En plein air, that is, in the open air.

Merila says, “My art is about using colour, light and textures to transform my world. The way light bounces off leaves, sand and sea in the afternoon sun, the broken reflections in water, or the translucent hues and textures on life ten meters below ocean waves. Works are en plein air paintings from Bali and Lombok as well as portraits of the undersea world.”

The Exhibition opens on Thursday, November 22 at 7 pm. There is an Artists’ Party on that Friday from 7 pm - 10 pm. The five artists will be on site throughout the weekend until the exhibition closes at 3:00 pm on Sunday, November 25. For further information please contact David White at 0813 857 00867 or Neil Bunting at 0813 1092 1265.

See you there,

This article was originally published Nov. 18, 2007 in The Jakarta Post.

Editing your work: writing tight brings the might

2008-01-24T11:00:00.000-08:00

On Words

Editing your work: writing tight brings the might

By ANDREW GREENE

Jakarta – To write tight is to write right. As mentioned in OnWords’ last column, omitting unnecessary words is a huge part of the editing process. Today we are going over how to identify and purge lazy openers, prepositional phrases and tedious nouns from your writing.

Lazy openers are those phrases like It is vital that and There are, that all too often open the baggy sentences that we write. Lazy openers are guilty of two sins. First of all, they contain forms of the weak verb to be. While at times we do need to use is, are, was, am and so forth, crisp prose contains them at a minimum.

Their second sin is that the words that make up lazy openers are simply unnecessary. Jump right into the action when writing. These phrases are easily cut from most writing and sentences read much better without them. Consider this example:

There is a mindless way to preparing meals which comes hand-in-hand with a mindless way of eating. This mindset is becoming more prevalent day-by-day and continues to bring with it greater and greater consequences.

By jumping straight to the point and eliminating the lazy openers and weak verbs we have reduced the excerpt by a third, giving us:

A mindless way to preparing meals, counterpart to the mindless way of eating, grows more prevalent every day and brings greater and greater consequences.

Although more concise and therefore stronger than the original example, you can reduce it even further:

Mindless meal preparing, like mindless eating, grows more…

Prepositions show relationships of one word to another. Some common prepositions are at, by, for, into, in, on, to, and with. A phrase, a group of words, that begins with a preposition is a prepositional phrase.

When editing, examine any sentences that seem to overly rely on prepositions. A good rule of thumb to follow is to avoid listing three or more prepositional phrases in a row.

The following example displays a number of the indications of excess wordiness that we have been covering:

The explanation offered by the principal of the school about the purpose for the new reading program in the English Department and the reasons that the teachers are not able to satisfy the wish of the parents by meeting with them this week was published in the newsletter.

Whew… What an eye full! How many prepositional phrases do you count in that example? What about the main verb? Is it active or passive? Remember from the last OnWords that we should stick with the active voice whenever possible.

Let us edit the passage by going active and reducing its number of prepositional phrases down to one.

In the newsletter, the school principal explained the English Department’s new reading program’s purpose and why the teachers cannot meet the parents, as they had wished, this week.

This condensed version is simple enough to be understood in a single reading, which is the goal of the effective writer.

One final ill to keep our eyes open for during the editing process is tedious nouns. Words ending with tion, ence, and ment suck the life out of your writing. Look for the weak verbs and tedious nouns that burden this passage:

The suggestion that Jakarta’s population increases and decreases by a quarter at the start and end of each working day, the fluctuation is because housing costs are too expensive near the city center may be incorrect since the benefits of living in the satellite cities are numerous in a variety of ways relevant to both education prospects and entertainment options.

Reading your writing aloud is a great way of judging it. Trust your own ear. Try reading the above. It should be hard to get through. Now, read aloud the revision below:

It is not only the high costs of living in the city center that lead to Jakarta’s population increasing and decreasing by a quarter each working day; people also chose to live in the satellite cities for education and entertainment benefits.

Despite being a third shorter than the original, the edited bit provides the same information as the first while being much easier to understand.

For most type of writing the primary objective is to be understood. By keeping our words as concise and as simple as possible, we are sure to meet this goal.

Happy purging,

This article was originally published Jan. 20, 2008 in The Jakarta Post.

Editing your work: the power of verbs

2008-01-24T10:56:00.000-08:00

OnWords

Editing your work: the power of verbs

By ANDREW GREENE

Jakarta – “Omit needless words,” advise William Strunk and E.B. White in their classic, The Elements of Style. Practicing what they speak, their textbook floats in at a mere 105 pages.

Deleting words, sentences and entire passages from your writing requires a hard to come by ruthlessness. After all, we, when writing, often become fond of what we have laid down and fall in love with our work. It happens to all of us.

The ability to look at sentences analytically is the key to being able to edit and liven up your own work. In order to do this, you need to understand the building blocks that make up a sentence. Its two main parts are the subject, the sentence’s who or what, and the verb, the sentence’s action or state of being.

Although subjects normally come before verbs as in Mom cooked and The sun rises, it is the verbs that give life to your writing. The grammatical subject of a sentence is often times different than the topic of discussion. Look at this sentence, She likes cereal more than eggs. What is the subject? What is the topic under discussion? Are they the same or different? If different, which is more important?

By asking these questions you see that the topic of breakfast foods is more important to the sentence than the grammatical subject, she.

The use of weak verbs produces limp, lifeless copy, while, conversely, active verbs give writing strength and confidence. Weak verbs are those which do not show action such as seem, be, remain, feel, appear along with passive forms, made up of the verb to be plus a past participle: for example, was stolen and has been bitten. The more weak verbs your writing contains, the more tiresome your writing most likely is.

When rereading and editing your work, look for weak verbs. When you find one, ask yourself what the sentence’s action is and then try to express that action as a verb.

Find the weak verbs in this sentence about expensive restaurants, These more expensive, less popular restaurants, whose lack of success was often the result of how expensive they were, are likely to go bankrupt.

The verbs of the rambling sentence are all or contain forms of the verb to be. Let us strengthen it by putting the action into verbs where we can. Here we go, Since these restaurants charge more, they are not popular and may go bankrupt.

Although we still have a single form of to be, this example is stronger for two reasons. First, the second sentence is much easier to understand and secondly, it is half the length of the first sentence. Remember, concise writing is powerful writing.

Consider this copy about a fictional project,

Though the canal ferries will be owned by the neighborhoods that they operate within, they will be operated by members of Jakarta’s Venice Project Association and partially supported by funds raised by the group. The remainder of the funds is to be provided by the city.

The wordiness of this 46-word example results from the many uses of the passive voice. Once you make the verbs active you end up with this tighter 25-word example,

The neighborhoods will own the canal ferries while Jakarta’s Venice Project Association will operate them. Both the association and the city will fund the ferries.

Now that we have shown that we must always be aware of weak verbs, we need to recognize that all to be forms and all passive verbs do not need to be kicked out of our writing. After all, “To be or not to be, that is the question,” is tough to improve upon. Weak verbs do have their place. We just need to ask ourselves the right questions during the editing process to ensure that they belong in ours.

Happy editing,

This article was originally published Jan. 13, 2008 in The Jakarta Post.

Three Ingredients to Good Writing

2008-01-24T10:53:00.000-08:00

On Words

Three Ingredients to Good Writing

By ANDREW GREENE

Jakarta – Writing hurts.

First of all, ideas are hard to cage elusive creatures. And then once we have been fortunate enough to secure a collection of thoughts to work with, we need to wrestle them into some sort of coherent order all the while deciding which to keep for further development and those of which we need to discard.

Understandably, many never get past this initial prewriting stage.

This does not need to be the case. The most talented, so-called natural writers schedule regular time to work at the craft. They know that writing is a skill that can be practiced and mastered the same as any other. They treat writing much the same as many of us approach golf, cooking, or any other hobby.

Indonesian residents often face the additional challenge of writing in a second or even a third or a fourth language. This hurdle brings with it its own set of unique difficulties since language is in a large part a manifestation of the thought patterns of native speakers.

Just as rules for eating differ from culture to culture, the rules for writing are different all around the world. When it comes to writing, being conversant in the grammar and the vocabulary of the target language is not enough just as when it comes to dinning it is not enough to bring your hungry Acehnese mother-in-law to Tony Roma’s. In order to write well, we need to understand how these speakers organize and communicate their thoughts and their language.

The three main ingredients that determine the organizational patterns of your written English are subject, purpose and audience. Increasing your understanding of these three elements will have you well on your way to becoming an effective writer.

Perhaps the biggest hindrance to writing is not having anything to say, that is, not having a suitable subject. Good writing needs a subject that is neither too general nor too specific. Think about having your school or your workplace for a subject. Both are too large to grip. They must be narrowed down.

The whittling of the former subject may go something like this:

My School

Long Days

Many Classes

Limited Free Time

45 Minute Lunches

Not Enough Time for Lunch

“Not enough time for lunch” is a subject that most students are interested in and would like to explore further. A strong subject is something that you know or that you want to learn more about. Finding a hook to your interest is a large part of the writing process.

The purpose behind your writing is just as important as your subject. Simply put, you need to know why you are writing. Are you writing to entertain, to inform or to persuade? Most writing will have more than one purpose, such as attempting to entertain while at the same time trying to persuade or inform.

An activity that you can do to help build your awareness of purpose in writing is to skim through some newspapers and magazines to find articles that entertain, inform, and persuade. Also, you can look for some that have more than a single purpose.

The final ingredient we are exploring today, audience, strongly affects the first two. Whom you are writing to helps you decide upon your subject and your purpose.

All audiences read your writing with differing expectations. To best be understood and, more importantly, to not be misunderstood it is vital that you keep your audience in mind as you proceed through the writing the process. You probably have incorrectly read between the lines of an email or have had your own emails incorrectly read. As more of our daily communications become less face-to-face and more frequently written, this type of misreading will become more commonplace. By paying attention to your audience you can avoid this error.

A last exercise to tie your understanding of subject, purpose and audience together is to narrow a subject down from the broad ideas of either your school or your workplace. Once you have discovered a subject like “not enough lunch time” determine a purpose and an audience. Then write a paragraph that meets the demands of your subject, purpose and audience.

After you have written this paragraph, change the purpose and the audience while keeping the same subject and write a new paragraph. After you have your two paragraphs compare them and see how writing is controlled by these three ingredients.

If you play with these three basic steps until you are comfortable with them you are sure to make quick progress in your written communication.

Until next column happy writing,

This article was originally published Jan. 6, 2008 in The Jakarta Post.

Technology in the classroom: e-portfolios

2008-01-24T10:50:00.001-08:00

On Words

Technology in the classroom: e-portfolios

By ANDREW GREENE

Jakarta – Portfolios have traditionally been folders that artists, photographers and models proudly toted around town showing off their work. Nowadays, however, portfolios are finding their ways into the lives of more and more of us. In fact, at the international school I last worked all students possessed electronic versions of them.

I never understood the reasons behind their use so I asked two Information Communication Technology teachers to talk to me about e-portfolios. One explained that e-portfolios showcased students’ work. He said that a selection of the students’ work was scanned into or produced upon a hard disk that was then saved to DVDs for the children to take home to their parents. He summarized that, “The only positive to this is that we can save audio and video.”

While I understand the need for children and their schools to please parents, this use of e-portfolios did not seem to me to be a true representation of a way technology could best be part of the classroom. Sure, there are some peripheral skills being practiced during this process such as video and audio recording, editing, scanning and saving files, but honestly I expected more. Fortunately, it turns out, there is more.

Supposedly, when ancient Egyptian King Thamus was presented with the new technology of writing he worried that it would turn out to be a tool of recollection rather than a booster of wisdom. When not completely utilized, e-portfolios run this same risk of becoming merely repositories of past accomplishments.

But, the good news is that fully-realized e-portfolios are more than that; they are truly tools of learning. They delineate clear learning standards for educational professionals, students, parents, family members and, in certain cases, the public. Educator June Ahn wrote in the T.H.E. Journal that e-journals are tools that help teachers with both reflection and feedback. She wrote, “As an assessment tool, e-portfolios provide an economy of scale in terms of efficiency and informational depth… providing ease of access to teachers, students and the general public.”

Teachers and authors Leah E Wickersham and Sharon M Chambers wrote about this same benefit in the journal Education. They state that in the past decade the focus in education has shifted “from a teacher-centered instructional environment to a student-centered one.” This has made teachers more accountable to students than ever before and as a result more dependant upon e-portfolios. E-portfolios empower students. They enable us to judge progress and learning objectives against those of other students and institutions.

This work storage and the opening up of the educational ledger are not the only benefits to e-portfolios. Ahn says they also enhance learning by allowing different levels of access to teachers, students and whoever else should be able to review and comment upon work.

These cleared lines of dialogue bring educational content into context. This concept is key in the ESL classroom. Indonesian students frequently know the English tenses rules without knowing when and why to use them. They have the content, but not the context. Content acquisition is fine for sitting exams, while contextual learning is necessary for living.

Wickersham and Chambers continue, “Multiple researchers concur that the best learning, which is retained, occurs in the context of an active learning experience.” E-portfolios brings context to learning by helping with self-reflection while turning the classroom and homework experience into a more dynamic experience by inter-connecting all of the students’ work with what is happening around them.

Just as I am writing this article following years in the classroom, discussions with ICT instructors and the reading of numerous educational journals, all students learn and produce work that has been filtered through their own experiences. When such work is stored online along with links to class material and peer work, students, parents and teachers can look back upon it learning from it in relation to the setting that it was completed in. This helps everyone.

By improving communication within the teacher-student-parent triangle and bringing context to content, e-portfolios are a tech tool that belongs in the classroom. The challenge we face is how to best make use of them.

Happy Holidays,

This article was originally published Dec. 30, 2007 in The Jakarta Post.

Studying Online

2008-01-24T10:47:00.000-08:00

On Words

Studying Online

By ANDREW GREENE

Jakarta – Last column we discussed the benefits of following the higher-education pathway overseas. Today, we will explore some reasons as to why we should consider doing this online.

I have taken online classes with schools in Britain and the United States for a number of years now and feel that the classes have been a boon to me both professionally and personally. I have also worked with and hired people who have earned qualifications online.

Through the use of the internet and virtual classrooms, I have truly felt that I have been part of these classes. After much reflection and research I have come up with five main reasons a person should consider studying online.

1. For many, the most important reason for pursuing a degree online is cost. Distance learning saves money on transportation plus room and board at a school. As stated in our last column, these costs can easily add up to (USD) $10,000 per year.

University of Massachusetts, Amherst charges around $300 per credit for online undergraduate classes. A full-time student completes 30 credits a year which adds up to $ 9,000. Clearly, you can see that by choosing to stay in Jakarta while virtually studying overseas you can cut your expenses in half.

2. My online learning experiences have been vastly different to those of my earlier university years in California. Back then, the huge majority of us were pretty much the same, in our twenties and from Northern California.

