Complete Weekend

We celebrated another holiday here this past Friday. Waisak is referred to as “Buddha’s birthday”, although the day really celebrates Siddharta Gautama’s (Buddha’s) birth, enlightenment and death, which apparently happened on the same day on different years. Even though the day celebrates many other things for Buddhists,the unifying theme of this holiday could be summarized as “completeness.”

I celebrated it and the weekend by being “completely" busy.

Hope and classmates at ballet concert. She is in the back.

Mountain Biking in Sentul

Thursday night started with a ballet concert for Hope followed by a sleepover with one of her friends (at our house). Then Friday morning at 5:15 AM, I loaded up our new mountain bike, drove to Sentul (a suburb of Jakarta just near the slopes of local mountains) with two others and biked all morning. After returning as close to 12 noon as possible (8 minutes late), we attended not one, but two holiday BBQ’s (sorry, no pictures here). I think I also drove Hope to and from a birthday party somewhere in there too.

At the Volcano Tangkupan Parahu

On Saturday, 14 of us from our church went on a day trip to Bandung, which is a large city about 100 miles away from Jakarta. Besides sitting in terrible holiday traffic for hours, we drove to the top of a volcano named Tangkuban Parahu, attended an amazing cultural show (based around the Indonesian instrument called an angklung), squeezed in a little shopping and had two fantastic meals. We returned near Midnight.

At the end of the cultural show, performers invited us to the floor to dance with them.

Following church today, I will be grading lots of exams I have put off the rest of the weekend.

During the weekend, I also learned that my uncle, Les Dykhouse, passed away on Friday (Waisak). He found his eternal completeness, not in self enlightenment or in extreme busyness, but in a life of Grace and Gratitude, in that order.

May we know and live in that Truth.

But if the Spirit of Him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, He who raised Christ Jesus from the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies through His Spirit who dwells in you.
Romans 8:11

Train to Jogjakarta

Java is the most populated island in the world with over 100 million people on it. It's always been easy to believe this living in Jakarta (likely over 10 million). Our travels on Java have always been to other big cities (Surabaya, Jogjakarta and Bandung) and have either been by plane or along busy roads. To see the rural side of this island, we took our four day weekend and trained from Northwest (Jakarta) to South central Java (Yogjakarta). You can check out our route on the following train map of java here-- http://www.happychap.eu/travel_info/indonesia_2008/java/railway_map.htm

(we took the route through Cirebon).

Here are a few pictures from our trip:

Waiting for the train in Jakarta

(I'm actually a little more excited than I appear:)

Hope enjoying the spacious seat.

We took the "eksekutif" train, complete with A/C, comfortable

seats and few stops.

Terraced rice fields along the way through a very dirty train window.

Eric and Neil complained that the scenery never changed.

Proof that Eric and Neil were correct.




Enjoying a becak (bicycle taxi) in Jogja along with other

activities for 2 days following the train ride.

We cheated and took a 45 minute flight back to Jakarta on Saturday!

(It cost the same as the train ticket)

When I was a kid....

When I was a kid, a 6^th grade report or project involved the following:

• Choosing a topic—usually a static item like a country (Ecuador), issue (Abortion), thing (cell) or an event (moon landing).
• Researching—going to the small elementary library and looking up information in the encyclopedia.
• Writing—hand writing the information on neat lined paper along with traced or hand drawn maps, diagrams. If the teacher was quite good, they made sure you didn’t copy information and properly cited things in a bibliography.
• Presentation—hand drawing a nice title page with some sort of free handed graphic.

Neil's 6th grade class is continuing a huge project called exhibition. Here's how it works ( without getting into Education speak). In addition to all of the above elements, students engage in reflective journaling (both weekly and daily), field work (interviews and surveys), presentations (movies and powerpoints), and action (they actually try to help people struggling in the issue they are studying). It's quite amazing to see. In fact, what I have been struggling to succinctly state was summed up well by our head of school in his weekly thoughts to staff:

"It was a delight to spend some time chatting with Grade 6 students during their Exhibition last
week. Two things were impressive for me. Firstly, the knowledge that these young
people were sharing was “internalized” – they knew what they were talking about.
Secondly, many of them were doing something with their knowledge in relation to
injustice or bad practices. They were involved with plans and activities that
will cause positive change. I learned a lot, particularly about the incredibly
wide ranging effects of polluted water. These young people had a positive and
significant influence on me."

.

Neil shows 1st graders his Power Point (below as well)