There was no internet in the country of Indonesia for three days. Can you imagine? Now there is a connection but it is VERY slow.

We had arrived home five days before we had told the maid, Iis, that we would – we had planned to travel more, but returned since Greg was so sick. When we arrived the house hadn’t been cleaned, the cat was hungry, the plants were droopy and she wasn’t there. Right before we’d left, she told me she was getting engaged over the holiday and requested one day off. The engagement was shocking to me, since it was proceeded by the numerous conversations we’d had about planning for the future, saving money, agreements between couples, and her previous comment that her short-term boyfriend was “nothing serious.” But her parents were putting a lot of pressure on her since she was already old (20) and her younger sister wanted to get married. In any case, we left a note asking that she talk to us if she came home, but she came home, said thank you, took her things and left. We don’t know why, and we asked her to stay – she said she’d call and never did. Apparently this is a pretty normal thing here. Now we’re back to doing things the American way – by ourselves. I sure wish the house was smaller! Or that it was carpeted and we had a vacuum! It takes 2 hours just to sweep and mop just the downstairs!

There sure are a lot of accidents around here. Here’s a part of a report from the Jakarta post about a recent train derailing:

“At the time of the accident, I was asleep under the seat of another passenger because the train was overcrowded and lots of people were standing. All of a sudden the (fourth) car, which I was in, lost power. Later the car somehow became uncoupled. People started screaming in fear," said Sri Lestari, a 16-year-old student who was in the car that plunged into the riverbed.

Police said the train was passing over a bridge spanning the Pager river near Rancamaya village in Cilongok district when the accident occurred.

Railway officials said the car had a maximum capacity of 106 passengers. However, they also said economy class trains were officially "allowed" to exceed the maximum passenger numbers during peak traveling times.

"We allow up to 50 percent more passengers than the maximum capacity on economy-class trains. That's normal during every Idul Fitri holiday season," Soemino, the director-general of state railway company PT KAI, said.

He could not say what caused the accident. "We are still investigating."

"Winter" Break

After the semester ended we took off for a real vacation on the small island of Bunaken in Bunaken National Park north of Manado in North Sulawesi. The park preserves the underwater wildlife and reefs and includes five islands. That means that fishing is closely monitored and only line fishing is allowed, people can only dive with certified guides trained in protecting the park, and lots of research is being done on coral re-growth and so forth with foreigners keeping track of everything and starting to involve the locals, too. We flew the same Adam Air flight that got lost the next week. To date (January 10^th) it still hasn’t been found. In any case we arrived and found the people at the airport much calmer than Surabayans and were picked up by our hotel, driven to the boat, and boated to the island. We stayed at a place called Froggies which is known for being very ecologically friendly. At first I was very disappointed at the lack of showers or hot water (this was supposed to be a relaxing vacation, after all!) but by the second day I got over it because the staff was so helpful, the food was so good, and the diving was so amazing. The staff was so well trained that I felt like we were in another country plus laundry was included in the room rate, and there was excellent fish at every meal and cookies and things for in-between meals – nice after a dive. Greg and I had a dive guide assigned to us and with only one exception we had the boat and crew to ourselves so everything was on our time schedule. It turned out that our guide, who was really excellent at pointing things out to us, had discovered a species of seahorse only a few years before. The diversity of underwater life that we saw was incredible, ranging from nudibranchs to seaturtles, mandarinfish to napoleonfish, and phosphorescent plankton lionfish – particularly on our night dive. The whole experience was incredible. We dove 6 times, mostly in Bunaken Bay but also near Manado Tua, a small cone-shaped island with a cloud rainforest covering the top. Most of the people staying at Froggies were much more serious than us, though, some of them diving 4 times a day and staying for a month. After four days, we moved to the island of Siladen to do nothing but beach. We could walk almost all the way around the island on the very nice beach, saw rainbows on two days, and saw totally amazing things just snorkeling off the beach like trumpet fishes, a purple nudibranch, and both a male and female boxfish, not to mention the swarms of red, purple and blue damselfish, schools of angelfish, and rainbow-colored parrotfish. We originally checked into a place that was literally a cabin with a bucket on the beach, but decided to splurge for a place equally close to the water’s edge but with a shower and hot water. The only other guests at that hotel was an Italian family who didn’t speak any English. Greg learned important phrases like “prego” and “bon giorno,” and the last night during a sing-along, they sang “o solo mia” and thought our laughter was hysterical.

After three days of very pleasant beaching, we took a tiny outrigger back to Manado sitting on bags of smoked fish. We saw several dolphins surface a few times. When we got to Manado we took a bemo and then a bus to Tondano in the mountains to visit a Baha’i family. We had a wonderful visit, and the family was really friendly and welcoming. We ended up staying at their house (ousting the woman’s younger brother from his bed in the alley) and got along well, considering that they didn’t speak any English. They are a young couple about our age with a 1-year-old daughter. I went with the woman, Bahiya, to the ‘market’ and was amazed to find foreign items like peanut butter and frozen fish sticks. While we were staying, we visited some friends of theirs, a Christian minahasa family. We went to their house in a horse cart. It was a beautiful trip, since every house was covered in Christmas lights with Christmas trees in every window. The air was cool and misty, so it even felt like winter time! The family had a celery farm – celery is used as an herb in Indonesia: the leaves are used and the stalk is discarded, so it’s grown to have as thin a stalk as possible – the whole area smelled like celery. We had a good time with them and sampled several types of prepared fish. The next day we went back into Manado where we had lunch with a Baha’i visiting from Jakarta then flew to Jakarta for the youth conference.

We arrived, got on the bus toward Bogor (where the US president visited earlier in the year) and sat in gridlock traffic for four hours. Unfortunately, one of the fishes we’d sampled didn’t agree with Greg… He got sick on the bus and spent the whole trip in agony. We finally arrived in Bogor and I found a taxi to Puncak. The taxi driver made a point of telling me that he liked Americans. We checked into a strange hotel with air vents in the walls (but it had Western facilities) and Greg spent the next three days there, drinking gallons of tea and bocari sweat (the Indonesian one-flavor gatorade). Throughout the Baha’i youth conference, the 150 youth practiced presenting key messages through use of the arts – poetry, painting, drama, music, you name it. I was able to go to the conference on New Year’s Eve. Each locality had prepared a song, dance, drama, or presentation to share, and there were youth from 42 locations in Indonesia. Fortunately, there were only 20 presentations, but as it was we finished at 2 am and completely missed the ‘welcoming the new year.’ The performances were amazing with all sorts of traditional clothing and languages and some very silly skits and songs, too. The last performance, from Mentawai (a small island that once had 5,000 Baha’is living on it), did a traditional dance of calling the spirits. They beat drums and bottles, sang, released nutmeg oil, and did a dance that looked very Native American while wearing armbands made of palm leaves. Afterwards, everyone went outside for roast corn (jagung bakar).

We stayed at George and Shiela Soraya’s home (along with 20 or so youth who missed their train home) before leaving the next day for the airport to return to Surabaya. I had a long conversation with a young woman about the challenges that youth face in America vs. Indonesia.