Distance learning introduces you to people from all over the world and from all walks of life. Online, I have studied with and learned from peers living on three continents with each possessing unique professional backgrounds and life experiences. An analytical writing class I completed just last week had a Transportation Security Administration inspector, preschool teachers, a computer programmer, a traveler and a metal shop worker for students. They all made for an interesting mixture that made the learning enjoyable and worthwhile.

3. Although distance learning students are in classes comprised of students from around the globe, they are still able to enjoy the benefits of living at home. They can use these years to learn the family business or help with whatever familial responsibilities need to be covered. Furthermore, by remaining home you do not need to be concerned with the costs and troubles of securing a student visa. Overall, staying put in Indonesia while studying online is a great option for those with full-time jobs or families.

4. With distance learning, students have constant and immediate access to course materials. The classes I have been in have had bulletin boards, email communications, online content and library access. I have been able to study and review the materials at my convenience. There is no need for me to carry books around, since as long as I have internet access I can study.

Also, when students post their work in the virtual classroom we were able to review and learn from it. There have been many occasions when I was simply amazed, in a positive way, by someone else’s take on a topic.

In addition to classes that you enroll in, many universities post lectures online free of charge for anyone to learn from. Of course, you will not get class credit for learning this way, but the benefits to learning need not be only pragmatic.

In the autumn of this year, Stanford University, ranked second best in the world by The Economist Magazine, offered the following free seminars: Seminar in Guidance, Navigation and Control, Bioengineering and Biodesign Forum, Law for Computer Science Professionals, Software on Demand, Frontiers in Interdisciplinary Biosciences, Human-Computer Interaction Seminar, Seminar on Computer Systems, Seminar: Topics in International Technology Management and Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders Seminar.

Harvard University likewise offers such lectures online. Another way to find free digitalized lessons and lectures is through Apple’s iTunes software.

5. Distance learning instruction forces students to become fluent in the languages of English and technology. There is a basic educational tenet that all classes are language classes. I like that idea. After all, math has its own vocabulary and needs, just as the different sciences and other subjects do. I feel that technology should be treated the same. In reality, all classes are technology classes. Online classes enable students to improve their English and technological capabilities no matter where they live.

Whichever direction you decided to follow, local, online or overseas, I wish you success in your educational pursuits.

Cheers,

This article was originally published Dec. 23, 2007 in The Jakarta Post.

Why Keep Learning

2008-01-24T10:45:00.000-08:00

On Words

Why Keep Learning

By ANDREW GREENE

Jakarta – It is hard not notice the signs of educational institutions such as Premier Language Service, MIBT, Future and ACG dotted throughout Jakarta. In Indonesia, learning is big business.

And rightfully so, after all, investing in education produces bountiful dividends. Nipissing University of Canada reported in 2001 that a university graduate earned an average of 91% more than someone who possessed only a high school diploma. Over the course of a lifetime this worked out to more than one million Canadian dollars at the then present value. The benefits of a university degree are not merely monetary. Without a degree, you cannot even apply for many of the most rewarding and interesting jobs.

For many Indonesians, a qualification from a local university is not enough. Many prefer to study abroad. According to the Jakarta’s Australian Embassy’s 'Study in Australia' press release, 16,000 Indonesians study in that country alone. There are numerous reasons why people opt to study overseas. For some, it is frustration with Indonesia’s educational system. For others, it is a desire for freedom away from home or the wish to make oneself as marketable as possible.

Whatever the reason, it cannot be denied that an overseas education provides many benefits. First of all, the quality and standard of foreign education is, as a whole, of a higher quality than that which is offered in Indonesia. From The Economist Magazine’s ranking of the world’s top 20 universities, only one, Tokyo University at number 14, is not in Europe or North America.

The internationally-recognized qualifications you earn overseas can help you in a number of ways. They open up the entire world as a job market. They add value to your resume. They provide proof that you have been exposed to techniques, skills, perspectives and systems of thinking that you may not experience in Indonesia.

Language is often another deciding factor for people who are considering such a move. More than ever before, people have a need to learn English. It is the language of business and technology. Many international companies and organizations will not consider hiring employees who lack adequate language skills. Without the ability to process English, you are locked out of one-third of all the information on the internet, and a large percentage of the material published on business, medical and technology matters.

However, the advantages to an overseas degree notwithstanding, there is one prohibitive hurdle to realizing this dream. It is extremely expensive. CNN reported that the average cost of a four-year private college climbed above the (USD) $30,000 mark for the first time last year. For foreign students, who are charged a higher tuition rate, this cost is even higher. In addition to the course fees, students studying abroad also need to figure in travel and living expenses which can add up to more than (USD)$ 10,000 per year.

Fortunately, there are other, less-expensive ways to earn that same high-quality education nowadays. The first option is to complete a portion of the degree in Indonesia. Many overseas-based universities offer foundation programs here. These require students to spend fewer years overseas and help them make an easier transition to international studying styles and norms.

The second option is online learning. The fact that technology is making the world smaller is bringing traditionally brick-and-mortar classrooms to wherever the students may be. OnWords’ next column will explore these two ways of reducing the cost of an overseas education along with the qualities and factors to consider while choosing a program.

Until next column,

Cheers,

This article was originally published Dec. 16, 2007 in The Jakarta Post.

Learning to Think

2008-01-24T10:40:00.000-08:00

On Words

Learning to Think

By ANDREW GREENE

Jakarta – Students are not educated for the past, but rather for the present and the future. This is done by teaching critical thinking skills.

Critical thinking is, as defined by American psychologist Diane Halpern, the ability to use skills and strategies in a purposeful manner, increasing the probability of achieving a desired result. It is this ability, more than any content learning, which students need to bring forward with them into future learning situations both in and out of the classroom.

Without critical thinking skills, we cannot fully participate within our current time and context. Nowadays, we face new learning challenges faster than ever before. Whether at school, home or our workplace, we constantly must make decisions quickly and correctly. For us, living in Jakarta, some of the most common problems we encounter have to do with educating our children, staffing our houses and businesses, choosing places to live and re-upping for another contract. Critical thinking helps us make such decisions judicially.

University of Massachusetts professor Cynthia Suopis likes to demonstrate the difference between standard thinking and critical thinking by giving an analogy of a river running through a town. She says,

Imagine standing by the river and then suddenly you see someone in the water, waving their arms, being swept downstream. If you can swim and you are able bodied, you would probably jump into the water and try to save the person. Good for you! That is good thinking and certainly responsive to the person in need. After you save one person, you go back on shore and dry yourself off and you suddenly see another person floating down stream in the same manner. You jump back in and you save that person. This strange occurrence happens again and then it happens again a few days later when you walk by the same spot along the river. A thinker would jump into the water and save the drowning people one by one by one. A critical thinker would do something else. Can you guess?

Yes, a critical thinker would ask, why are these people falling in the river? What is happening upstream?

Suopis explains that this story shows that simply reacting is “a very different thing” than using skills and strategies to break problems into parts for analysis. This process slows down the situation enabling you to search for the heart of the problem and ways that can best solve it. Suopis’s explanation reminds me of the way in which top-flight athletes talk about how they see the entire court or field while everyone else moves around them in slow-motion.

Fortunately, anyone can improve his or her critical thinking ability. In their book, Writing Analytically, David Rosenwasser and Jill Stephen lay out “five analytical moves” that we may follow in order to strengthen our critical thinking. We will review three of the five moves in today’s column.

The first move is suspending judgment. The two authors argue that the stopping of judging our world with likes and dislikes, agreement and disagreement is well worth the effort since judgments usually say more about the judge than that which is being judged.

Secondly, Rossenwasser and Stephen suggest that we “define significant parts and how they’re related.” This is the breaking down of a situation into workable pieces. This moving from the general to the specific and tracing the relations between the parts is vital to all critical thinking. We often use this technique in the language classroom when it comes to reading and writing exercises. Once, we can see how a text is organized and figure out how everything is connected, the mystery and the fear are vanquished from the learning process.

Finding patterns and binaries is important for the critical thinker and the authors’ third analytical move.

Patterns represent themes. Does more homework make for better educated students? Does the Trans-Jakarta Busway lessen traffic or make it worse? Are there other correlations we need to find and analyze before we can make a conclusion. A critical thinker explores patterns.

Binaries are matched pairs of exact opposites such as open and closed, black and white, home schooling or enrolling in school. Actively searching for these forks in the analytical road is essential since this is from where both sides of arguments are found.

Critical thinking is not a simple process of moving from point A to point B to point C. Sometimes we need to explore the road less traveled before turning back from where we came or, if need be, continuing on. Critical thinkers ponder and revisit all possibilities.

Thankfully, Rossenwasser and Stephen do not merely explain these moves. They also provide suggestions for us to follow if we would like to strengthen our critical thinking. We can actively work our critical thinking muscles on poems, speeches, movies, paintings, or anything we can read or observe.

I tried out the analytical moves on Emily Dickinson’s, Because I Could Not Stop for Death. Sure enough, by suspending judgment and searching for the parts that make up the whole, I was able to appreciate the poem in a way that I had never been able to do before with poetry. I hope that you too can find the time to practice the moves.

Happy thinking,

This article was originally published Dec. 12, 2007 in The Jakarta Post.

Three Big Answers by ESL’s Biggest Star

2008-01-24T10:36:00.000-08:00

On Words

Three Big Answers by ESL’s Biggest Star

By ANDREW GREENE

Jakarta – For educator and thespian Jason O’Donnell, all the classroom truly is a stage. The American, a long-time Jakarta resident, graces our living room television screens and our children’s English classes. O’Donnell recently took time out of his busy schedule to answer three questions for OnWords.

OnWords: What productions have you been a part of in Indonesia?

I hosted more than 30 Turis Dadakan, Sudden Tourist, prime-time episodes. This has been my favorite shooting gig, since I got to travel all over Indonesia, stay in luxurious 5-star hotels, and explore this amazing country. All this while inviting a poor, hard-working Indonesian fellow to join me for the trip of a life-time. It was a reality-travel program. We stayed in presidential suites well out of most people's budgets, some upwards of eight million rupiah a night! It did, of course, spoil me immensely.

On the other hand, I enjoy fiction, though not Cinetron so much. I especially like acting in comedies. There's such a challenge in comedy, and it's just a lot of fun to do. I have been a guest star on a variety of shows like, Rumpi Talk Show, Selebriti, Kontes Dangdut Indonesia and Dangdut Mania.

I really have a passion for acting and have enjoyed the roles I have played on made-for-television films, Layar Komedi and various roles for Tawa Sutra.

In addition to the acting, I have been a contestant on Bule Gila, (Crazy Whitey), Indonesia’s Family Feud game show, and Super Deal 2 Milyar (billion). Non-fiction is easier; I just have to be myself when I'm a host or a contestant on a program.

OnWords: How did you get involved in teaching and what do you enjoy the most about it?

Teaching for me is very similar to being onstage, it's all in the performance and delivery. If you can teach and entertain at the same time, it makes it all the more enjoyable, and therefore memorable, for the students. I first started teaching in Taipei, Taiwan. I lived there a couple years attempting to learn Mandarin. Soon, I discovered that teaching English was a lot more rewarding than studying Chinese!

I love teaching young people. They're more likely to be as gila, crazy, as their bule gila teacher. I often like to do dramas and role plays in class, and the students are less reticent to just jump up in front of the class and do it. Business classes I find a little too dry so I try to avoid those. Teaching to my strengths is important to me.

I have been lucky to have an understanding director of studies, Justin Roberts at English Education Center, who has been very accommodating to my turbulent schedule. Last year was especially tough, I was shooting three or four episodes of Turis Dadakan each month and my classes were affected and cover teachers often had to be found at the last minute. Justin was a great help. Students, for the most part, didn't mind too much. I think they liked the fact that they could see their teacher on TV, if not in the class. I always told them it was homework to tune in and help ratings at the same time!

OnWords: Why did you first come to Indonesia and how do you like it?

I basically came as a language refugee from Taiwan. Indonesian proved far easier to learn. It should really be the international language, rather than English. But then we'd be out of a job.

I had come to Indonesia first as a tourist and found it intoxicatingly fascinating. And I've always been a fan of islands, and what better a country than Indonesia.

It’s a bit cliché, but honestly Jakarta is like a durian. It smells and tastes awful at first, but then you get used to it, and it pulls you in. It tugs you in such a way that escape is impossible. And there are a ton of negative adjectives that could be used to describe Jakarta, but boring would never be one of them!

OnWords: Thank you for your time O’Donnell. I look forward to catching you on the screen in the near future.

Until our next column,

Cheers,

This article was originally published Nov. 26, 2007 in The Jakarta Post.

Importance of Art

2008-01-24T10:33:00.000-08:00

On Words

Importance of Art

By ANDREW GREENE

Jakarta – When school budgets are cut, art is often the first class to go.

The groupthink seems to be that studying art is fine as long as time and other resources allow. Otherwise, it is treated as if it were a disposable subject; something that is at its heart little more than an entertainment that can be guiltlessly thrown away.

True, most students do not grow up to be professional artists. But then again most do not become mathematicians, authors or scientists either. However, since we understand how the macro skills taught through math, language and science instruction spread into all areas of our lives, those later subjects remain untouchable.

What we fail to keep in mind is that when we study art we discover new ways of looking. Art opens our eyes. Without fresh perspectives there will be few new ideas in math, science, literature, business or life. A background in art gives us the ability to see the world from different angles. This is a skill that colors all that we do.

One of the best ways parents can foster their children’s natural love of art is to introduce them to museums and clubs that stimulate their interests. In Jakarta, we are fortunate to live in close proximity to all sorts of galleries, art clubs and art schools. One such club, profiled in the last OnWords, Jakarta Art Teachers and I, offers art workshops. I was fortunate to be able to discuss one of these workshops with the participants of a recent gathering.

Consisting of a variety of workshops and instructed by 15 art teachers, the workshop gave students the opportunity to learn from new friends. Teacher Judi Harwin says that although the students started off a little shy they were eager to learn new skills and "were extremely motivated by working alongside students from different schools."

Participant eleventh-grader Satoshi agrees saying, “It’s a good idea to have this kind of event, because we were able to learn lots of art techniques from different teachers and share our knowledge of art with other students.”

Tuktik, another eleventh-grader, was also pleased with her experience. "I’ve learnt new things,” she recalls, “gained new skills, experienced new styles of teaching. It seems to me the world is wider.”

Art workshops provide students safe places from which to address difficult subjects. Satoshi is especially proud of his work on racism saying, "I did nine paintings of students' faces. It was a bit hard, but it was fun as well… I used black, white and gray for the painting on canvas in a black frame. The idea is to show that if you take the color out people, we are all the same."

