Watermelon juice will cure all that ails me.

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Originally uploaded by fuckyeahfuntornado

9:23am July 4, 2009

I just walked for 2 hours. Normally, if I'd been planning to walk for 2 hours, I wouldn't have any issue with this. However, I was NOT planning to walk for 2 hours. I was just taking an early morning walk to the ATM, then headed to breakfast/email/writing time, but I guess I overestimated my ability to navigate around here, and I ended up walking for 2 hours before finally giving up, acknowledging that I was lost, and getting a taxi to take me where I had been trying to go originally. It was a lovely walk. I stopped and got a bottle of water. I took some pictures. But I was wearing cheap Old Navy flip flops, and the space between my big toe and its neighbor is killing me. In my defense, I sensed I was going the wrong way about an hour into the walk, which is, it turns out, about exactly when I WAS going the wrong way, and I asked for directions. TWICE. I had been told by several people that the soccer fields are often the landmarks by which people give directions around here. In the village where I live, just outside the main town, I can say I live at so-and-so's house, near the soccer field. In the big town, the restaurant where I was going for breakfast is right on the soccer field, near the library. I figured that was plenty to go on in terms of asking for directions (I couldn't remember the name of the restaurant). I don't know what soccer field/library combo I was being directed towards, but it took me another hour and increasingly sore feet before I cried uncle, called one of the other volunteers here, confirmed I was lost, turned around and found a taxi.

Its a joke around here that you are constantly being asked if you need transport by taxi drivers looking for a fare. Often they hold signs that say "Do you need transport?" When, almost invariably, you say no thanks, they say "maybe tomorrow?" Supposedly there are t-shirts around here someplace that say "Do you need transport?" on the front, and on the back "Maybe tomorrow?" which I think is pretty charming. Anyway, I was asked if I needed transport maybe 15 times on my walk. I didn't think I needed transport. I'm not exactly flush with cash, and my legs work fine thankyouverymuch and it can't be THAT much further because the last two people I asked both told me to go this way and I've been walking FOREVER... Anyway, I finally turned around and went back to the nearest taxi place I'd seen. One guy was sitting there, outside of a black car with decals on the driver and passenger side doors that said "Sheriff" in official looking letters. I asked the guy if there was a taxi around. He gestured in sort of a "duh" way to the sheriff car and asked me where I wanted to go. I described the restaurant and the soccer field and the library and he said he knew where it was. I asked him how much it would be. 20,000 rpa, he told me. $2.00. (REALLY? What was I waiting for? Oh, brother) We got into the sheriff's car, with me still not totally sure if this was the sheriff ("Should I get in the front? Is that police social faux pas?" I wondered to myself as I opened the door) or if the western taboo of not impersonating officers of the law doesn't apply here. At any rate, the would-be sheriff got me to the restaurant in about 10 minutes, driving back along much of the way I came. It was TOTALLY worth $2.00. I'd have gladly paid much more.

And now, of course, I'm totally thinking I'm getting a motorbike. Because walking is nice and all but (excuse my language) FUCK THAT SHIT.

In other news, I'm homesick. Not in a crippling way, but in a, "gee, I have another 5 weeks here... this might get old soon" kind of way. I really wish I was able to share the culture and beauty here with some -ANY- of you in real time. It feels very isolating to me to be so far from home, having such a profound experience of another part of the world and feel like words fail me so completely. I hadn't planned to do this trip alone and, while its totally fine that I'm doing it alone, it is lonely. I woke up this morning and realized I was in Bali. And as beautiful a place as it is to wake up, I must have been dreaming about being home, because it was disconcerting to not be at home.

The work I came here to do is not going to be as easy to get to do as it was in Senegal. The midwives in Senegal were happy to step back and let us get in and do the "dirty work." They'd call us when someone was about to have a baby, especially if something "fancy" like breech or twins was happening. That is less true here. There are many Indonesian midwives who are paid to do the dirty work and are good at doing it, and not eager to let some young fresh-faced wanna be from the States jump in and take over. And while I completely respect and understand that, its not what I was expecting. Also, I was grossly misled in what was promised to me as a student coming here by the woman I interviewed with when I applied for this program. I was told I would be the ONLY student here, and therefore I wouldn't have to compete for births. Instead, there are FOUR students and three foreign midwives. All of them wanting births. So its frustrating. I'm not here to learn how to do blood pressures, or to be "allowed" to catch the baby as it is delivered and passed up to its mother. I don't think I need the training wheels anymore.

Some of you know that the hardest part of my educational path has been what should be the easiest part: doing my school work. I loved apprenticing, I love going to births. But I have this stack of school work that I have barely touched. All it is is lists and lists of questions that require me to open my text books and write in the answers. I won't get into how totally and completely I detest these questions and how absolutely inadequate I find them to prepare a young midwife for the very REAL and IMPORTANT practice she's going to undertake after doing all this silly work, but suffice to say, I hate it and I'm so resistant to doing it that, three years into my formal education, I still have most of it to do. In fact, it is the only thing preventing me from sitting for my license exam sooner rather than later. I'm not proud of that, but it's true.

So I've decided that, starting today, I'm camping out in the clinic. I'd had a vision of being able to hang out by the pool, work on my suntan, and get called for births. That's totally not happening. So I'll install myself. I'll be there for as many births as I can be. And when there are no births happening, I'm going to be in the office working on my stupid lists of stupid questions. I cannot use my disappointment with how this is going so far as an excuse to check out and just be on a 6 week vacation in Bali. And I'm hoping that by hanging around the clinic like a bad smell, learning some Indonesian, maybe I'll start to build some relationships with the Indonesian midwives and being included a little more in what's happening. Basically, I'm going to the mats.

After just one more watermelon juice.