All I have to do is blink and it feels like a month has flown by. Upon realizing how much time has passed I then remember that I once again haven't really updated any one of how the project that is ‘turtle camp’ is going. So this one is dedicated to turtle camp.
Not so long ago I was living in a pondok without a door, in the garden of a family in the kampung (kampung is more or less ‘neighborhood’). Now I have a big house on the cliff overlooking a beach, a functional bathroom, a mostly finished dining hall, a half finished stone path, a charming fence to keep the goats and other wandering livestock (and children) at bay, and a couple of tent platforms scattered around the cliffside.
Most of this has been accomplished with the help of my worker, Teni. Thus far my budget has only allowed me one worker, so I chose somebody that I had observed to be a hard worker with a good attitude(as you do). It turns out that I chose wisely. Teni is a total badass. He has an uncanny knack for understanding what I’m trying to say even if it’s not translatable. He turns gibberish into real live projects. He waters my plants when I’m not home. His wife comes to my house and cooks me corn under my porch while I’m working. His youngest daughter and two sons cling to me like monkeys. His oldest daughter studies English with me when she has time. His parents bring me fresh vegetables and fruit trees from their garden. His extended family hikes down the mountain for an hour to give me coconuts, avocados, squash, chiles, eggplant, and puppies (no joke).
I had the amazing luck to have 2 friends come and stay with me for the month of March and work trade as well. As I wasn’t able to have a 2nd paid worker yet, this was a saving grace. Tyler and Polly came, helped me plan and make future decisions. (Insight from others is invaluable when you’ve been staring at the same piece of paper for 4 months and have no new ideas.) They helped me cook, clean, explore, build a rock path, upgrade my living situation, and maintain my morale. Without their help a lot less would have been accomplished in the last month! (THANK YOU a million Tyler & Polly, i.e.; Ricky & Flo. You guys saved my sanity by giving me some of yours!)
Fortunately at last, this month my budget finally allows me to have add a second worker to my force. Teni works so hard everyday doing any project I can think of all by himself. But as more of the compound is coming together, we have bigger more permanent projects ahead of us. This month Teni and Vincent (my 2nd worker) will be building 4 more tent platforms, a cement platform and drainage ditches for my kitchen, varnishing the entire house, and adding to the stone pathway. These are only the highlights of what will be completed this month.
In addition to projects on site, one of the men who helped build the house, is building us 3 bunk beds to put in the guest side of the house. We have our first group of official guests arriving in late May and plan to be up and running by then with beds, a kitchen, tables, chairs, food service, and activities. It’s a long way to the finish line but we have a pretty solid foundation to start off of, so I’m hopeful.
As far as the turtles go; there has been no actual turtle sightings yet. I have found the occasional turtle egg scraps or a half hearted turtle nest. As it stands, none of the villagers can give us an exact time of year the turtles come. Every answer you get differs greatly from the answer someone else offered. For example, with information I have collected from the village, there are lots of turtles between the months of January to December. This is not exact information. So for the first year we are maintaining data and learning when it is that the turtles are actually on our beach. I’ll surely let you all know when the turtles arrive.
As far as my language skills go……. well, I am certainly maintaining my Indonesian and improving it little by little. I have plateaued a little with having work traders that speak only English. Their tenure has ended however and I will once again have no choice but to communicate only in Indonesian, so it’s time to pull out the dictionary again and start adding more words to my vocabulary. My Manggarai is slowly but surely coming together. It’s a lot harder to learn as I cannot relate any of the words to anything in English. Everybody also speaks so quickly…..and it’s not a written language…..so it’s harder to maintain words when you learn them only through speech. On top of all that I have started studying German as well. So there’s that for exercising my brain. It might implode if I’m not careful.
The nice part about study overload is that I’m so exhausted every night that I literally can’t speak because all my languages get jumbled up and I have an excuse to lay down on my mattress on the porch and stare at the stars, planets, and lightening storms in the distance.
As things go, this job is hard work. There’s a lot of physical, mental, and emotional strain that goes into it. I’m being tested in ways I never thought I would be. I’m managing people in ways I never thought possible. I’m networking with a disappearing culture in a remote part of the world. I’m learning things I never imagined. And it is totally worth it. I wouldn’t change a thing. I have absolutely enjoyed all the leeches, dengue, sore muscles, sunburns, jelly fish stings, spider bites, sweat dripping nights eating rice and cassava leaves in the village, and extreme, uncomfortable cultural differences just as much as I have enjoyed swimming in the ocean on an empty beach, trekking mountains, hanging out with 70 year old Manggarai villagers in their garden pondoks eating jungle pig, guerilla milking goats to feed my 7 week old puppy, exchanging languages with the kids, and living in an insanely beautiful part of the world with the absolute kindest culture on this planet. (How’s that for a run on sentence?)