An additional beaming participant, tenth-grade student Hana, says about her project, "I wanted to focus on an Indonesian concern. I picked the Bird of Paradise because the bird is only found in Indonesia. I wanted to make the style of my art unique by using spices as a painting material. Spices symbolize Indonesia. The colors of spices are limited and I struggled hard to find a perfect match for the plumage of the bird. This project has been a real challenge for me as I had never drawn with spices before, and I had to do lots of trial before the final piece."

Learning from others is one the keys to the success of these workshops. Simon Mortimer, the leader of the workshop's etching work station, says, "The focus was on giving students from different schools the same collective artistic experience, but more importantly, to allow them to have fun experimenting with different media and techniques."

Harwin agrees adding that she believes that both teachers and students got the chance to grow. She says, "There is a great diversity of international and national teachers, different ages, yet with a common focus… We all have our own individual strengths and weaknesses, so we pick up lots of helpful advice.”

For further information about joining an art club or school contact JATI at jati_contact@yahoo.com, Mitra Rahardi Prana Art School at 719-4715 or Kelas Melukis Yudacitra Art Classes at 719-1042.

Until next column,

Happy Creating,

This article was originally published Nov. 11, 2007 in The Jakarta Post.

Jakarta Art Teachers & I

2007-10-27T22:47:00.000-07:00

On Words

Jakarta Art Teachers & I

By ANDREW GREENE

Jakarta – Picasso famously said, “Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up.”

Each day, art teacher Neil Bunting works at solving this problem with his dedication in his international school’s classroom and through the organization he founded, Jakarta Art Teachers & I.

Formed two years ago this November, JATI was, like much in the art world, crafted out of a sense of anxiety and loneliness.

Bunting, who has lived in Jakarta since 2002, recalls in a written interview, “I first thought of an arts organization in 2004. I felt as an art teacher, and an artist, I was living in a state of cultural disconnectedness and desperately needed to forge links with other schools, teachers and people connected with the arts.”

JATI’s inaugural meeting in 2005 was attended by five international-school art teachers. These initial members were enthused by JATI’s dream and spread its message and now around 20 members from thirteen schools take part in each meeting.

In addition to the monthly meetings the members are in near daily contact with one another in order to bounce ideas around and share practical information about such things as exhibitions of interest and where to buy art equipment. “The organization has made significant progress during the last two years,” says Bunting.

Open to all Indonesian schools, JATI promotes the values of expression, individuality, and creativity. Bunting explains that the organization “encourages collaboration and sharing of expertise between art educators, facilitators and anybody who cares passionately about the visual arts” by developing and promoting art through exhibitions, workshops and all kinds of artistic relationships between students and teachers.

Bunting says that it is key to JATI’s vision that local, national and international schools are involved, “This is imperative. The organization is not simply an international school organization. Many of our schools use the International Baccalaureate curriculum. To apply the philosophies of IB we must involve Indonesian schools. This is not just about paying lip service to a school curriculum. This about doing what is right—walking the walk.”

“We,” Bunting continues, “are still striving to involve Indonesian schools and the local community more. We want Indonesian art teachers to take a more active role and we are seeking to not make them feel alienated in any way by producing our minutes and agendas and statements in Bahasa and English.”

Past workshops have featured stations teaching a variety of techniques from book-binding to chocolate moulds and transcriptions in mixed media to printmaking and watercolor painting.

Both students and teachers are encouraged to stretch, to grow at JATI workshops. The students experience new techniques and ideas while the teachers are able practice team-teaching methods and observe their peers at work.

JATI continually strives to create and maintain mutually supportive working environments. Bunting believes its members understand that in order to be creative, the fear of mistakes must be abolished.

Bunting says, “Workshops are particularly beneficial for students from less well resourced schools, who, for example, have never had the opportunity to use a printing press or be involved in photographic processes.”

The new year should be fruitful for the club. Bunting and JATI colleague Dave White are hard at work securing a location for JATI’s next exhibition. Showcasing the work of students of all ages from the organization’s 13 schools, Bunting promises the show will be "huge."

This next exhibition is just a step. Bunting says, “"JATI will go from strength to strength. There will be more exhibitions, workshops and opportunities for the art community.”

For further information about JATI, visit its website at http://www.neilbunting.com/JATIWEB.html, email the organization at jati_contact@yahoo.com or telephone Neil Bunting at +62 813 10921265.

This article was originally published in The Jakarta Post.

Indian Bagpipes

2007-10-09T05:07:00.000-07:00

Samosir Farmer

2007-10-09T05:06:00.000-07:00

Outdoor Barbers at Lake Toba

2007-10-09T05:04:00.000-07:00

Water Buffalo on Samosir Island

2007-10-09T04:59:00.000-07:00

Tika ready to cross the river at Bukit Lawang

2007-10-09T04:55:00.000-07:00

A Batak Girl with her Slingshot

2007-10-09T04:54:00.000-07:00

A Girl Walking Along the Road from Tuk Tuk

2007-10-09T04:41:00.000-07:00

Public Speaking: Rehearsing and Giving the Speech

2007-10-08T00:59:00.000-07:00

OnWords

Rehearsing and Giving the Speech

By ANDREW GREENE

Jakarta – The moment has arrived, for today, we rehearse and we give our speech.

First of all, as we prepare to conquer our oratory fear, we need to remember that the key is in the preparation. It is as coaches preach, “You play as you practice.”

Confidence in front of your audience comes from complete familiarity with your material. Tentativeness and an over-reliance on notes rob you of your confidence and therefore your credibility.

As you practice your speech, you need to remember where your signal words are. How did you organize your speech? What are the most important points? Once you understand and are fully acquainted with the skeleton of your speech you will be more capable of presenting it in a natural manner.

Mind-mapping, also called clustering, brainstorming and a whole list of other names, is one effective way of memorizing your speech’s notes due to its visual nature.

To mind map, you begin by writing your subject in the middle of a blank sheet of paper. You next circle the subject and then write your main ideas radiating out from the circled central-subject. From these main ideas you branch out your supporting details. Once you have finished, you are left with a series of webs that clearly delineate the relationships between the subject, its main ideas and their supporting details. Some people feel that color coding the map by order of importance is of further help.

After you have memorized your speech using whichever mnemonic techniques you are comfortable with, you will need to rehearse it. At first it is fine for you to practice with your note-cards, but eventually you want to be able to deliver your speech without them, only having them on hand in case of emergency.

When you begin to practice aloud you may initially feel awkward. After all, for most of us, it is not natural to speak all alone. What you should aim for is the ability to give your presentation in a conversational, normal manner. As you give yourself feedback on your rehearsals, ask yourself if you appear natural. Drill and drill until the speech becomes second nature.

Where are you going to give your speech? Are you going to use any sound or lighting equipment? If so, try to get practice time in the actual venue and with the equipment that you will be using. The time to first hear your own amplified voice is not when you are parting your lips in front of the audience.

When the occasion to give your speech arrives, there are a number of tips for you to keep in mind.

Most importantly, you need to remember that you are ready. You are completely prepared and it is you who knows your material the best. Next, you need to always bear in mind that the audience is there for you. They want to go on your journey with you. They are not looking for faults; they want you to succeed.

You want to speak to friends, not strangers. The international nonprofit organization Toastmasters suggests you greet members of the audience as they arrive. This gives you the chance to “Know your audience” and in turn boosts your credibility.

During your speech it is helpful for you to look out over the audience and make eye contact with individuals. This calms your nerves and in turn puts your listeners at ease.

As OnWords’ final public speaking column comes to a close, I would like to ask you a few questions. What public speakers do you admire? Why do they appeal to you? Is one of their main strengths that they seem to belong on stage? That they are natural speakers? I am guessing your answer to these last two queries is, yes.

What we all need to keep in mind is that when we are observing those gifted speakers, we are witnessing just the tip of a long process that involves writing, editing, and a whole lot of practicing. They have put in the time perfecting this skill so that it does in fact become natural. The good news for all of us is that we too can work at public speaking. We too can transform it into an activity we come to enjoy.

For information on how to join Toastmasters or on how to even start a chapter within your company or group please contact Kebayoran Toastmasters’ Vice President (membership), Monica Sugiarto, at 062818155119 or queen@sugiarto.famili.com. Toastmasters also has a website, www.toastmasters.org, loaded with public speaking tips and membership information.

Until next column,

Happy Speaking,

This article was originally published in The Jakarta Post.

Public Speaking: Clearing the Mud

2007-10-08T00:56:00.000-07:00

OnWords

The Speech: Clearing the Mud

By ANDREW GREENE

Jakarta – Now that you have finished your speech’s draft, it is time to tighten it up. You do this by going through your writing and weeding out the clutter.

During this phase, it is helpful for you to keep in mind that your primary goal is simply to communicate your message. Show no mercy when it comes to editing your speech; it is dangerous to fall in love with your own language skills.

The following points will help you while you edit.

Adjectives deaden. “Show, don’t tell,” is the old axiom. Adjectives, words such as pretty, good, best, important, do not tell the listeners much about your subject. They just tell the audience how you feel about the subject.

Have you ever asked your kid how school was and all you receive in return is a reply of “good?” Of course you have. All parents have. Why is this common answer so frustrating? Because, what we want to learn are the hows and whys of our children’s days, not just that they are good or bad or awright. Your audience is no different. An over-reliance on adjectives keeps your listeners from going on the thinking journey with you.

Awaken the senses. Can you see, taste, feel what you are trying to say? If you cannot, neither can your listeners. The noun happiness is just a word, an abstraction, an idea. It is no stronger than an adjective. A warm puppy, coffee served in bed, a phone call from an old friend, those are all concrete ingredients that make up the experience of happiness. By replacing telling words, adjectives and abstractions, with concrete details, that is showing words, your listeners experience your speech.

Public groping is distasteful. When you have got something to say, say it! Do not stand in front of all, reaching for meaning as you try to clarify your position. Phrases such as, “What I’d like to say…” and “What I’m trying to get across today is….” only tell the audience that you do not understand your own message. By having chosen a subject and focus that you believe in, you can avoid these trust-killing phrases and stick with the concrete details audiences thrive in.

Confidence. Before your listeners can believe in you, you must believe in yourself. Saying, “I feel that…” or “In my opinion it’s clear that …” weakens both you and your message. If you do not feel it, do not say it. Your audience understands that what you say is what you believe.

If you need to share someone else’s thoughts, attribute them to that person so that your own message maintains its integrity.

Which sentence is the strongest from the following four examples?

The Red Hot Chili Peppers are an underrated band.

I believe that the Red Hot Chili Peppers are an underrated band.

You need to understand that The Red Hot Chili Peppers are an underrated band.

He feels The Red Hot Chili Peppers are an underrated band.

The first sentence is the most powerful since it is stated as a fact. There is no belief, no feeling, no wiggle room involved in the declaration. When speaking this is the most effective format to follow.

Stop on and ons. Many of my students love to use etc… This is wrong. When you want to give a list, give the list. Then stop that list concisely with your final item. Your listeners do not need to hear “etcetera” or “and so on.” Keep your message clear, by just sticking to your message.

Repeat by repeating. During your introduction and your closing you will wish to restate your thesis. Also, throughout your speech you will need to reinforce your speech’s main ideas and theme. However, it is important for you to do so without muddying your words with things like “Let me reiterate now…” and “Once again, I need to stress…” When you need to restate, do it. Do not ask for permission, do not explain. If your message is clear and strong, your listeners will be smart enough to follow.

In the next OnWords, our final installment in the public speaking series, we will go over rehearsal techniques and tips for the actual presentation.

Until then,

Happy editing,

This article was originally published in The Jakarta Post.

Speech Writing

2007-10-04T23:06:00.000-07:00

On Words

Speech Writing

By ANDREW GREENE

Jakarta – OnWords’ last column went over the importance of a speech’s subject, purpose, audience and occasion. Today, we will explore speech writing.

First of all, we need to realize that while there are commonalities in all forms of writing, the fact that a speech is heard, not seen, presents us with some unique challenges.

A reader is able to highlight important details, reread complicated passages and even take breaks. The listeners of your speech will not have these liberties. They will just have a single go at it and it is up to you, the speech writer, to craft a message that is both comprehendible and interesting. You have got to write something that is as listener-friendly as possible.

To help your listeners, it is important that your speech has a theme that can be referred to again and again. The theme will largely be determined by your speech’s subject, purpose, audience and occasion. It is the single thought you would like to leave your audience with.

If the subject of your speech is “success” then perhaps your theme could be “never giving up on your dreams.” This gives your subject a focus and provides your audience one easily remembered point.

After you have chosen your theme, organizing the speech is a pretty straight-forward affair. There are three main parts to a speech: the introduction, the body and the conclusion.

Beginning the speech writing process with an outline is a good idea since it provides you with a visual layout that is easy to remember. While you build your outline you need to remember to come back to your theme at the end of each main supporting idea.

Once the outline is finished, the time to write the speech arrives. The introduction needs to jump right into the action by stating your theme and then giving a preview of your talk. This will provide your listeners with a clearly demarcated path.

The introduction should say something like, “Today we are going to discuss three ways in which never giving up on your dreams leads to success. First, … Second, … Third, …” These words, “First, Second” and “Third,” act as signposts which lead your audience where you would like them to go.

When it comes to speaking, simple is beautiful. A speech’s sentences need to be precise and short. If you use complicated sentences you run the risk of losing the audience. Generally speaking, more complicated subjects demand more concise structures. Specialist vocabulary and acronyms need to either be avoided or explained in full.

Pronouns present a danger too. They can be difficult on the listener. It can be tough trying to keep tract of what “it” or “this” or “he” refers to. In speeches it is usually best to stick with concrete nouns.

Transitions are especially important in speech writing. As mentioned above, these are your speech’s signposts. By the proper use of words such as “but,” “however” and “despite” listeners know that a contradiction is on its way; while using “additionally” and “another point is…” informs the audience that you are about to buttress your position.

Do not be a statistics slave. Only present the most salient factual details that support your theme. This is the information that listeners are not going to easily forget. Your audience can get lost if you throw too many numbers and data at them.

After you have written the introduction and the body of your speech you will need to write your conclusion. An effective conclusion lets your audience know that the speech is coming to an end and more importantly restates your theme. A sound way of testing your conclusion is to see if people get a good general idea of what your message is just by listening to the conclusion.

By paying attention to vocabulary, sentence structure, theme and its reinforcement along with its overall simplicity you will soon be writing speeches that you will be proud to present.

This article was originally published in The Jakarta Post.

Speech Writing: Subject, Purpose, Audience, Occasion

2007-10-04T22:51:00.000-07:00

OnWords

Public Speaking Organization: Subject, Purpose, Audience and Occasion

By ANDREW GREENE

Jakarta – As promised in the last OnWords, today we will begin to explore how to become better public speakers.

Public speaking success is in a large part determined by your attitude. You can maximize this positive attitude potential by keeping in mind the four organizational basics of subject, purpose, audience and occasion while you plan your speech.

