A Day in the Life: Language School....Indonesian Style!
This is a post I wrote to share on my new page - Life as an MAF Wife. Every now and then, I'll write a post that describes in greater detail what my life looks like as an MAF wife.
Sorry, this is a long one! Better grab a cup of coffee and find a more comfy chair to sit in ;-)
We go to class for a grand total of...wait for it....two hours. Must mean we have lots of free time, lots of time to sit around sipping lemonade and soaking up all this tropical sun, right?
Ha! WahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaHAha!
Oh, that's a good one! *wiping tears from eyes*
This is what I thought too. And, I suppose that might be a little more true if we weren't parents to three very active and needy children! But, alas, our day - more specifically my day - looks a little more like this:
5:30 a.m. Rise and Shine! I awake to Sean jabbing me in the ribs because my annoying cell phone alarm has been going off for a while and I managed to ignore it. I've become very good at blocking out sound in the early morning hours. Our neighbors rise by 3:30 a.m. and we can hear them next door washing dishes and clothes and getting ready for the day (they do all of that with well water in their backyard). Then there's the roosters, the sound of revving motorcycles, and the morning call to prayer at 4:30 a.m being blasted from the three or four different mosques in our neighborhood. I don't hear it. I honestly don't. This is nothing short of a miracle and a gift from God. I'd be a very grumpy person if this stuff woke me up. Instead, I'm only mildly grumpy after being jabbed in the ribs by my morning person of a husband.
5:30-7:30 a.m. I usually use a good hour of this time to read my Bible and have a quiet time. That, of course, is all depending on the girls sleeping until 6:30 a.m. Otherwise, I'm scrambling for some quiet time later in the day. I fix breakfast for us all (anything from oatmeal to granola to pancakes to bagels) and then Sean and I rush along the girls to get them ready for school. They are never in as much of a hurry as we are.
7:30 a.m. Sean takes Brooklyn to school on the scooter and I finish getting Maddie and Paige ready for school.
7:55 a.m. Sean is back and the rest of us (Paige, Maddie, and I) climb onto the scooter with snacks and blankies and water bottles in tow. Sean and I deliver Maddie and Paige to their preschool and then head on to a hotel that lets us use their exercise equipment for a small fee. It feels good to exercise! If we don't go to the hotel gym, then we go walking around our neighborhood and let everyone stare and laugh at us. (Actually, they are very nice to us and we enjoy getting to know the people on our route.)
9:30 a.m. We're back home by now, usually after running a few errands in town on our way home. We say hello to our two helpers (more on them later) who have arrived while we were out. I take a shower, check email, visit with our helpers, and see if there is any exciting news to be found online (there hardly ever is, but I keep trying!). I spend the next few hours doing homework - writing essays, asking questions, doing grammar homework, preparing presentations, writing sentences to practice vocabulary, and going over that days' text so I can understand new words. On Tuesdays and Thursdays I meet with a tutor - we hardly ever actually study, we usually end up just chatting for an hour and a half but it's still great practice and I love her. If there is a pressing project like writing a prayerletter or organizing our shipping list I tackle that once the homework is done. Sean may head out on various errands, doing something to help another MAF family here, to pay our bills, or some other task. If I happen to have my homework done, I go along. Otherwise, Sean gets to go alone! The morning hours always go by too fast and then it's time for Sean to hop back on the scooter to go pick up the younger two girls from preschool.
12:00 p.m. Sean and I sit down to lunch with Paige and Maddie. Our helpers usually have a great spread waiting for us. Sometimes it's something Indonesian like mie goreng, nasi goreng, gado-gado, soto ayam, or some kind of curry dish. Sometimes our helper makes a more Westernized dish like a casserole or fried chicken or something along those lines. It's always delicious...and it always comes with rice (we love rice!) and fruit for our dessert. We eat rather quickly and then get a very exhausted Paige down for her nap before gathering up our things and rushing out the door for school!
1:00 p.m. - 3:00 p.m. We leave Maddie and Paige in the confident care of our helpers and hurry off to our language classes. Sean is in a different class so we part ways once we get to the school. In my current class, I am the only American! I'm joined by a Swiss couple, a Korean man, and a gal from Brazil. I love the "international-ness" of my class. One of us has to make a presentation to the class each day and then the rest of our class time is spent studying either grammar or reading a text and learning from that.
3:00 p.m. - 5:00 p.m. After class, Sean and I swing by Brooklyn's school and pick her up. She actually gets out of school at 2:40, so she plays on the playground or goes to the library until we can get there. When we get home we say good-bye to our helpers and then spend the next couple hours trying to control the chaos that erupts! How to describe this section of time? In a way that is honest but doesn't make me sound like I think my children are horrible? The fact is, these hours are the worst for our family. Our house feels tiny. Everybody is grumpy and tired and hungry and impatient. Everybody has some urgent need! If things aren't too chaotic, Sean and I enjoy sitting out on our front porch and visiting with our neighbors...this doesn't happen as often as we'd like. Instead, we're usually doing crowd control indoors. The girls like to watch a DVD at this time of day and if we can get all three of them to sit down and watch a movie, it is wonderful!
5:00 p.m. - 6:00 p.m. I start thinking about dinner. If there are enough leftovers from lunch, I heat those up but it doesn't usually work out that nicely! Sometimes I actually manage to throw a meal together with what we have on hand but more often than not I'm too exhausted to think about it and it's too huge of a task. My brain is FRIED after my long day studying the language! Sometimes we end up eating breakfast for dinner, or we make sandwiches, or we eat out or order in. It works. About once a week, I really put forth the effort to cook but it's hard on so many different levels that I've learned to let that go for this season. (more on that issue later!)
6:00-8:00 p.m The girls play for a little while and then I give them each a shower/bath. This is a step I can rarely skip - these girls get dirty and stinky by the end of just one day! I usually put away a bunch of clothes that were washed that day and help the girls get their room cleaned up, while Sean washes dishes so that the ants don't carry them away by morning. Oh, and then we realize Brooklyn still hasn't done her homework, so either I or Sean sit down and help her with that. I try to get the girls read to and tucked into bed by 7:30 but more realistically it's 8:00 before they are in bed and our average of having a nighttime story time is rather pathetic these days.
8:00-10:00 p.m. Sean and I pretty much pass out by this time of the day. If we're feeling especially studious we'll go ahead and do our homework. But honestly...we're usually too tired. Either we read or we turn on the TV. We have a television antenna and can get several Indonesian stations. Sometimes we can find an American movie playing (usually in English with Indonesian subtitles) and we'll watch that or we'll watch another Indonesian program and see how much of it we can understand. Surprisingly, I'd say we're learning just as much new vocabulary watching Indonesian television as we do in class. It's funny to see how American movies are edited for Indonesian TV. No kissing, no swear words, and definitely nothing remotely questionable! It makes for a far more enjoyable television viewing experience. And we're totally tricking ourselves into learning more Indonesian!
10:00 p.m. Sean turns into a pumpkin. He heads off to bed and I usually follow closely behind. More often than not, though, I get trapped by my computer as I pass by and I spend about 30 minutes or more reading my favorite blogs, checking Facebook, and reading the news. By the time I do fall into bed, Sean is already snoring. I spend a good thirty to forty more minutes laying in bed trying to calm down my many frenzied, random thoughts (I haven't had much time to just think during the day, so my brain wants to do it now) and trying to fall asleep.
That's my day! It wasn't this predictable or nice before when we had four hours of language class to go to and it's bound to change in the future as our class schedules change but you get the general idea.
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