To wrap that up, the project is coming along nicely and everything improves daily. I’m almost ready for all of you to come live with me!
Not so long ago I was living in a pondok without a door, in the garden of a family in the kampung (kampung is more or less ‘neighborhood’). Now I have a big house on the cliff overlooking a beach, a functional bathroom, a mostly finished dining hall, a half finished stone path, a charming fence to keep the goats and other wandering livestock (and children) at bay, and a couple of tent platforms scattered around the cliffside.
Most of this has been accomplished with the help of my worker, Teni. Thus far my budget has only allowed me one worker, so I chose somebody that I had observed to be a hard worker with a good attitude(as you do). It turns out that I chose wisely. Teni is a total badass. He has an uncanny knack for understanding what I’m trying to say even if it’s not translatable. He turns gibberish into real live projects. He waters my plants when I’m not home. His wife comes to my house and cooks me corn under my porch while I’m working. His youngest daughter and two sons cling to me like monkeys. His oldest daughter studies English with me when she has time. His parents bring me fresh vegetables and fruit trees from their garden. His extended family hikes down the mountain for an hour to give me coconuts, avocados, squash, chiles, eggplant, and puppies (no joke).
I had the amazing luck to have 2 friends come and stay with me for the month of March and work trade as well. As I wasn’t able to have a 2nd paid worker yet, this was a saving grace. Tyler and Polly came, helped me plan and make future decisions. (Insight from others is invaluable when you’ve been staring at the same piece of paper for 4 months and have no new ideas.) They helped me cook, clean, explore, build a rock path, upgrade my living situation, and maintain my morale. Without their help a lot less would have been accomplished in the last month! (THANK YOU a million Tyler & Polly, i.e.; Ricky & Flo. You guys saved my sanity by giving me some of yours!)
Fortunately at last, this month my budget finally allows me to have add a second worker to my force. Teni works so hard everyday doing any project I can think of all by himself. But as more of the compound is coming together, we have bigger more permanent projects ahead of us. This month Teni and Vincent (my 2nd worker) will be building 4 more tent platforms, a cement platform and drainage ditches for my kitchen, varnishing the entire house, and adding to the stone pathway. These are only the highlights of what will be completed this month.
In addition to projects on site, one of the men who helped build the house, is building us 3 bunk beds to put in the guest side of the house. We have our first group of official guests arriving in late May and plan to be up and running by then with beds, a kitchen, tables, chairs, food service, and activities. It’s a long way to the finish line but we have a pretty solid foundation to start off of, so I’m hopeful.
As far as the turtles go; there has been no actual turtle sightings yet. I have found the occasional turtle egg scraps or a half hearted turtle nest. As it stands, none of the villagers can give us an exact time of year the turtles come. Every answer you get differs greatly from the answer someone else offered. For example, with information I have collected from the village, there are lots of turtles between the months of January to December. This is not exact information. So for the first year we are maintaining data and learning when it is that the turtles are actually on our beach. I’ll surely let you all know when the turtles arrive.
As far as my language skills go……. well, I am certainly maintaining my Indonesian and improving it little by little. I have plateaued a little with having work traders that speak only English. Their tenure has ended however and I will once again have no choice but to communicate only in Indonesian, so it’s time to pull out the dictionary again and start adding more words to my vocabulary. My Manggarai is slowly but surely coming together. It’s a lot harder to learn as I cannot relate any of the words to anything in English. Everybody also speaks so quickly…..and it’s not a written language…..so it’s harder to maintain words when you learn them only through speech. On top of all that I have started studying German as well. So there’s that for exercising my brain. It might implode if I’m not careful.
The nice part about study overload is that I’m so exhausted every night that I literally can’t speak because all my languages get jumbled up and I have an excuse to lay down on my mattress on the porch and stare at the stars, planets, and lightening storms in the distance.
As things go, this job is hard work. There’s a lot of physical, mental, and emotional strain that goes into it. I’m being tested in ways I never thought I would be. I’m managing people in ways I never thought possible. I’m networking with a disappearing culture in a remote part of the world. I’m learning things I never imagined. And it is totally worth it. I wouldn’t change a thing. I have absolutely enjoyed all the leeches, dengue, sore muscles, sunburns, jelly fish stings, spider bites, sweat dripping nights eating rice and cassava leaves in the village, and extreme, uncomfortable cultural differences just as much as I have enjoyed swimming in the ocean on an empty beach, trekking mountains, hanging out with 70 year old Manggarai villagers in their garden pondoks eating jungle pig, guerilla milking goats to feed my 7 week old puppy, exchanging languages with the kids, and living in an insanely beautiful part of the world with the absolute kindest culture on this planet. (How’s that for a run on sentence?)
To wrap that up, the project is coming along nicely and everything improves daily. I’m almost ready for all of you to come live with me!