Subject

You cannot have confidence in front of others, if you do not have confidence in your subject. That is why it is essential for you, especially if you are a beginning orator, to choose a topic that you know well, something that genuinely interests you and something you understand.

There are numerous techniques which can help you whittle down broad subjects until they become specific enough for you to give a concise and, therefore, effective talk on. Some methods, such as brainstorming, listing, the journalist approach, and freewriting have been explained in previous OnWords columns which are archived on my blog, http://writerinjakarta.blogspot.com.

If you are able to sum up your topic, your thesis, in less than half a minute, you have most likely sufficiently narrowed it down. Later in the process, as you write your speech, you will need to keep coming back to your thesis asking yourself if what you are writing is relevant to the topic.

Purpose

Once you have uncovered a topic you feel comfortable talking about, it is time to for you consider the purpose of your talk. There are three main motivations behind a speech, to entertain, to inform and to persuade.

George Grice and John Skinner say in their textbook Mastering Public Speaking that you are an entertainer when you want to amuse, a mentor if you wish to inform and an advocate when you persuade.

The most memorable speeches combine elements of more than a single purpose. At the early stages of your speaking journey it is usually best to stick with entertaining and informing.

While going through this step, you need to ask yourself what you would like the audience to do or to learn. What do you hope they gain from their giving of their time?

Audience

Who you speak to greatly influences the subject and the purpose of your speech. To be an effectual communicator you must never forget who your audience is.

Have you spoken to the group before? If so, what did you learn about them? If it is a new group, you need to ask yourself what the audience members have in common. What is your connection to them? How can you establish a rapport with them? What do they hope to gain from listening to you?

Different audiences have different needs and different expectations. Although they share a subject, a speech you give to your child’s class on career day would be completely different than one you would give to a panel during a group interview. Vocabulary, tone, grammar, body posture and gestures are all determined by who you are speaking to.

Occasion

Related to audience and purpose is the occasion. You need to know if you are going to be the event’s only speaker. If you are one of many, you will need to be more aware of how disconnected your audience may be feeling by your time to speak arrives.

Time constraints are likewise important. Always leave the audience wanting more by wrapping up your speech before the audience begins to tune out. The last thing you want to see as you look out over the audience is a sea of glazed-over fish eyes. Remember, listeners will complain about you speaking for too long before they complain about you being too short.

After you have organized your speech while always being cognizant of your subject, purpose, audience and occasion the time to write it comes. OnWords’ next column will help you with that.

Until then, good organizing,

This article was originally published in The Jakarta Post.

Public Speaking: The Greatest Fear of All

2007-09-16T21:53:00.000-07:00

On Words

Public Speaking: The Greatest Fear of All

By ANDREW GREENE

Jakarta – I have a confession to make. For years I could not speak.

Sure, when sitting around a table with friends or standing in front of my students I was cool, coherent and as charming as a Pomeranian kissing a Hollywood starlet. But, when it came time for me to slip out of my comfort zone and speak to groups or strangers, I fell apart time and time again.

Public speaking was my greatest fear.

I did not tremble alone. Many western studies have found the fear of public speaking to be the most dreaded of them all, greater even than the fear of death itself. Monica Sugiarto, Vice President Membership, Kebayoran Toastmasters, says that although she has not seen any statistics on the subject she believes it to be the top fear in Indonesia too, saying it is “the same all over the world.”

For me, the pain would start as soon as I found out I was to speak. Right away, my mind would begin to play over and over the upcoming task and visualize all that could and surely would go wrong. As the days passed, the anxiety would fold up upon itself filling my days with worry, my sleep with nightmares.

I did not know how to prepare for a presentation. I used to write out my speech in full and then practice it over and over, memorizing each comma, full stop, letter, word.

When the time came to deliver, I’d stand there, my hands clenched into balls of fear, vomiting out my message as quickly as possible. I only had one goal: get out of there! With adrenalin pumping through my body and mind I was purely in 'fight or flight' mode. The emphasis, squarely on the later.

I honestly did not care how effective I was or what my audience got out of it. As far as I was concerned, once the words left my mouth, they were no longer my responsibility. It was up to the audience to dig through the quick-speak, mumbled message. I had done my part.

And this is the state my skills would still fester in if I were not a teacher. Just over a decade ago, I began to learn the secrets about how to speak effectively by having to critique others when I was given a class of business executives who wished to sharpen their presentation skills. At that early point I was living the old axiom, “those who can, do; those who cannot, teach.”

However, my students’ blossoming abilities drove me to study the subject more deeply. It turned out that public speaking consisted of a skills set that could be learned the same as cooking or drawing. True, not everyone will become an Obama, but by learning how to properly prepare for, practice and give presentations even the most leaden-tongued of us can come to approach these tasks with confidence.

As I acquired more knowledge, my confidence grew and I began to give presentations to prospective clients and lead training workshops at my school. Although I still did not genuinely enjoy public speaking, I was at least able do the job when need be.

Learning these skills will enrich your life both personally and professionally. Sugiarto says, “We get more confident by overcoming fear. Since we do this ourselves, with no teachers, we give giveback. This improves our listening and communication skills along with showing us how to look at things from different points of views… We become better parents and teachers.”

In the next OnWords, with Sugiarto’s help, we will go over some public speaking techniques and learn how to practice them. Hopefully, with time, they will become some of the most-frequently-used tools in your language skills toolbox.

Good presenting,

This article was originally published in The Jakarta Post.

Lake Toba: Samosir, world's largest island within an island

2007-09-08T21:17:00.000-07:00

Sunday, July 8, 2007

Lake Toba: Samosir, world's largest island within an island

Andrew Greene, Contributor The Jakarta Post, Samosir, North Sumatra

Looking out over Lake Toba, it is evident that it is a basin of superlatives.

With a surface area of 1,130 square kilometers and possessing a maximum depth of 529 meters, it is the world's largest and deepest crater lake.Resting in the planet's largest caldera (collapsed volcano formation) on the world's fifth-largest island, the flat waters of Lake Toba belie the violence that gave it birth.

The Toba caldera is believed to have been created in stages by super eruptions taking place about 840,000, 700,000, and finally 74,000 years ago. The last, probably two weeks in length, is thought to be the world's largest in the last two million years.

The ash and gases it shot into the atmosphere triggered a six-year volcanic winter which, according to some geneticists, killed all but 10,000 humans worldwide.

The ash from the blast blanketed the entire Indian subcontinent with an approximately 15-centimeter-thick coating. The global climate did not to recover for a millennium. Fortunately for today's traveler much has changed in the last 74,000 years.

Now, embraced by a chain of mist-swaddled peaks, the lake is North Sumatra's leading tourist destination.

Stretching from northwest to southeast, its landscape sprinkled with Protestant Christian church steeples and ribbons of cascading waterfalls, Toba's setting is among the most spectacular in the archipelago.

Attached by an isthmus to the middle of the lake's west coast towers a testament to the lake's great size, Samosir Island. The peninsula-island's emerald walls climb a nearly vertical 700 meters straight out of the lake's surface, dominating the scene.

Nearly the size of Singapore, Samosir is the world's largest island within an island and serves as the area's main tourist hub.

Specifically, Tuk Tuk, a tiny circular peninsula hanging onto Samosir's east coast, is the foothold for most of Toba's visitors.

With restaurants pushing magic mushroom omelets, bookshops, bars, tourist shops and hotels strung along its circumference, Tuk Tuk is the ideal base for those wanting to explore Samosir or simply to relax.

The frequent ferries from Parapat on the lake's east coast stop at nearly all of Tuk Tuk's hotels. All a traveler needs to do is tell the ferry workers where one would like to stop and the ferry, colored like a Philippine truck, will pull up to that hotel's private dock.

Center of Batak culture

The rest of Samosir is well-worth investigating. The island is the heart of the Batak culture.

Originally Neolithic mountain peoples from northern Thailand and Burma, the Bataks were displaced by traveling Mongolian and Siamese populations.

Once they had found their way to Lake Toba the Batak lived, cocooned by the neighboring mountains, largely unaffected for centuries by the outside world.

Today, with a population of six million they are one of Indonesia's largest Christian communities. Lutheran German and Dutch Calvinists missionaries introduced the Batak to the faith in the 19th Century.

Though the majority of Bataks are practicing Christians, the area is replete with reminders of their animistic past. The ubiquitous traditional rough-hewn wooden-planked Batak houses, with their upswept roofs, have three levels.

Each represents a different plane of their world. The high roof corresponds to the home of the gods; the middle elevated level, where the family lives, represents the space that humans occupy; the final bottom space beneath the house is for the dogs, pigs and chickens and is the lair of a mythological dragon.

These houses are ornately decorated with large, carved animal heads at the ends of the side beams. These heads are protectors and, as is believed by some Bataks, are able to radiate positive energy, shielding the residents from disease and evil.

More common than the traditional houses are the family tombs. In fact, they are so widespread that it may be impossible to find a vista from which one cannot see at least one.

The tombs range from the simple to the elaborate. Some are whitewashed concrete boxes with the rounded tombstones that are ordinary in the west. Others are many meters in height, tiled and topped with large crosses and life-sized statues representing the departed.

These tombs are everywhere: in the rice fields, buffalo pastures, next to houses, beside the road. A day or longer could easily be spent just examining and photographing these extraordinary tombs in their picturesque surroundings.

There is no public transportation on the Tuk Tuk peninsula so to travel inland one needs to walk or rent a car, motorcycle or bicycle.

Traveling by foot is a pleasant way to experience the countryside and meet the outgoing people. Even with stopping to take photos and shake hands it should take no more than an hour from anywhere on Tuk Tuk to reach Samosir's main road.

This article was originally published in The Jakarta Post.

An Island of Your Own: Traveler's Tips

2007-09-07T21:42:00.000-07:00

Traveler’s Tips

For Pulau Seraya Kecil

By ANDREW GREENE

A guest to Pulau Seraya Kecil needs to book through Gardena Hotel (0385-41-258). There is a minimum two night stay on the island.
Watch your valuables at all times while at the mainland Gardena. There are many tales of money and cameras being spirited away from locked rooms.
There are two airlines plying the route between Bali and Labuan Bajo. Indonesian Air Transport (0385-41-088) departs Bali at 10.00 and returns from Labuan Bajo at 12.15 daily for Rp 650,000 one way. Trigana Airlines (0385-41-800) has daily flights between the two destinations from between Rp 541,000 and Rp 761,000 dependant upon class.
It is possible to return to Jakarta by air-conditioned executive bus. An all inclusive ticket is Rp 490,000.
Traveling to Labuan Bajo from Jakarta by bus is not as simple. Exchanges must be made in Bali and possibly in Lombok.
Snorkeling during low tide on Pulau Seraya Kecil must be done from the beach directly in front of the restaurant. There is a bamboo pole in the water marking the path to the far side of the reef.
Snorkeling on Pulau Seraya Kecil can be done from anywhere during high tide. The reef is accessible from anywhere during high tide.

This article was published in The Jakarta Post’s Weekender Magazine, June 2007.

Six Alternatives to Television

2007-09-04T00:45:00.000-07:00

OnWords

Six Alternatives to Television

By ANDREW GREENE

Jakarta – Television watching is the stinking ashtray on the dining room table. Though most profess to believe it is detrimental to our well-being, we refuse to turn our TVs off.

True, there are benefits to having a television. After all, it provides us with the cultural images that bind us to our communities. The Challenger exploding, O.J.’s white Bronco chase, the subsequent L.A. riots and the more-recent toppling of the Saddam statue are all events that I have, at least, virtually experienced.

Also, of course, there are sports to consider. Without television most of us would never be part of a World Cup or even, more importantly, the scrumptious shirtless-Beckham post-match interview. For many, sports are the main reason to have a television.

But, all of that notwithstanding, once we have made the decision to live a telly-free life, we need to think about how to fill the void. After much thought and research at sites such as www.squidoo.com/notv, www.thesimpledollar.com, www.whitedot.org plus other publications, I have assembled a selection of half-a-dozen activities that I myself start today as my own television-less existence commences.

Read it. Most of us have those books that we have always wanted to read. Ulysses and Under the Volcano head my list. I have started and quit both on numerous occasions and now that I have shut my box, I will open the first again and, this time, finish it.

Connect it. Sit down with your family. Have focused conversations and learn about one another. Go out, meet your neighbors, join clubs. The Living in Indonesia website at www.expat.or.id/ has a list of clubs that can help you connect with people who have the same interests as you do. Go nuts and use your free evenings to start dating your spouse or partner again.

Play it. The classic games of Monopoly and Uno never, in my opinion, go out of style. Some of my favorite childhood memories are of my family and I playing Risk, Monopoly, Spoons, and Uno.

Chess is a game I came to appreciate once I moved to Indonesia. This is a wonderful place to hone your game. Most drivers and security guards are willing to school you free of charge.

For card enthusiasts, the websites at www.pagat.com and www.cardgamerules.homestead.com are stocked with rules of games you have probably long forgotten how to play along with many you most likely have never heard of.

Learn it. Many universities now offer online degree and certificate programs. These can make productive use of your newly-found surplus time and hopefully even help you secure that next promotion.

Closer to home, many schools and institutions in Jakarta offer evening and weekend classes that will help you learn that skill you have always wanted to pick up. Mandarin, oil painting, creative writing and pasta making classes are just a sampling of what is available here.

Move it. Use that evening television time to go for walks. Sure, the Big Smoke is not exactly foot-friendly, but deep within the city’s neighborhoods and winding gangs, the roads are less-heavily mechanized and full of interesting sights and people. Walking is also a great way to spend time with your family and a fine way to meet your neighbors. In addition to walking, this evening time would also be nice for starting any fitness plan you are interested in.

Box and Eat it. Start a picnic day. Be creative and get the whole family involved. Each week, another person can select the picnic’s menu and setting. An eating blanket can be spread anywhere, from your master bedroom’s balcony to the Bogor Botanical Gardens.

As I reread the above six thoughts, I realized that they all possess a common thread. They are about paying more attention to those two things that matter most: you and the people around you.

That, to me, is not a bad trade off.

Good luck,

This article was originally published in The Jakarta Post.

The Threat of the Goggle-Box

2007-08-26T23:16:00.001-07:00

On Words

The threat of the goggle-box

By ANDREW GREENE

Jakarta – Mid election-surprise-holiday day, I sat on the foot of my bed with a mound of Kraft Macaroni & Cheese balanced between my wine-capped knees as an advertisement for something called the Baby Channel was broadcast on the screen of my Digital 1 fed moving-picture box.

I sat up straight. Surely, I thought, as a small-screen enthusiast, this development was to be to my delight.

“Finally,” I inwardly rejoiced, “the cycle was complete. At last, the time had arrived in which we have television programming to pull us wet and swaddled from the womb, propel us all through life, before finally surrendering our wide-eyed, empty-headed bodies back into mother earth’s embrace.”

