"Easy" Going

Our assistant coach's wife is an English teacher at a local school here in Surabaya. A while back, she asked me to come and speak with the students and to let them experience a “native english speaker” ....the first ever at the school! I didn’t hesitate. Being a native speaker was my part-time job title when I was playing in Austria 4 years ago. Speaking infront of a class of students isn’t so hard, especially when you're not their teacher, they're extra excited.

I was told that I needed to wear my jersey, shoes and long pants. 80% of this country is Muslim, with the other 20% being Catholics...... my usual uniform of short tights and flip-flops just wouldn’t be acceptable. Wearing my uniform proved to come in handy for the introductions as I told the students my name was “Izzy”, while pointing to the name on my back, not “easy”. For those of you who don’t know, for every language other than English, “I” is pronounced “E”. After all my travels through Europe and Asia, I don’t flinch at this anymore. Every class I walked into, this was a good ice-breaker and got a good laugh.

This school was a junior high, grades 8-10 with 1000 kids. Each class has about 40 students. The kids go to school 6 days a week for 12 months of the year. They get one week of vacation twice a year.


As for the past weekend, we won another match in straight sets over Jakarta Popsivo. With the last weekend of regular season games next weekend in Jakarta and having officially clinched a playoff spot, we have 3 more weekends of volleyball left. I had a meeting with one of the team's "Big Bosses" yesterday asking me to please stay close to the team. For example, I should attend all team meals and avoid staying after matches to watch other teams play. At this stage in the season the foreigners are "high profile" and people will do anything to try and distract our team from winning. These things might include poisoning our food, putting "hexes" on us, calling us at all hours of the night and even sending the police our way to hassle us about our visas. My manager termed this "terrorism". I'm still not convinced that it's as bad as it sounds, but things are definitely heating up as teams are scrambling to bring in more and more foreigners to give their teams the edge.

So I'm off to Singapore tomorrow to renew my visa again and it'll be followed by another 10 days in Jakarta. I haven't been able to spend any time in Jakarta yet, so I'm looking forward to some time away from "Home".