A Real Experience of Teaching in Indonesia

As part of our on-going journey to help provide real life experiences of expat teachers who have “been there and done it”, we would like to thank Mr McLean for submitting this article to be posted on the SeekTeachers Blog.

Mr McLean shares his real life experiences about life as an expat in Indonesia. Here’s what he has to say…

“So you’re thinking of teaching overseas and embarking on an adventure in foreign climates. Why not? Do it!

But the best word of advice is to suspend your expectations and be prepared for a challenging adventure. I worked in Jakarta for two years. It’s a throbbing, pulsing and dirty city of over twenty million people. Did I enjoy it? I would have to say I did. Was I challenged? Indeed I was.

There is massive wealth in Indonesia sitting next to amazing poverty.

One of the problematic things for me was having a maid. It was an expectation that, as foreigners earning a good income, we employ someone. The cost came to about eighty dollars a month for someone who cooked and cleaned and looked after the house very dutifully. Was she worth more? Of course she was. Whilst we paid more than a local would, paying too much would have made her chances of getting work after we had gone difficult.

What we paid had to be kept in proportion to the social and economic conditions to which she was accustomed. My maid actually gave me a small parting gift when I left and said, “You have helped me.” The help I gave was in the simple things like allowing her to keep the family motorbike in the foyer of the unit at night so it would not be stolen. I purchased a small, compact and collapsible clothes frame so she would have somewhere to hang her clothes. Whilst she was a “live in” maid, her room was minuscule and had no fittings.

But that is the standard in Jakarta and I couldn’t change it. Moreover, many of the maids wanted the security of knowing you could provide for them, making the inequality between us strangely reassuring for her.

When my maid became ill, I paid her medical bills. She discreetly left an envelope with the bills in the fruit bowl on the kitchen table and I discreetly left some money in the envelope. It was up to me what I contributed. I paid the lot. The cost of living there is a lot cheaper than in a first world country and her only medical insurance was me.

There are other interesting customs; unusual for us but standard practice. During the Muslim season of Idul Fitri it is customary to provide your maid (or driver, or gardener, or house boy depending on your situation) with an extra months pay. It is the time of year they travel across the country back to their families. Many mothers will be visiting their children whom they haven’t seen for eleven months. Husbands will be visiting wives, brothers meeting siblings and so on.

What we don’t realize is the social fragmenting that has taken place simply because of the need to find some sort of work however lowly.

I could go on about stories of cultural differences; the imam calling the faithful to prayer at 5am, the lack of sanitation in many areas, the need to make sure you only drink bottled water. But it is in finding out how other parts of the world live and greet each day that we can become enriched in our own lives. I had the opportunity to travel widely around Indonesia during term breaks and saw the antiquities of Borobudur, the animist traditions of Sulawesi, the orangutans of Kalimantan and so much more.

The school I taught at did have a few difficulties. Some of these difficulties were created by the foreign staff. I was actually in a National Plus school where the students were from well to do Indonesian families and could all speak English. But there were also Indonesian staff from whom we learnt a lot. One reassuring element was that the students thought my jokes were bad. Students back home reacted in much a similar way.

Establishing a social network is important. The things we take for granted at home and to which we are accustomed like shopping, transport and entertainment all have to be revisited. How do you get around a city of twenty million people? How do you read the labels in the supermarket? What do you do with your evenings? The simplest solution is to be prepared for the uncertainty and embrace it. There’s always someone who will help you. The Indonesian staff at the school were fantastic in this regard. And the foreigners often held social evenings in their respective houses to keep the loneliness at bay.

You will find it overwhelming at times and exhilarating at others. The teaching is the constant in all of this and it’s where you are providing the most help and support. Get as much information as you can before you go and remain open minded – you are, after all, in someone else’s country where you are the strangest thing around, and not their customs.”

We would love to hear from teachers who have worked in Indonesia to see if they have also experienced something similar.

If you would like to share your article on the SeekTeachers Blog about your experience of teaching overseas to help fellow education professionals or newbie teachers making that first nail-biting jump, please submit your article to blog@SeekTeachers.com.