Cradle to grave goggle-box. How could this possibly be wrong?

But, then I remembered hearing about a study published by the University of Washington and Seattle Children's Hospital Research Institute just a few days before. It had concluded that popular DVD’s such as Baby Einstein offer toddlers no benefits and that the babies who viewed such fare in fact comprehended fewer words than video-free tots.

Suddenly my comfort food left me cold and with bits of powdery orange-pasta drying in the corners of my mouth, I lowered the bowl.

As a parent of a soon to be ten year old, I am utterly aware of all, ok, some, of the influences children face nowadays. In our enlightened era in which Mc Donald’s is introducing healthy kid’s meals and smoking has been outlawed on the thoroughfares of Jakarta, do we really need to take a step back and introduce our children to an addiction at yet an even earlier age?

How far behind can the Cemal or Pell Mell (their misspellings, not mine) candy cigarettes of my boyhood be? Next thing you know there will be children’s Visa debit cards and Bintang Zero alcohol beer. All props for a twisted make-believe world, these are best relegated to Tim Burton’s silvery screen and out of our more-than-Technicolor lives. The buying on credit, binge drinking, and eating disorders can surely be put off until the university years.

Childhood is the time to solidify the good habits. And since today’s column is about adolescent television viewing, let us get back to that. Simply put, numerous studies have shown that watching too much television leads to, among other things, obesity and low test scores in children.
Obesity

Watching television dulls your awareness so that you do not notice messages to your brain saying that you are full. This is why it is so easy for you to mine through an entire bag of chips or a pint of Hagen Das while you are distracted by the latest madcap happenings of your favorite fictional family.

Two 2005 studies published in The Journal of Pediatrics said that children who watched too much telly were prone to fatness. R.M. Viner and T.J. Cole from the University College London found that every hour over the recommended 1.5 hours of daily television watched by five year olds raises the risk of them becoming obese by the age of 30 by seven percent.

In the other study, on the Atlantic’s modern side, Doctors Kirsten Davison, Lori Francis, and Leann Birch from the State University of New York discovered that nine and 11 year old girls who exceeded recommended guidelines of television viewing were 2.6 times more likely to be overweight than girls who watched less television.

Low Test Scores

Television in and of itself does not make us stupid. The danger is that it is such a demanding, time-devouring habit that it keeps us away from true life experiences.

According to Jim Trelease, author of The Read-Aloud Handbook, in 1990, the National Assessment of Educational Progress tested eighth-graders across the United States and found that, “The more they watched, the lower the scores.”

In 1991, other tests of young teens from more than a dozen countries showed that in math and science “Students who watched the most television had the lowest scores.”

A 2005 edition of The Archives of Pediatric and Adolescent Medicine quoted Doctor Dina Borzekowski as saying about similar tests, “Among these third graders, we saw that … those who had bedroom TV sets scored around eight points lower on math and language arts tests and seven points lower on reading tests.”

Indonesia

Though the above studies were conducted in the West, Indonesian children are not safe. They too are falling victim to the same electronic demon, watching well-above the recommended limit of 1.5 daily hours. The Children Media Development Foundation (Kidia) says, “The average Indonesian child watches between 30 and 35 hours of television per week, or 1,560 to 1,820 hours per year.”

Kidia’s Chairman, Boby Guntarto, told The Jakarta Post just over a year ago during the nation’s first “No Television Day,” “Children who watch too much television are more likely to be overweight and unhappy. It also affects brain development and learning."

It is clear that this seemingly-innocuous practice can hook and detrimentally affect us no matter where we live. Next week’s On Words column will explore some techniques that can help you and your family kick the television habit.

This article was originally published in The Jakarta Post.

Balinese Children's Foundation

2007-08-26T23:14:00.000-07:00

On Words

Balinese Children’s Education Foundation

By ANDREW GREENE

Central Bali – Dennis and Nancy Colbert’s Balinese Children’s Education Foundation is making a difference one school at a time.

The grandparents of five visited Bali for the first time in 2000 to see Nancy’s sister Christina Welty who had recently moved to a village north of Ubud. They were struck by the kindness of the island’s people and once back in their Northern California home, decided that they had to try to help them.

With humble ambitions, they started their non-profit foundation with the hope of just building an elementary school library to encourage reading. Dennis, in a written interview, says about the beginning, “Nancy and I have always loved being with children, always very interested in their education, as well as knowing how the love of reading can enhance a child’s education.”

Nancy, a former elementary school teacher, and Dennis, a retired business executive, wanted to find a school in need of a library and, just as importantly, one with which the Colberts could forge a bond.

Dennis says, “Having a connection in some way to the school really helps with the overall communication and receptiveness to looking at new learning techniques.”

Returning to Bali in early 2005, Dennis searched for such a school. He visited a number of elementary schools before selecting one in Kalabang Moding. “The connection in this school,” he says, “is through the local village families that live in the villages near my sister-in-law’s house; we got to know them and they in turn went with us to the school to introduce us to the headmaster and teachers.”

The library is located in a building off the school’s main wing which had not been “painted or maintained in any way for 20 years.” The foundation started with the basics: getting the building’s inside and out painted, the floor retiled, a new ceiling installed, the leaky roof repaired, and new books purchased.

Then with the library completed, the foundation found it hard to ignore that the school needed much more than a simple library. The school still needed to be modernized and cleaned up.

To meet the first goal, they added five desktop computers, a printer and a computer teacher to teach all of the grades and teachers in after-school classes. All of the teachers participated and learned the basics of word processing and creating spreadsheets. Currently, the foundation is preparing a computer education program whereby the local inhabitants can earn a computer proficiency certificate.

Then, in May 2006, the foundation started a recycling program to help clear away the plastic and trash that littered the school grounds. They found a recycling business in Ubud to provide recycling bags and a weekly pick up service at the school.

Next came perhaps the biggest challenge of all, educating the students, teachers and locals as to how recycling would improve their health and their collective environment.

The foundation posted charts around the school detailing how long plastic takes to decompose. A two-page Indonesian flyer explaining the benefits of recycling and the health dangers associated with burning plastic was distributed to the students. The students in turn used these to educate their families.

Then with the recycling program in place they held a school assembly, where the entire recycling program was discussed and, following which, everyone went straight to work cleaning up the area. Dennis is proud of the program’s success, “In our subsequent visits to the school, usually every three to four months, we have found the grounds very clean and a real pride in the neat grounds.”

Dennis says that all of this assistance has been deeply appreciated, “We found that our work was also a motivational thing for the headmaster and teachers, as they poured concrete for new pathways, improved the gardens and showed a new enthusiasm for their basic job, teaching the children.”

Infused with the spirit of success from its first school, the foundation began the search for a second in late 2006. Assisted by the local Rotary club, an elementary school in Belang-Singapadu was located. This village turned out to be the home of Ganesha Book Store manager, Made Rohani. The foundation had been purchasing most of its books at Ganesha at a discount, so the foundation was fortunate to once again have secured that connection that is so important to its work.

On the foundation’s visit to the school, Dennis says it found, “One of the wings just needed painting. The other wing…was in terrible shape; one of the rooms could not be used because of the leaking roof, floors had many holes, windows and doors broken…The school also had an unused building that could be repaired and used as a learning center.”

Following a meeting with the village school committee the heavy construction was started in January 2007. Utilizing the skills of the local villagers, the classrooms, learning center and library were repaired and painted.

In April of this year, Dennis, Nancy and Nancy’s sister Susan returned and turned the school grounds into an educational project by having the students design the grounds and select the plants that would landscape the area.

Always a businessman, Dennis has been able to measure success at the two schools of about 135 students each, “When we were in Bali in April 2007, the library checkout system for the two schools showed that the books had been checked over 1,000 times over the last three months, which [is] way beyond anything we had expected.”

“We are now working on obtaining government statistics on how our two schools have done in the past few years, in terms of testing results, number of sixth grade graduates… to compare to current results.”

With the two schools thriving, the foundation is now ready to expand its reach.

Dennis reports, “Once again, with the success we have had having a connection to the schools we have selected, I am going to look at three schools in September, that have been attended by Balinese that have worked for us on various jobs in Bali and for my sister-in-law, and now have children attending these schools. If the schools need libraries, recycling programs and some repair work, we will do all three.”

By working school-by-school, forgoing contractors and using the labor of local inhabitants as much as possible the foundation keeps costs down to a minimum. Dennis says, “The advantage someone would have in donating to our foundation is that I personally oversee 100% of the funds and disburse them myself, so it guarantees that 100% of the money goes to help the children.”

“I handle all payments directly to people I hire,” he continues. “With as many as possible from the local village to do the work at the school, and do not use contractors for the work. I found that this ensures that the money gets to the right people.”

The foundation says that a library usually costs between US$600 and $2,000 depending upon how much building repair is required. Computers are up to $3000, while ongoing training expenses are about $1,000 per year.

Thus far, the foundation’s work has been funded by the Colberts, an Indonesian businessman in Jakarta, and the sale of products from Bali that are sold in the San Francisco Bay Area. The Colberts say, “All proceeds from the sales go to the Foundation and then back to Bali schools.”

Registered with the National Heritage Foundation in Washington, DC, American citizens are able to make tax deductible contributions to the foundation. If you have any questions regarding the Balinese Children’s Education Foundation please contact Dennis Colbert at dennis_colbert@earthlink.net.

This article was originally published in The Jakarta Post.

Doctor H. Arief Rachman on Education: Part Two

2007-08-26T23:12:00.001-07:00

On Words

Doctor H. Arief Rachman – part two

By ANDREW GREENE

JAKARTA – Today’s On Words’ column completes Professor Doctor H. Arief Rachman’s interview.

Coming into being just a few years before Indonesia gained independence; the educator has matured alongside his nation. And, similar to his younger sibling, he does not hesitate to stand up for what he believes to be just. This trait has landed him in prison on two separate occasions.

The first was in 1966 when he fought against communism because, he says, “Our philosophy says to believe in God, while the communists claimed to be atheists. For me it wasn’t political. I just went against what I thought was wrong. All the fighters who went against communism were imprisoned.”

A dozen years later, the man who spends his free time helping drug abuse victims was locked up a second time while he was a dean of students. He explains, “All the students went against the government due to its corruption and instead of the students being caught, the Dean of Students was caught. I was in for eight months without ever being charged.”

With his forty plus years in classrooms, schools, and universities, Rachman has witnessed the development of education in Indonesia. He says, “The city universities and teacher colleges are changing, though evolutionary, not revolutionary as we need.”

Despite this sluggish pace of growth, the heart of the man remains rose colored and he says, “On the micro side we are OK, with many good universities flourishing along good high schools and international schools.”

Rachman was just a teen of 16 when he first experienced the joys of a multicultural classroom after he was accepted into the American Field Service foreign-student exchange program in 1959. He was enrolled in a small high school in New Jersey, America, becoming the program’s first Muslim student to move in with a Jewish family within a Jewish community.

He recalls about that pivotal time, “In that high school we exercised cross-cultural understanding, active learning and discovery learning. I saw teachers as friends. It was then, that I began to think in the back of my mind, I’d like to go into that field and help students.”

Now, Rachman envisages a land where schools are genuine societal reflections. He says of the late 1980’s, when he was a member of the team that established Lab School’s integrated culture, “I discovered that a school should not only have intellectual input. So we tried to have a healthy population of children from the poor, the middle, and the upper classes. We did this both for financial and intellectual points of view along with cultural diversity. A homogeneous-school society cannot create a strong school.”

“We should have,” he explains, “Muslims, Christians, Hindus and more, all in good proportions. Additionally, we should not only have clever students, but also average and slow learners. With that blend, we’ll have a healthier, intellectual society.”

“Fast learners understand that life is a learning process in which we all live together with people who are not on the same track, different races, and religions. The good schools have a mixture of fast and slow learners that help each other. Multiculturalism should be emphasized.”

In keeping with his assimilation goal, Rachman’s vision as an educator has always been to develop well-rounded people. He remembers, “We aimed [at Lab School] to develop good personality and character based on good faith and strong healthy nationalism… Our teaching curriculum was accompanied by lots of extra-curricular activities that involved: intellectual development, emotional development, spiritual development, social development and physical development.”

“Those five potentials,” he adds, “we realized by using the school culture, the relationship between the parents, the teachers, and the students. We became a strong family.”

Unfortunately, Rachman feels this spirit and vision are lacking throughout much of the archipelago. “The state system of putting all the clever in the same schools is a mistake because not much learning takes place in those schools. It’s more like training.”

“I think we have a weak and narrow way of looking at success,” he adds. “Perhaps it goes to the love of materialism and status of the tangible, instead of the soft power of the intangible that education brings, like values, music, dance, culture, and religion.”

Elaborating, Rachman continues, “Even at the global level, Greenpeace and WWF have not been successful,” says the professor who also is the executive chairman for the National Commission for UNESCO. “In UNESCO we have a motto: ‘Learning to know. Learning to do. Learning to be. Learning to live together.’ I think now we [Indonesia] are only at the stage of learning to know.”

He feels that second-language instruction in Indonesia remains at that same stepping-off phase, saying, “Language is an arbitrary system used to communicate. For English, the communication is not there, what teachers are doing is giving the knowledge of rules. Here, English is knowledge, not a skill. The teachers realize this, but do not yet have the capacity and skills to go beyond the rules.”

Aware of English’s importance in today’s world, he says, “The role of English in Indonesia is as an open window to knowledge, a window to the world. People who do not speak English, do not know the world. Secondly, English is a path of international friendship. Without English you are confined in a box.”

Rachman has long been propping open that window to the world for Indonesians. For ten years, more than 20 years ago, he was the presenter of a televised English language quiz show on TVRI. “I entertained and motivated people to like English,” he says. “Everyone watched me since there was only one channel at that time. I was lucky.”

Indonesia is fortunate too, for older brother Professor Rachman continues to watch over her.

This article was originally published in The Jakarta Post.

Doctor H. Arief Rachman on Education: Part One

2007-08-26T23:10:00.000-07:00

On Words

Doctor H. Arief Rachman – part one

By ANDREW GREENE

Tuesday, 17 June, 2007, 8:17 PM Local Time

JAKARTA – Deep into his fifth decade of educating, Doctor H. Arief Rachman has no plans of slowing down.

In fact, with his recent appointment to Diponegoro junior, high, and vocational schools adding to his work as a Universitas Negeri Jakarta (State University of Jakarta) lecturer along with his duties as the Executive Chairman of the Indonesia National Commission of UNESCO, his frankness is clear as he claims the word retirement holds scant desirability for him.

He says, “I do not understand the meaning. Perhaps there is status in the word. For me, I think I will be busier in my old days, because at that age it isn’t just about implementation, but about inspiration.”

