Scenes from everyday life...or something

I have gotten into the bad habit of telling the students (mainly the girls) at my school that I “love” them. So they’ve really taken off on this. They will accost me from random classrooms with “Miss Tori! WE LOVE YOU! We LOVE YOU!” Only here.

But the absurdity of my relationships with students isn’t limited to the love we’re always proclaiming. As most know, I LOVE using the word “naughty” to describe Indonesians. The truth is so few of them are bad (that is, morally corrupt, evil, cruel, whatever), though so many of them are naughty. My meaning of naughty is a playful sort of badness, usually done in innocence. My boy students who wrestle one another in class, for example, or my girls who secretly have pierced tongues, or even my bad gang of boys who sit outside warung and smoke cigarettes after school instead of praying, are all what I consider naughty. But because I enjoy using the word “naughty” so much, it’s really caught on, and now the students label anything at my school as “naughty”. A Christian boy named George who sings while I’m giving a talk, a student who takes more than 2 minutes to wash his hands (the boys love to leave class to ‘wash their hands’…I don’t get it), a girl from another class who pops her head into my class to say hello: these are the new “naughty.” Essentially, naughty at my school means doing absolutely anything that isn’t perfectly in line with the rules of decorum or state-school style discipline. The best thing is that the students have taken an intense liking to being called “naughty” by me; it’s almost become a sort of popularity contest to be called this magic word the most frequently. What have I done to these poor children?!

In other news, my bestest friend—a woman who sells nasi Madura on my walking route to school—has finally returned. Like most of my friendships with Indonesians, my relationship with this woman is based solely on the fact that I walk by her food stand every day, that I’m friendly and that she’s curious. But what was first an unimportant relationship has gotten a lot more intense. We began to talk every day; I’d tell her about my week, my plans; she’d tell me about her kid, her family, her food. Then, for more than a week she wasn’t at her nasi Madura stand. My morning walk felt bizarre and unfulfilling; I wanted to find out where she was but I had no way of doing it. I don’t know where she lives, I have no contact information, no mutual friends. But today she was back. I can’t remember the last time I felt such relief. We shook hands for about five minutes straight (it’s a Muslim thing); she told me she had to return to Madura because her daughter was sick and she needed her family to help out, she admired my tunic (bought here, not in America), and I told her about a zillion times how much I missed her. Some of the most “random” (whatever that means) people in this country have begun to mean so much to me. It’s unsettling.

My other recent “best friend” is the becak driver who sits outside Indomaret all day, every day. He’s started shaking my hand every single time I walk past, and the other day he said “ya, kita teman-teman” (yes, we’re friends). A few days back TWO different becak drivers offered me free rides (if you’ve been to Indonesia you know how and why this is so strange), and about a week ago, at 10 a.m., they asked me to drink whiskey! True naughtiness, if you ask me.