E-plus language day

Today was quite interesting, because me and my Nordic trainee friends Catharina, Maj-Britt and Samuli were invited as guest stars to a special English language learning day for Indonesian kids to a village 2,5 hours from Jakarta. This is how it went...

Our cute students

One of my colleagues holds an English language school (called "E-plus") as a hobby beside work in his home village close to Bogor. Since I got to Indonesia, my colleague has been telling me about his language school and asking me and my friends to join in and help some time. Once every six months, he and all the teachers take their classes out of the classroom to spend a fun day together while learning English. His idea was, that he could invite us foreigners there to make the kids talk and so that they would have the opportunity to use English in real conversations.

I'm teaching a game

Today was the day. Hotib came to pick us up from Jakarta at 7am and we drove straight to the village in question. There were maybe 50 kids, all aged between 6 and 16, waiting for us with curiosity. During the day we split them up in four groups, so that Samuli, Catharina, Maj-Britt and I rotated amongst the groups. The idea was simply to talk to the kids and to ask them questions making them use English as much as possible. We were invited there as "native speakers" which was of course flattering, but kids don't have many opportunities for speaking English in their little village, so we did our best and tried to make them speak. It was quite difficult most of the time because they were usually too shy to say anything, but I hope that they at least understood most of what we said.

Surrounded by cameras

I had some standard questions to all of the groups: besides asking the kids' names and ages, I also wanted to know for example their dream jobs and whether they had travelled anywhere in Indonesia and abroad. And I found out some interesting things. According to my little survey, most of the kids want to become doctors or teachers, but some of the boys also wanted to become policemen, clearly because of money: the police is by far the most corrupt institution in this country and known to collect good money in bribes. I also asked the kids what they liked most about Indonesia, and the most common answer was "beaches". But when I asked which beaches they had seen, it seemed they hadn't actually been to any, only a few lucky ones had been in Bali before. When I then asked if anyone had been in Singapore, Thailand or other foreign countries, I only got some amused looks and laughter, nobody of our 50 kids had been anywhere abroad. They obviously didn't represent the poorest Indonesians though as they had money to go on this course, and I was actually surprised to hear that nearly all of them are on Facebook, have their own mobile phones and use the internet daily. I made a terrible mistake to confess that I'm on Facebook too and will probably find 50 new friend requests in the coming days :)

The kids also asked us several questions, like "what's your favourite Indonesian movie", "who is your favourite Indonesian actor/actress" and "who's your favourite Indonesian singer". Well, have to say I don't have that many opinions on those yet ...

Catharina posing. Tens of kids wanted to have their picture taken with/of us

Generally speaking we all were quite amazed to see how well-behaved the kids were. The smallest were only 6 years old and even they had the patience to sit down in the heat, listening to us talking for 1,5 hours nonstop. I'm sure that Finnish kids would have got tired and started running around or whining by that time. Also, the seemingly general Indonesian attitude towards waste and garbage disturbs me a lot and I therefore couldn't help noticing how all the kids were distributed a water drink in a plastic cup. When the cups were empty, they stayed lying around. In Finland, somebody would have walked around with a plastic bag encouraging the kids to collect and throw away their own cup, but here nobody collected any trash and it was left behind on the ground in the language course place. Guess I can't blame Indonesians for trashing their own country, if nobody has taught them as children, what a waste bin is.

Group picture. Task: can you find the four Nordics? :D

We also wanted to use this opportunity to influence little Indonesian minds and taught them some basic things. We told them that in Jakarta we were often greeted as "misters" and that there are also alternatives, such as "miss" and "mrs". I had some leaflets about Finland with me and showed pictures of Finland to the kids. They gasped in terror when they heard that winter can be -20 degrees, wondered how green our summer looks on the pictures, and how many lakes and trees there are. Here I've also really learned the value of calmness, peace and FRESH AIR; just a few of the many things Finland really can be proud of. I taught the kids that sauna, Santa Claus and Nokia are all Finnish things and taught them how to say "hi" in Finnish. At the end, the kids had the chance to take pictures with us and the instructors even encouraged them to do this because it was a "unique chance to get their picture taken with foreigners". We smiled to cameras till our cheeks were sore. Nice day, and yet another great learning opportunity - not only to the kids, but also to us "guest stars".

PS: Happy Fathers' Day!