Sleep, at times, does not find the grandfather of three easily. Thirty-six of his high school senior students had recently failed their national examinations and he says, “I couldn’t anticipate whether I’d have the courage or not to face them. I knew it was to be hard and it kept me awake at night.”

However, meet them he did, saying, “I am trying to build a system that teaches honesty is most important. When you fail, you fail.”

This commitment to integrity is important to the man. Before he joined Diponegoro half a year back, he declared “if I am wanted in this school, honesty is on top of everything. True, the final exam results are sad and quite low but… you’ve got to perform according to what you are and failing is OK.”

Rachman believes dishonesty is rampant in lower-income schools with tests being marked up and reports falsified. He does not understand how the schools can have 99% or 100% final examination pass rates.

“Corruption in education is largely uncontrolled,” he says, “lots of teachers enjoy doing wrong practices. We’ve got to keep echoing to everybody that this is wrong. I’d like to call on my fellow teachers to be honest. Do not make up scores or reports.”

The educator feels that it is the final examinations that breed problems and dishonesty. “We need to go back to the essential and ask what we are evaluating. Marks, final exams or students progress over the years? A student’s continuous evaluation should be considered as a basic criterion of passing. So no national government rules should be the only criteria for passing.”

Explaining, Rachman continues, “In Banda Aceh, 32 teachers were killed in the tsunami and entire schools destroyed. The students were living in tents and suddenly it was demanded that they meet the same criteria as those in Block M. This is very illogical.”

The youthful-looking, eternally-smiling lecturer is a realist and understands the need for examinations. He says he knows there is a need for student evaluation, but believes the examinations “are causing people to worry, and does not make them aware. Our education is fonder of competition with ranking, putting people in blocks, not together as one.”

He warns, “Unless the government gives realistic criteria for passing grades, people will try to find shortcuts instead of being true; people will try to be safe. This principal has got to be abolished. I’d like to change it by giving guidelines to schools and then letting the teachers and headmasters decide who’ll pass and then demand all teachers and headmasters are honest.”

Rachman believes that this desire to be safe at the expense of being true “comes from the discrepancy between the haves and have nots, [from] the big gorge growing between the clever and the slow learners. I am afraid,” he says, “the clever and the rich will have better facilities and will go up and up while the slow and poor will sink down and down, although our constitution and our laws of education do not agree with this.”

“Our philosophy in Indonesia,” he elaborates further, “Unity in Diversity, is an excellent philosophy and we should go in that direction. We should be more consistent with what’s in our constitution. It is said we’ve got to believe in God, humanity, nationalism, social justice, democracy and being humane. [But] How can you be humane if you are cornered by a situation in which you are forced to steal and to lie? I think education should come into that area and teach that no matter how poor you are, you have no justification to steal, to lie. You must be strong no matter what you face.”

Rachman says he was drawn to Diponegoro for the opportunity to assist those that face such dilemmas. He says that 75% of his students come from poor families, the children of our maids, guards, laundresses, walking food hawkers.

“It attracted me,” he says, “because the students come from the lower financial classes and I’ve discovered that although intellectual input is not very high, financial input is not very high and the salaries of our teachers average just five to six hundred thousand rupiah a month, the schools have about 3,000 students in total.”

“I am also attracted to the schools because the students are so enthusiastic to go to school, although I do not think many of them have healthy support at home. They’ve got to fight for their lives.”

He leans back, pushes his fingers through his full-head of salted hair and remembers, “I asked one student why he wasn’t wearing a belt and he replied, ‘This is Tuesday. It’s my father’s day to wear the belt.’” During the interview the professor shares similar one-belt family stories about shoes and study materials.

“I do not feel we have addressed them well and I do not think we have paid enough attention to these kinds of schools. I imagine these types dominate all schools in Indonesia.”

He is proud of Diponegoro’s progress thus far. “When our students finish they have strong confidence to face all our challenges.”

The good doctor was gracious enough to invite me into his Rawamangun home for more than an hour as he readily shared his thoughts. On Words next installment will continue the interview, with the professor’s words about building a progressive school culture, the role of indigenous and foreign languages in Indonesia, his decade as a English quiz show host on television, and the two times he was imprisoned.

This article was originally published in The Jakarta Post.

Idea Mining: Part Three

2007-08-26T23:09:00.000-07:00

On Words

Mining Ideas – part three

By ANDREW GREENE

Saturday, 07 July, 2007, 9:12 PM Local Time

JAKARTA – Now that we have all had a week to play around with the more staid prewriting techniques of brainstorming, the journalistic approach, and listing, it is time for us to step out of academic writing’s confining safety and drop into creativity.

Just as last week’s skills do, these idea-generating techniques give writing energy, honesty, and originality. And, once again, these activities are meant to be fun, so come along and get happily messy.

Freewriting

The timed exercise is a staple of writing practice. The key to it is writing continuously for a pre-set amount of time, refusing to pause for any reason whatsoever. Freewriting silences your inner-critic and gives you the freedom to get down those fresh-flashing thoughts hot as they appear.

The rules to freewriting are all about not having any rules:

1. Start with a topic at the top of the page. It does not matter what that topic may be. It can even be, “I’ve got nothing to write about.”

2. Let your hand go, keep it moving. Do not even lift it from the paper. Stalling is your critic attempting to gain control.

3. Do not edit. Do not reread what you have just written and do not cross out anything (The time for that is later in the writing process).

4. Have no worries. Grammar, punctuation, spelling, neatness do not exist in freewriting.

5. Be illogical. In Freewriting, one plus one does not necessarily equal two. It may equal 23. Or a pair of fuzzy purple socks. Who knows, it may even equal two.

6. Write with courage. Frightening, naked thoughts are often the most energized.

Before your writing muscles strengthen, you may want to start freewriting with short limits such as five, seven or ten minutes. There is no magic number. The power lies in your commitment to writing nonstop for that entire period.

Random Book Prompts

Bibliomancy is the practice of seeking spiritual insight by randomly selecting a passage from a holy book. The art dates back at least 3,000 years from when folks peered into the I Ching for guidance. Since then, adherents of all the major religions have done the same with their own particular holy books.

And now you have the power to bring this deliciously groovy technique into the here-and-now by using it to mine your own writing ideas. The steps are simple. Set a book, any tome at all, on its spine and let it fall open. Then, with your eyes closed, point to a place on the open page before opening your eyes and writing down whatever sentence, phrase or passage your finger has divinely chosen.

That is your writing prompt. You coddle it. You nurture it as you see fit. A timed freewriting perhaps would suit the prompt or a brainstorming or even a methodical listing. The options are limited only by your vision and your courage. What is guaranteed is that through bibliomancy, you will wander down paths of creation you would have never otherwise even known existed.

Jump into the Unordinary

Daily lives can be boring and be even more boring to write about. Sometimes it is necessary to try a new angle when it comes to writing. Mix it up. If you normally write with Leonard Cohen in the background, put that old Canadian man to bed and give your daughter’s Pussycat Dolls a ride.

Use props, costumes, become someone new. Wear your maid’s housedress or your driver’s flip flops. Buy a monocle, a cigarette holder, a feather boa. You could change your materials and try generating ideas with the precision of a jeweler on a series of post-it notes or you could go in the other direction becoming a kid who writes with a fisted-crayon on a large pad of drawing paper.

The point here is to find a new state of mind in which to write.

Pay attention to the Ordinary

Writers keep track of the ingredients that make up life. They write about the tilt of grins, the roar of bajajs, the way shadows fall across sidewalks.

Take the above-detailed freewriting technique and use it to explore the ordinary. Select for your topic something so humdrum you never give it a second thought and freewrite about it. Your elbow, white rice, your husband’s eyebrows are all ripe, commonplace sources of ideas. Our task as writers is to find what’s special in the everyday.

Final Thoughts

As we finish this three-part Mining Ideas series, we need to remember that practice is as practice does. It is the doing that cranks the taps. Promise the time to yourself; schedule yourself a mere corner out of your daily schedule and soon you will be watching the ideas flow.

This article was originally published in The Jakarta Post.

Idea Mining: Part Two

2007-08-26T23:08:00.000-07:00

On Words

Mining Ideas – part two

By ANDREW GREENE

Sunday, 24 June, 2007, 3:13 PM Local Time

JAKARTA – Today, as promised in the last On Words’ column, we will explore the whats and hows of various prewriting techniques. So grab your pencil, a fat pad of empty paper and come along. Soon, with a little practice, you too will find joy within writing’s difficulties.

The skills you learn today, brainstorming, the journalist approach, and listing are geared towards academic writing. Next week we will delve into creative techniques that can help even the most constipated of nonfiction writers. That caveat notwithstanding, all prewriting techniques produce ideas that inject energy, honesty and creativity into any writing.

The key to all of these techniques is that they must be approached playfully. At this stage in the process mistakes are not mistakes. All is a seed that may or may not take root. Every sense, every thought that flashes in your brain needs to find its way to your paper. Nothing is wrong.

Brainstorming

My favorite academic-prewriting technique is brainstorming. Also called mind mapping, clustering and all sorts of other things, it is not just a writing skill. It is a mnemonic that goes two ways by both boosting output and securing intake. Brainstorming is effective because it mates the visual aspects of our beings with the verbal.

Besides its visual efficiency, I dig it since it is so easy to turn into an outline that is ready-made for writing. Just sprinkle in some lower case characters, Roman numerals and there you go, a paper merely lacking verbs and signal words.

To brainstorm, you start by writing a topic in the dead center of a blank sheet of paper. Then you draw a circle around that topic. The topic can be a single word, phrase, picture, or symbol. Anything.

Then other words, associations, will start popping into your mind. These you write inside circles that are connected to the centered topic by lines radiating outward from the topic. As more words come, you write these down while always drawing lines and circles showing how everything is strung to one another.

These associations become sub-ideas supporting their own web of ideas. Within five minutes you should have a fully-inked page regardless of topic.

Journalist Approach

Journalists are taught to report on the five w’s and the one h. This grand idea is suitable for any writer writing on any topic. By addressing these questions during the prewriting process you will ensure that you are heavy with ideas once the writing starts.

A simple method of following the journalist approach is to do the same as you did with the brainstorming method. Start with a topic circled in the middle of a paper. Then have each of the six outward pointing spokes represent a different w or h.

This is also a very quick and easy technique a person can use when needing to talk on any topic. My IELTS students have used it to great effect when it comes to the long turn of their speaking examinations.

Listing

This technique is very similar to brainstorming in that ideas are written down as they come to you. However, listing is more suitable when you need to whittle down a topic to a point. For example, Indonesian cuisine is too broad a subject for the reach of most single papers. It needs to be narrowed down some. The course of thought could go like this:

Indonesian Cuisine

Available everywhere

Available at all hours

Eat at home

Five-foot hawkers

Often spicy

By following this natural stream of thought you, the writer, would be left with the specific nugget of writing about the spicy food sold by the walking peddlers you eat at home. This very well could be an interesting read.

Next week we will, as mentioned above, get into techniques that are more creative and, in my opinion, more fun.

Until then,

Happy writing,

This article was originally published in The Jakarta Post.

Idea Mining: Part One

2007-08-26T23:04:00.000-07:00

On Words

Idea Mining – part one

By ANDREW GREENE

Sunday, 10 June, 2007, 4:22 PM Local Time

JAKARTA – Have you ever had something to write, perhaps a school report, a business proposal, or even just a simple letter for those back home? So you set aside some time, cleared a space at your desk, put on some writing music, hunched forward over your pad and wrote… nothing … nil …naught?

Your brows huddled together tangled with vacant thought. Your knuckles, a row of whitening little helmets of surrender, tightened around your pencil. Tick, tock, the paper’s vacant nonchalance taunted you, dared you to put something down. But you didn’t. You couldn’t. You had nothing to say. Blankness there and nothing else.

Of course you have experienced this. We all have.

Writing is just about the most frightening of all the language skills. With the exception of public speaking, itself a trauma so great that the majority of us fear it even more than we do the reaper’s nippy embrace, the action of facing a blank pressed sheet of lined pulp armed with merely a No. 2 is something most try to put off as long as possible.

We either forget or are not aware that this dread of filling the empty page is something all writers experience, even the most accomplished. I once read that James Joyce, perhaps the most celebrated novelist of the 20^th century, lamented after a friend caught him anguishing at his writing desk that he had not been able to pen more than seven words that day.

His friend, attempting to lift the author’s spirits said, “Seven? But… that’s good, at least for you!”

“Yes,” Joyce replied. “I suppose it is… but I don’t know what order they go in!”

And this from a literary god whose most distinguished work’s final chapter consists of a single sentence that runs on for nearly 50 pages. When it comes to writing, what chance do us mere mortals stand?

While you may never become the next Joyce, Dr Seuss, or J.K. Rowling, you can become a strong and effective writer who enjoys the challenge and thrill of creating something out of nothing. One of the early keys to this growth is learning the prewriting techniques.

Prewriting techniques generate ideas. The ability to create these first thoughts is vital since the act of actually getting starting is often the toughest part of writing. The initial ideas germinated by these techniques will liven your writing with energy, honesty, and creativity.

First thoughts are powerful. Most of our lives are spent in a world made up of messages that have been prettied-up by our internal censors. This is why it is so refreshing to meet someone who truly speaks his mind, a real straight shooter. The prewriting techniques will teach you how to capture your thoughts at first spark before they have been altered.

First thoughts are egoless. Uncensored, they are your most honest, no matter how nutty that may in fact be, and therefore extremely potent. An honest voice is the door through which strong writing walks. Writing that lacks an honest voice is timid and flaccid.

First thoughts breed creativity. The power and honesty created by the prewriting techniques will give you the freedom to be wrong, to be creative and to essentially write without fear. It is while in this zone, that pieces seem to write themselves. By learning these techniques, you too can bathe in writing’s autopilot sweet spot.

Next week you will learn what the prewriting techniques are and discover how easy it is to master them and add them to your language skill arsenal.

Good writing,

This article was originally published in The Jakarta Post.

An Island of Your Own

2007-06-30T04:34:00.000-07:00

An Island of Your Own

By ANDREW GREENE

Saturday, March 25, 2007, 11:42 AM Local Time

Flores – The bay to the front of my simple cottage is a magical place.

With my feet up on the cottage’s railing, a daybreak coffee in my hand, a dark blue, perhaps an azure, belt spills across the bay marking the boundary to the deep waters.

The sun climbing above the shadowy humps of the Pulau Seraya Besar Island in the sea before me, reddens the sky with its morning arrogance.

On my side of the azure border, the calm waters are a blue so pale that it could be considered to be tan or even white. On the belt’s further side, the waters seemingly continue on forever, their blueness incrementally increasing in power. Each shade represents a different wet world.

With the tide in, my first morning on the island, I slip on my flippers, don my mask and snorkel and sit in the water. I tilt forward, lay flat on my belly and begin to pull my way, one handful of sand at a time, through the knee-deep water. The water is very clear and the soft bottom is less than an arm’s length away. A few sandy, nearly translucent, fish dart out of my path as I float on my way above them.

