Makassar Visits and Activities January 15th, 16th 17th

NOTE: One Day still needs to be added to this entry:

Today was exceptionally active. As a group we visited with three schools, a newspaper, and had a television interview. It is remarkable to me how hard it is to remember the schools we have visited so on this trip I have made more of an effort to enter the name, headmaster, address, and email of the school just to remember it.



This morning we visited SMA Negri 1 (Makassar).
Headmaster Drs. Herman Hadine, M. PD

The school had abut 800 students and they were in on a Saturday to work on extra projects, classes, and clubs. This is our friend Fitri’s school and the students were excellent. They were arrayed in a U shape instead of classroom seating and the students, juniors in high school, had a host of questions. After about an hour of questions we adjourned to a television interview in the same room. The man gave me 14 questions ahead of time and I asked how long the show was and he said “15 minutes”.

I left Sam and Julienne to go to a local paper and met with George Scholz of RELO (A State Department program designed to provide English language learning. It started very strangely with them telling us about their paper. It continued this way for a long time – they asked no questions – but were very proud of their text message/facebook program. They invite citizen texts about local government problems and corruption and try and get an answer from the town government right away (hey, what about this pot hole?) they print the question and the response in the paper. It has been a very popular and it made me think that their readers would love the chance to “ask an American a question” so I proposed a monthly facebook program where people would post questions to the Civic Initiative and to Alumni in the area. The questions might be about daily life or politics – and the paper loved the idea – they want to start right away.

In the afternoon I went to a vocational school
SMK 4 Makassar
Principal Asmah Baharudding
Assistant Rahmat Wiyrayo
rahmatwijaya68@yahoo.com
08124296961

This was a vocational school (business management, tourism, and technology). I told them I would send some books and ask about sending them an English language teacher.

I also will send them the debating material used by Nurul's group (the Sex Ed debate team) They were also very interested in an Exchange. The small group of student’s represented the schools debating club and they had a lot of questions about the US (questions in a separate post)


At night we went to Ratna’s house for a dinner party. It was a small, very neat and new house across from a Mosque along a narrow street. Over 20 people attended including three English teachers, all young women, from America. They were here for training and teach in different locations in Indonesia. The remarkable thing was that they were all from UMass – and didn’t know each other before coming. One even went to Amherst High School. That was the ultimate small world moment

January 17th
Typing, finances, and packing – we fly to Jogyakarta today on another roundabout trip leaving Makassar for Bali and then for Jogya – four hours for what could be a one hour flight. Note to self – tell travel agent next time to book other airlines (not Garuda) if convenient. I think I believed that Garuda was safer but I am not sure that is still true. Lion, SilkAir, and Merapi all seem good.