Ron and Sally Jo Blog

What does an ordinary day look like for us here in Salatiga? That’s a little hard to say because two days are seldom alike. However, putting together happenings of several days may give you a flavor of what we experience.

We may wake up to the 4:00 a.m. Islam call to prayer. The closest mosque is almost “in our front yard” and there are two others within 5 blocks of us. Lately, we actually sleep through that but wake up to hear the ringing of the food cart which is brought along the street about 5:15 a.m. By the way, our bedroom is very close to the street and we keep the windows open for cool air. (The photo looking toward the street is not taken in early morning, but you can see how close the mosque is! It is the red roof with white cupola.)

After our morning tea, 3 or 4 days a week we take the two dogs for a half hour walk. It’s a nice cool time of day. We have a defined route we take which takes us through small streets and through some rice paddies. The dogs are always on the lookout for cats and chickens of which there are plenty of both on the walk. They come back to the house, tired and flop on the floor.

We clean up (watching for cockroaches in the shower), eat breakfast, talk a bit with our house-help who arrives about 8:30 and then walk to the office. It’s about a 15-minute walk—uphill to the office and downhill coming home. Schools start at 7:00 in the morning, so that when we walk by at 9:00, the kids are on morning break. They gather around the food carts buying various foods. A couple of the vendors are beginning to know us. They comment if we are late or if only one of us is walking. We pass a large open field where many different kinds of activities take place. School children have their P.E classes there, concerts are held, people walk the track for exercise, public celebrations are held, and many activities we don’t know about. There are food carts around the edge. (The photos showing our walk are in order as we go to the office.  However, we are sure it doesn’t matter to anyone else but us!)

The day is usually spent in the office. However, often unexpected things arise:
– We may get word that MCC has a new recruit. Can we contact the organization to see about suitability. (We have placed two new workers since we are here.)
– We learn that a service worker (and family) is not feeling well. (Twice we’ve had someone need to go to the hospital 1 -2 hours away.)
– We learn of the sudden death of the father of a future IVEPer. Someone needs to attend the funeral 4 hours away.
– MCC Akron writes that they need some documents immediately.
– We learn that a service worker’s visa will not be extended after December unless government gives special approval. This requires meetings with the organization.
– The electricity suddenly goes off which means our laptops won’t last long because of small battery and those with desktops also won’t work. (This happened only once—and we all went home!)
But we also have happenings that are planned:
– Meetings are  scheduled– in town or out of town
– We helped moved furniture from the home of service worker who left.
– We organized the storage rooms at the office.
– Sally Jo weeded and then inventoried the library.

We usually come home for lunch. That’s a half hour walk in the heat of the day. When we return to the office we need to spend time cooling down! A couple of days a week we do stay in town for lunch. We usually go to a small “warung” for gado-gado or nasi goreng.

When we return home at end of the day, we have our afternoon tea on our front porch. The dogs know that when we have tea, we also have good things to eat and hope for a bite! The dogs enjoy watching activities on the street—and always are on the lookout for cats! Our evenings are relaxation time—either reading, writing, or playing games.

We have very good house-help. She loves to cook and is very good. She does both American and Indonesian foods. We have eaten well here.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 10th, 2015 at 10:35 am and is filed under Indonesia. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.