Five meters seaward, I come to a sea grass bed. Here I begin to see more marine life. Crabs crab their way through the thick dancing fronds. Their poppy black eyes dart and blink with panic as my pink bulk form floats overhead. These are small crabs, less than the diameter of a Malang apple and are in no danger of making it onto my dinner plate.

Red starfish, large, stiff, five pointed things with black nodules running down the crest of each arm, likewise make their home in this grass bed. They too, I swim over the top of. They remain stoic, fortified with the nonchalant character for which they are famous.

The starfish and crab are not alone. An expanse of sea urchins lay just towards the end of the sea grass. There must be hundreds of them in each grouping of the spiny animals. Their black spines are a marvelous defense. Each creature possesses more than a hundred of the ten-centimeter long barbs. In the angles where the spines meet on their rounded bodies are red spheres that may be light sensors, primitive eyes of some sort.

I carefully paddled my way past these thorny challenges and into the world of where the true wonders begin, the coral garden. To use the tired cliché that a snorkeling above a coral reef is like looking at an aquarium is a bit like saying that meeting an alien is the same as watching ET.

A coral reef does not have one true bottom. It is made up of layers and shelves and outcroppings, all homes and shelters and hunting grounds to creatures doing what creatures do in any biological niche. Fighting, breeding, hiding, stalking, and feeding are all on display below.

Colorful anemones expand and contract and sway to and fro like heavy flowers in a breeze pulling microscopic nutrients from the atmosphere. From between the anemones’ poisoned tentacles dash about, seeming to play, are families of clownfish. Here in the bay, the first family I spy is a trio of skunk clownfish, named for the white strip painted down their tops from head to tail. The largest of the three shoots from the safety of their home nipping at my fingers as I wave goodbye.

The nearby underwater grasslands fading to become a distant memory, I begin to spot giant clams of all sizes dotting the landscape. They come striped in black and a variety of bright colors, blue, violet, purple, red, orange, green. When I bend at the waist and kick my flippers to swim down to them, they exhale huge gusts of water through their breathing tubes and clam up tight, their meaty tender inners safely hidden from me.

On the far side of the reef I spot a series of parrotfish. These brightly colored fish are easy to spot. They are flat-bodied and round. The line I see are grazing, heads down, at the rocky reef underneath me and defecating clouds of sandy powdery remains.

Just to the right of the clownfish I swim over two triggerfish. A couple. These aggressive fish are the bullies of the reef. Growing to nearly a meter in length, they are very territorial and do not hesitate to attack intruders. This is bad news since they have sharp teeth. Similar sized to the parrot fish, they are more diamond shaped. Carefully I make sure that I do not pass directly over there two.

I swim parallel to the shore, patrolling the border that demarcates the deep from the shallow. Other guests of the islands have mentioned sea snakes and sharks. I have not seen either. But I do see many large barrel sponges, their openings large enough to take a rest within. I dive down to one particularly large barrel sponge, its supporting ribs as thick and corded as a weight lifter’s wrist, to find, to my surprise, a lion fish in full bloom.

This turns out not to be the only lion fish I come across this day. On the swim back to shore I come upon another lion fish hovering, motionless, over a bump of coral. Its fins spread wide, supported by a rack of poisonous ribs. Its heavy slung jaw was lowered and ready for any unsuspecting fish to swim by. It was the perfect ambush predator.

I swim a circular route, giving the lion fish’s poisonous fins a wide berth and made it back over the grass bed and onto the beach and walk up to my cottage.

I traveled to Pulau Seraya Kecil from the Flores’ westernmost port of Labuan Bajo. To the East of the Wallace Line it is markedly drier, browner, and more dead in appearance than Bali, Java, and Sumatra are.

Labuan Bajo is just an hour’s flight from Bali and Pulau Seraya Kecil is but an hour’s boat journey from there. It is also possible to travel to Flores overland. I made it in four days by bus and ferry from Jakarta.

There is only the one ten-cottaged resort on the island for guests to stay at. A night with a free breakfast is Rp 100,000 and the boat ride to the island is free. The downside is that electricity is generator-powered and available only a few hours nightly. That is long enough to recharge cell phones and cameras and pump fresh water into bathroom basins, but not long enough to have a climate-controlled sleep. Nonetheless, the island is popular with those travelers who have made it to Flores.

Chris, a tourist from Switzerland and frequent caller to Bali, is a first time visitor to Pulau Seraya Kecil. He says, “I didn’t know what to expect. But I have extended my stay from two days now to seven so far.”

“The location is great, with a super beach, no noise, very relaxed, no disturbances. I’ve got all I need here.”

The resort is operated by the Gardena Hotel of Labuan Bajo. There is one restaurant on the island which is also the snorkeling gear center, front desk, and library. It opens during set times and is ran by a small staff.

Paulus, the manager, has worked here for four years. He is also the boat captain that carries guests to the island from Gardena. His wife is the cook.

“I like the solitude,” the 32-year-old manager says. “The guests are great. From them, I’ve learned some Italian, German, and English.”

In addition to the guests, Paulus is fond of turtles. He visits fish markets on the mainland and purchases any turtle eggs he finds for Rp 1,000 per egg. “I love turtles,” he says. “I don’t want the fishermen to sell the eggs for eating.”

He says that after bringing the eggs to the island they require up to sixty days to hatch. He then keeps the hatchlings in washing containers in the back of the restaurant, feeding to them bits of fish and changing their seawater daily until they are large enough to safely release into the ocean.

He says that he has recently freed 60 baby turtles and only has a few to show me. He brings out two who are immediate hits with the small gathering of guests in the restaurants. Cameras pop out and the hard-shelled infants are immortalized in photos that will surely be shown in photos across Europe. Then they are put back in a bucket in order to fatten up further.

Pulau Seraya Kecil is a small island, much smaller that its sister island Pulau Seraya Besar. It consists of ten hills with none being taller than 200 meters. To the South, behind the resort, over a hill and across a saddle sits a fishing village of 50 families.

Being arid and lacking fresh water, there is no farming and as one walks the hills one will be met with grazing goats, the odd deer, leafless trees and many blocks of crumbling red rock overlooking grand seascapes. Though hot, dry, and barren it is a fine chuck of land to explore and possesses fantastic spots from which to shoot remarkable photos.

The island is also a fantastic place from which to explore Komodo or Rinca, the two main dragon visiting islands. Boats are easy to chartered through the restaurant and more inexpensive than those rented from Labuan Bajo.

For those looking for a real weekend getaway or for those already traveling to see to dragons or those traipsing further east along the drips and drops of our archipelago Pulau Seraya Kecil is worth a visit.

This article was published in The Jakarta Post’s Weekender Magazine, June 2007.

Faiz's photo

2007-06-30T04:23:00.000-07:00

On Words: The Boy Poet Abdurahman Faiz

2007-06-30T04:09:00.001-07:00

On Words

The Boy Poet Abdurahman Faiz

By ANDREW GREENE

Friday, 15 June, 2007, 12:52 PM Local Time

JAKARTA –Poet Abdurahman Faiz will be busy this summer. His sixth book, Nadya, Kisah Dari Negeri Yang Menggigil (Nadya, Stories from a Shivering Nation), comes out in July.

Once the book is released, he will travel about Jakarta the rest of the month, meeting his fans and signing their purchases. Faiz has got just a few weeks to promote this latest work, for in August he begins the sixth grade.

To read a Faiz collection is to walk Jakarta’s streets. It is to ponder headlines, to question, to belong. Family, beggars, God, war, faith, disaster, and hope are just a sampling of the topics living within his pages. His sixth book deals with Indonesian society and politics and is, according to the author, infused with optimism.

Faiz says he is drawn to poetry because poems are short, meaningful and can often be spontaneously finished at one go. Some he completes within minutes, while his more stubborn pieces can demand a month or two. His Javanese father, Tomi, explains in English, “He doesn’t have a finishing target, so he just writes when he has ideas.”

The poet says he does not worry about writer’s block. When the affliction hits him, Faiz simply goes and plays, confident that the ideas will return. They always do.

He says that he finds ideas everywhere, from all that he sees and all that he hears. He is primarily driven to the keyboard by social problems that he witnesses or reads or hears about. When an idea comes, he records it in his cell phone for later retrieval.

Faiz writes with a clear vision. He knows what needs to be said and will not be satisfied until his message is lucid and strong. He recalls that he has had to fight his editors in order to maintain the integrity and precision of his work. If even a single word is altered, he feels the work is no longer his and does not accept it. His Acehnese mother, Helvi, a university lecturer, says Faiz remembers every word he writes and is tenacious when it comes to protecting each and everyone of them.

On the surface, Faiz is a rather ordinary soon-to-be 12-year-old child. Though smiling and friendly, he is noticeably less-than-comfortable as we talk in his family’s modest living room. He frequently pauses and looks towards the ceiling in search of words. His fingers twist and knot together between his rocking knees. He explains, in Indonesian, that he writes better than he speaks.

When not writing, he is just a boy. He enjoys playing basketball, riding his bike around his Depok neighborhood, reading automobile magazines and books such as Harry Potter and playing computer games.

He spends a lot of time at the computer. Never having liked writing by hand, he took to the keyboard at the age of five. Now he writes poems and updates his blog just about daily. Tomi, a television-news producer, says in English that Faiz is a “completely modern boy.”

Readers of his work come from all walks of life, politicians, fellow-writers, academics and the public at large. President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono considers Faiz’s work to be “very touching.” Political and religious leader Amien Rais calls Faiz “a deeply thoughtful writer,” while former president Megawati Soekarnoputri hopes his work will “inspire and give spirit to future generations.”

Poet Agus R Sarjono says that Faiz’s “worry about social situations is his fresh style.” Professor Riris T. Sarumpaet finds Faiz’s “concern to be pure, simple, transparent, and deeply sensitive.”

One of his poems so clearly demonstrates the need for governmental transparency that it is used by Masyarakat Transparasi Indonesia (the Society for Transparency of Indonesia), in its anti-corruption campaign.

Faiz’s first book, Untuk Bunda dan Dunia (For Mother and Earth), has been reprinted ten times since it came out in 2004. All of his books together have sold around 80,000 copies.

Later in the interview, Faiz relaxes and shows me around the family’s upstairs office. The wall next to the computer is nearly completely covered with writing and poetry awards the he has won and framed clippings from newspapers and magazines that have featured the boy poet.

Faiz says that he wishes there were more young authors in Indonesia. He suggests that children who would like to write keep diaries, play scrabble, read a lot, observe their surroundings and always ask questions. He believes it is vital that writers are sensitive to the surrounding world.

Faiz possesses that sensitivity. He suffers from it. Helvi says that her son is so painfully aware that he used to cry whenever he witnessed or learned of sorrow. Now, he crafts that raw openness into his art and uses it to affect change. He donates half of each royalty check to his two foster brothers in North Jakarta and Aceh’s tsunami victims.

As he shows me his blog, I think to myself that he is fortunate the room still has three bare walls. I get the feeling he is going to need them.

Abdurahman Faiz’s blog is at http://masfaiz.multiply.com.

(Sidebar, one of two)

Doaku Hari Ini

My Prayer for Today

My Lord

Give me your time

To grow in the road of love

A seedling

In all along the road of my parents

In all along the road of my Indonesia

In all along the road to you

Amen

July 2003

(translated by Rafi Hayati and Andrew Greene)

(Sidebar, two of two)

Pengungsi di Negeri Sendiri

Refugee in Their Own Country

No one dances any longer

Between the filthy tents

Over here

Only suffering

Caught in our eye

And our ear

Not even one song

We ever sing anymore

Only teardrops sing

Between hunger, thirst

Changing seasons

Have you noticed this, my brother?

October, 2003

(translated by Rafi Hayati and Andrew Greene)

On Words: A Reading Life Begins in the Home

2007-06-18T04:28:00.000-07:00

On Words

A Reading Life Begins in the Home

By ANDREW GREENE

JAKARTA –Reading is life. The written word separates us from the animals. Its thread ties us to our ancestors’ stories and, in turn, strings forward our lives into the consciousnesses of those yet to come. Want for knowledge, independence, self-confidence all grow from a love of reading.

Understandably, tempted by gaming consoles, cable television, pirated DVD’s and gadgets galore, the children of today’s Jakarta are often reluctant to foment that passion. However, we, as parents, can, by leading by doing, turn even the most text-shy kid into a life-long reader.

Walk the walk

The power of parent modeling is immense. Scatter books, magazines, newspapers about your house. Place a magazine rack in your bathroom. You need to lower the television remote control and raise a fist of words. Make the sacrifice. In all honesty, will knowing the latest about Rosa and Yoyo’s marriage or what Lost is in fact an allegory for really complete your existence? If your children see you reading, they will know it is valued.

Do not talk about reading

Reading can intimidate children. Oftentimes, they view it as a chore that must be accomplished under the stern eye of a schoolmarm. By introducing variety into reading, books can be pulled from the equation. You should try to teach children how to chose and enjoy what they wish to read. Cereal boxes, comics, age-appropriate magazines, and learning about particular hobbies and interests are all great ways for you to take the schooling and intimidation out of your children’s reading.

Read with your children

Scheduling a few evenings each week for your family to read together is a wonderful idea. By sharing this time with your children, you will show them that reading is an important and pleasurable hobby, not a penance. You can take turns reading paragraphs, pages, or chapters aloud to one another and then discuss favorite characters, happenings and anything else of interest that comes up. Not only is this habit a great way for you to foster a love for reading, it will also help you lay the lines of communication that are important to all families.

Create a reading station

Place some large pillows or cushiony chairs in a comfortable well-lighted corner of your home. This can become your family’s dedicated reading spot. If possible, it would be nice if you could border the area with low, eye-level shelves, enabling your kids to display their books and magazines in this area of importance.

Schedule a weekly, fortnightly, or monthly book day

You can elect a different family member to be the leader of each book day. The leader has the responsibility of choosing which bookstore to visit and perhaps even of picking the topic that all the club members need to try to find reading materials about. You, of course, can help your children make these choices by suggesting subjects that relate to what is presently happening in their lives. If your family has an upcoming holiday planned for the hills, a recommendation to learn about volcanoes or tea farms would be in fine standing.

Some local bookstores have scheduled readings or author visits. These could easily be plugged into your family’s book day schedule.

Once back home, in the embrace of your family’s reading station, the leader can read aloud to the group her new purchase. Then you all may discuss the reading along with the rest of the club members’ purchases.

Make reading journals

Using large notebooks, your children can craft reading journals covered with their own decorated designs. They may write about what they like and dislike in their readings and record any news words, phrases or ideas they uncover. You will then be able to respond in writing to your children’s thoughts. It is important to remember that your family reading station is a place where your children are discovering how to enjoy exploring and playing with language, so you should avoid correcting your children’s journal entrees.

Most of All

Have fun. The above ideas are merely suggestions. We all need to keep in mind that life-long habits grow from activities that produce positive returns. You, the parent, know best what rocks your children’s socks and by your being tuned into these desires, your children will soon be as excited about an upcoming book day as they are about the next broadcasting of High School Musical.

Good reading,

(Sidebar, one of one)

How to Choose Children’s Books

· Stay with the known. Look for readings that match your children’s interests, characteristics and life. Kids enjoy reading about people and situations they relate to.

· Explore the unknown. Children love learning about something new.

· Mix it up. Help your children build a wide-ranging library stocked with fiction, non-fiction, the classics, and fantasy.

· Open the book and read a few pages. You know your children best, do you think the material will grab your children’s attention?

· Check the children’s book best-seller lists at www.bookweb.org, www.nytimes.com and www.booksense.com.

· Read book reviews, www.amazon.com is loaded with both editorial and reader reviews. You and your children are also able to post your own reviews. Writing online reviews is a great way to stoke your children’s interest in both reading and writing.

· Ask for advice from other parents, bookstore clerks and, if you have access to libraries, librarians.

This article was published in The Jakarta Post’s On Words Column Sunday, 17 June 2007.

KABAR Magazine, "Inspired by Indonesia," writing contest results.

2007-05-18T19:07:00.000-07:00

KABAR Magazine held an "Inspired by Indoesia" writing contest. I entered and earned a second place finish. One of the judges wrote the following about my piece:

"This was a very close second. I adore the first page of this story, it has a brilliant opening. The way the flood, death and disaster are described is truly captivating and I was taken to the river side immediately. Again the story deals with a very timely issue of environmental disasters and whether humans are to blame because of their arrogance in a very engaging and enjoyable way. It's an extremely well written short story."

Two weeks ago there was a celebratory dinner to announce the winners and distribute the prizes. It was good to meet the winner, Tim Hannigan, who is an EF (I believe) teacher in Surabaya. I look forward to being able to read his entire entry in the next edition of KABAR magazine. Wimar Witoelar and Lilimunir Croft Cusworth spoke.

Strangely enough, I did not meet anyone from the magazine.

My entry is posted below.

The award-winning Travel Piece for KABAR Magazine

2007-05-18T18:29:00.001-07:00

The Spirits of Bukit Lawang

At first cock-crow the ghosts must go

Back to their quiet graves below.

--Theodosia Garrison

NORTH SUMATRA – The spirits have been silent since the water swept through three years ago. “The flood changed the river. It changed everything,” says 30-year-old male trekking guide, Umbrella.

Reminders to that November 2003 night, in which perhaps 400 people were killed, abound in Bukit Lawang. Tombstone-white cement foundations, remnants of washed-away huts, dot the Bohorok’s east bank. An inappropriate pollen-yellow excavator labors downstream from where I stand, its dinosaur movements biting wide the river banks. An entire neighborhood of cement block houses climbs up over a hill to the river’s southeast, reportedly a consolation gift from the government for those left behind. And, of course, the spirits do not say much anymore either.

Standing at the riverside, looking out over these worn foundations, testaments to what once was, it is hard not to imagine how glorious it must have been to be staying in one of those rooms perched at the border of North Sumatra’s wilderness. The west bank that marks the entrance to the Gunung Leuser National Park is made up of boulders and smaller rocks. The jungle mountains rise directly from this bank, presenting a lacework so intertwined, that individual trees are as hard to discern as a single thread is in a finely-made ship cloth.

This must have made for the most beautiful of jungle settings from which to sit on your porch and watch the orangutans swing their heavy burgundy potbellied bodies from tree to tree on the river’s other side. The river was narrow, the apes were close, and all was as it should have been. It must have been the kind of place that someone would fly half way around the world to experience.

With generator-provided electricity available only a few hours daily, Bukit Lawang is in the realm of a heavy darkness that city-dwellers have evolved away from. A blackness so complete, your hand waves unseen in front of your face. So total, that a torch is needed to fumble your way to the bathroom at night.

And so all-encompassing, that when a flashflood crushes the rattan walls of your room upon your sleeping body, you will have no idea of where to flee and you will be wrenched by the river’s muddy grasp into the water, uncomprehending, and you will scream out to those dying and screaming their own fruitless prayers around you, hoping that they might perhaps be noble enough to forego their own tragedies in order to come to your aid. Your lungs will be pressed full of mud, your warmth extinguished by its vacuum-filling solid coldness as your life is squeezed from you, gasp-by-gasp, and still your body, unseeing, unfeeling and unknowing, will continue on its macabre parade downriver continuously recruiting new followers along the way.

If your family is fortunate, your body will be found, its limbs stuck in odd, driftwood-like, poses. Pulled from the mud like a fossil, it will be tossed into the back of a palm-tree-plantation truck and brought home and buried and loved.

At the end of 2003, many were not so lucky.

Umbrella says he knew evil was drawing closer. He says that in the months leading to that night, the spirits of the jungle and the spirits of the river came and warned the people. Every night, for two months, the black ghost bird visited the Jungle Inn. This inn, the last accommodation available before the national park, lost a row of rooms that night.

“The ghost bird,” Umbrella softly says, while looking at the Bohorok from the Jungle Inn’s restaurant, “perched on the railing there and cried out its warning caw. Also, a midnight cock crowed its ‘cock-a-doodle-dooo’ in the middle of each night for a month.”

“A week before the flood, the spirits grew more desperate,” says Umbrella, his right hand tapping a cigarette against the table. “They came inside people sitting here and said through those people, ‘Go away. The river is coming.’ They tried to tell us, but many did not listen.”

“I saw and talked to the people with the spirits inside them. I heard the midnight cock and the ghost bird. I knew. My sister sold drinks to tourists at the side of the river. I told her, ‘Do not think of the money. Think of the strength of the river.’ She didn’t listen. She was in her house that night, at the river’s edge, and I lost my sister, niece, and nephew,” his moistening eyes focus on his smoke.

For the survivors, the demands of life were not washed away. Jobs must be had and livelihoods secured. Umbrella, now only guiding trekkers part time, farms oranges 20 minutes from Bukit Lawang. The Jungle Inn has added rooms at higher elevations than before. A new motorcycle bridge is nearly finished and the river is broader in the hope that it is now less potent.

My nine-year-old daughter and I sit in the Jungle Inn’s restaurant watching a family of macaque monkeys walking on all fours foraging among the rocks on the opposing shore. We are on a daddy-daughter journey and have just walked back upstream following a one kilometer river run on inner tubes. Our wet clothes suction tight against our bodies while bold drops of river water pattern the cement floor.

Going through the menu we agree to share a lemon pancake and order a pair of the inn’s signature drink, Jungle Inn Tea. Made with cinnamon, cardamom, red stick, bay leaf, ginger, lemon grass, Chinese akar root, nutmeg, star anise, lemon, and sweetened with honey, the drink is served in a tall clear glass chocked full of leaves, roots, and other plant odds and ends.

While I cannot vouch for the menu’s claim that the mixed herbal tea is “Good for Malaria, Blood Stimulation, Slimming, [and] many other properties,” it is the perfect beverage for us this late afternoon while our clothes dry, steaming upon us.

Asa, the inn’s genie-bellied shirtless keeper, brings our sugar-dusted thin pancake. The plate is lowered.

“How was the river?” he enquires in Indonesian, his chestnut nipples staring into my eyes.

“Great. Not as cold as our mountain rivers.”

“Where you from?”

“Canada,” I lie, veiling my red, white, and blue vein.

“Pretty cold there. How long you going to stay?”

“Probably two more nights. We want to catch the feeding tomorrow morning.”

“This morning they didn’t take anyone across. Said the water was too high for the canoe,” he says, motioning with his rounded teak chin towards the tethered single-log craft.

“Does that happen much?” I ask, lifting my glass to my mouth, deftly pushing the mix-herbed foliage out of my face with an index finger. Surely the locals are impressed with my one-handed abilities.

“No. I think the feeders were just lazy this morning.”

“The river seems fine now,” I say. “It was shallow enough for me to stand in.”

“Yeah. It actually looks rougher than it is.”

“That’s good. Do people ever get caught up in the rapids? Or drown?”

“A few times. Medan people come and fall in. If a spirit gets inside them, they will die unless their clothes are given to the river.”

“Give their clothes?” I ask.

“When they are pulled from the water, their shirt or pants or something must be sacrificed. Otherwise, the spirits will not leave them and the people won’t wake up.”

The next morning’s feeding does not go as advertised in Lonely Planet. We are roped across the river in the canoe with our shoes held high. We clamber up into the greenery following a well-traveled path to ascend 20 minutes to a two-by-three meter elevated platform. On the platform the feeder bangs two pieces of wood together, calling the apes. They do not come. We hear gibbons calling, “woo, woo, woo,” from somewhere we are not.

We sit and we linger just to the side and below the platform. The feeder bangs, bangs, bangs his wood. The meal of bananas waits at his feet. Insects collect on my ankles, each one of my pores rush to push out beads of sweat. I take a photo of my daughter, even sweaty she is cute, and begin to turn over rocks, rotting wood, and fallen leaves hoping to uncover a lizard or snake or anything like those khaki-clad folks on TV do. Nothing. Bang, bang, bang.

After an hour, our simian dreams unfulfilled, we start back down the path with the feeder leading the way. Half way along we turn the corner and there, the feeder points, five meters downhill, not on the path but through the foliaged-thickness, is a large orangutan nonchalantly brachiating her way up. She reaches from limb to limb with arms twice the length of her body. I close my eyes and concentrate trying to listen for her movement through the jungle. I cannot. To my 39-year-old Jakarta-seasoned ears, she is as silent as an unfolding fern.

Once she reaches the path, she lowers her tubby self to the ground and ambles across the clearing like a George Lucas character and, in a single unhurried movement, hauls herself into a tree. She hangs out horizontally, to the side, using just her left limbs and, with her right foot, takes the bananas from the feeder. She hangs like that, seemingly posing for photos, for many minutes. It is magical to be so close to a semi-wild animal that possesses such grace and power and is, according to molecular biologists, genetically, 96.4 percent identical to us.

Just two meters in front of this female, her eyes swinging into ours, I understand why these animals embody mystical beings to many indigenous peoples in Sumatra and Borneo.

The peaceful nature of these orangutans, Asia’s lone great ape, belies their tragic tales. As infants, many were stolen from the cooling grasps of their murdered mothers by poachers who then sold them to the best and the brightest of South East Asia’s upper class. It is from their homes, that the apes were rescued and reintroduced into the wild.

A young orangutan normally stays with its mother seven years and, therefore, teaching one to thrive as it was designed to live is a protracted process. Though the rehabilitation center is no longer open, the feedings still take place, with only a mundane diet of milk and bananas being offered. These feedings raise awareness and bring cash into the area.

Visitors are told not to touch nor feed the apes. With the orangutan’s DNA being so similar to ours, diseases nimbly jump from our population into theirs. Estimates are that since 1990, 80 percent of the wild-born babies in the Bukit Lawang area have been killed by either disease or malnutrition. We resist all temptations and depart with only photos.

My daughter and I have traveled by plane, bus, motorized trishaw, and foot to make it to Bukit Lawang. We came to experience the jungle, its wildlife, and tube its river. Our expectations realized, we are truly thankful and we both know there remains but a single task.

While packing the next morning, I hand my blue button-up Tommy Hilfiger shirt, a gift from my mother in America, to my daughter and we walk hand-in-hand to the Bohorok. Carefully we pass our way over the river rocks. It is awkward going.

Once at the river’s edge, we squat down, I like a middle-aged western man, my daughter like the young Asian she is. Using both hands she silently folds the material into halves, quarters, eighths.

I leave it to her to say the prayer and she does so in Arabic before reaching out and floating the rectangle onto the river’s surface.

Strong and flat, the offering twists away from the side. The cloth raft, rotating in the current, picks up speed and suddenly, tiny chocolate tendrils inch up, accept the gift and pop it beneath the surface.

The Badui of West Java

2007-03-22T22:41:00.000-07:00

The Badui of West Java

Each of the three Inner Badui villages, Cikeusik, Cibeo, and Cikartawana, select holy headmen, called Puun, every ten to 14 years says Hasman. They choose two to three persons and educate them to be leaders. Next year new leaders will be chosen in Cibeo.

“It’s their own country,” says Hasman. Indonesia is only 61 years old, while they’ve been there for 1,600 years. In Indonesia every 17 year old is required to have an ID card, but none of the Inner Badui have one.”

Hasman says visitors pose the biggest peril by introducing diseases. Around 25 years ago tuberculosis killed many Badui. Mortality was extremely high he says, especially for the infants.

Hasman says the Badui have a unique naming tradition, “Every Badui may change their name up to nine times throughout their lives.”

“Their first name is when they are born and the headman gives a name to the midwife. The second name is used from eight to 12 years old. If a child becomes ill, he will use a third name.”

“Once a person is officially engaged a fourth name is picked and used for about six months until they are married and then a fifth name is introduced. The sixth name is given when the first child is born. The parents and the first born all use the same name. Another name is used the same way when the first grandchild is born so at that point, the grandchild, both parents, and four grandparents will share a name. This happens again when the first great-grandchild is born.”

“There are also names for people who are married but unable to have children. These names translate as ‘old’ and ‘empty.’ The ‘empty’ term is the same word they use to describe an empty rice husk.”

The Inner Badui, Hasman says, are all animists while the Outer are nearly so with less than 200 being Muslim. Hasman says that their belief about the birth of the world is, “a universal story. There were some seeds that grew. And from these seeds humans came as descendants from God. God is called ‘Batara Tunggal’ meaning ‘the One and Only.’”

Once a year they worship at a five-terraced rock pyramid. The pyramid is located in “the golden place” where the Badui believe the spirits of their ancestors dwell. Hasman says he has never seen the pyramid though he knows where it is. “It is very holy to them. There are some outsiders who have seen it but they then got the spell and died young.”

Hasman says no one knows where the Badui are originally from. From the architecture that they use, it is believed that they have been in the area since the fifth century. Their language is Sundanese which is spoken throughout West Java.

Even with three decades of Badui observations, Hasman says he still has much to learn. He has been studying the Badui calendar for six years and feels that he will need another one or two before he completely figures it out.

He says there are 12 months and roughly 360 days in a Badui year. However, the months, says Hasman, can have anywhere from 27 to 60 days and are decided two weeks before they are to begin. The Puun decide when the next month commences.

Hasman says that the Badui calendar is neither lunar nor solar. He believes that it is based on the stars and consolations. “When Orion is at its highest point in the sky is when land tilling begins and then a month or two later planting is started.” The crops are then left for the rain to water.

This was published as a sidebar to the below profile of Don Hasman.